Title: Charlene Dreiburg
Author: akisawana
Genre: Watchmen AU.
Disclaimer: This is not even a particularly original borrowing of other people's toys
Warnings: Rule 63'd Rorschach. People reproducing who really should not. People letting six-year-olds watching M*A*S*H.
Notes: SIX YEAR OLD GIRLS ARE REALLY THIS ADORABLE. One might argue that makes them Mary Sues, but those people clearly have never met my nieces, who are only alive *because* they are so cute. Also, this is actually chapter sixteen or so of a longer story that I might put up if there's an interest in it.
Charlene Dreiburg is six years old, and it is 1974.
Usually, she's woken by the sounds of her mother in the shower, but she stays in bed because if her mother thinks she woke her daughter up, she is sad. So Charlie waits until her mother comes in and wakes her up with a kiss on the forehead, and then Charlie hugs her. They have to be quiet, or Charlie's father will wake up, and then he will be grumpy, because Charlie's dad does not like to get up before noon.
Charlie owns pants, somewhere, but she much prefers the pretty dresses her mother makes for her. Today she picks out a princess dress, pale purple and glimmery, but not too sparkly. She wears white tights with it, and she will put on her black Mary Janes downstairs. First, though, is breakfast.
Her mother pours two cups of coffee and sets them on the table while she makes eggs and toast (which, along with canned soup, is about the extent of her mother's cooking.) It is Charlie's job to add the sugar to her mother's old cracked mug and her own smaller pink one. Her dad says that "It's not easy being the princess" is written on the side, but it's written in very fancy cursive and she can't pick out more than half the letters.
Six is an easy number, two rows of three, and she puts six sugar cubes in each cup and stirs them carefully. Her mother puts milk in Charlie's, and two plates of food on the table. Charlie eats like her father, dipping the toast in the egg yolk and eating the white with a fork; her mother makes a sandwich out of her breakfast.
Then it's back up the stairs to brush her teeth and hair. She does one while her mother does the other. In the mirror, she looks like her parents; she is short like her mother and just this side of chubby like her father. She has his soft brown hair and soft brown eyes, and her mother's nose and freckles, which are cute on a six-year-old. Her mother pulls Charlie's hair away from her face and pins it with barrettes with purple butterflies on them. Charlie is perfectly capable of climbing down from the stepstool herself, but she turns around and hugs her mother instead.
She hugs her mother a lot, because her mother always smiles when she does and her mother doesn't smile enough. Her mother lifts Charlie down from the stool and they go downstairs hand-in-hand.
Charlie's backpack is ready next to the stairs where her dad put it last night after making sure everything she needed was in there. It looks like an owl. She thinks it's a little creepy to unzip the head of an owl to keep her school papers in, but her dad thinks it's more than a little cute, and she likes owls anyways.
She buckles her shoes and buttons her coat all by herself, like the big girl she is, and her and her mother go out into New York October together. Charlie holds her mother's hand tightly as she leads her to the subway station. If she doesn't, her mother will try to take "shortcuts" through icky alleys, and they don't get to the subway station any faster. Charlie thinks that it's because her mother doesn't like to be around so many people, because her mother walks with her head down and she walks as fast as Charlie can. Charlie's dad agrees with her, and tells Charlie that she should make her mother walk on the sidewalk like a regular person except when her mother is too upset, and that Charlie is a big girl and can tell the difference. Charlie can; it's easy. When her mother holds her hand tightly, that means that she's okay, and when her mother barely holds her hand at all, that means it's time to go down the alleys because her mother is scared and trying very hard not to hurt her.
Charlie's mother has never hurt her.
Today is a good day, and when they get to the subway station, they only have to wait a minute or two before the train comes. On the train, her mother holds onto one of the straps and Charlie holds onto her mother, because you never know who was just sitting on the seats and once there was poop on a seat. Most children Charlie's age would have found that funny, but Charlie just thought it was gross, which made her parents happy for some reason.
The school is only two stops away from their house. Next year, or maybe even after Christmas they will walk all the way and not take the subway at all, but right now Charlie's legs are too short to make it. Her father told her it was better to admit that she can't and take the subway instead of trying to walk and falling down in the middle of the road halfway there, because there's a difference between being proud of what she can do, and doing what she can't just to try to prove people wrong. That doesn't make any sense, but he was looking at her mother when he said it, so Charlie thinks maybe her mother walked too far once and fell down and they had to call her father. Charlie's mother falls down a lot.
