Just another magical crack fic

The Little Shit

*Truly, I am the little shit*

After an afternoon of coloring and watching Pokemon, then subsequently discussing whether Mr. Mime was a person or not for an inordinate amount of time, Lana and I made dinner. I discovered that Jack had done a fair job of refining the girl's palate, so we made feta cheese pasta a la Tiktok, or as Lana dubbed it, "goat cheesy pasta." It was bizarre how natural it felt to have the girl in my home making dinner with me despite having lived alone for more than ten years. It seemed like pieces of a puzzle were slowly coming together. Then I had a funny thought that may or may not have been my own idea, because my brain seemed warm and fuzzy and loud at the time.

I frowned over the dinner table at Lana as she sang sight word songs and recited the phonetic rules for certain digraphs, and as she paused to shovel more pasta into her mouth, I said what seemed so obvious before. "Your dad isn't a merman, is he?" She put her fork down and looked at me like I had three heads. "A merman? Like Ariel? Or like Aquaman?" she asked. I honestly did not know the response to that, but thankfully she said, "He's not a merman. He's just Daddy." She shrugged and raised the fork to her mouth. My frown creased even deeper. "But what magic does he have? What kind of magical entity is he? Charlie told me he was a merman." She stopped chewing and looked at me, confused. "He has my magic," she stated, as if that was the simplest explanation. Welp. Here I was, mouth gaping, staring at a child and trying to dissect the words that just came out of her mouth. "He has your magic? What does that mean, honey?" "We share it. Sharing is what you're supposed to do. You don't share your magic with anybody?" Even more confused, I raced toward the rabbit hole that seemingly contained all the answers to my questions. "Is that what they told you when you got your magic? Can you explain it to me, sweetie?" This time it was Lana's turn to send me a deeply furrowed brow. "Daddy gave me my magic. We share it. I don't understand..." she warbled off like she was about to cry. A tiny pink lip started to quiver and I quickly abandoned ship. "Oh, no, of course, honey, that's perfectly all right. Just eat your dinner and we can watch a movie or play Uno or something afterwards."

As a childless and socially secure adult female, I would normally scoff at people who babysit via screens, but as Harry Potter snuck through the library under the invisibility cloak on the television screen, I discreetly texted Annie. It's difficult for a person who doesn't use all caps, exclamation marks, or emojis in texts, ever, to convey how surprised they are, so it was difficult to get a read on Annie's reaction. She seemed to take the whole magic-conveyance-and-sharing thing on the chin, and helped me piece together the fact that Jack did not, in fact, tell us he was a merman. If anything, I pointed out to Annie, I was skeptical from the beginning, even though that was mainly to piss off Charlie. Another critical element was what I was told about Magic HQ not "manufacturing" pixies. It seemed that the tether was some form of magic sharing, and that pixies could use their magic as a legacy, of sorts. This explained how pixies "chose" a person as an anchor and would basically entrust them with their whole being. This practice put pixies outside the purview of Magic HQ and was seemingly problematic, as HQ had denounced the race (?) entirely. I guessed it was sort of a magical endowment rivalry for them, and without the ability to control such magical endowment, which they didn't like. Finally we talked about what to do with Lana's tether on me that seemingly had not slackened since it was first tied. We decided that I had more than enough to talk to Jack about when he and Charlie got back, including, but without limitation, the status of his child and the awkward half-friendship we now had, so I could add "Removal of Magic Tether" to the list. A great deal would be solved tomorrow afternoon.

After I tucked Lana into the blankets, I went out to gather teeth for the evening. I moved as quickly as I could through the various bedrooms, only thinking of my blue-gray guest room and the little girl snuggled into the white duvet. I felt a slight tug on my heart, and though it was about 3:30 in the morning, at the same moment I felt the buzz of a text in my back pocket. Fearing the worst, I rushed through the current acquisition and fled the scene. When I checked my phone, I saw that I had a "summons" from Pinkberry Crunch at HQ to come in for in-service training, as is typical every other year or so. I quickly tried to remember what year it was, and when I was satisfied that I wasn't senile, I went about my business. Slipping back into my own front door never felt so relieving as it did that night. The responsibility over another whole person, especially in tonight's circumstances that child services might find a little sus, was so stressful. I dug both heels of my hands into my eyes and began to get ready for bed. Tomorrow things would get better. Tomorrow I would have answers, or at least the means to obtain those answers.