I do not own Watchmen, or any of Alan Moore's characters that appear in this story. I only own Sonja and her family, and am not making any profit off of this story.
Sonja Hamal was attempting to complete her history homework for the next day before she had to go pick up her little brothers from their friend's house. Her youngest sister was asleep in her crib across the small living room, dreaming of elephants and princesses that lived in storybooks. Sonja wished she could be two years old again, back when she wasn't expected to act as a second mother while her parents were at work in the restaurant they owned.
The phone rang, disturbing her rare bubble of concentration. She sighed in exasperation and got up quickly to answer it, pushing stray pieces of her black hair out of her face as she went. Expecting to hear her little brother Amrit's voice asking to be escorted home, she was surprised to hear a woman on the other end. "No, now be quiet!"
"Hello?" Sonja asked hesitantly.
"Oh, I'm sorry! Hi Sonja, this is Sylvia Kovacs from the third floor. Listen, I was wondering if you'd be willing to babysit my son Friday night while I visit my sister. Normally he'd be all right by himself, but I'll be out until late and I'd like someone there to keep an eye on him."
Sonja glanced at the calendar before she said, "Uh…I need to double-check with my parents, but it should be all right. What time would you like me to come down?"
Mrs. Kovacs replied, "I'll be leaving at six, so if you could come by a little bit before then, that'd be great. Just let me know if anything comes up, otherwise I'll be seeing you on Friday."
"Thank you, Mrs. Kovacs," Sonja said before she hung up. She made a note on the calendar, feeling sad for Mrs. Kovacs' ten-year-old son Walter. The little redhead always looked dejected when Sonja passed him in the apartment complex, and he never had any friends with him. Whenever she said hi to him, he answered as if alarmed that someone was paying attention to him. And people around the building whispered that Mrs. Kovacs was a prostitute, which added to Sonja's pity for the little boy. Maybe she'd be able to get him to have some fun by playing games that her little brothers enjoyed.
Her parents had no problems with her babysitting job on Friday and asked how much Mrs. Kovacs had offered to pay. Sonja admitted that she hadn't asked, just assumed that she'd be paid whatever the woman could afford. Her father frowned at her answer and commented, "Woman is a cheapskate who cheats on her rent. Don't let her walk all over you."
On Friday evening at five fifty, Sonja knocked on the peeling door and heard shuffling inside the apartment. The door swung open and Mrs. Kovacs loomed over her, fumbling to get an earring in and missing one shoe. "Oh, nice to see you! Come in, I'm almost through getting ready…"
Sonja entered the apartment and was immediately hit by a cloud of cheap perfume and old dishwater. She shifted her bag on her shoulder, in which she'd packed board games and cards to keep Walter occupied. The small rooms she could see were in disarray, with various items of clothing strewn about on the furniture, the window shades crooked and drawn to different heights, and unwashed dishes sitting on the dingy coffee table. True, the apartments were for low-income residents, but her family made great efforts to make their home appear as clean and welcoming as they could. This was just…gross.
"Walter!" Mrs. Kovacs called out as she put her other earring in. "The babysitter's here!"
Sonja smiled at the boy when he walked in from the kitchen, studying her warily. His grey T-shirt was worn and had a set-in stain up by the collar, and his blue jeans were just as tattered. One of his toes poked through a hole in his right sock, and he clenched it as if he could sense her staring.
"Hi, Walter. I'm Sonja, remember me? I live two floors up," she said to him brightly, trying to draw a smile from his freckled face. Instead, his brown eyes shifted to the bag.
"What's in there?" he asked.
"Here, I'll show you." She found a spot on the sofa that wasn't taken up by loose newspapers and sat down, putting the bag between her feet and opening it. She pulled out a deck of cards, Pictionary, a kid-oriented version of Monopoly for ages nine and up, and Scrabble. Walter stood on the other side of the small table and studied each of the games as she set them out. Mrs. Kovacs shuffled about the apartment as she finished getting ready, but the freckled little boy paid no mind.
"I like Scrabble," he said, looking up at Sonja. "They had it at my school for a while, but then too many of the pieces got lost."
"All right, we can play whenever you feel like it. Have you eaten dinner?" she asked him.
He shook his head as his mother walked back into the living room, wearing too much perfume and with too much spray in her brunette hair. She handed Sonja a five-dollar bill and said, "It's not much, but it'll pay for a pizza if you'd like. I'll pay you in full once I get home, I hope that's okay."