Once, Charlie's teacher asked if her father ever hurt her mother. Charlie thought that was silly, because her father's the one that puts the band-aids on her mother when she falls down, and when her mother fell down and twisted her ankle and it got really big her father insisted on carrying her mother everywhere, even to the bathroom. Her mother just falls down. Someday soon her parents will be called in "to talk about Charlie's schoolwork" but there will be two police officers there and after two hours Charlie's mother will want to put her in a different school and Charlie's father will laugh and say he likes having his daughter in a class where the teacher cares so much and pays so much attention to that kind of thing and they won't talk to each other for two days.
But that is a few weeks into the future, so now Charlie just hugs her mother and kisses her cheek at the school door. Charlie's mother tells her to be good, and she promises she will. She has friends to play with and while there are bullies they leave her and her friends alone because Charlie has proven that she can make bullies cry just by saying things to them, and she can do it without swearing so she doesn't get in too much trouble. She has been at school for six weeks, which is forever to a child, and at school she isn't a princess so much as a queen.
School is mostly play, and Mr. Adams teaches with games. Everyone wants to be on Charlie's team, but for games where you get to pick, she picks Mikey who is a "scholarship kid" and no-one else likes him because of that even if no-one is quite sure what that means, but Charlie likes him because he is nice and her parents didn't tell her not to. Sometimes, she picks Olivia who falls down almost as much as her mother, but like her mother, doesn't do it in front of Charlie. (She will have Olivia at her birthday party, and after that she will only fall down as much as a normal six year old.) Her best friend is Sophie, but she rarely picks her because when they do things in groups of four, the teacher usually picks. Sophie doesn't mind that Charlie never picks her once Charlie tells her that she never picks Sophie because Sophie can always find a partner by herself. Sophie picks Andrew who no-one else likes because he doesn't seem to understand the difference between people and televisions, but Sophie knows he tries really hard and when he hits the other kids, it's only because they said something to hurt his feelings. He never hits Mikey. Mary is the other girl that plays with them, and there is nothing special about her besides the fact that she can draw better than anyone else in the class.
Charlie likes writing the best, because it's like magic. Someone writes something down and she reads it later and it's like talking to them on the telephone, only better, because it doesn't matter how far away they are or if they wrote it past Charlie's bedtime. She writes careful letters to her Uncle Hollis, and even more careful letters to Jenny who lives in the Bronx and doesn't have a father. She is the only one in her class who holds the pencil in her left hand, but that's how her mother writes, so it's not wrong.
Charlie doesn't like math, because it's too easy and boring. She can count all the way up to a hundred, and her dad taught her how to add any two numbers on paper a long time ago. She doesn't like reading either, because the stories they read are boring and she read them when she was a baby of three, but her parents love to buy her books so she helps the other kids read and thinks of all the books she can read at home. She doesn't read books with pictures anymore.
At lunch, she gets a hot meal and she doesn't have to pay for it because her father paid for a lot of them in advance and her name is on the list. Mikey's name is on the list, too, and Sophie brings money every day. They sit together, along with Andrew and Mary and Olivia. Andrew always has the exact same thing for lunch, and he gives his apple to Mikey. Charlie and Sophie and Mary and Olivia talk about very important things, like how Mary's little brother tried to feed Mary's dog chocolate last night and Olivia wants them to come over and see her new little sister but is afraid to ask her parents because they'll say no.
After lunch is art class and Charlie's bad at drawing, and coloring inside the lines. Mary helps her, and shows her how to trace three fingers to make a tree, and how everything is made of circles and lines, and Charlie thinks this must be how other people feel when they try to read. Charlie's favorite thing to do is to put big wet circles of watercolors on one side of a piece of paper and carefully fold it in half to make a pretty picture that everyone thinks is something different. Her second favorite thing to do is to fold paper birds. There's a book in the classroom that shows how to do it, and as long as she follows the steps in the right order, she has a bird. The book has other things in it, too, but birds she carefully memorizes so she can do it at home.
