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For once in her life—Meenah Peixes was waiting.
Sitting in the car, in the driveway of her younger sister Feferi's corporate mansion, she waited for Feferi's son to meet her outside, so she could babysit the kid while her sister flew off for an Important Business Trip.
She was the type of woman who had patience for a limited number of things.
Finally her nephew appeared, taking the form of a pinch faced boy of thirteen. His extra length shirt swallowed his slight figure whole—it had been custom made to hide the two stumps that were left after a double leg amputation. He started to make his way down the ramp that had to be fitted into the Peixes mansion three years ago. All the while scowling from his seat in his wheelchair.
Pinch-faced teenagers weren't on the list.
He rolled himself to the car door. He gave her a forced smile. She watched as he waited by the door--and she quickly realized he was not going to make any effort to open it. She frowned, and rolled down the window.
"Yo. Eridan. Are you gettin’ in or what? Didja forget somethin?""
Eridan scowl tightened. "How do you actually expect me to get in the car by myself?"
Meenah raised an eyebrow. "You can't even open the door?"
Eridan scoffed. "What's the point? You're just going to have to help me out of the wheelchair anyway."
Meenah sighed, expecting nothing less from her notoriously nihilistic nephew. She meant to highlight the importance of independence and self-sustenance—but instead, she unbuckled her seatbelt, and made her way round to the other side of the car. She yanked open the door with more force than what was required to open it—and then simply scooped her nephew out of his wheelchair, and hauled his ass into the passenger seat.
"Ow ow oww!!" Eridan hissed. "That fucking hurts!"
"Language," Meenah warned him. Feferi had informed her that she was trying to get Eridan to slack off on his cursing. Having a nasty habit for it herself, she felt weird reprimanding Eridan for it. "How else do you expect me to get you in?"
"Well you could start by not manhandling me," he scoffed. When Meenah folded up his wheelchair and tossed it into the back seat, and locked her belt in the driver's seat again, Eridan was still rubbing light circles over a spot on his shoulder blade with his thumb.
Meenah sighed and turned to him, laughing a bit. "You ain't gonna need me to buckle your belt for you too, right?"
Eridan didn't smile at all. "Ha. Ha," he said falsely, then fastened his own buckle with a scowl.
Meenah wasn't heartless enough not to feel a little bit bad for her sister's son. He'd had to have both of his legs amputated when he was ten because of two tumors found in the femur bone of each of his legs. He didn't really have much of either leg left—the doctors cut both of them off pretty high. This was before her sister remarried one of the big cheeses at her company, bringing Cronus, Eridan's step brother, into the Peixes family. Eridan didn't have the sunniest of dispositions before getting sick. But he sure was crabby as all hell after. And Meenah was certainly running out of patience for his nonstop complaining.
This was going to be a long weekend.
The car jostled on the rocks as Meenah pulled up the gravelly driveway of her lake house.
Meenah parked the car, unfolded Eridan's wheelchair on the porch, then carried him up the steps because of the lack of ramp. She went back to haul in his samsonite suitcase as Eridan wheeled himself in.
Meenah showed him to the spare bedroom.
She almost waited for him to say something sharp about the size or condition of the room. Nowadays, Meenah didn't see her sister often—but she remembered quite vividly the first time Feferi showed her four year old Eridan's bedroom when the two of them first moved in. She remembered being shocked that it was literally the size of the entire apartment they lived in when the two of them first moved out of their parents' house.
Eridan said nothing, but stared at the bedspread rather judgmentally. He massaged that same spot on his back again. Damn, he’s never going to forgive me for “manhandling” him, is he?
"You aren't gonna axe me to unpack your stuff, for ya, are ya?"
Eridan pursed his lips. Perhaps he was, perhaps he wasn't. "Ask," he corrects pretentiously. "Not axed." He silently unzipped the first pocket, and pulled out his laptop.
Meenah bit down on her tongue to suppress more than a few swears. If Eridan hadn't just ruined her mood, she would have asked him if he wanted to be helped onto the bed. But instead she let him open his laptop up in his wheelchair.
"Guess what we're havin' for dinner?" Meenah asked, voice leaning towards dangerously cheeky.
"Fish?" Eridan guessed flatly without looking up from the screen.
"Uh huh," she said. "I'm catchin' tonight." She snickered. "Now, you can come with me, if you want."
Eridan looked up at her. Meenah smiled at his almost horrified expression of shock. "Wha—? Nope, I'm good, thanks."
"Well—" Meenah had expected his answer to be no, and she was past the point already of being offended. She grinned. "Your mama's gonna have a fit if she finds out that I left you at the house all alone. So it's either come on the boat with me, or sit on the dock and wait."
Eridan took a second to check the battery on his laptop.
"I'll wait."
"Alrighty then," Meenah said. "Dock it is."
