Leopold Fitz rubbed his blue eyes and yawned. It was nearing midnight the day before the competition, and everything was finally coming together. He had actually finished the Ice Ghost sometime around noon, but the hardest parts were making it look good, and making him look older, so he could, you know, actually enter this competition. The first part was easy; he simply fitted the outer part with aluminum he had melted himself with his soldering iron. It took longer than he planned, because the soldering iron was so fine-tipped, but he had eventually ended up with some semblance of an outer-casing and carefully printed the name on the smooth-ish surface. The latter task, however, was proving quite difficult. Because of Leo's bright red cheeks, curly hair, big round eyes, and a baby face he thought he would never grow out of, nothing seemed to work. Drawing on a mustache looked too fake. Wearing his nicest t-shirt looked too juvenile. And adding height to his shoes was just plain obvious. He sat down on his bed, defeated, when his mother knocked lightly on the door.
"May I come in?" She poked her head through. Her hair was frizzing around the edges from working all day, and she smelled pleasantly of the diner where she worked. She wasn't from Scotland, and didn't have the same heavy accent as many other's in the town. "How is the invention coming?" She asked with her delicate British accent- she had moved to Scotland for his father- and sat next to him on the bed. Their relationship had always been tentative. Sometimes he felt like he hardly knew his mom, since she had been out of commission for the first three years after his father died, and working the next five. They would only ever pursue small talk and awkward silence during dinner, which prompted a distractible Leo to think mainly on his next inventions. But even with these faults in the relationship, she was still his mother, and he still needed her help.
"It's actually finished." Leo responded, and then sighed. "I was going to enter it in a contest tomorrow, too. But… I..." He didn't know if he should admit to being technically too young to enter. His grandmother might tell him he shouldn't be dishonest, and not to enter, and he didn't know if his mother would say the same. So he tried to cover, "I want to look professional. I—I want them to take me seriously, so I was thinking I needed to look…" This seemed like the perfect way to phrase it, but he glanced at his mother to see if she looked convinced. "… Older." His mother nodded, and he exhaled slowly, and his nerves seemed to leave with that breath. There was still a lingering feeling of anxiousness, though.
"I understand." She said, and smoothed her hair back, standing to leave. "And I have an idea." She smiled facetiously at Leo, and any third-party observer would immediately notice where Leo got his smile.
She returned after having been gone for about five minutes, having told Leo to wait in his room. She held a nice dress shirt, tie, slacks and even loafers. "Your father's…" she said with a smile on her face, but tears in her eyes. She brought the shirt to her face and inhaled Darius' scent, before handing the dress clothes over to her son. Leo looked appreciatively at his mother and began trying on the clothes over his own. She left for a while so he could get fully dressed. When she came back, she gushed at her little boy. While he had technically hit somewhat of a growth spurt, he was still a good three inches short of for everything. Except the shoes; they fit perfectly. His mother began pinching and pinning the hems of the pants and rolling up the sleeves of the shirt, trying to make it look as if he wasn't swimming in his clothes. When she had finished, Leo took off the clothes and handed them to her to hem. When she was finished, the dress clothes didn't look nearly so large, and the shoes gave him a natural lift. The shoulder and sleeves were still a bit too big, so she advised him to just roll up the sleeves. "It gives you the look of a busy and important person." She'd explained. He didn't really know it then, but this conversation and generosity on his mother's part would shape the way he dressed for a good portion of his life, until he met another girl in his first year at a top-secret academy who would do almost the same for him.
His mother had complimented him on how grown-up he looked, and Leo fell asleep easily that night.
AN: The competition is tomorrow! And if you want it by tomorrow, you ought to review. Five reviews and I'll update tomorrow. The standard two, and I'll update on Saturday, like I had originally planned. Yes, I am unashamedly blackmailing you. Constructive criticism welcome, Flames will be laughed at, then squelched.
