Ambrosiac

Misguided Attention

Say nighty-night and kiss me; Just hold me tight and tell me you'll miss me

While I'm alone, and blue as can be; Dream a little dream of me...

-Dream a little Dream of Me (as sung by "Mama" Cass Elliot)

. . .

"Hey dad, lookit what I did!" ten year old Toby declared as he ran up to his working father with a test score in his hands. Tenma was working on something at his home desk and barely looked up to acknowledge his son.

"That's nice Tobias." Tenma said with a hand wave.

"You didn't even look..." Toby remarked. Tenma did not seem to hear him- an action that secretly made Toby a bit more bitter.

"If we can complete the adjustments before next Friday, we could go on with the demonstration by Saturday." Tenma said, not to Toby but to a handheld phone connected to his desk. "That should please the Ambassador to some degree...hopefully."

"Dad." Toby tried again, his voice beginning to sound annoyed.

"Not now Toby." came the reply with another hand wave. Giving up, Toby let an annoyed huff before storming out the door.

"Hey Dad, I got excellent marks on a class everyone else is failing." Toby said to himself bitterly as he walked up to his room. "I thought we could finally go to the aquarium to celebrate. Heh, I'll drive if you won't."

Then an idea hit the boy like a runaway freight train.

Toby bit his lower lip as he crunched the report into a tiny ball before darting toward the family garage. He tried to get his father's attention the normal way, but if it had to take a way that was inconvenient for the both of them, then so be it.

. . .

Astro would have never assumed that Professor O'Shay would be prone to drinking when stressed- but there sat the wine bottle on the kitchen table, waiting to be opened and downed before the end of the night.

"Deep down, William really did love his son." Professor O'Shay told the android as if it hurt it to do so. "But placing his work above his family was an awful habit that he was ashamed to admit to. Tobias was a curious boy who refused to take no as an answer, and in more than one instance, it almost placed him in serious harm..."

. . .

The car had been totaled; the body of the car had been crunched into an odd looking rectangle, the engine some how ended up in the back seat, a tire had gone missing with absolutely no trace of where it had gone, and Doctor Tenma's fury had reached to such a crescendo that he could see more red than technicolor.

"WHERE! IS! MY! SON!?!" Tenma screamed at one of the robots in charge of the clean up. Innocently surprised at such fury, the robot then answered the man in a calm voice;

"Tobias Tenma -aged ten years, eight months, and eighteen days- was admitted into the Metro Memorial Hospital at approximately fourteen hundred hours, which occurred roughly fifteen minutes ago. Would you like directions to the hospital from here, sir?"

Tenma had already left before the robot was able to finish his sentence.

. . .

"Humans are fallible, it's just in their nature. Human fathers are possibly even more so for a variety of reasons; Tenma was no exception. But he wasn't heartless, remember that Astro, some times men forget that there are others lives to care for besides their own. It's part of the human psychology to blame others, and it has unfortunately become a pathway to coming to terms with our own guilt and frustrations. Human are incredible creatures Astro, able to destroy the very things we would fight for at a moment's notice..."

. . .

Tenma had opened the door so quickly and with so much force that a nurse that happened to be on the other side almost got sandwiched in between the door and the wall. The angered father marched into the hospital room with full intent to withdraw from his son everything he held dear in the material world before stopping to see what his son now looked like.

The boy sat on the hospital bed with a drug-laden expression from the pain medication they had proscribed to ease the pain he was in, a neck brace had been fitted onto him to keep his head in place and his spine straight, both of his legs had been outfitted with casts, a cut on his lower lip was swollen, and a rather large amount of gauze had been placed near the temple of his head down to the corner of his nose. When Tenma saw how roughed up Toby had made himself, the father's expression quietly changed as he realized that it could have been a lot worse than this.

"Toby..." Tenma breathed, almost unable to say anything else. Hearing his father's voice, Toby turned to his father and gave a lazy little smile. The poor child looked like a carved out pumpkin that had been sittting out long past fall.

"Hey Dad." the boy slurred with the same amount of cheerfulness that he would have had if they were sitting at the dining table.

"Hello... Toby..." Tenma said carefully, the idea of scolding the child for taking the company car and crashing it now suddenly becoming an embarrassing thing to do at the moment.

"He's been given a bit of hydrocodone-acetaminophen, almost enough to make him feel a bit lightheaded and drowsy." the nurse Tenma had almost run into told him. "Sweet thing was telling me about a robot named Titanium that looked almost like him as a baby. Then he starting something about a slightly deaf Cobalt and a depressed Uranium so I stopped listening."

"Th... thank you." Doctor Tenma said, looking over the nurse with a measure of skepticism before turning back to Toby.

"I aced my test Dad." Toby told him, the boy's smiling reaching a bit higher. For a moment, Tenma didn't even know how to start with his son's announcement. The things that kid would do to get attention...

"Well... if you hadn't crashed the car, we could have gone to the aquarium tomorrow."

If Toby was able to shrink a little on the hospital bed, he would have.

"But," Tenma then said, "We could go after you can be admitted- I'm sure the project we're working on can wait until then."

A small candle was placed into the sad little pumpkin's face, making him look better already.

. . .

"Doctor Tenma wasn't a bad man." Astro observed. "He just didn't have a right understanding on what was important."

"Yes." Professor O'Shay agreed with a stiff nod. "He's not the only one either. I... also owe you an apology Astro."

The android looked up, confused. The professor continued as he looked at the half emptied wine bottle in dismay.

"I've been treating you like an experiment. Tenma created you to be more than that- a protector, a son, a very good kid. Not... not an atom in a petri dish for examination. I've been thinking it over for some time, and I think it's time that I ease my reign on you. I understand that you should have friends, to go make mistakes, to be a... a kid for once."

Astro looked at the professor. Was he saying, what Astro thought he was saying?

"Astro... I want to adopt you." the old man then said, looking up at Astro for a reaction. "I might even... I'm thinking about adopting Uran too, I owe her more than a life and limb. After that, I might do something that could be of even greater use to you two- maybe I could give you something you both lack right now. I could give you both a... a family... What do you think?"

For a while, Astro was silent. "You mean... Uran and I... we would actually be siblings?" he finally asked. O'Shay nodded his head.

"I just have one question for you, however."

"What's that?"

"Do you remember anything about Toby? Do you have any of his old memories at all?"

The android had to think about it for a moment before he shook his head. The professor responded by pouring some wine into a shot glass, then downing it in one gulp before placing the cork back into the finish.