As soon as Meenah got Eridan parked with his computer out on the lake, three young kids about Eridan's age appeared sprinting towards the dock.
Every time Meenah saw the trio, the one girl with the glasses and eyepatch was always up front. She yelled as she was running, "Ms. Peixes! Ms. Peixeeeeeeees!!"
Meenah smiled as the kids stumbled short in front of her. This time, the eyepatch girl was accompanied by a wicked skinny boy whose legs had braces on them, and a redheaded girl with big red glasses so thick God knows how she was even able to see at all.
The redhead squealed and asked, "Ms. Peixes, will you let us ride on your boat today?"
"'Course, guys," she said, placing her fishing box in the boat and untying it from the marina. "Y'all wanna meet my nephew? This here is Eridan."
"Hi Eridan!" the kids chirped.
"How old are you?" demanded the eyepatch girl.
"Thirteen," Eridan responded flatly.
"Tavros is thirteen," the girl said, jerking her thumb at the skinny boy. "And I'm Vriska, and that's Terezi. We're both twelve."
"Good for you," Eridan replied sourly.
"You kids comin'?" Meenah yelled, trying to diffuse matters before her nephew earned himself a good ole Serket sucker punch.
"Yeah!" Terezi shrieked. She was the first to climb in the boat, followed by Tavros and then Vriska.
"Is he coming?" Vriska asked Meenah, pointing back at Eridan, who hadn't moved from his space on the dock.
"Nah," she replied. "He ain't up for it."
"Why not?" Vriska demanded of Eridan.
"I'll get boat sickness," Eridan replied curtly.
"So does Tavros," Terezi chimed in. "only he just blows his chunks up over the side." This spread a redness over Tavros' face.
"I'll pass," Eridan replied.
"Suit yourself," Terezi shrugged.
Meenah revved the motor a bit until it purred, then when she was far enough away from the dock, kicked the boat's engine into full swing. She ran the usual routine with the kids—speed around the lake in a big circle, making enough sharp turns to spray the kids with water as they screamed with delight.
Every time she started another circle, Meenah would search for Eridan in her rear view. And every time, she saw his hands folded in his lap, staring blankly, face pinched, in the vibrating mirror.
She took the rugrats for a few rounds, sure enough, had to pause long enough to let Tavros puke, and finished up the ride by slowing the boat near the dock.
The kids jumped out before Meenah fully stopped the boat. She had long since given up on telling them that it wasn't safe—they always did it anyway.
They laughed to themselves for a bit on the dock while Meenah tied a loose knot up on her boat. "Had fun?" she asked the kids as she straightened up, hands on her hips.
"Yeah!" the three of them exclaimed.
"Good," Meenah said with a smile. "You okay, bud?" she asked, directed at Tavros.
The kid nodded, smiling crookedly.
"Awright, awesome," she said, patting him on the shoulder. "I'll see y'all sometime later?"
The kids nodded vigorously in affirmation. "Bye!!" they all hollered as they clambered up the hill again. "Thank you!!"
Meenah waved as the two girls sprinted away, the boy stumbling to keep up with them.
She sighed, and turned to Eridan. "Now that that's taken care of," she said, "you sure you don't wanna go fishin' with me? No fast turns, I promise, ‘cause it'll scare the fish away."
Eridan squinched up his face. "No," he repeated firmly. "I'm good."
He opened up his laptop again, and Meenah pulled loose the knot on her boat. "Alright. I'll be back," she said shortly.
Meenah appeared back at the dock an hour and forty five minutes later, with a near-empty box of shrimp and a few trout for dinner, smiling silently at her nephew.
Eridan looked up from his laptop, pushing his glasses up farther on his face as he closed it.
"Give me another thirty minutes, and I'll have these lil’ guys cooked up for us," she said. When he nodded, Meenah shoved the fishing box into the crook of one arm and grabbed the handles of his wheelchair to push him inside.
As promised, Meenah had dinner on the table in half an hour. Two trouts, one for each of them, with a few tomatoes and broccoli on the side.
Eridan meagerly picked at the plate in front of him. He poked the fish, sniffed at the vegetables, and ate very little.
"What, what's wrong with it?" Meenah finally asked him, after she'd hungrily devoured her whole plate.
He looked up at her, sighing. "Most kinds of fish make me sick," he said. "Of course it depends on how it's cooked, but basically anything but salmon, and I'll throw up."
Meenah blinked at him from behind her glasses. "Your mother is the CEO of a seafood catering company," she said. Laughing, she added, "You realize how ironic that is, right?"
Redness swelled rapidly into Eridan's face. "Why are you laughing at me? I could die from a seafood allergy and you wouldn't give a crap!"
Meenah suppressed a final snort and said, "Oh, cool it. I did axe Fef, you know, before you came, if you had any allergies. She said nothin’, an when I axed her if fish was okay for dinner, she said it was fine for you. You're just bein' picky, that's all."
