fandomtownies | The Park, Friday Morning

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The Park, Friday Morning

So, Sparkle had been a bit upset to hear this morning's radio broadcast, to say the least. Just as he was wickedly planning to tease Ada about those kigurumi that he'd ordered, Atton had read off the news about Alluka.

He'd spent a good twenty minutes just kind of staring at a wall, arguing with himself. He was no hero, and the rescue party seemed to have already left anyway, but he had to do something.

And that was why he was in the park, scouting around until he found the site of the abduction. A tea-stained blanket, teacups, some toys...

Anyone who came to that particular part of the park that morning would find him slowly and carefully packing up the blanket and everything on it, folding things and neatly tucking them away in his backpack so that he could take them home and clean them. The stuffed toys he picked up last, pausing to offer his condolences to each one and to tell them it would be fine. Fandom rescue parties almost always succeeded at what they did. Sure, it was more for his own benefit than theirs, but they still nodded and each offered him a hug, which he accepted, before he moved on to the next.

He'd keep them all safe until Alluka's return. This was fine. Yeah.

[OOC: Open park! I kind of had to.]

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"You got everything?"

Atton'd shown up to an empty apartment shortly after the broadcast, and-- well. Even if he hadn't had Force senses and a paranoid habit of keeping tabs on Sparkle he'd never admit to anyone, it wouldn't have been hard to figure out where the kid had gone.

So he'd followed. Maybe he could help, or something. But apparently there wasn't much for him to do besides park his shoulder against a tree and keep an eye on Sparks, here.

"I think so?" Sparkle looked up, a stuffed dinosaur under one arm, a plush rabbit under another. "She's got a lot of toys here, but I guess she had a friend with her when it happened, so she probably had help getting them all to the park in the first place."

He stared down at a giraffe that he hadn't quite been able to juggle into the equation, and a panda.

"I guess I could use a few more arms, too."

"Well, since this doesn't seem to be double your arms day on Fandom," Atton said, pulling away from the tree with a sigh, "I guess I'm going to have to lend mine to this one."

He walked towards Sparkle, snagging the giraffe and the panda off the ground.

"Thanks," Sparkle said, licking his lips and kind of staring down at the spot where all the stuff had been set out. The grass was a little tamped down there. A combination of having things sitting on it overnight and the fact that it was all still fairly soft, trying to be proper grass after the winter. "I'm gonna... take them to work, I guess. I don't know what room is hers and can't get into the dorms anyway, but if she comes back, she'll find them there eventually, you know?"

If, not when. He didn't know a hell of a lot about her home life, but he did know that the girl was damaged goods. He'd seen enough neglected kids in his lifetime to be able to spot one from a mile away.

"And if she doesn't, I'd rather not have them in the apartment reminding me how worried I am all the time."

"All right," Atton said. His tone was easy; this wasn't something he'd pick an argument about - surprise, surprise. It was Sparkle's call. "If you've got everything bundled up, I'll walk you over there."

He turned his head as he spoke, giving the area a quick look-over to see if anything special jumped out.

But there was nothing. Ah, well. At least the rescue party was already heading off.

"Yeah," Sparkle murmured, nodding a little. He sounded tired. He felt tired. There wasn't anything easy about bad parents finding out where kids were, and then coming to collect them. At least, not that he'd seen. "The blanket and dishes were all dirty. I'm gonna take them home and clean them. Maybe I can get the tea out before it stains too badly."

He wasn't holding his breath, but it was worth a shot.

"This sucks."

The situation in general. The fact that there was nothing he could do about it but this. One of a million things, take your pick.

"Yeah."

There was really no getting around that. Atton had no real connection to this Alluka kid outside of Sparkle, but that didn't diminish how much that did suck.

"Have you got any idea who did this?" he said.

"My guess? Family," Sparkle replied, shrugging. "I don't know, like, who else would show up and grab her. You said it was someone she recognized, right? The girl's sheltered, man. She doesn't act like a kid her age should. Doesn't quite know how to process the world around her, yet. I can't think of who else she would know."

Which just made this shittier and messier.

"Family just makes this kind of shit more complicated. But if it was some rando just grabbing kids, they probably wouldn't have left one of them behind after knocking her out."

"That's what it said on the note, more or less," Atton agreed.

He made a little gesture with his head towards the town; they might as well start walking. "You think they might be locking her up?"

"Or something," Sparkle sighed, starting his trek toward the store. "She's always excited to be around people, but she kind of... misses important beats, here and there. Doesn't know how to process anything that gets too serious. Like all of her understanding of the way the world works came out of storybooks. Like maybe she doesn't know the words for whatever happened to her, yet."

He scuffed his toe against the ground on his next step, sending a little pebble tumbling ahead.

"She's a good kid, you know? But most kids who act that happy at least have stories about, like, that one friend they had a sleepover with, or when their uncle visited and brought candy, or this one thing their daddy told them. But she doesn't have any of that sort of thing before here, and she wouldn't last ten minutes out there if she had been completely left alone. She's gotta be at least fifteen, but it's like her world stopped at five."

Sparkle had been putting a lot of thought into this.

"Now that's screwed up," Atton muttered. To put it mildly. He was trying to reason this through to something that made sense, but-- well.

People did bad things for almost no reason, sometimes. It made him think about Mira, abducted by the Mandalorians when she was still a kid, but they'd at least given her an education.

He walked along, plush animals under his arms. "I guess that explains all the toys."

"They're her friends," Sparkle agreed. "I think she's more comfortable with them than with real people, half the time. She's never at work without at least one, you know?"