After art is more learning pretending to be games, and after that is recess, but it's raining so they have to stay inside. Charlie and her friends sit by the window and Charlie tells a story her father told her, about King Arthur and Merlin and the sword in the stone. She does not know about Guinevere or Nimue yet, but she does know about Tristan and Isolde. Some of the other children come over to listen, and then she tells a story about the Minute Men, and how Mothman flew up to rescue a little girl's cat and got stuck in a tree, and how Nite Owl had to come get him down. It's mostly true, and she knows it because her Uncle Hollis told it to her, and he was Nite Owl. He also told her that the Comedian was actually the first person to try to rescue Mothman, but all he did was laugh and try to find someone with a camera to take pictures. Charlie leaves that part out, because it's not very nice, and if you don't have anything nice to say, you don't say anything at all.
After recess, Mr. Adams looks in his big gray book and announces that they're all so smart, they can do whatever they want for the rest of the day, because they've learned so much they have to let the other classes catch up. Charlie knows this is important, because next year the children will be reshuffled like a deck of cards in Go Fish, and if some of them know more than others, they'll be really bored while the others catch up, like she is during reading and math, only all day.
Andrew goes to his special classroom after recess, and Mr. Adams has a special project for Olivia. Mary and Mikey want to play house, but Sophie would rather show Charlie how to play the piano in the corner. Sophie goes to lessons every Tuesday after school, and Charlie wants to take them too, but the piano teacher is very busy so she has to wait until after Thanksgiving. So until then, Sophie plays for her, plays Mozart and Beethoven, and also some songs that Charlie hears on the radio. Sophie shows Charlie how to play the easy half of "Heart and Soul," and then teaches her the words, and they practice until it's time to go home.
Charlie's father is waiting for her outside the school like he always is, smiling in thick glasses and a bowtie. He holds out his arms and swings her up when she hugs him. She chatters excitedly all about what happened at school today as he waits for a taxi, holding her out of the puddles. Finally, a yellow cab appears and he flags it down, tells the driver to take them to the Museum of Natural History, all without Charlie missing a beat.
At the Museum of Natural History, everyone knows them, since they come in every Thursday. Charlie's father takes her to a different museum after school every day because they can't go straight home; her mother is taking a nap and if Charlie is home she won't. The Museum of Natural History is Charlie's favorite and her father's favorite, and they easily spend two hours flitting from exhibit to exhibit until Charlie is tired enough that she doesn't protest when he carries her piggyback outside, even if she's a big girl and can walk by herself. They take another taxi home, and it's a very fast taxi because Charlie is too big to take naps, so this must be some sort of magic taxi to get them home so fast in rush-hour traffic. She's not exactly sure what rush hour is when she tells her father that, and he smiles and agrees with her.
Charlie's mother is always waiting in the kitchen for them with a plate of Oreos, and when she hears the door she pours three glasses of milk. Charlie tells her mother all about her day, and though her mother doesn't ask questions like her father does, she does occasionally say, "Enk," or "Hurm," and Charlie knows that her mother isn't asking questions because Charlie is explaining everything so well. She asks her parents if she can have a baby brother like Mary and Olivia, and the no comes before she even finishes the question. Then she asks if she can have a dog like Uncle Hollis, and at least this time they don't say no until she finishes the question, but they still say it in unison. Then she asks if she can get a kitten, which is what she really wants, and they look at each other before her father says maybe.
Charlie goes off to play, and her parents tell her they will be down in the basement if she needs them. Charlie isn't allowed down in the basement, but that doesn't bother her because all that's down there are rats and bugs. Her parents are trying to get rid of them so they can keep stuff down there, but right now Charlie is happy to stay upstairs, where it is light and free of vermin.
Charlie is playing with her dolls when she decides to have a tea party. Uncle Hollis had given her a tea set, one piece at a time, last Hanukah when she stayed with him because her mother went to Staten Island and got lost and her father had to find her. It's a real adult tea set, and that means it really can break, so she is very careful as she sets the small table in her room for three. She brings the milk jug upstairs so she doesn't have to carry a creamer full of milk, and when she goes downstairs she brings back up a double handful of sugar cubes. Her parents are still in the basement, so before she continues she raids her father's desk for a blank sheet of paper. She carefully folds it in half and even more carefully writes "Your Invited" on the outside, and on the inside the date (Today), the time (she draws the clock face instead of writing it out), the place (My Room), and on the bottom she writes "RVSP Egrets Only." She doesn't know what that means, but it's on the bottom of all the party invitations she gets.
She takes it downstairs and props it on the table so it is the first thing her parents will see when they come up from the basement. She brings up a plastic cup and three teabags for the tea. The plastic cup is used to get some very hot water from the bathroom sink, and she pours it carefully into the teapot over the teabags, spilling only a little. Then she sits down and waits for her parents, unwrapping the sugar cubes and putting them in the sugar bowl. She only eats three. Okay, four.