"Asked!" Eridan practically screamed. "Asked. Not axed. Oh. My. God," he breathed into his hands as he buried his rosy face into his palms.
Meenah poked him in the shoulder. "Look a' me," she breathed, nostrils flaring. "Eridan Ampora, hello, I'm talkin’ to you! You are in my house. You will not talk back to me like that, not in this fuckin' house. Shit," she burst out. "I goddamn swore to my sis that I wouldn't curse in fronta you while you were here."
Eridan's pointed face looked up at her with a glare. "I just wanna know," he said, "How come my mom can say it and you can't? How come she's sitting pretty with the sharks in an air conditioned office while you're scavenging for guppies at the bottom of a lake?"
Meenah felt her muscles flex, blood flowing into them as they vibrated with rage. She let herself raise a heavy hand—far from her nephew's cheek.
When the initial flush of rage had simmered down, she found her quavering flat palm poised in the air. She let the malicious hand hang there, suspended, for a moment, up there in the open for Eridan and Meenah to both see. Then consciousness crashed down on her like a torpedo, and with the dizziness of alarm, and she forced that shaking hand to her side.
She relived what she had chosen not to do, as memories swam into her brain. Of a heavy hand larger and more callused than her own—and her fingers felt like fire as she forced her trembling palm to rest, the only way to bury the marks on the cheeks and backs and asses that came before his.
Eridan took a breath after getting over the initial shock, his eyes still wide as saucers as he gripped the wheels of his chair and pushed himself back into the guest bedroom.
Meenah took a shaking breath and tugged on each of her long braids, wanting to rip each of them out of her skull. She robotically cleared the table and carried their dishes to the sink.
Almost. It was an almost, you didn't actually—
She heard her own voice in her head as she scrubbed the plates harder.
You and Fef promised. You both fucking promised that you would never, ever, even think to—
But you took hold of it, you chose not to—
But you felt the need to. I can't believe that was your automatic reaction—
You're just like him. Chip off the old block.
Abruptly after she was done, she decided to go to bed, since she'd already decided she didn't want to stay awake any longer.
She had to pass the guest bedroom in order to reach her own. The door was wide open, and Eridan was sitting on the bed, under the covers and propped up with his two pillows, playing on his phone. He looked up when he heard Meenah's footsteps creak on the floorboards.
I don't wanna be just like him.
Meenah's eyes stared wordlessly into Eridan's—which were dull brown and devoid of any expression. "What I almost did was wrong, Eridan, and I ain—I'm not gonna pretend it wasn't," she said lowly. She took a deep breath. "But to answer your question—when we were little, my sister and I each had our own version of independence. And she likes hers, and I like mine. You've got the same choice."
You don't have to be, then. That's your choice.
Eridan nodded silently and awkwardly reached for the lamp to fiddle with the off switch.
"You want me to close this?" Meenah asked, laying a hand on the door.
"Yes."
"'Kay. G'night," she said. "Call me if you need anything," she said before closing the door behind her.
Meenah scuffled off to her own bedroom and laid down on her bed, tossing and turning for what felt like hours before eventually drifting off into sleep.
Meenah was roused by a sharp ringtone, signaling a text from her phone.
She blinked herself awake and squinted at the bright square of light piercing her eyes from her phone screen.
On its face were four missed calls and a text from Eridan. She opened up the text and squinted to read it.
meenah please come, I need help was all it read.
Meenah rolled off of one side of her queen bed with a grunt, swiping up her glasses as she did so. She shoved them onto her face as she shuffled off into the guest bedroom.
"Eri, whaddya need this time—"
She froze in her tracks and raised an eyebrow at what she was seeing. She blinked a few more times to make sure what she was looking at was what she was looking at.
Eridan was sprawled on his back on the bed, covers tangled with squirming. His face whipped towards Meenah as she entered, eyes huge with worry now that his glasses were off.
"Eridan, what do you want?"
"Meenah. I'm stuck."
Meenah's eyebrows knitted together. "Whaddya mean, you're stuck?"
Eridan let out a whimper. "To the bed."
Meenah approached his bedside as Eridan pointed to his shoulder. Meenah grabbed the dim desk lamp by the neck and pointed it where Eridan was motioning. Then she saw what he was referring to.
It was a wound of some kind. Deep and raw like a crater in his back, with the center of it grossly melded to the sheets as the blood had half dried during the healing process.
Meenah stared at it in horror. "What the fuck..."
"It's a bedsore," he cut her off. "From sitting in the wheelchair all the time."
Meenah noticed that Eridan's nightshirt had been cast to the floor by her feet, and even despite the dingy lighting, she could tell that it was covered in blood and pus—it looked like a bullet hole had been shot through Eridan's back.
