✅ Younger Than You Think?

"X: Reception"

"Do they really do that?" Deb asked. She couldn't stop staring at the new admission to the nursery. Maggie was in a onesie that did almost nothing to hide her thick diaper, with a weird little tutu skirt that stuck out almost horizontally around her waist. There were tight straps around her muscles as well, to limit her strength, and the seams of the onesie concealed a couple of stiff ribs that kept her legs wide apart. She was struggling to crawl on her own now, a massive change from the last time she had been here for a storytime. Sometimes it looked like she was wondering how to get her revenge, looking at the teachers and thinking what she could do to take their place again. But those were only ever fleeting thoughts before she returned to staring into space and drooling on herself, under the influence of the additives in her bottle this morning.

"Looks like she's a baby now," Claire said, and shrugged. "It's supposed to be the biggest possible deterrent against child abuse. Some shrinks worked it out or something, being treated like a baby is the worst thing you can imagine, if you're the kind of person that likes to hurt them."

"I can't make any sense out of that. But then, I can't imagine anybody wanting to hurt these little ones at all. The whole thing doesn't make any sense."

Deb didn't fully understand, but that was nothing out of the ordinary. There were quite a few of the staff here, helping to look after little ones in the later stages of their training, who didn't know the actual ages of the babies in their charge. They thought they were helping to protect precocious babies from being corrupted by thoughts they weren't ready to understand yet. And that was close enough to the truth that they were unlikely to find anything to dissuade them. So it was weird to be expected to treat an adult like one of the little ones, but if that was what the psychiatrists had determined was effective, she was going to keep on doing her job.

She looked down and saw another toddler, Kelly, gripping her hand more tightly. That was something that wouldn't be so easy to address. The little girl probably didn't even know what had changed. Could she understand that Maggie was doped up to the eyeballs and wouldn't be able to hurt her now?

"Are you okay, Kelly? I know you're a bit scared, but nothing's going to hurt you here. Do you remember Maggie from before? She's not going to be mean to you anymore. She's going to be one of the little ones, so we have to be nice to her."

Kelly nodded and smiled, responding more to the soothing tone than the actual words. She knew what the words meant, she knew that they were all in her head somewhere. But putting them together to think about what somebody was telling her wasn't important now, and she didn't need to try that hard. She already knew that all the grown-ups here were nice, and she should do what they wanted. She'd even been allowed to walk today, which made her feel like such a big girl. Kelly loved this school, because she had so many friends here. She had two or three different groups of friends, who had their meals at different times, and when some of them went to nap she could go and play with somebody different, or sit in a crib to read her special books. She didn't need to think too hard about why the world worked like that; there were niggling little thoughts at the back of her mind sometimes, telling her that something was weird here, but she could just lock those thoughts away where they couldn't bother her. All the worries, and all the big thoughts, could go away like dolls in a big toy chest. She only needed the ones she was playing with right now.

She didn't even need to put her thoughts into words; she didn't need to think about it at all, but she knew deep down that she was doing exactly what Mommy and Daddy wanted her to do. And she was looking forward to playing with them again. As soon as she threw away any worries about the new girl, she was shambling awkwardly across the floor to grab the best toys before somebody else found them. She was always excited to find out what the best toys were each day.