Chapter Text
Riz always wakes up two minutes before the alarm goes off. His eyes shoot open; he fiddles with the cheap watch that functions as his clock and turns off the alarm preemptively, then allows himself exactly thirty-one seconds to collect himself.
The Room is the same it’s always been. Riz holds a hand out, covering the metal door from his vision, and stares up toward the skylight.
The sun has mostly risen, he’d guess. The sky is light enough, but there are still light streaks of red just visible at the corner of the tiny patch of pale sky.
7:00.
Riz lets his hand drop. He sits up, stretches.
On the calendar taped to the dying fridge across the Room, today is marked as a very special day. Riz had done his best to make little black squiggles look like confetti shooting out from the words written there.
7:01.
Another morning and another day. Every morning, Riz wonders how he can face another day. How can he just get up and keep going? Even the idea of getting out of bed seems insurmountable. He’d much rather lie here, staring up at the ceiling, fading more and more with every passing hour until he eventually doesn’t exist.
He used to talk to Dad to keep himself sane. Sure, as far as he knows, his dad can only hear him when he speaks beside his grave, but it was worth a shot. He couldn’t bear the idea that nobody heard him. That he was talking to thin air.
He hasn’t done that in a long time.
Maybe, if he hoped real hard, his whispers would be heard by Dad. He could reach out to someone else, someone like Bill Seacaster, who could in turn reach out to. . . .
Everything in Riz’s body feels unbearably heavy. How can he go on?
Then the closed wardrobe to his left rustles, and Riz can’t help the smile that brightens his face.
That’s how he goes on.
It’s not quite so difficult when Riz slips out of bed, pulls the blanket into something resembling neat, and takes a moment to balance himself with his arms out. His lack of balance is always most disorienting when he first gets up in the morning.
Then he carefully steps to the wardrobe and eases it open.
Yellow eyes blink up at him from the shadow within, followed by a green face and big ears and long hair. He’s tiny, though not as small as Riz was at that age, and he clambers out of the wardrobe and wraps his arms around Riz’s legs.
“Daddy!” his son cheers, and Riz combs his fingers through his dark hair and holds him tight.
“Hey, kiddo,” he says softly. “Happy birthday.”
Fabes has never known more than Room.
Room is pretty great, he thinks. It has four walls, Skylight, and Door (but Door never opens), and Rug on the floor and Tub in the corner and Table and everything! He has Dad and toys and TV, and Dad never forgets what day it is and always helps him learn things and lets Fabes cuddle him on days when Dad can’t get out of Bed. Today isn’t one of those days, though, because today is his birthday!
They do things like they do every morning, even though this morning is special. Dad sits on Yellow Chair and counts as Fabes runs back and forth, then he cheers as Fabes does jumps, then they do push-ups together (and Dad always cheats, tickling Fabes’s stomach to make him fall over).
After that, they brush their teeth together, and then Fabes watches TV while Dad makes breakfast. Usually cereal, but this morning Dad makes them each a fried egg and sets them down on Table to eat together. Sometimes, when Daddy’s tail is hurting, he eats on the floor, but even though this morning he’s smiling like it hurts, he still sits across from Fabes and eats with him.
“How does it feel to be four?” Dad asks. He reaches across the table to cut Fabes’s egg with the side of his fork, but Fabes pushes his hand away. He’s four, after all. He can do it himself.
“I’m big now,” he tells Dad, and Dad chuckles.
“So big,” he says. “You’re almost big enough to cook with me.”
“I’m gonna cook everything!” Fabes insists. “Then you won’t fall off Yellow Chair.”
“I only fell off once,” Dad protests. “It’s not easy cooking when you have to stand on a chair to do it, dude. But when you grow up a bit more, you might be able to reach the counter without one.”
Fabes’s eyes grow wide. Will he ever get that big? Surely not. Dad isn’t that big, and he’s all done growing.
“Am I gonna be as big as The Man?” he asks curiously. Dad looks away.
“I dunno, bud,” he mumbles. “Let’s hurry up and eat, okay? You need Learning Time, and then we’re going to make a cake.”
A cake? Fabes has never had a cake before! He’s seen them on TV, and he asked Dad if they could have one for his birthday, but Dad had only said “We’ll see” which usually means no.
He bounces excitedly in Red Chair, his tail looping around a chair leg. “Really? A cake?”
“After Learning Time,” Dad reminds him. “The cake is for this afternoon. Do you want to work on letters first, or hiding?”
“Hiding!” Hiding is fun. Fabes gets to find somewhere in Room to hide while Daddy covers his eyes and counts to thirty. Then, when Daddy finds him, he teaches him something about how to hide better.