Eridan himself looked like he was about to cry. And not a whiny thirteen year old cry either—it was a "I don’t know if I can even take this" sort of cry, that Meenah's nephew was on the verge of.
"What do I do?" Meenah asked helplessly.
"Get some salt water, and a wet towel," he said.
Meenah briskly left the room, clumsily typing "how clean bedsores" into the Safari search bar. She popped open the first link on the page, and quickly scanned the page for answers.
She returned to the guest bedroom with a glass of water and a container of salt clenched in one hand, a towel and the first aid kit in the other. She laid them all down at the foot of the bed.
Meenah set herself to work on her first order of business—getting Eridan detached from the sheet. She soaked the towel in the glass and worked away at the ulcer wound. After ten minutes, Meenah began to get impatient, so she resorted to rummaging in the desk drawer for a scissor and cutting a hole in the sheets to eventually free the cloth piece from the sore.
"I'm so sorry I ruined your sheets, Aunt Meenah," Eridan said in a small voice.
"Oh my fuckin' gawd." Meenah breathed out as she at last took a step back from her handiwork.
When she finally pulled the sheet away, she found herself gawking at a field of little craters spotting Eridan's back—just like the one she'd just scrubbed. His shoulder blades, spine, and the small of his back looked like the face of the goddamn moon.
"Eri..." she let herself say.
"Just leave them," he said shortly. "I'll clean the rest in the morning."
Meenah blinked a few times before responding. "You'll just get stuck again," she said firmly, "and I don't want any more holes in my sheets."
"Um. Okay," he said abruptly.
"I'm gonna need more salt water. And some kinda gauze that won't get cha stuck again..."
"There's some medicine cream in my suitcase," he said. "Front pocket."
Meenah crouched over his bag, fishing around until she found a teal bottle labeled pressure ulcer cream.
"Says it's got antibiotic in it too," Meenah read. "Alright, lemme get that salt water."
Meenah proceeded to set up her workstation—gauze bandages, towels, a tall glass of salt water and Eridan's medicinal cream—
"Lean over."
"Okay."
—and carefully flush each and every one of them out, clean them, cream them, and dress them with gauze. Over the course of a grueling two hours, Eridan's face would screw up in pain, and he would let out a whine whenever Meenah rubbed a bit too hard.
"I'm sorry kiddo, but you know I gotta get em cleaned out," she would say. "Wikihow says if we don't they'll get infected, n' send you to the hospital."
"I know."
When Meenah secured the tape on the final dressing, she cracked her knuckles and got up from Eridan's wheelchair, which she had been sitting in. She reached into Eridan's suitcase and tossed him a new nightshirt.
He tried to wrestle himself into the shirt. Meenah watched him having trouble successfully doing so without jostling his dressings—and swiftly slipped his arms through the sleeves.
Right when she was about to leave the bedside to throw out the soiled gauze—she suddenly found each of Eridan's skinny arms around her middle, roping her into a tight hug from his seat on the bed.
Meenah would have whirled around if Eridan didn't have such an aggressive hold on her at the waist. She craned her neck sharply downward to look at him.
Eridan's face had gone all screwed up again, and Meenah could feel his hot tears on her stomach.
"Oh crap—did I miss one?" Meenah moaned.
Eridan shook his head no as he buried his face in her nightshirt.
He pulled away, snot under his nose and eyes swollen as he wiped his cheek for tears. "None of my babysitters—" he said, "—nobody wants to touch them. Cro just leaves them because they're disgusting..." He wailed and buried his face in Meenah's shirt again.
Meenah bit her lip sadly.
Perhaps some people just wish others had the time for them.
She managed a small smile, saying, "Hey kid, you're my nephew—someone's gotta spoil ya when your mom isn't around."
Eridan buried his face again, and his wailing swelled up again.
"Ah, quit your blubbering," Meenah said, although empty of sharpness. She put a hand round his shoulders and ran manicured fingers through his hair. She plucked a tissue off the desk and stuffed it in the fist that was currently clinging to her shirt.
Once Eridan’s breathing had calmed a bit, he pulled away from her, and Meenah took a seat at the foot of his bed.
“Aunt Meenah?”
He spoke softly, as if trying not to wake the other people that didn’t live in the house. He was now only occasionally batting teartracks off his face. The air was still and awkward, the tension between two people, something Meenah didn’t usually have to deal with.
“Yeah?”
“Do you think—” he stopped himself short, shaking his head in frustration.
“What?”
He came out with it all in a rush. “Well, do you think we could—I could—go out on the boat tomorrow? Like—just to try it out.”
Meenah was taken aback. She said abruptly, “Well, sure, of course. Yeah. We can do that.”
Eridan gave a small smile. “No sharp turns, right?”
“Right. No sharp turns.”
“And you’ll give me time to puke if I have to?”
She snorted. “I’ll give ya all the time in the world.”