Taako looks up, and up, and up.
“You’re big,” he says.
The man in front of him chuckles. “You’re small,” he says, and kneels. “How are you doing, Taako?”
“Good,” Taako says, because you never tell adults if you’re not doing good. He frowns. “You smell bad.”
The man in front of him blinks. Behind him, the man in blue jeans that Taako thinks was called Barry stuffs a snicker into his fist as he walks out of the living room, hand-in-hand with Lup. Taako finds himself not too worried about Lup. He likes the man with the blue jeans. “I do?”
“Yeah. You smell like chemicals.”
“Oh,” the man says, and he sounds inexplicably disappointed. “I always thought
—
well. I suppose there is something to be said for complete honesty, isn’t there, Taako?”
“No,” he says. “You’re dumb.”
“I
—
okay,” he says. “That’s…you know what? That’s fair. I have done some pretty dumb things.”
Taako, for some reason, feels kinda bad. “It’s okay, we all do dumb things,” he says.
Then he gets an idea. Taako pats the man’s shoulder and nods sympathetically in that way that makes adults feel bad for him and Lup, and twists a gold bead out of his hair. The man is too busy smiling at him to notice.
“I suppose we do.”
He puts a hand on the man’s shoulder and says, “Stay there.”
“Okay,” he says, and obliges. Taako runs a quick eye up and down his clothes
—
all nicely cut, well-fitted, and stinking of ozone, and also something sweeter, maybe blueberries.
More importantly, though, there’s gold practically everywhere on him: in his hair, around his wrists, in his ears. “Your earrings look like skulls,” he comments from behind the man’s back, and reaches out to touch them. There’s some pretty stuff on him: a gemstone-embedded bracelet, a ring flecked with pink crystals.
He freezes. “They are,” he says carefully. Taako knows that tone of voice. He’s about to be lied to. “It’s, ah…a fascination of mine. Death and dying and, um, all that.”
Taako hums noncommittally. With careful fingers he undoes the clasp, and in a quick whisk tugs it out of his ears.
It occurs to him that he should perhaps not be doing this.
It occurs to him that when he and Lup are kicked out of the house they’ll need money, so Taako shrugs and pockets the gold pieces. “I like your hair,” he says, threading his fingers through the man’s tiny braids. “’s long.”
all i can think about is krav meeting the Tiny Twins(tm). like, he’s all goth with skulls on every clothing item, but wins them over by letting small taako keep the jewelry he tried to steal from him
Published
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