Sabine woke up with a lovely warm body cuddled up to her front, her back pressed against cushions that melded to her frame just perfectly, and her mouth full of feathers. The feathers were wet, and soft, and pointy and...she opened her eyes and looked at the body she was holding, spitting out the eagle feathers that were in her mouth from being entwined with the little beast.
"Morning, Aunt Sabine!" chirped Amell, his golden eyes shining at the caribou-red wolf hybrid. The patch of feathers on the side of his head flattened from her drool. "You wag your tail in your sleep."
"You're not Eichii," Sabine said, blinking confusedly. She'd gone to bed on the couch at Grandpa and Grandma's house, she was sure, with the tiny chicken and not the toddler eagle hybrid. "And yes," she said to his observation, "I've been told that I do that."
"Momma traded us in the night," Amell said with a smile, "because you're starving the baby."
"What?" Sabine struggled to sit up, but the three year old was making it difficult as he obviously did not desire to move from where he was and the back of the couch, while soft, was not moving to give her room to get up, either.
"You're starving the baby," the eagle/condor/crow hybrid stated, sounding very much like his mother at that moment.
"Your momma tell you that?" Sabine asked, her voice not very kind.
"Yeah," Amell answered, not seeming disturbed by Sabine's tone of voice, also a trait he inherited from his mother.
"Rina!" Sabine yelled, hoisting herself up off of the couch, and Amell with her, perching him on her hip. "What did you do with my baby?!"
Rina came in through the veranda door, closing it softly, her beautiful, shiny brown feathers ruffled from the salty breeze of the sea that was close to the apartment building. "You trying to wake the dead?" she asked, holding a different basket than the one Sabine had brought over yesterday on her chest. "I am right here."
"Why did you trade babies with me?" Sabine demanded, holding Amell close to her side. "And why is my baby in that basket and not in his basket?"
Rina said nothing, she just looked at Sabine with her golden eyes that she'd inherited from her Grandmother and a smug smile on her beak.
There was no sound in the room.
"Why is my baby not talking?" Sabine blustered, rushing the distance between the two of them.
Rina put her hand out, as if to stop the caribou-red wolf from coming any closer. "Because he's sleeping."
Sabine blinked. "Excuse me?"
"He's sleeping," Rina repeated. "You were starving him."
"I was not starving him," Sabine replied through clenched teeth. "I fed him all day long."
"Well," Rina shot back with the same tone of voice, "you weren't feeding him enough, because he ate half a tub of worm paste last night. Half an entire tub."
"His stomach can't hold half a tub," Sabine snarled.
"No," Rina agreed, "it shouldn't be able to hold half a tub of worm paste. But it did. And then he had an explosive bowel movement in the middle of the night and I had to give him a bath because he had poop all the way up to his neck. And you know what?" Rina leaned forward. "He didn't cry the whole time."
"I don't believe you," Sabine said sourly.
"Plus," Rina added, "you were carrying him around in a bread basket."
"No, I was not!" Sabine said, insulted. "I bought that basket off of and it said it was a nesting basket."
"It was a bread basket that you put rolls into eat," Rina put her hand on her hip and rolled her head to the side. "You were trying to starve out the bread baby."
"I was not trying to starve out the bread baby!" Sabine yelled, mimicking Rina's movement. A painful tinge flared up her neck.
"Shhhhh!" Grandmother Washi came into the room from outside the apartment, "I could hear the two of you all the way downstairs. You'll wake all the babies up."
"I'm awake, Grandma!" Amell pipped. Sabine grabbed onto him tighter, it obvious he was not to be taken out of her arms.
"I can see that," Grandma Washi said, standing at the side of the two women. "And you were trying to starve out the bread baby," she said to Sabine. "He ate a half a tub of worm paste and you were holding him in a bread basket."
"It is not a bread basket," Sabine hissed in an angry whisper. "It is a nesting basket!"
"You were starving the baby," Grandma Washi declared.
"I was feeding him," Sabine clutched at Amell. "All day. Every day. All he did was say Eichi. He didn't cry. How was I starving him?"
"You're not a bird, Sabine," Rina's voice had an obvious tone to it. The caribou-red wolf turned about to the eagle hybrid again and blinked. "You don't know everything," Rina continued. "Despite the fact that you like to think you do."
"I'm part bird," she mumbled.
"What? Your skinny little neck?" Rina raised an eye ridge incredulously. "That's what? 3.12%? That doesn't count."
"It counted with the other bird!" Sabine yelled again. "I didn't starve her!"
"I don't know how you didn't, because you were starving him!" Rina retorted.
"You two look exactly alike when you do that." Grandpa Hagetaka came through the front door with a bag of groceries in his arms. Both younger women turned simultaneously to look at him, their eyes, shaped the same, beak and muzzle set in a disbelieving line, to stare at him. "That's all your fault, Kiyoko," he said, pointing at Grandma Washi.
