Vexation
Vexation London Holmes-Watson is a mostly pale child, except for pink cheeks and ears, with bright blue eyes and a head full of short dark curls. She's quite long and angular—especially her face—and daddy says she's taller at eight than even he was at the same age.
Vexation is inclined toward reading and a certain degree of quiet, though she smiles all the time does Vex, and uses her raw-boned elbows to good effect, jabbing her sisters in the sides whenever one sets her to laughing.
And Vexation laughs. A lot. As a matter of fact that child can get into a fit of hysterics so loudly splendid it brings the rest of the family down with her. Needless to say everyone tries to make Vex laugh.
Umbrage also tries to make her lisp but, like daddy, Vex isn't particularly fond of this trait of hers and last year mostly managed to train the tendency away. Something papa says daddy still hasn't managed to do if provoked with the right circumstances. When Vex asked what those circumstances were, papa just giggled and would not elaborate, no matter how many times Vex asked (Vex, like pretty much everyone in that household, does not well tolerate unanswered questions. "Well too bad," says papa. Sometimes. About some things.).
Though Vex has tamed her lisp she's not yet licked—pun intended—her tendency to dart a quick tongue out over lips, just like papa does. As a matter of fact, she does this so often that he puts a fresh stick of lip balm in the pocket of her jeans pretty much every Monday.
Vexation likes tarantulas—just like papa did at her age—and has two, both of them seventeen years old. She likes to lie on her back and read while Spott and Fiddo are generally inert on her tummy. Sometimes one of them will move and Vex will observe the proceedings until the proceedings stop. Then she'll report what happened by yelling loudly across the flat.
It doesn't matter how many times she's admonished for the yelling, Vex forgets that "Yelling is for people unsure of their data." Every time he hears this papa just rolls his eyes and tells daddy that he's making shit up—"No swearing Vex!" "But you do it!"— because he's giddy that the girls actually believe every single thing he says.
Anyway, Vexation loves her spiders and has asked for a snake for her birthday, but daddy knows she made the request in a bid to seem a touch more eccentric than she is. A Holmes-Watson does enjoy being unique, after all.
So Vex does not have a snake, just two large cobalt blue tarantulas who seem to both be boys or both be girls and maybe gay which is really rather the point at 221B but no one quite knows and cares even less.
Anyway, right now Vex would like to get a greenbottle blue tarantula ("You have enough arachnids, my love.") and also to be a spider veterinarian and no matter how many times everyone else tells her such an occupation does not exist, her papa and her daddy tell her she can always invent the job and really why shouldn't spiders have their own doctors anyway?
"Exactly," she says at the dinner table, a small saucer always to the right of her water glass, that saucer always busy with the doings of Spott (never Fiddo, who doesn't like the clink of cutlery), which mostly consists of her/him not doing very much at all except bearing the brunt of Discontent's diatribes but we'll get to that later.
For now just know that Vexation is quite her papa's little girl and some nights you can find the two of them in the stuffed chair, Vex curled against John's chest, her head beneath his chin, dark curls tickling his neck, lean bones constantly shifting, fidgeting, and the one word, "Why," punctuating each of John's pronouncements like a new kind of full stop.
Actually that right there is her favorite thing on earth—even more than Fiddo and Spott—cuddling with papa or curling up with daddy, asking questions, and then pressing her ear to their chests to listen to the rumbley answer. Yes, that's her favorite thing ever.
That and tickling Umbrage until she shriek-laughs so hard she almost has an asthma attack.