Disclaimer: Embarrassingly not mine.
A/N: Written for Challenge #039: Puppet at ygodrabble on LiveJournal. Pre-canon.
Ignore the Man Behind the Curtain
© Scribbler, May 2011.
Sugoroku held the book out. His eyesight was getting worse. He should wear glasses, but they made him feel old. He squinted, hoping poor eyesight was behind what he saw. No such luck. His mouth dried. When he tried to speak, his voice was a hoarse whisper.
"Errm…"
Yuugi looked on with big expectant eyes. He sat cross-legged on the carpet, his whole body tilted slightly forward, hands braced on his heels. He didn't hurry his grandfather. That was almost worse.
Sugoroku looked between the book and his left hand, poking over the top of the polystyrene wall that came with the kit. He wasn't a big man, but had to hunch his whole body to hide behind the wall. His neck cricked whenever he looked up to see what his hand was doing.
He should've known this was a bad idea when he unpacked the kits in the shop. He would never stock educational games again. He was certainly never testing them on his grandson.
"Hi, uh, kids," he read from the script.
Why had he thought this was a good idea? It had seemed better than the alternative. He cursed the bright box with its smiling children and their smiling parents, all smile-smile-SMILING after the kit helped conquer those 'life lessons' that always flummoxed him.
He hadn't raised his son. He was too busy on archaeological digs, chasing secrets of the past, or funding for his next expedition. His son's life had been a series of snapshots, viewed whenever he came home. He remembered a baby, a toddler, sometime after the boy started school, a teen, and finally a college student who breezed in and out for laundry and snacks but slept somewhere else and never mowed the lawn. Sugoroku hadn't felt the pang of loss as keenly as his wife, left all alone in an empty nest when her men were away. Now he understood what it had been like – what he had done to her in pursuit of his own dreams. He marvelled at his selfishness, but more that she never complained. He hadn't understood or appreciated her while she was alive. That behaviour now shamed him in ways he would've thought impossible while lecturing about ancient Egyptian burial rituals at Oxford, Harvard, Keio, or trekking deserts on camels, in jeeps or on hot, blistered feet.
When Yuugi came to live with him, he had mourned his career as an archaeologist as much as he mourned the son he hadn't, actually, known all that well. How could raising a child compare with the thrill of a dig? Downsizing to a shopkeeper was embarrassing. He had done it, he told himself, because Yuugi had lost his parents. He had nobody else. Sugoroku couldn't just abandon him. And maybe he'd listened to the quiet guilt whispering: you should've got to know your son better.
Embarrassing? The irony struck like a brick to the head. Child-rearing was the toughest job in the world. Give him poisonous darts, angry natives and a cursed artefact any day. Anything would be better than… well, this. Sugoroku once woke semi-naked after an indigenous tribe bopped him on the head, burned his clothes and dressed him in a 'more respectable' loincloth. He spent a night upside down after stepping in a jungle snare-trap. He once got too close to a camel's rear and spent a hot, sweaty day surrounded by flies and the smell of dung. Nothing came close to this.
He put down the book and raised his right hand. It wore a glove shaped like a man. The left was a woman. Both wore strategic soft-felt fig-leaves.
No more educational toys. Ever.
"When a man and woman love each other very much and want to have a baby, they hug in a special way…"
Fin.
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