"Mom, where can I buy some bullet ants?"
"Check the internet, dear."
I took another sip of my coffee, too tired to look up from the paper. Oh look, that celebrity died yesterday.
...wait.
"Kaede, why exactly do you want to buy bullet ants?"
"Reasons."
"Okay, that makes sense."
I am fully aware that our child had a few, slight problems. Such as their obsession with bodily modification, the fact that their best friends were bugs with a taste for human flesh, and their complete inability to recognise dangerous situations whenever they appeared.
Now some of that may be down to me and my over-reliance on caffeine to function, which has led to some questionable decisions on my part, like right now, where I'm quietly expositioning to myself rather than paying attention to whatever Kaede's doing. Is that my credit card they've got? Meh, too tired to move.
However, the last problem is entirely my husband's fault.
Don't get me wrong, I love him very much, it's just… Well, he looks like somebody flayed a velociraptor, stretched the skin over a human skeleton, then broke the guy's back, legs and hands for good measure. When he's happy, it gets even worse, as their sheer number of teeth would give a shark pause. He's always in a good mood, which can be problematic.
In short, he looks terrifying. And making an impressionable young child associate something that every primal part of their brain is screaming at them to run from with happiness is generally going to produce some kind of nightmare fetishist. Not that either of us care about that, mind you - whatever makes Kaede happy.
But anyway, by far the worst part about him is the fact that he's a morning person.
"Yuuko ~ how's the decaf suiting you?"
I glared into the coffee with the intensity of a thousand suns; no wonder I was expositioning if I was drinking this shit.
"Aww, don't be like that, it's terrible for you anyway."
"Don't care, let me die in peace."
Ryou laughed, hugging me, despite the newspaper to the face he got in return. Kaede called from the computer room:
"Mom, what's your pin code?!"
"I don't remember - your father took my good coffee!"
"It's ten in the morning!"
"It's my day off, I can sleep in if I want!"
---
After I'd finally gotten some proper coffee, and felt less like a microwaved corpse, I started talking with Ryou about what to get as a reward for Kaede; they were graduating soon, after all. That, and after the heart attack last winter, they hadn't been to the hospital in over five months - a new record.
"We are not getting them bullet ants. Do you not remember what happened with the spiders?"
"Then I've got nothing."
It was certainly taking a while to decide on something; it was difficult to find things that Kaede both enjoyed and couldn't find a way to bring about the apocalypse with.
"...Maybe something that would be useful to them when they start at UA? Or just something to help them out in fights would be reassuring…"
Kaede was going to UA, it was an indisputable fact, but even so - the thought of our little Kaede fighting villains is more than a little unsettling. Pepper spray and body armor were ruled out as redundant, and while some kind of heromade weapon would be useful, they were bloody expensive.
"We could, I don't know, pay someone to let Kaede eat them?"
I stared at him, struggling to hold back the expletives.
"And then what happens if they go blabbing about how they can theoretically copy quirks? We wouldn't be safe anywhere! Hell - they don't even need to do that. What do you think would happen if they panicked while right next to their organs?"
He held up his hands in surrender.
"Sorry, sorry, I didn't think."
"No, I'm sorry, it's fine, I just-" I sighed, rubbing the bridge of my nose, feeling a headache coming on. "Maybe we should just go with your first idea."
"The explosives?"
"No, the bullet ants. At least it's just an upgrade to something they already have, rather than giving them the idea of synthesising explosives. That is not happening in my house."
"Hey, I paid for it. Oh, speaking of jobs, I've - er, got another… business trip… coming up later in the year, so, ah -"
"You're a terrible liar."
"I know."
---
AN: So, have one of these things. Doesn't feel right without some sort of break.