88!
baby, baby
cw: age play
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Water sloshes, splashing onto the cuffs of Daniel’s jumper even where he has the arms pushed up high past his elbows. Michael is going to kill him for what he’s doing to his knees, crouched by the bath, but it’s whatever.
It’s nice.
“Okay ba- Maxy,” he corrects, because it always feels too on the nose to call him “baby,” when he's soft like this. Not fucking sinister or anything, just- He doesn’t know if Max would like that, if maybe when they’re done playing, he would ask Daniel not to. That he’d tell Daniel it was weird. “Tilt your head back and shut your eyes. Tightly, so I don’t-“
So I don’t get water in them.
So I don’t hurt you.
He’s got to get Max’s hair wet somehow, if he wants to wash it.
Max doesn’t look happy about the suggestion, looking up from where he’s been playing with his ducks.
Daniel brought them for him a few weeks ago. He’d been thinking about the smile that had been on Max’s face, so soft it was almost a secret, when he’d turned up at Daniel’s drivers room in Monaco. Clutched tightly in his two hands, like somebody might try to yank it from them, was a rubber duck, a metal ring protruding from its back.
“He is very cute, yes? Maybe they will let me keep this little guy,” he’d said, hopeful, but guarded. Like he thought Daniel might tell him he wasn’t allowed.
“We can smuggle him home, Maxy,” Daniel had promised, leaning in to kiss him.
Except that later, when Daniel had asked where the duck was, Max’s face fell further as he looked up from where he had been angrily eyeing his third place trophy, to instead just look- Upset.
“He is gone,” he said in a very small voice. “Of course, they tidied him away when they came to clean my room. I hope, at least, that they will put him back on the swimming pool with his friends.”
It was so Max, to worry about the loneliness of a plastic toy, yet to shrug and say in a flat monotone, ‘it was okay,’ whenever Daniel asked him if he had missed his mum growing up. Naturally, clumsily, and like always, Daniel tried to soothe that lifetime of separation with something stupid.
He brought Max a whole family of ducks.
He’d thought, maybe one, but then he remembered the way Max had said ‘with his friends,’ like the idea of a plastic rubber duck being on its own really hurt him, and had picked up a set. Two big ducks, two little ducks.
“Like mum, dad and babies,” Max had said, a unique mixture of shy and excited that comes when he’s- He’s like this. He’d run his fingertips over the smooth, almost fluorescent orange rubber of one of the beaks and whispered an even softer, “thank you, Daniel.”
Then he’d taken them to the bathroom and set them neatly and carefully on edge of the bath while Daniel watched, leaning against the door frame.
In the bath, they always race. The two baby ducks side by side, while mum and dad watch, sat on the rim of the tub. The grandstands, Daniel had jokingly called it the first time, crouched beside the bath just like now, and Max had looked delighted and suddenly it didn’t feel like something Daniel should joke about anymore.
He was still learning, but watching the way Max made sure each baby duck got a kiss from both mum and dad, no matter who won, made him feel like this at least was something he got right.
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why does maroon break my heart and out it back together and break it again?! 💔
what other songs do you have lined up for chapters currently? ya know, just so I can prepare ahead for when I’ll be really crushed 🥴
i'm so sorry babe AAAH it's just a little broken hearts club over here in maroon land. </3
and i wish i had a more exact list!! i can tell you next chapter is eddie's pov, and right now, i'm really leaning into being inspired by the prophecy <3
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