02-21-2018, 08:10 PM
The invitation had arrived some time ago but she’d shoved it under a stack of mail she planned on ignoring. That is until her mother called and mentioned her youngest sister’s husband having also received an invitation for his family to attend. Burnt had not liked how the conversation with her mother had gone at that point. It left a sour taste in her mouth and somehow she ended up being volunteered (voluntold was more like it!) to take her nephew so he could meet the family.
She’d met the brat only once and learned that her sister had practically stolen him from his birth mother because he looked so much like his father. Burnt could not fathom the odd open relationship Femur had with Longclaw but whatever, it worked for them. As of now her sister was long overdue with their first child and still had two more they’d “adopted” at home. So the arrangements were made and Burnt would be picking up her nephew Wildling just in case his father couldn’t make it.
Worse, her mother mentioned that her father Nish might be there. She’d thought him dead or at the very least, completely absent from her life. So on the day of what she presumed to be some fucked up family event, she dresses in a simple understated way: jeans and a soft t-shirt that flattered her body and made the freckles on her face more noticeable beneath the haphazard mane of reddish-brown hair. Sighing, she took one last look in the mirror before leaving her house to go pick up her appropriately named nephew.
Meanwhile - -
“Mom! Moooooommmmmm! Mommy! Moooooooooooom!”
Came the incessant call from a boy to his mother. He was freckle-faced too and somehow already had a smudge of dirt on his cheek despite having had his face washed minutes ago. The feigned desperation in his little voice forced an exasperated sigh from his heavily pregnant mother’s lips before she found him sitting half-naked in the floor of his room.
“Wildling, I thought I told you to put a pull-up on five minutes ago. Goodness child! Your aunt will be here any minute now!” Femur sank heavily to the floor and helped her son with his pull-up and pants. The boy was on a blue and purple color streak and she’d allowed him to have his hair dyed at that age in those colors with kid safe hair dye to be just like daddy. Just as she managed to get one shoe on the boy, she heard a car honking from outside and Wildling tore out of the room in an excited flurry of motion that Femur wished she felt. All she got instead was shortness of breath and a kick in the ribs from Longclaw’s overdue son in her belly.
She managed to corner her son downstairs in front of the big bay window and get his other shoe on while also extracting a hug and a kiss from him. “Be good for your auntie okay?” she admonished him to which he just gave her a cheeky grin and ran out the door to where his aunt waited, leaning against the passenger side of her car with the door to the backseat open. “Aw man, a booster seat? I’m too old for that!” he huffed and puffed until one look from auntie Burnt sent him scrambling into the seat where he sighed and promptly crossed his arms over his chest in toddler petulance after she buckled him in.
Burnt couldn’t believe the mouth on that kid. Or the vocabulary he possessed at such a young age. Femur had warned her though that he was becoming a handful despite how cute he looked. The next time she glanced back at him in the child safety mirror she had installed in her car for times like this, her nephew had fallen asleep. She wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not that he napped before the big get together but too late now as she pulled up to the curb behind a long line of cars. Shit, this many people were here already?
Burnt wasn’t the type to panic but she really only knew her mother’s side of the family well. She parked the car, woke her nephew up and managed to drag a half-sleepy and stumbling kid up to the door. She tentatively lifted a hand to ring the door bell but it opened before and a gaggle of children spilled out. Wildling perked up and tugged at her hand but she refused to relinquish him just yet - he was her only lifeline here, so she scooped him up and carried him inside not knowing what to expect...