Sure, he carried his plush cat around with him everywhere, but that was different.

"And when she is in the shop, she's less... working, and more playing store. We were taking it a step at a time. I think she'd probably overload if I tried to teach her everything about running a shop all at once."

"Trying to catch up on ten years of arrested development in a couple of school years is already going to be more difficult than building a hyperspace engine from scratch," Atton said. "Stuffing it into a couple of months is probably a bad idea, yes."

You know. If they got around to picking that up again.

He slanted a look at Sparkle. "Trying to start your own home for wayward children at Demon Marcus, Sparks?" he said, trying to work some kind of levity into the conversation.

"What, between me, Ada, and Alluka?" Sparkle gave Atton a crooked smile that belied the concern he was feeling. "It wasn't, like intentional. Fandom probably attracts them more than I do, you know. Anyway, I like kids. That doesn't mean I should ever be directly responsible for them."

He'd teach them arson safety tips and pickpocketing. Nobody wanted that.

"You technically are during work hours, I guess, but I get the point," Atton replied. He shrugged a little. "Look, I know you're worried," he said, "But it sounds like there's people on it."

"Yeah," Sparkle muttered. "I know. And even if there weren't, there's not a hell of a lot I could do. I'm not part of the Fandom rescue party."

He was no hero.

"So... hey, this part, I've got. I do dishes like a fucking superstar."

He was getting so smashed tonight.

Yeah, Atton had a feeling.

"You want me to run by the store on the way back and do the groceries this once?" he said, which was code for how much booze and shitty food do you need.

"Hey, yeah, that'd be fucking awesome," Sparkle replied, happy to leap on that offer, just this once. "We need, like, eggs. And those cheap-assed microwaveable bean burritos."

Hangover food.

"I figure you can probably handle it from there."

This, of course, was code for you know what I drink on days like this.

"Sure. Uh... What aisle are those burritos in again?" Atton asked.

He knew.

"They're the frozen ones," Sparkle replied, shrugging his shoulders and starting to shuffle stuffed toys around so he could pull out his keys to the Demon Marcus. "They're in the freezer."

Where the frozen stuff lived.

"Right, I keep forgetting," Atton said, "The giant cold lumps of coal repository."

He reached out to try and pry some of the toys away from Sparkle to make it easier.

Sparkle was quite happy to let Atton handle the large dinosaur and the bunny, at least for a few moments. He pulled his keys from his pocket, rummaged through them for a moment, and then he was pulling open the door and nodding a sort of 'after you' to Atton as he held it with one foot.

"Coal repository and really shitty cheese," Sparkle corrected. "It's really important you don't forget the cheese."

They were terrible. He loved them.

Atton slipped into the shop, giant plush animals and all. "You know what my feelings are on that cheese," he said, "That cheese should not be allowed to exist on this planet. I know there are people who can't afford glow-in-the-dark jackets and probably need that cheese to spruce up their outfits, but no."

Was he deliberately prompting his own tangents to distract Sparkle? Yeah.

For what it was worth, Sparkle kind of figured that was what was going on. And he appreciated it.

"Just on this planet, huh? So there are other planets that this cheese would do more good on?"

He slipped behind the counter and started unpacking the rest of the toys he was carrying. A little crocheted flower, the plush sheep he'd gotten Alluka for Valentine's day, an elephant with heart print in the ears...

It was probably just him, but they looked sort of sad just sitting there without their owner.

"Hey, they might like it on Manaan," Atton said, setting the toys he'd been holding on to down next to the ones Sparkle'd been lining up. "You know, deep underwater in the dark, creepy deadly fish... you can use it for lighting and then fling it at something as a defense mechanism."

Sparkle watched Atton set the toys out, and then, mostly for something to do with his hands, kind of shimmied them a little closer to one another. There. They didn't have to look so lonely, that way.

... Shut up.

"Cheese that bright would probably attract all the most vicious predators," he decided. "Like, the JAWS of Manaan. That planet's probably got some nasty things with really big teeth, there."

But then, what life-bearing planet in that galaxy didn't?

Hey now. Hey now. That wasn't true. That wasn't... strictly... true... all the time... everywhere...

... it was totally true here, though.

"Yeah, but it's like poison," Atton argued. "No self-respecting big-teethed anything would eat that stuff."

"True enough, I guess," Sparkle decided, taking the elephant's paw thing and arranging it so that he looked like he was holding hands with the bunny. There. Good. "It'd just serve as bait to let the self-respecting big-teethed things know that there's some self-loathing tasty dumbass looking to eat something quick and greasy."

"Underwater," Atton added, "Which is a whole new level of stupid right there."

He leaned casually against the counter.

"Hey," Sparkle protested as he dusted his hands together and pulled himself to his feet, "sometimes you've just gotta eat shitty food."

Apparently frozen burritos. Underwater.

"Funny you're the one making that point."

Atton shook his head.

"Anything else you need?"

"You eat the shitty food and the good food together, instead of just eating the crap stuff all the time," Sparkle countered, sticking out his tongue before looking around. "We're basically done here, I think. We might need more, you know. Whatever. Milk. Broccoli. Pop-Tarts..."

Atton didn't have to eat the broccoli.

"You're going to make me buy broccoli?" Atton asked, pushing away from the counter with a theatrical groan. "You're a monster, Sparks."

"It's for me," Sparkle replied, smirking the tiniest bit as he made his way back toward the door. "I'm going to need something to balance out that radioactive cheese with."

"You're going to stick the worst of all vegetables in radioactive cheese," Atton said, walking after him. "I don't get you, Sparks. I really don't."

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The Park, Friday Morning

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