Sonja stood up and nodded, slipping the money in the pocket of her pants. "It's no problem, Mrs. Kovacs. Do you know what time you'll be back?"
The woman glanced at the door and then answered, "Pretty late, I'd say around midnight or so. I hope that's not a problem."
"No, no, it's fine." Sonja said quickly.
"Walter usually goes to bed around nine on weeknights, but since it's a Friday he can stay up until ten." She smiled at her son, who merely lowered his eyes to the floor. "Well, if that's all taken care of, I'll be heading out," she announced, swinging her large purse over a wide shoulder. She bent over and kissed Walter on the top of his head. "Behave for the babysitter, okay?"
He nodded, unsmiling. "I will, Mom."
Sonja walked Mrs. Kovacs to the door, said goodbye, and closed it behind her. Once she could no longer hear the woman's footsteps in the hall, she smiled at Walter and asked, "Want to order that pizza now?"
He nodded eagerly but his expression remained the same. "Can we get mushroom? My mom hates mushroom so she never orders it."
She thought it peculiar that a ten-year-old liked mushrooms, but she enjoyed them herself and didn't see anything wrong. "Yeah, I like mushroom pizza too. I'll go call it in real quick."
The pizza would be delivered in half an hour, the man on the phone said, and then Sonja returned to the living room to find Walter sitting on the floor with the Scrabble game set up. He looked at her eagerly and said, "We can play while we wait for the pizza, right?"
"Of course," she answered, sitting on the other side. He hadn't yet picked his letters, but waited until she took hers first. They set to the game, and Sonja was surprised at how many words Walter knew, let alone how many he was able to spell out with his words. Within fifteen minutes, he had spelled out prone, tern, myopia, and aura.
"Wow, you're doing really well so far," Sonja commented as she finished the word bolt.
Walter studied the board for a moment before he added a few letters to an unfinished word that she couldn't identify yet. "I like spelling. I'm still learning, but I don't hate it like math class or history."
She chuckled. "I don't like history either, and I get a lot of history homework at school. Do you do any writing, Walter? Like stories or poems in school?"
His ginger eyebrows furrowed and he suddenly looked unsure of himself. A thin finger, thin even by the standards of a ten-year-old, poked idly at a wooden w and he didn't look up at Sonja. "Well…I had a journal for a little while. But my mom found it under my pillow and threw it away. She says writing is stupid."
Sonja frowned now. "Why would she do that?"
"I dunno, she says nobody can live by writing so I shouldn't even try. But it's okay. My teachers say I'm a good writer, so that's fine with me. You don't get grades on journals you keep at home, anyway."
"Yeah, but journals are where you can put your private thoughts down, in case you don't want your teachers to read them. I keep a journal and my parents know that it's my private thing. Maybe you could talk to your mom about it," she offered.
Now Walter met her gaze, his brown eyes hard. "I can't talk to her about that. I'll just keep a journal in my head."
Sonja, now genuinely unnerved by the little boy, waited until he returned his attention to the game and put a few letters down. When it was her turn, she spelled the word tyrant. Walter watched her the whole time, his muddy eyes blinking only a few times as they followed her hand. Her turn was over, and he looked intently at his letters. Ironically, he had enough to complete a whole new word. He did not grin or frown or look disgusted as he spelled out whore.
"Walter, that's…not a nice word." Sonja was alarmed at the derogatory term sitting on the board amongst benign words and articles. How did a ten-year-old know that word?
Walter looked into her eyes again, mahogany meeting ebony in a way that made Sonja's spine shiver a little bit. "It's what my mother is."
Her lips parted in utter surprise. It wasn't hard for her, a fifteen-year-old, to tell that Mrs. Kovacs was not a woman who earned her money honestly, but for her ten-year-old son to say it so blatantly was a slap in the face. She suddenly wanted to take his small hand and pull him out of the reeking, filthy apartment and take him somewhere, anywhere else. This little boy was not like the innocent children he went to school with, nothing like her own ten-year-old brother Amrit who loved dinosaurs more than anything else and would spend entire afternoons drawing dinosaurs out of borrowed library books. Now she knew why Walter's expression had unnerved her so badly when she first arrived: he had the mind of a much older boy, corrupted by his mother's indecent lifestyle.
