Title Caretaker
Author Uozumi
Genre General/Humor
Rating G
Disclaimer I do not own nor claim to own this. The characters, ect...contained within are not my property. This is an act of fandom and I do not make a profit from this endeavor.
Summary He really should have been more cautious when they handed the baby over to him with a smile. L and Mello in the Wammy House.
Note This is going on the assumption that L was around twenty-six during the series and Mello was thirteen and Near was ten when we met them. Why those numbers? They just were what struck me when I first met these characters.

Caretaker

He should have been more cautious. He should have run away and hid in that big chair he liked where he could draw his legs up and hide away from everyone, but no, he accepted the bundle without much thought. The boy was a bit over thirteen, almost fourteen, and the little thing in his arms was just under one years old and stared at him with an equally stunned expression.

They told him that the boy's name was Mihael and he had come from another country. The adults marveled at how quiet the child was and told the teenager that he should look after the baby since it had finally stopped fussing after he held him.

Away at a tennis match, the teenager came back to the Wammy House to find a crib moved into his room and set his tennis things on the floor. The room had only the essentials in it, but there were more things on the floor or covering the desks than were in drawers or on shelves. Though, through the disorganization, the teenager knew where to find everything.

Except for the things the adults had moved when they put Mihael in his room.

Everything seemed to be going fine once he tracked down his charge. The blonde haired foreigner was sitting in a playpen grumpily watching some of the other babies that shared it with him. The child's dark eyes instantly focused on him when he appeared while the others cowered at his presence. None of the other children liked him that much. He was very animal like and they all knew he was constantly in trouble at school. There were rumors of picking fights and that he was a vampire, but really, he had no posture and no motivation to fix it.

Mihael stared at him impatiently as though the teenager could read his mind. He only received a similar stare right back through owl-like eyes that were round and intelligent. He made a gurgling noise as though that could get his expectations across but he merely received a curious look with a finger pressed lightly to the teenagers bottom lip. Mihael was not happy at being a curiosity at all.

"I think he wants to be fed," a woman noted, breaking the teenager from his reverie.

Mihael made another gurgle. Stupid woman! He wanted to get away from the other kids. He didn't like them. He wasn't used to them. He had been an only child after all.

The teenager gave her a curious look and then looked contemplative. What did babies eat? He never had paid attention to them before, even when he first arrived. Well, he knew that they couldn't have honey, but that was about it.

Well, he supposed he could just take the child to the kitchen and figure it out there. He stooped down and awkwardly lifted Mihael away from the children and heard the day nurse comment about how much Mihael liked him.

"He looks so happy already," she said with an amused smile.

Mihael decided to ignore her.

The cook had shown the teenager what the babies ate before he could give Mihael chocolate. Constantly the man yammered on about how smart the teenager was and how he should know better. After rifling through some drawers, he returned with something that looked like plumb pudding but smelled like radishes. The teenager gave the cook a dubious look but decided that it was probably best not to tick the man off since the cook never told on him when he took pieces of dessert in the middle of the night.

It was nighttime now and the teenager had just settled in to do his homework after putting Mihael to bed. Methodically he began answering his math problems while enjoying a rather large bowl of leftover pudding when his spoon went crashing back into his bowl.

What was that noise!

Looking over his shoulder at the crib, he frowned inwardly. He'd never been anywhere near where they kept the babies, but he knew it wasn't uncommon for them to cry in the night.

But, this sounded more like screams of someone being murdered. Not that he knew what those sounded like, but he had heard first-hand accounts before.

He should probably do something about this. Mihael would only wake up everyone around them, and it would only give him no peace tomorrow at school. He walked over to the crib and peered own at his roommate. The baby's face was bright red, his fists balled up and his mouth open as wide as it could be. Certainly he should have run out of air by now, the teenager mused to himself.

Putting a finger against his lips, the teenager studied the situation. Should we touch the child? What if this was a night terror? Maybe Mihael would simply stop after a while? What if he didn't stop? What if the child started to suffocate?

The volume was only increasing, and it was finally beginning to hurt the teenager's ears. Someone had told him that Mihael had been in the orphanage for three days now, so certainly they knew about this. Was it possible that even the adults didn't know what to do?

More than likely they didn't. Just like whoever moved his detective books to put the crib in place. He still hadn't found them, and had a sneaking suspicion they might have been thrown out with the trash.

Reaching out, he thought that maybe touching Mihael would work. Drawing his hand back sharply, he winced. Mihael barely had any teeth to even mention and he had bit him! Giving the child a rather dark look, the teenager absently mused letting him scream himself to death, but that wouldn't be good for anyone. Instead the teenager reached out and picked the child up, keeping his mouth in sight. Carefully, he sat down on the bed and put the child in his lap and watched as its screams got quieter and turned into sobbing.

Now what?

The teenager looked around. He didn't like remembering his parents, but this was a critical situation. What did his mother do when he was like this? He had a very dim memory, but he had been two when his father died and five when his mother passed away, so it wasn't so long ago as to lose a memory.

That's right! He could read Mihael a story! Looking around, he frowned inwardly again. Someone was going to have to answer up for his detective novels tomorrow. He would go rifle through the trash bins for them right now, but he had Mihael to take care of, and if he knew better than to take the small child out with him.

The only book he had nearby was his math book. The teenager looked at the crying child and then at the book and back again. Well, did children really pay attention to the story or the pictures? He couldn't remember that part and he didn't feel like remembering anything more about it either. Grabbing up the text book, he shifted Mihael around so the child could see the inside of the book. "Okay now pay attention," the teenager said, "this is a story about logarithmic and your calculator."

The child glanced at the book through glossy eyes. An expression that could only be described as "'The hell?" passed over his small features, but he didn't protest being read to. He actually liked it. The teenager had a soft, slightly nasal voice with a rather thick accent. He was saying things that Mihael didn't understand in a book with pictures that didn't seem like pictures at all, but the timbre of the teenagers voice was soothing and gentle.

"…and if you want to change it into a function," the teenager read as gently as he could. He was trying to mimic his mother, but he didn't think he was very good at it. Though, math could be a boring subject for some people so maybe the material would put Mihael to sleep. He was right in his assumption. The baby was indeed falling asleep it seemed.

Placing Mihael back in the crib, the teenager watched him for a few minutes and then went back to his studying. After twenty minutes and a swift trip to return his empty pudding dish to the kitchen, he settled into bed and set his alarm for six in the morning.

He woke two hours later to another round of screaming.

The End