He opened his eyes.
Everything was white. Then shapes. Then the shapes stopped swimming and became a ceiling, wooden and low, with a small crack running along the middle of it.
He stared at it.
Something was wrong with his face. Wet. He reached up and his hand was tiny and he didn't understand that yet but he understood the wet. He was crying. Not the kind you chose. The kind that came from somewhere deep that hadn't been touched in a long time, maybe ever, and now it was open and there was nothing to do about it.
He hadn't cried in years. He didn't think he still knew how.
Apparently his body disagreed.
He lay there, small and new-born and shaking, and let it happen. There was nothing else to do. The ceiling blurred and cleared and blurred again and somewhere nearby there were voices and warmth and hands that picked him up but he barely registered any of it.
Something that had been locked down for a very long time had cracked open the moment he took his first breath.
He didn't even know what it was.
He just knew it hurt. And that the hurt felt like relief.
The hands that held him were warm and steady and when his eyes finally focused he saw her first.
Brown hair, a little messy from what he could only assume had been a long night. Blue eyes, the kind of blue that was almost too much, looking down at him like he was the only thing in the world that mattered. She was smiling. Tired and relieved and something else underneath both of those things that he couldn't name yet.
He had never had a mother before.
He didn't know what to do with one.
Then over her shoulder, a man appeared. Brown hair like hers, a wide goofy smile that looked like it belonged on someone who laughed easily and often. He looked soft at first glance. But there was something underneath that. Something that sat in his shoulders and the way he held himself, quiet and settled, like a blade that didn't need to be drawn to make its point.
The man looked at him and the goofy smile got wider.
"Hey there," his dad said.
Simple as that. Like it was the easiest thing in the world.
He was still crying. He couldn't stop. But something about the two faces looking down at him made the crying feel different. Less like grief and more like something finally exhaling after holding its breath for a very long time. His dad looked over at his mom, that goofy smile still on his face but softer now, quieter.
His dad looked over at his mom, that goofy smile still on his face but softer now, quieter.
"Name him Arthur."
His mom looked down at him. Her blue eyes were wet, tears spilling over before she could do anything about them. She didn't seem to care. She just held him a little closer and said it like she was testing how it felt in her mouth.
"Arthur." A breath. "Arthur."
Then she looked up at his dad, something passing between them that words would have only gotten in the way of.
"Arthur Arwin."
The name settled into the room like it had always belonged there.
His dad reached out and put a hand on her shoulder, that strong quiet presence of his filling the space without needing to announce itself. He looked at the baby in her arms, at the mismatched eyes blinking up at them both, and for a moment the goofy smile was gone, replaced by something much older and much more serious.
Then it came back.
"Hello son" the dad said.
--
his parents watching him.
His mom was the first to notice he was gone.
She had set him down for maybe two minutes, just two minutes, to grab a cloth from the other side of the room. When she turned back the blanket was empty.
"Edric."
Her husband looked up from the chair he was sitting in.
She pointed at the empty blanket.
There was a beat of silence and then they both moved at the same time, following the soft rhythmic pat of small hands on floorboards. They found him in the hallway, three months old, moving with a focus that had no business being on the face of a baby. He wasn't wandering. He wasn't lost. He was heading straight for the front door like he had somewhere to be.
Edric crossed his arms and leaned against the wall watching him.
"He's been doing that thing again," he said.
"What thing."
"The thing where he looks like he knows exactly what he's doing."
His mom crouched down just before Arthur reached the door and scooped him up. Arthur looked up at her with those two mismatched eyes, one purple one blue, and for a moment he looked less like a baby and more like someone deeply inconvenienced.
She laughed despite herself.
"Outside later," she told him. "Not yet."
Arthur said nothing. Obviously. But his expression said plenty.
His mom set him down in the hallway and he was off again within seconds.
She and Edric followed at a loose distance, the way you follow something small that hasn't learned danger yet but moves like it has somewhere important to be.