Letters is kind of boring. Dad says it’s important to know how to read and write, but he has to trace so many things. He likes hiding a lot more. And sometimes they just talk all day, sometimes in the clicky words and sometimes not, and Dad teaches him new words.
After breakfast is done and Dad washes the dishes and Fabes dries them, Dad covers his eyes and counts. Fabes hides on top of the wardrobe, where he’s hidden before, but he moved quieter than every other time and Dad doesn’t find him right away, checking first under the bed.
He hides under the covers of Bed, and in the wardrobe, and on top of Fridge, and behind Toilet (which is silly, because Dad sees him immediately). Then they do letters, and Fabes does a lot of tracing with Pencil while Dad watches.
“Now cake?” Fabes asks when he sets Pencil down. Dad shakes his head.
“Now lunch, then we can make the cake.”
They eat peanut butter sandwiches for lunch, but even better because Dad puts them in the pan and makes them all crispy on the outside and hot on the inside. He hands Fabes his blue cup of water and his vitamin, which he takes before they eat.
Once lunch is done and dishes are washed and dried, they finally get to make the cake.
Dad pours flour and sugar and a couple of other things into a bowl, while Fabes sits on the counter and stirs them all up with the big white spoon. It gets hard to mix when Dad adds water, but with two hands and a lot of growls Fabes manages it.
“Can I crack the egg?” Fabes asks, as Dad gets the last egg out of the carton in Fridge.
“Not today, bud,” says Dad, steadying himself on Table to walk back from Fridge. “You can rinse out the shell though, and we can add it to your snake.”
Fabes beams. Egg Snake is his toy, one that he made with Dad a long long time ago. He has to be gentle with Egg Snake, but Dad says he’s getting really good at coloring gentle so maybe he can color this egg blue.
Once everything is mixed, Dad pours a little circle of the mixture into the pan. Fabes watches carefully, waiting for the moment it becomes a cake.
It doesn’t, though. Even after Dad flips it, showing a golden brown side, it doesn’t look right at all. It looks like a pancake.
“That isn’t a cake,” he accuses.
“Just wait.”
Fabes waits. He waits as Dad flops the pancake onto a plate, then pours another into the pan. He waits as Dad cooks that one and puts it on top of the other.
“Those are just pancakes. This isn’t a cake!”
“Bud—”
“No!” Fabes clambers down from the counter. Dad lied! He said he was going to make a cake, but now he’s making boring old pancakes. “You promised cake!”
Dad flinches, grips the counter to keep himself steady on the chair. “Fabes, I’m—”
“No!” Fabes stamps his foot, his toe-claws clicking against the concrete floor. “You should have asked the Man for a cake, instead of stupid vitamins!”
Dad’s grip on the spatula grows so tight that his knuckles turn white. “I can’t ask him for everything, only the important things. But—”
“No, you lied!”
“Fabiuk,” Dad says sternly, “we don’t yell at each other. Do you need to go sit in the corner?”
Fabes stamps his foot again, but he doesn’t yell anymore. He doesn’t want to sit in the corner. “This is the worst birthday ever,” he mutters darkly, then immediately feels bad when Dad’s face falls.
“I’m sorry, little guy.”
Torn between feeling bad and feeling mad, Fabes stands uncertainly in the middle of Room. “I’m not little,” he says eventually. Dad chuckles.
“You’re right, big guy. How about you watch some TV, okay? I’ll finish this up.”
So Fabes, still not quite sure how to feel, plops down on the floor and turns on the TV.
Fabes only watches TV for a few minutes before wandering back over to help. Riz has him get the milk out of the fridge—the last little bit of milk, he’s been rationing it all week—and he finds the tiny bit of powdered sugar that he’s been keeping for five months. The Man had brought it in once on a night he requested waffles, and Riz had squirreled away a half cup of the stuff while he wasn’t looking.
Back home, Riz made icing for just about everything. It was cheap and required so little that Mom almost never noticed, so whenever she wasn’t there he would mix up a little bit to drizzle on his cereal. He hasn’t forgotten, even with the intervening years.
With the precious powdered sugar used and the icing a decent consistency, Riz coats the small stack of pancakes with the stuff. It drips slowly off the top pancake; Riz spreads it around with the spoon until it covers the whole stack.
“Whoa,” Fabes says, his ears perking up. “It’s a cake!”
It does look remarkably like a cake. Riz ruffles his kid’s hair, then takes a fork and stabs it into the cake handle-first so that the prongs are sticking out the top.
“There,” he says. “Like candles.”
“Because I’m four!”
Riz swallows away the lump in his throat. “Yeah, bud. You’re four.”
