[Fin!] Little Bitty Creepy One [Dark]

[Bee]

Milena was on a very special hunt. She was hunting papas. Very quietly and adeptly, she followed him around his home office—she heard he used to have a different one, but Mama wrecked it and they had to move. Well, Milena hadn’t heard that, Zhenya had, but she was good at getting information out of Zhenya. She liked that her papa lived in the same building Mama did; on the same floor, even—it made it much easier to be near him always. Out the door, down the hallway, and she had it made.

Papa was shuffling some kind of paper on his desk. Milena crouched behind an inn table and peered over at him. Papa liked following people too. He did it for a living.

He probably already knew she was there, so she couldn’t get the total jump on him, but maybe, when he least suspected, she could dart over and give him a good fright.

[Dark]

The fine guard hairs at the back of his neck prickled with awareness, and Rin gritted his teeth against the unpleasant, lingering feeling of being watched. He continued to sort the papers on his desk—a week-old crossword, notes from his most recent case, bills, invoices, receipts—and tried to ignore it, like he’d been trying to ignore it for the last five years. He had never had much success.

Milena was watching him again.

Ever since she was a baby all she had ever done was stare; stare and stare with big, blue, unblinking eyes. And now that she was older and more able to get around, she did so from under tables and behind chairs and inside cupboards, and various other places you wouldn’t expect a little girl to be laying in wait. And she was bloody quiet while she was doing it, too.

It might have been less creepy if she didn’t enjoy following him around so much, but Rin was too often the target of that stare. He shivered.

[Bee]

Her papa looked like he was trying very hard to not look up from his papers, which suited her just fine. When he was once again distracted-looking enough for her tastes, Milena crawled out from behind the inn table and crept, quickly and quietly, to her Papa’s desk, in the front and off to the side, and then around the side, and finally rested when she was on the floor next to her papa. He looked large from this angle, though not intimidating. Her fur had none of his blue.

She grabbed his wing (she wished she had gotten wings, even little stunted ones like Zhenya, though she would much rather have big ones like Coralie so she could sleep upside-down in the closet rather than in a bed, and also be able to launch aerial assaults), tugged fiercely, and shouted, gleefully, “Papa, hi! Milena is here!”

[Dark]

“Holy fuck,” Rin exclaimed, and then: “Don’t repeat that to your Mother.”

He had not noticed her move--how had she gotten so close without him noticing?--and barely managed to avert him knee-jerk response to smack down his assailant--an instinct honed from wandering down one too many dark alleys after a lead and getting jumped. It would not go over well,

“Hello, Milena,” he replied dutifully, when he had calmed down sufficiently. (A hard task, all things considered; one too many sneak attacks had him a bit on edge as of late). “I see you down there,” hard to miss when you’re attached to me like a limpet, “What’re you up to?”

If he were a lucky man, she would get bored and leave now that she had wrung the reaction out of him she desired. If she was feeling particularly troublesome, though, she would probably linger. And Rin wasn’t generally a lucky man.

[Bee]

Milena crawled up into his lap and settled herself there contentedly. The floor had suddenly become inadequate. Papa picked up Coralie all the time.

“Papa should teach Milena how to find people better,” she said, conclusively, looking over the contents of his desk. Upon closer inspection, most of it didn’t look particularly business-like. There were a lot of puzzles. Some of it was stained with coffee rings from the bottom of a mug. Of course, there were also a lot of slips of paper with big numbers on them, and numbers always looked official and important. She pawed at them a little bit—and an easy time she had of it, too, being somehow the only person in her family with hands—looking for something truly interesting. She gave an unhappy noise when she found nothing of note. She returned to the topic at hand: “Papa should teach Milena how to find all the people.”

[Dark]

Rin glanced down at the top of his daughter’s head, attempting to harness some level of calm. The task was made harder when she started rifling through his papers--he’d been attempting to sort those, and she had no real business going through them to begin with--but he didn’t rebuke her, in fear of prolonging her visit.

He was afraid to ask who she would be finding, and more to the point, why she wanted to find them. The thought of Milena actually having technique behind her natural creepiness left him with a feeling of cold dread; his daughter did not need any help being a stalker. (There was no doubt in Rin’s mind that Milena would use the knowledge for evil, rather than good; it probably meant he was a horrible parent, thinking that about his own daughter, but he liked to think of it as just being realistic.)

“Maybe later, dear,” he said diplomatically. “Get along, now. Papa has work to do.”