A/N: Unapologetic fluff for a challenge to write outside my comfort zone, posted in honour of Lilac Day, the Glorious Twenty-Fifth of May. Sir Terry, you are and will always be very sorely missed.
It was quiet.
Months had passed since Young Sam's schedule had shifted and his fixation on the ritual reading of Where's My Cow? had begun to very slowly wane, but Vimes' iron-fast rule about arriving home by six o'clock remained. It had been put to the test many times, for many reasons, but six o'clock was important. On the quiet days as well as the chaotic ones.
The recent driving rain had flooded out the usual dens of disquiet within the city, and put a decidedly soggy dampener on the ethnic squabbles that usually crowded the streets of the Disc's most multicultural city. Today there had been no scraps between tiny Überwaldian countries whose names Vimes could never keep straight. None of the traditional dust-ups between dwarves and trolls which continued in spite of a treaty signed and countersigned by Low King Rhys Rhysson and Diamond King of Trolls. Chrysoprase appeared to have broken the back of the drug market in Slime, which had replaced Slice and Slide on the troll drug market, or at least broken the backs of enough dealers that it had ground to an abrupt halt. Nobby Nobbs was still too disconsolate to start up another scheme after the injustice of having been made to stop attempting to fine families retrieving personal possessions from their flooded homes for using improper boating licences. The River Watch was even keeping a firm lid on the garden variety domestic disturbances over whose house the possessions were being retrieved from, at least since Constable Dorfl had proved able to walk underwater through the flooded streets and surface unexpectedly the moment trouble did.
Vimes didn't trust quiet. It always meant there was trouble brewing. It had been quiet the whole day at the Watch House, so he'd come home early because a copper knew to always get his rest in before everything went all to hell, only to find…
Quiet.
It was too quiet.
"Hello, Sam," said Sybil cheerfully when Vimes poked his head into the library looking for any sign of life at all in the house. His feet throbbed with prophetic blisters at the sight of a pile of freshly darned socks next to her chair. "I think Sam's out in the garden. Fetch him in for his bath, why don't you, and I'll tell Cook to expect us in half an hour."
"Yes, dear," said Vimes obediently. He headed out to find Young Sam nursing the deep suspicion that he'd been deliberately handed the more difficult job.
Young Sam did love baths. He did. It was the process of getting him into the water in the first place that was a challenge generally accompanied by kicking and screaming and threats and tears, the effect of which Sybil seemed to be somehow immune to, but which always made Vimes feel like he'd rather be breaking up a dwarf-troll riot in nothing but his drawers.
Of course to Young Sam, now approaching his second birthday, every small thing had become a potential match to the powder keg of his conflicted soul. He was a happy child, generally, but appeared to have inherited Vimes' innate distrust for authority—at least authority that was telling him to eat his greens, or wash behind his ears. Even story time had become less straightforward, as Young Sam branched out into literary criticism and discovered that the search for a recalcitrant cow, however it amused him, was no longer enough to distract him from the inexorably encroaching future of bed.
Still, with wives as with city politics, someone had to do the dirty work, and it usually ended up being Vimes.
At first glance, the garden appeared to be empty, populated by nothing more than overgrown shrubs, muddy grass and a few pieces of decrepit, algae-coloured statuary that had stayed put when the back garden at Scoone Avenue had briefly become, even at their elevated location, a lake. Fortunately not one connected to the Ankh, or the flood waters wouldn't have been able to recede so much as ooze away.
Eventually, half-hidden behind a wall, Vimes spotted a flash of blonde hair over what would probably have been pale blue dungarees, were it not for the generous helpings of mud splattered all over them. Closer investigation revealed the wearer to be Young Sam, squatting beside a bush, peering underneath with the intensity of focus common to toddlers and madmen.
"What are you looking at there?" asked Vimes, squelching over to him.
"Daddy! Cow!" he said, pointing underneath and looking up at Vimes, his face alight with wonder.
"I doubt it," admitted Vimes.
Still, he was hesitant to rule anything out entirely, after the fiasco with the miniature elephants that had escaped from Benny Zee's Fabulous Flea Circus last month to cause havoc in the dairy-maker's guild and left tiny round, buttery footprints all through the city. He squatted down to have a look too, but couldn't see anything.