He cuts Fabes a small slice, then one for himself. They only have two forks, so Riz uses the one with the cake-coated handle. It doesn’t taste too bad; not quite as sweet as a cake typically would be, but there’s no way Fabes would ever know that.
Predictably, Fabes is ecstatic. He’s usually a happy kid. Riz does his best to ensure that. He declares that cake is his favorite food ever, and he wants to eat it every day for forever. More than that, he licks his plate clean, determined to get every last speck of icing.
The rest of the day passes quickly. They do the dishes and wash out the eggshell, then Fabes colors it while Riz tries to figure out what they’re going to eat for dinner. Out of milk, out of eggs, out of ground turkey. They had peanut butter sandwiches for lunch but still have enough bread for more, but there’s no way that’s acceptable.
If there’s anything Riz is sure of, it’s that he won’t send his boy to bed hungry. He double-checks the cabinets, comes up with a package of spaghetti and a dented can of cream of mushroom soup. He digs a bit more and finds a can of peas as well. That’ll have to do.
“Daddy, can I do blue stripes?”
“Weren’t you just going to do the whole thing blue?” Riz responds absently, weighing the two cans in his hands. If only they still had some kind of meat.
“I wanna do both.”
“I don’t think the stripes will show up.”
“What if I do stripes first?”
Finally, Riz looks over. Fabes is holding two blue crayons, one light and one dark. About to answer in the negative, Riz reconsiders and shrugs.
“Why don’t you try it out and see?”
Instead of trying right away, Fabes spends the rest of the afternoon drawing eggshells on plain paper and jabbering on about which design would be best. Riz half-listens. As it gets later, he finds himself continually checking his watch, as he always does around this time of day.
After a not-too-bad pasta dinner, Riz runs a bath in the tub in the corner for the both of them. Fabes splashes him while Riz washes their hair, taking the time to comb out any tangles in his boy’s long hair before scrubbing his own body with the cracked bar of soap.
“One more piece of cake,” Fabes bargains as Riz helps him pull on the human-sized t-shirt that serves as his pajamas.
“Nope,” he tells him. “Bedtime for big guys. Hand me your day clothes?”
Fabes’s jeans are getting too small. He’ll have to ask for some new clothes soon. He hadn’t expected him to grow this quickly, to be honest. His head is already at Riz’s waist.
These clothes will have to do for now, though, and Riz adds them to the pile of dirty clothes wedged behind the bathtub. Tomorrow is wash day, which is Fabes’s favorite day because it means he doesn’t have to take a bath.
“Daddy?”
Riz straightens, balances himself on the tub. Fabes is behind him, his little fists twisting his sleep-shirt. “Can you tell me my name story?”
Riz had been about to tell him to go to bed again, but something in his chest swells at the sight of his son, hope in his big yellow eyes. He smiles. “Sure, but then bed. Come on.”
They both get on the bed; Fabes scampers up with no difficulty, Riz has to pull himself up and roll onto it. It’s a human-sized bed, just like most things in the Room.
Once they’re both settled in, sitting curled together against the padded walls, Riz begins.
Every letter has a meaning.
It’s goblin legend, one that Riz simply doesn’t know enough about. It doesn’t come up often in places like Elmsville, where most people speak Common. Yes, all the letters have meaning, but Riz only remembers one.
The most important one, though, is K. It means strong.
Fabes’s tail curls around Riz’s leg. Riz smiles.
When a goblin is a baby, their parents give them a name. If they need the baby to be strong, they make sure there’s a K. Goblins with Ks are warriors, protectors, fighters.
Riz remembers the day like it was yesterday.
One day, four years ago, I was very lonely and sad.
“You spent every day sitting on the floor and watching TV,” Fabes adds.
I spent every day sitting on the floor watching TV, yeah. Then that one day came,and suddenly, a baby goblin appeared right in front of me.
The Man panicking, a towel on the bed, blood everywhere. Then the sound—the loud shriek of air filling brand new lungs.
Then, as he tried not to pass out, a bloody bundle shoved into his arms. In the bundle was a newborn half-goblin baby.
I saw you, and I knew right away that this was the strongest little boy I had ever met, and he needed a name to match it.
The Man had left, the squalling baby set upon the bed. Riz had watched it, too afraid to touch, before snapping into action. He prepared a bowl of warm milk, then a cloth to use as a nipple, and then looked right in that baby’s face and broke down into tears.
I picked you up and said, hey there, little guy. Your name is Fabiuk Sklo Gukgak, and you’re my strong baby, and I love you very much.
Riz didn’t name the baby for three days. He tiptoed around it, and fed it, and changed it with the box of diapers that the Man dropped off.
I promised that I would always love you, no matter what.