"I know she is. The other kids in the apartment call me 'whoreson' because that's what their parents told them I am. They say that she goes out with men for money and I've seen them here sometimes. But they never come back. She told me that after my dad left, she was stuck with no money and then I was born. When I'm old enough, I'm going to find him and live with him." Walter spoke with such blatant disinterest, like he was discussing the weather section in the newspaper, that Sonja was left completely speechless.
He frowned now, looking slightly concerned at her lack of response. "Are you okay, Sonja?"
She bit her lower lip and nodded. "I'm sorry, Walter. Is there anything I can do to help you?"
"No, not really. I mean, if my mom ever has to go out again, you could come and babysit like this. It's nice not having her in the apartment sometimes." The little boy shrugged when he said it, admitting that he was powerless to his mother's rule.
"Okay." Sonja returned her attention to her Scrabble letters, suddenly not wanting to play anymore but knowing that it was normal and that was what Walter needed in his life. When the pizza arrived shortly later, he won the game without her going easy on him.
They ate their mushroom pizza in the kitchen, on top of a scratched and gouged table made of linoleum and cork. Walter gorged on the pizza like he hadn't eaten in a week, scarfing down four slices and a tall glass of water before he was full. Sonja managed two, and then put the remaining two slices on a paper plate under aluminum foil to stay in the fridge. Hoping to brighten the boy's mood, she asked, "What would you like to do now?"
He didn't answer right away, but padded into the living room to examine the remaining games that they hadn't yet opened. "Um…how about Monopoly?"
Sonja set the game up and they rolled dice to decide who would be the banker. Walter won by two, and he set about dealing the money. They chatted idly as they played, discussing Sonja's parents' restaurant and Walter's love for doing jigsaw puzzles and newspaper crosswords. As much as the young boy said he didn't like math, he never showed any difficulty when counting out the Monopoly money or doing the additions and subtractions. Sonja wondered how she had never noticed him in the building before.
"I've been to your parents' restaurant once before," Walter commented, lying on his stomach with his elbows holding him up. "They have really good Indian food there. I didn't think I'd like it, but it wasn't as weird as I thought."
She chuckled, moving her piece across the board. "It gets a little old when you eat it five nights a week. They bring home leftovers for us because it's cheaper and faster than cooking new stuff. But if you ever feel like getting out for a while, I'd be glad to take you down there for lunch. My parents give us free meals if we go in."
A rare smile spread across Walter's pale face. "That'd be swell."
Not surprisingly, Walter won the game of Monopoly when he forced Sonja into bankruptcy after an hour and a half of playing. She was relieved when the game was over, never one for long board games, but Walter never looked bored or impatient. He took his time with rolling the dice and deciding on whether or not to buy real estate for his property, never changing his mind or calling for do-overs. And when he won, he didn't jump up and down like her brothers would have, but smiled and said honestly, "That was fun."
Once the game was packed up and returned to its box, Walter stood and said, "I should probably take a shower now. My mom said I have to take one tonight sometime before I go to bed."
Sonja nodded. "Okay, I'll be in here when you're done."
She pulled some homework out of her bag and set about to doing a few math problems as the boy got into the shower. Though she still felt the unreasonable urge to take him out of the apartment and bring him to hers, she was impressed with his maturity and calm logic. Though he lived in disorder and moral corruption, he was self-sufficient and not easily pushed over. He'll turn out all right.
Sonja didn't even fathom that the ten-year-old was standing under hot water that didn't always come, scrubbing his skin furiously with a bar of soap that didn't foam up easily. He rubbed and scratched to clean off as much of his mother's filth as he could, because she was gone for once and wouldn't yell at him to stop wasting the water. Whoreson, whoreson, whoreson. He imagined that her wrongdoings were swirling down the drain with the soap, leaving him innocent of it all. For once in his ten years of life, he was positive that he was innocent of their lifestyle, that he didn't cause anything.
He returned to the living room twenty minutes later, wearing a long T-shirt and pajama pants that were a few inches too short for him. His damp red hair stuck up all over the place, and Sonja smiled because now Walter was the epitome of youth, of careless boyhood that thought nothing of hair brushes or pants that were long enough to cover skinny ankles. She put her homework away and he said that he wanted to play Pictionary.