"Cow!" insisted Young Sam, and reached pudgy arms right underneath the bush to extract a muddy rock, which he held up in cupped hands.
Vimes was all set to admire it in tones of not-entirely-feigned astonishment. How the child kept finding rocks everywhere he went, Vimes had no idea. Ankh-Morpork was supposedly on loam, but nonetheless, every day Young Sam would come inside with his pockets full of the—
The rock moved, opening its beak to make a pitiful squeaking sound, and the picture abruptly coalesced in Vimes' mind into a tiny, bedraggled duckling. It was possible that it might once have been yellow, but at the moment its down had been slicked and spiked in various places by mud.
"That's not my cow," said Vimes stupidly.
"Nomicow," agreed Young Sam, who could now repeat this line, too, but had been slow in coming to terms with the fact that the vast majority of animals in the world were not, in fact, remotely easy to mistake for cows.
Vimes shook his head, trying to clear it, but at this point there was really only one place to go. "It is a duck," he said gravely.
And oh, gods, where had the thing come from? Slicked down with mud and shivering, it looked half-dead. A moment's squelchy investigation turned up a bundle of twisted twigs and leaves underneath the bush, along with a handful of broken eggshells. It seemed the short term residents of the Ramkin estate during the floods had left something behind.
"Guck," said Young Sam, looking at it dubiously. Story-book ducklings were noticeably absent a muddy covering. "Wack?"
"Yes, quack. It's a duck. Now it needs to go back in its nest, Sam."
Young Sam clutched the muddy duckling to his chest, the contact somehow contriving to make both himself and the duckling even dirtier. Apparently, he'd inherited his heart from his mother.
"Put it down, please, Sam," repeated Vimes, as gently as he could. Please, he begged internally, looking at the tiny shivering thing, please put it back, and don't get attached. "Or its mother will wonder where it is."
Although from the looks of the nest, its mother had probably gathered up its brothers and sisters and paddled away on the last of the floodwaters, leaving this one to fend for itself.
"Samuel Vimes!" interrupted a booming voice from the house. "What have you been up to?"
Lady Sybil stood in the doorway frowning at them both with the Duchess-level hauteur that made Vimes instinctively hide his muddy hands behind his back, before realising that her disapproval was directed at their entirely mud-encrusted son. Probably, at least. Almost certainly.
Recognising the tone as well as Vimes, Sam hurriedly thrust the duckling back under the bush and ran over to her, slipping and skidding through muddy puddles in the sodden grass and up the wide stone stairs to the door. Vimes gave the bushes a guilty look.
"Bath before dinner, young man," Sybil was telling their son firmly, her large frame entirely eclipsing the doorway into the house. "No excuses, now, you're all over with muck."
"Noba!" yelled Young Sam, going from calm to full tantrum in a moment. "Nononono! Nobaaaaaa!" He looked up at her with tears of betrayal flowing down his cheeks, and wails of heartbroken despair took over from words.
Oh, gods. Vimes hated this part. Would it really be too bad to let Young Sam eat his dinner without removing the outer layer of mud first? It wasn't like Vimes had never done the same thing, when he'd been on the go for days and food was just fuel to keep him going for days more.
But Sybil was always a rock in the face of Young Sam's meltdowns. She gazed down at him sternly, like a guardian goddess carved into a mountainside.
Desperate for anywhere to look that wasn't the oncoming clash of wills between the two people he loved most in the world, Vimes sidled back towards the bush where Young Sam had left his little friend, and rummaged around underneath. Maybe, if he smuggled the thing inside under his jerkin, and stashed it in a warm corner of the dragon pens… He could let Sybil know, take over Young Sam's bath; she'd know what it should eat, and they wouldn't be risking Young Sam's little heart.
"Now, Sam," said Sybil, in the no nonsense tone she always used on ill-behaved swamp dragons and Vimeses. "Bath time, and then dinner. Won't that be nice?"
Giving up on finding the duckling by feel, and on pretending to himself that there was any chance he was going into the house without it, Vimes leaned down to check properly under the bush, only to find it entirely gone.