The kitchen was first. Arthur made his way across the stone floor with surprising efficiency, past the legs of the table, past the hearth where something was still simmering from dinner. He stopped at the back door, looked at it for a long moment, then seemed to accept that it was also closed and moved on.
Edric watched him from the doorway. "He checked the back door."
"I see that."
"He's three months old."
"I know how old he is Edric."
Arthur had already moved on, back down the hallway and into the small bedroom at the end. Their room. He looked around at it with those serious eyes, took in the bed and the closet and the low window with pale light coming through it, seemed to decide there was nothing useful here and turned himself around.
Back up the hallway.
He stopped at the doorway opposite his own room. The book room. Small and a little cluttered, shelves lining two walls, a worn chair in the corner with a lamp beside it. He sat in the doorway for a moment just looking in.
His mom watched him quietly.
"He always stops there," she said.
Edric nodded. "Every time."
Arthur stared at the shelves a little longer then looked back at them both over his shoulder, that same inconvenienced expression on his face.
"Later," his mom said again.
Arthur looked at the books. Then at her back. Then at the books again.
"N—"
She stopped.
Edric stood up straight.
Arthur's face scrunched up, working at something, like a man trying to lift something heavy with hands that weren't quite his yet. His mouth opened and closed once.
"Nwow."
It came out small and a little mangled, the w soft and uncertain, but it was there. Unmistakably there.
His mom turned around so fast she nearly knocked into the doorframe. She stared at him. He stared back at her with those two mismatched eyes, looking exhausted from the effort of it.
Edric was already crouching down, his big goofy smile gone completely, replaced by something wide and disbelieving.
"Did he just—"
"He just talked." Her voice was barely above a whisper.
Arthur looked between them both, slightly impatient, then turned back to the book room and pointed at it with one small unsteady hand.
"Nwow," he said again. A little clearer this time.
His mom let out a sound that was halfway between a laugh and a sob and she crossed the hallway in two steps and scooped him up.
"Okay," she said, squeezing him. "Okay. Now."
It was a small room. It looked massive for him but still small. But the shelves were full and it smelled like paper and the light coming through the single window was soft and pale. A worn chair sat in the corner with a candle on the small table beside it, burned low and waxy, the kind that had been relit so many times the holder was thick with old drippings.
Arthur made his way to the middle of it and sat down.
His parents hovered in the doorway for a moment, watching him, then his dad put a hand on his mom's shoulder and they quietly left him to it.
He sat there in the small warm room and looked around at nothing in particular.
In his past life a room like this would have meant one thing. That it belonged to someone else. That he was in it to clean it or carry something out of it or be questioned in it. Rooms were not for him. Warmth was not for him. Quiet was not for him.
He had slept on dirt floors. On stone. In the cold with nothing between him and it.
And now he was sitting in a book room that was apparently his to sit in whenever he wanted. In a house with a kitchen that had food in it and a garden just beyond the door and two people who had looked at him like he mattered from the very first second.
He was three months old and he already had more than he had ever had in an entire lifetime.
He didn't know what to do with that yet.
But it was a start.
Arthur sat in the middle of the room for a while, just taking it in. Every now and then he would crawl toward one of the shelves, get close enough to look up at the rows of books stacked above him, and then just sit there at the base of it like he was thinking very hard about a problem he couldn't solve yet.
His arms weren't strong enough. He knew that. He tried once, reaching up toward the lowest shelf, fingers barely grazing the wood before his arm gave out and he sat back down.
Not yet.
He crawled to the next shelf and looked up at it anyway. Same result. He sat there for a moment with an expression that belonged on someone much older than three months, then turned around and made his way back to the middle of the room.
He would get there eventually.
He always had.
By the time his mom appeared in the doorway the candle on the table had burned a little lower and Arthur had made his slow circuit of the room twice more, ending up roughly where he started. She didn't say anything, just crouched down and picked him up gently.
He didn't fight it this time.
She carried him across the hall to his room and set him down and pulled a small blanket over him and he looked up at the wooden ceiling with its familiar crack running down the middle.
His eyes were heavy before she even left the room.
He was asleep before she reached the door.
What happens next?