She let out a huff and waved her hand at her husband. "Juzo," she fussed at him. "It had barely anything to do with me."
"She's not crying," Grandpa Hagetaka said to Rina, motioning to Sabine with his beak. "You didn't tell her yet."
Sabine turned back to Rina. "Tell me what?"
"I'm keeping Eichi," she said in a compassionate voice.
Sabine licked her lips in a very canine fashion, then swallowed. She had trouble getting the swallow down her throat due the lump that formed there. "What?" she managed to get out, eyes fluttering.
"We're keeping Eichi," Amell said. "He's gonna be my brother!" The little boy grinned, his beak open and his eyes shining.
She put her lips on top of Amell's head so he couldn't see the tears forming her eyes or the grimace on her face from the feeling of being punched in the stomach. With her eyes on Rina, she managed to squeak, "What?"
"Sabi," Rina said gently, putting one of her golden, feathered hands on Sabine's shoulder, "you don't want to start all over again, do you? Not when you've got a ten year old."
Sabine hadn't thought she did, but now that she was being presented with the opportunity for Eichi to be taken, she didn't want him leaving. He was her little bird, that she had carried around and fed constantly, and listened to, and slept with. Her children had bonded with him, like he was their baby brother. And now, he was being plucked from her.
"No one is going to want a rooster," Rina continued, "if he gets adopted out, there's a good chance he'll end up at the market." The eagle hybrid did not have to elaborate which market. "He's not a producer. He isn't worth anything to a chicken family."
Tears began to overflow from Sabine's eyes. "I'm the same age as you," she whimpered.
"I'm not saying you're too old to raise him," Rina explained. "I'm saying your youngest is a ten year old. Then you get a newborn? Not even a newborn. A pre-newborn." She sighed. "I already had to start over, do you really want to start over?"
Sabine remembered vividly when Rina had announced Amell's impending arrival after her youngest child was 14. "I knew that egg was viable the minute I laid it," she had groused. "I should have made that sucker wear a condom." She'd been ribbed for it for the first two years of Amell's three year life.
"I already have all the baby stuff for him and he and Amell can grow up together," Rina went on.
"But,"
"And I'll teach him how to fly!" Amell announced.
"You have to learn how to fly first," Sabine squeaked, tears falling on the boy's feathered head.
"I know how to fly, I learned on the couch."
Sabine leaned her head back, looking at Amell through her tears, "How'd you learn how to fly?"
The little boy paused.
"Go on. Tell her," Rina said in a no-nonsense voice, putting her free hand on her hip and waving her head again.
With not quite so happy a look now, Amell said, "I was jumping off the kitchen counter and doing what I saw this man on a show do, he was beating up bad guys, and he jumped off the kitchen counter and flew into the other room, so I jumped off the kitchen counter and practiced and practiced and flew into the other room."
"Keep going," Rina said, looking at him with raised eyeridges.
Amell looked away from both his mother and Sabine and took a deep breath. "Then I jumped off the balcony window and flew to Grandma's balcony."
Sabine gasped, her mouth dropping open. Rina's apartment was four buildings down the street. The little bird could have dropped to the ground below at any point in his flight. "If I ever hear of you flying outside again, I will beat your butt so raw, you won't be able to sit down for a week," she said in an abraded voice.
Amell stared her silently.
"You're the third person to tell him that," Rina said. "And I'm sure you won't be last." She eyed the little boy.
"I only fly indoors," Amell said.
"And not down the stairs," Grandma Washi added.
"I think it's pretty impressive, what he did," Grandpa Hagetaka muttered as he put away groceries. "How many three year olds do you know teach themselves how to fly?"
"Don't you encourage him," Grandma Washi said, moving away from Rina and Sabine, now that their fight seemed to have ended and over to the kitchen area.
Sabine looked down at the chick that Rina held in the new basket and her throat began to close again. It must have shone on her face, because Rina said, "It's not like you can't see him whenever you want. Shoot, if you move back into your apartment, where you belong, you can see him all day every day."
"I can't move back into that apartment," Sabine shot at the eagle hybrid.
"Why not?" Rina asked. "It's yours and it's empty. The Haiburriddogumi can find another place to hold their meetings."
Because there's not enough room for me and three kids in that tiny, one room flat, she almost said, but caught herself before she did.
That's exactly what all of them did, what she had done when she was a girl. They crammed everyone into their tiny one room apartments, partitioning them off the best they could to give what modicum of privacy was available. Growing up, her own privacy had only been between the curtains that draped down on the bottom of the bunk bed she shared with Samayueru. As it was, the apartments didn't have a toilet in them, they each shared one at the end of the hall.
"It isn't that simple," she replied at last.
"You make everything harder than it has to be," Rina told her. "You always have."