Because it was just the two of them, they adjusted the rules so that each player had thirty seconds to guess what the picture was, otherwise they didn't earn a point. Sonja used her watch to keep time after promising Walter that she wouldn't cheat to earn herself more time for guessing. Walter, though not a stellar artist, was quite talented at drawing what he was prompted, and Sonja was able to guess what the images were under the thirty seconds most turns. Sometimes Walter's pictures were a little too detailed, which cost her a point, but when he showed her what the prompt was, she understood immediately.
He was even more clever at guessing Sonja's drawings, even ones like ukulele and capybara. Walter guessed five straight images on his turns and only missed meteorite because Sonja drew many craters in the rock and he thought it was some kind of cheese.
"Jeez, you're really good at this game, too," Sonja told him when he correctly guessed cartwheel in under fifteen seconds. She was sure she'd thrown him for a loop.
He shrugged and answered, "It's just everyday stuff. I see it every day, and you're good at drawing them, so it's not too hard."
They jumped at the knock on the door, both engrossed in the game. Sonja looked at the clock and saw that it was nine fifty, too early for Mrs. Kovacs to be back. She stood and made her way to the door, then warily looked through the peephole. To her immense surprise, Walter's bulky mother stood waiting to be let in.
Sonja opened the door. "Hi, Mrs. Kovacs. I didn't expect you back for a while."
The woman smiled, and Sonja didn't miss the fact that the lipstick she had been wearing when she left was now completely gone, and her hair was in slight disarray. "My sister's son got sick while I was over there…poor thing picked up the flu from school."
Sonja stepped back and let Mrs. Kovacs in, feeling a cold weight settle in her stomach when she saw Walter's face draw into an expression of woe. "Hi, honey. Did you guys have fun?"
He nodded, and then proceeded to clean up the Pictionary game. "Yeah, we played board games and ordered a pizza. There are two extra pieces in the fridge, but it's mushroom."
Mrs. Kovacs turned to Sonja and said quietly, "I hope he didn't guilt you into ordering mushroom."
Sonja shook her head. "No, I'm a vegetarian, actually. We agreed on it."
The woman looked relieved and said to Walter, "Well, that can be your breakfast or lunch tomorrow. As soon as Sonja leaves, it's time for bed."
Sonja helped Walter to put the board games back into her bag, and she swore that she could feel the bitterness and the anger emanating from him. She had been planning to let him stay up until he fell asleep and take the blame if Mrs. Kovacs returned to find him up past his bedtime. The young boy met her eyes once while they were packing up her things, and she saw the most heartbreaking loneliness in those brown orbs she'd witnessed yet.
She stood and watched Mrs. Kovacs walk into the kitchen and start to wash her hands. "Mrs. Kovacs?"
"Oh, that's right. Hang on a second, and I'll get your money," she answered.
"Bye, Sonja," Walter said, looking up at her as she swung her bag over her shoulder. He looked dejected, almost like he was holding something back, and Sonja knelt down and held her arms out to him. Walter accepted the offer and wrapped his arms around her neck, smelling like bar soap and the papery scent of playing cards. She could feel his ribs through the thin T-shirt.
She let the boy go, smiled at him one more time, and watched him go into his room down the short hall before she turned to talk with Mrs. Kovacs. The woman was drying her hands on a grungy dish towel hanging from the oven front. "Is ten dollars okay?"
Sonja nodded. "Yeah, it's fine. And I was talking to Walter earlier and he told me he sometimes has trouble with his math at school. If it's no problem to you, I could tutor him for free until he gets a better hold on it."
The woman handed her a five dollar bill and two singles, considering the offer. "Well, I don't mind, as long as it doesn't bother you. You can just give me a call when you want to come down."
"Actually, my parents own an Indian restaurant not too far from here. I do my homework there a lot and it's quiet, plus I get free meals. Walter mentioned that he ate there once and really liked it, so maybe I could take him down there."
Mrs. Kovacs nodded, and Sonja had a feeling that the woman wasn't really listening to her. "Sure, I don't care for ethnic food that much and Walter doesn't get out of the apartment a lot. I don't mind."
Sonja smiled at the woman, genuinely this time, and pocketed the money along with a scrap of paper on which the Kovacs' phone number was hastily scribbled down. "Thank you, Mrs. Kovacs. Have a good night."
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A.N.: Hello there! I plan on updating this weekly, until it reaches the end somewhere around 6 chapters. Hope everyone enjoys it. ^_^