The promise had come tearfully, as Riz accepted that this baby was his. He was just barely seventeen. He hadn’t wanted a baby. He hadn’t wanted anything like this at all, he was just a kid, when would his party come rescue him?
But this baby didn’t know any of that. This baby didn’t know the torture that had brought it into the world, and Riz was the only one who could show it anything different.
Letters and names hold meaning, more than he even knows. He knows that his own name means something about comfort and love and resourcefulness, but he can never quite remember exactly what it is. He certainly doesn’t have enough knowledge to properly name a baby.
But he remembered K, and that was enough.
Fabiuk, for his best friend. Sklo, for his mom. Gukgak, for his dad.
Four Ks, for the strength his baby would need to survive.
And I always will.
“And I love you, too,” Fabiuk murmurs sleepily, wrapping his hand around Riz’s fingers. Riz smiles, basks in the moment of peace, of his son cuddled up against him.
Moments like these are what keep him alive, he thinks.
Beep-beep-beep, beep-beep-beep!
Riz’s heart jumps.
He turns off the alarm on his watch. 8:00pm. “C’mon, dude. Time for bed.”
Fabes groans. “Can’t I sleep here, with you?”
“You know the rules. You need to be in the wardrobe when the Man gets here. Come on, get up.”
Riz would lift him, but his balance is too poor right now to carry a kid who’s already close to half his size. Instead he prods at his son until Fabes finally slides off the bed and hurries over to the wardrobe, climbing in and settling down without any further complaint.
Riz follows him, of course. He moves a bit too quickly, has to catch himself on the wardrobe, but Fabes giggles and it’s all right. He tucks in his son, gently pushes a piece of hair behind his ear.
“Night-night,” Fabes says, his eyes already closed.
“Night, buddy. Sleep well.”
Riz shuts the wardrobe door.
He breathes, his forehead pressed against the wood.
Then he hears a noise from outside.
The great metal door that blocks their only exit is sealed by an arcane lock, one more powerful than any Riz has ever dealt with in the past. The Man is a strong wizard with enough magic to dedicate so much to such a complex lock.
Riz hurries across the room, doing his best to appear busy. Putting away the pasta is the first thing to grab his attention—they have about a single serving of leftovers, and it’s not good enough for the Man to want any. Riz will probably eat it cold for breakfast in the morning.
The door swings open. Riz’s shoulders tense, but he looks up—there’s a moment, a beautiful moment of inky dark sky and cold air and the scent of pine trees (it smells like Cassandra, though Riz is long past prayers)—and then it’s gone, and the Man is here.
His age is starting to show in the grey hairs that sneak into his beard, though when Riz first saw him, he was clean-shaven and seemed not much older than he. Now Riz knows the truth in salt-and-pepper hair and lines etched into his forehead, in the creaks of his joints and the groans when he settles down onto the bed.
Even beyond all that, though, he still cuts an imposing figure. Large enough that Riz had no hope against his hold, his eyes bright in what some would label as mirth but Riz knows is malice. Riz looks away as soon as the door is shut, not willing to meet those eyes so early in the evening.
“Hey,” the Man grunts, setting two bags of groceries down on the table. He sheds off a heavy jacket that he rests on the back of the yellow chair, then sits down to unlace his boots. “Getting cold out.”
Riz hums, his eyes flicking up to the dark skylight, then over to the calendar. It’s October, just barely. The semester is in full swing by now.
Which doesn’t matter. Of course it doesn’t matter. He isn’t in high school anymore, and neither is anyone he knows.
“What’s this?”
Riz looks over; the Man is pulling the birthday cake closer to himself from where it was left in the center of the table. He ought to have put it in the fridge.
“A birthday cake? I guess it is around his birthday, huh? You should’ve told me.”
Riz shrugs. He grabs the bags of groceries and starts rifling through it. There’s the bottle of vitamins, right on top. More ground turkey. A carton of eggs and a carton of milk. A head of lettuce.
“How old is he now, three?” the Man asks as Riz starts unloading things that need to be refrigerated. He doesn’t correct him. He hopes that Fabes is long asleep.
“I’ll bring him something.”
“You don’t need to,” Riz mumbles.
“No, I want to. He’s a kid, I bet he wants a real toy.”
The old Riz would have made some sort of scathing remark about how he would have more real toys if he hadn’t been locked in a shed since he was born, but this Riz has learned better. Picking fights almost ends up as bad as trying to escape.
So he doesn’t say anything. He lets the Man undress, then stands motionless and lets himself be pulled toward the bed.
The bubbling hatred that threatens to burst from his throat combined with his twice-broken tail make it so that he doesn’t think he could walk there by himself if he tried.