Her parents are right on time for the party, knocking on her open door. Charlie jumps up, grabs a parent in each hand, and thanks them for coming while dragging them over to the table. The table only has two chairs, so her father has to sit on the floor, but he doesn't mind.
Miss Laurie taught Charlie to put the sugar in the cups first, and then the tea, and then the milk, because otherwise all the sugar will sink to the bottom. Miss Laurie had to teach her because, as she put it, neither of Charlie's parents "could make tea if their lives depended on it." Then she had laughed and painted Charlie's nails pink. Charlie's mother likes lots of sugar in her tea, and her father likes no milk. Charlie's father hands her mother the sugar bowl, and Charlie does not notice the marks of her mother's fingers around his wrist any more than the love-bite on her mother's shoulder.
She does notice, while her mother is eating sugar cubes, that her mother's sleeve is torn almost to the elbow. Charlie asks how the basement is coming along, in her best grown-up voice, and her father tells her about the tiny waterfall they found today, and how he's going to block it up. Charlie doesn't understand what he's saying, since it's awfully mathematical, so she does what her mother does and says things that aren't really words. Her mother stops her father every so often and reminds him to drink his tea. When her father is done with his very complicated story, Charlie remembers her duty as hostess, and asks her mother about the skirt she is sewing herself for Thanksgiving. Charlie saw the pattern, and it is very pretty, but it has a lot of parts and her mother is very busy. Charlie's mother doesn't tell stories like her father, so Charlie has to ask a lot of questions, but her mother is very smart and never has to look up an answer to her questions in a book like her father.
When the tea is done, Charlie's father says he will clean up so Charlie can do her homework. Charlie groans, but her parents are firm on the necessity of doing homework every night. Tonight, Charlie has to read out loud to her mother for fifteen minutes –they are reading the Hobbit, and Charlie trips over the names of the dwarves. Then she has to write a whole page about what she read. She wants to write that Elves are stupidheads, but her mother convinces her that racist is a better word, since she thinks they're stupidheads because they don't like dwarves just because they are dwarves. Then she has to explain that racist means that you don't like someone because of what they look like before you even meet them, and that takes up the rest of the page. Charlie's mother is very proud of her. They do not show her father.
She puts her homework back in her backpack, and then her dad gives her a bath. Charlie's father has always bathed her, for as long as she can remember, and before she could dress herself in the mornings, it was her father that did it –very grumpily. Charlie's mother goes out to get Chinese takeout, because if her mother can't make anything but eggs, toast, and canned soup, her father can't make anything but eggs and toast, and even then only one at a time. When Charlie's mother comes home, her father helps her out of the tub so she doesn't slip. Instead of pajamas like other girls, Charlie just wears one of her father's old t-shirts, which is tie-dyed and has dancing bears on it, and hangs far below her knees. Her father brushes out her hair upstairs while her mother dishes out dinner downstairs, and Charlie helps her father clear off the coffee table so they can eat in front of the TV.
Charlie's mother brings out three plates, two bottles of Coke and an apple juice box. Charlie leans against her father while he flips through channels on the couch; her mother curls in the recliner with a newspaper and pen. Charlie's father stops the TV on M*A*S*H, which is funny sometimes, and sad sometimes, but mostly it goes right over her head. Charlie's mother explained to her that the commies are bad because they are anti-American, and her father said it wasn't that all commies are bad but the people who told them what to do that are, and then her parents had a big fight when they thought she was asleep so Charlie doesn't ask questions about M*A*S*H or commies anymore. She just laughs at the TV when the laugh track tells her to, and thinks when she grows up she wants to be a doctor and save lives, except she wants to do it in New York City because there's enough people shooting each other that she doesn't have to go to a foreign country to do it. She'll be funny like Hawkeye, though, and everyone will ask her for help when they have a problem.
Charlie's father has to remind her mother to eat, and when Charlie is full she snuggles against him with her juice box. He puts his arm around her, and she thinks that Klinger's dresses aren't nearly as pretty as hers are. When her juice box is empty, he takes it from her and sets it on the coffee table. She leans against him, and her eyes are heavy, and she is asleep before the credits roll.
Charlie wakes briefly in her bed, when her mother kisses her forehead after tucking her in. She doesn't remember it in the morning, when the shower running on the other side of the wall wakes her.