Disclaimer: Lamentingly not mine.
A/N: Written for Challenge #002 'The past' at YGO Drabble, my brand spanking new challenge community over on LiveJournal – come and join in the fun! This was originally called 'Hush Little Baby', until I realised I already have a fic by that name.
Don't Say a Word
© Scribbler, May 2010.
Sugoroku was an intelligent man. He understood more ancient cultures than you could count on all fingers and toes without your socks. He could speak ten languages, three of which no longer existed in the modern world, and if anyone needed to know Egyptian burial rites in a hurry, he was your guy. Nevertheless, he tried and failed to understand the words now coming at him like snowflakes in a blizzard.
"Lip-Philtrum Guide? Likert Scale? Palpebral fissure length? What are they and what do they have to do with my daughter-in-law?"
The doctor had kind eyes and a gentle manner. "Nothing, but they do relate to your grandson."
"Yuugi?" Terror washed through him. Please, not after everything else.
The past twelve months rated only next to the year he lost his wife for bad luck. Doubly ironic, since things started out so well, with Kokoro and Tamashii's marriage and five-minutes-later pregnancy. Sugoroku remembered them standing in his kitchen, and Tamashii whapping his head when he claimed it was customary for prospective grandparents to smooch their daughters-in-law.
"For luck," he'd said. "Ow! I thought I got rid of all our wooden spoons? Did you bring that thing with you?"
"Be afraid, old man," she'd grinned. "In the West it's also customary for new babies to receive silver spoons, and I have lots of western friends."
"My skull is whimpering already. Kokoro, you married a harpy."
Kokoro had laughed and embraced his wife. "Maybe, but I can't say I mind."
"Your sweet-nothings are awful," she'd said, before kissing him.
Sugoroku would give anything to re-enact that scene. It wouldn't happen. Three months later a truck ploughed into Kokoro's car. The driver had suffered a heart attack after crash-dieting to slim into a tuxedo for his own daughter's wedding. The two deaths were so senseless, and hit Sugoroku hard, but Tamashii harder.
She stopped smiling the day her husband died. As distraction from her grief, she threw herself into work, and clawed like a rabid cat when forced into early maternity leave by worried colleagues. Sugoroku asked her to move in as her due date loomed, and then wished he hadn't when he found the empties she didn't bother hiding. Forgetting was Tamashii's coping mechanism of choice, and she didn't much care how she achieved it.
She'd been drunk when her waters broke. She hadn't been to her prenatal classes because she'd been too busy at work and then too inebriated. They couldn't give her painkillers because combining them with the alcohol in her bloodstream would've killed her.
Sugoroku shut his eyes. "Explain, and use words I understand. Small ones."
"I can use puppets too," the doctor joked. Sugoroku didn't laugh. She sighed. "Your grandson has hallmarks of Foetal Alcohol Syndrome. At this stage we're not sure of the extent of the damage. FAS often bears out in a child's development, as a lot of the issues are unseen aside from growth deficiencies. It could be he's just a little small for his age, is more prone to infections, or gets sicker from illness other children fight off easily. On the other hand, mental retardation is also a possibility."
Sugoroku pictured Kokoro, joyfully reading baby name books; and Tamashii scouring her family tree for an illustrious ancestor to name the baby after. After Kokoro died she'd lost interest, referring to it only as 'the baby' when she referred to it at all. It had fallen to Sugoroku to name the baby when told by the midwife it was a boy.
He opened his eyes and looked hard at the doctor. He already knew what he had to do. He'd known it since the first time he found an empty bottle and heard the belligerence in Tamashii's voice when he confronted her with it. This didn't change anything, except to hammer home how much his grandson needed him, and how much his daughter-in-law needed to get help.
"Doc, tell me everything I need to know to raise him happy and healthy."
Fin.