He glanced around the garden, but with its muddy covering, the thing could blend in anywhere.
Perhaps he could get Willikins to organise the servants to search for it. He didn't want to have to call in the Watch; Carrot would certainly take the whole thing too seriously, and they'd end up with a perimeter guard of armed trolls, and all hands from the Watch House mobilised to perform a miniaturised grid search.
Well, perhaps they'd save that for a last resort—then he spotted it, over by the house, struggling against the insurmountable height of the wide bottom step.
Above, Young Sam's tantrum was building in intensity, gathering strength with every breath he drew and losing what little coherence it had started with. "Nonono baaa!" he cried, and ran away down the steps on his pudgy legs, with the admirable determination of a toddler who hasn't yet realised that there is only ever one end to this argument.
Sybil drew in a breath, great bosom expanding over the top of her corset as the industrial strength strings creaked and strained and miraculously held. She paused at the height, frowning down at Young Sam's fleeing feet, seeing what Vimes was already watching.
Scuttling along behind Young Sam, peeping furiously as it struggled to keep up, was the baby duck.
Sybil's posture softened. "Well," she said, her voice as warm a swamp dragon dam breathing over her eggs, her enormous heart visibly expanding to take in another being.
And that was it, this duckling was going to survive even if Vimes had to bring Igor up from Pseudopolis Yard to do whatever it was Igor did in his dungeon room—although he may have to be quite firm on the subject of extra limbs. Or heads.
"Guck!" announced Young Sam, having also noticed his tiny follower. He pointed at it with the triumphant certainty of a new convert, miraculously cured of his inconsolable woes. A few confused, orphaned tears finished their trek down his smiling cheeks. "Wack, wack!"
"It certainly is!" Sybil agreed bracingly, crouching down to inspect it as Young Sam scooped the little thing up and brought it to her. "I think I know what this young fellow needs. And I think I know who he'll need to help him!"
The tears didn't return, even at the reintroduction of the dreaded 'b' word. Young Sam proudly led his small charge inside, letting it waddle after him along the flat, lifting it up difficult stairs, all the way to the bathroom.
As it turned out, once the clean bathwater had congealed to nearly the consistency of the Ankh from the mud the pair had brought in, the duckling was yellow, and perfectly content to paddle about in the warm water after the giggling Young Sam as he led it from one end of the bath to the other. It was also fluffy, once it and Young Sam had been coaxed back out of the bath again, and it had been wrapped in a towel warmed on the fire grate.
It matched Young Sam spoon for spoon throughout dinner, snug in its lined cardboard box between Young Sam and Sybil's place settings. Although even Young Sam's disgustingly healthy looking vegetable mash looked more appetising than the mixture Sybil was dribbling to the duckling: raw egg fortified with the vitamin formula she gave newly hatched dragon to grow shiny scales, and a touch of brandy.
The duckling did look stronger. Or at least drunker, given the way its path wavered after Young Sam as the two trailed behind Vimes to Young Sam's room. They settled together to listen to the story and drifted off to sleep, as peaceable as a boy and the duckling that couldn't lose sight of him for a moment without making a racket could be.
In the middle of the night, the silence awoke Vimes. There was no deafening scream, thunder was not rolling ominously, and Captain Carrot had so far entirely failed to come crashing through the door to summon him back to the Watch House for the expected crisis.
It was quiet, and he was alone in bed.
It didn't take him long to find Sybil. Usually, he would have looked in the dragon pens, where she might be checking on the newly-hatched dragons, or tending to one of the bulls with an upset tummy that was likely to turn explosive. Tonight, he doubted it.
She was standing in the doorway of Young Sam's room, looking in on their son sleeping: his mouth open against the pillow, legs pulled up underneath him and bottom in the air under the blue shawl decorated with little ducks which had been retrieved from the cupboard at Young Sam's insistence. The real duckling nestled in a shoebox box atop a hot water bottle on the dresser, downy breast fluttering up and down with its quick breath.
Heart full, Vimes put her arms around Sybil, and rested his chin on her shoulder. Somewhere in the city, trouble was brewing: it always did, in the quiet.
But right now, it was perhaps not too quiet.