Hyacinth heard, “Oh, me, oh, my, oh, you. Whatever shall I do?” from half a block away. She groaned and put a hand over her eyes. She’d hoped he’d be done by now. Mordecai didn’t impose practice times, Erik just played however long it amused him. It was so much more annoying that way.

By the time she made it to the yard with her paper sack, he had resorted to playing a simple phrase over and over and muttering under his breath, “Oh, me, oh, my, oh, you,” like someone trying to teach words to a parrot.

“Anyone throw anything at you?” she asked him.

Mercifully, he removed the bow from the strings. “No.”

Damn it, she thought. “Not even money?”

He sighed. “No.”

“Not discouraged?”

He stood taller. “No.”

Damn it again, she thought. “About done?”

“I guess,” he allowed. He sighed again. “I can’t get Angie to do the banjo.”

“Maybe Angie has taste.”

He held up the cheap violin and regarded it. “Naw, that can’t be it.”

As soon as she got into the house, she smelled apples and cinnamon. Mm, Mordecai’s baking.

Her next immediate thought, which wiped the smile from her face, was, Oh, gods, what is it and what has he done to it?

They had normal food now. There was no war, no siege and no rationing. They ate normal food. Mordecai tended to use it a little creatively, but it was normal food.

There was just that one time during the magic storm when he made an entire turkey dinner out of sand and tried to feed it to her. And that thing with the cricket. And his continual insistence that dried up dead frogs were indistinguishable from coffee if you did it right and much cheaper. (“You reuse them like teabags, Hyacinth!”)

She just got a little anxious when she came home and there was food in progress that she hadn’t seen being assembled, that was all.

His latest creation was in the oven and he was not in the room so she felt at liberty to examine it. It appeared to be pie. It smelled all right. There were some small dark objects in it that were very upsetting. She checked the trash and was relieved to find a box that said “Raisins.” There were, however, no apple peelings.

She pulled out the pie again and regarded it suspiciously for a few moments before leaving the mystery up to the gods and returning to her responsibilities.

She dipped a glass of water for Milo and took the paper bag with all the nicely-labelled bottles upstairs.

There were two pairs of legs protruding from the closet, one with grey trousers and wingtip shoes, the other wrapped in a shaggy plaid blanket with bare toes visible beneath the edge.

“Mordecai?” Hyacinth hazarded, clutching her bag in the doorway.

“We’re all right,” he answered softly. “Milo just wanted to sleep here. Be quiet.”

Hyacinth set the bag and the glass on the dresser. She knelt down by the closet with a sour expression. “Mordecai, I am worried for your mental health. I believe you may be having some kind of extended flashback. Milo is not being ridden by anything. You do not have to give him whatever he wants.”

“Milo is being ridden by a concussion,” Mordecai replied, frowning.

“And that is why we do not let him sleep in the closet!” Hyacinth replied, but more of a hiss than a shout.

“You know, I do know that,” Mordecai said. “But we don’t want him sobbing and hitting his head on the wall either. He’s exhausted and he doesn’t want the bed. It took me, like, half an hour to get him okay with the blanket. I thought I was going to have to tuck him under a dress!”

Hyacinth blinked. “Why? What’s wrong with the bed?”

Mordecai sighed. “He can’t tell me, Hyacinth.”

She couldn’t work her way past him, the doorway was too narrow. “Let me in there then, damn it. I’ll talk to him.” She gave his shoulder a yank.

He wobbled and stayed right where he was. “He cannot handle people snapping at him and shouting at him right now, Hyacinth.”

Milo was having a little difficulty with just their whispering over him. He had pulled the blanket over his head and turned away. He didn’t have to wake up all the way to know someone was mad about something.

“You know, I do know that!” she replied, further dropping her voice to a breath. It grew sharper, though, until she was almost snarling, “You’re not the only person in this house who knows how to take care of sick people, I’m a goddamn medic!”

“All right. All right.” Mordecai rolled stiffly to his hands and knees and made room for her.

Hyacinth leaned into the closet until she could reach the edge of the blanket and fold it down.

Dear gods, there were a lot of shoes in here. Ann had more shoes than dresses. (Logically, she should have twice as many, but it looked like more than that.) She could not possibly wear them all. At the moment, they appeared to be for sleeping on.

Milo had his head resting on a soft leather pair that didn’t have any buttons or buckles. Mordecai had selected them for the purpose. Milo was willing to negotiate about a blanket, but the pillow was right out. (It had a white case, like the ones in the infirmary. But Milo couldn’t explain about that or about being tied to the bed.)

Hyacinth brushed back his tangled hair and spoke gently, maybe even more so than she would have ordinarily, “Milo, honey, come on. Let’s go to bed.”

He smiled drowsily at her and said, One.

She smiled back. “Yes, that’s right. Let me…”

He laid back down on the shoes.

“Nooo. Come on. Wake up. Milo…” She pulled at him.

He opened his eyes and looked at her again, but quite a bit more miserably.

“We don’t sleep in the closet,” she told him. She tried smiling again. “We sleep in our bed, honey!”

He began to cry. He curled into a ball and hid his face in his hands.

“Damn it, Hyacinth! What did I just say?” Mordecai attempted to gain reentry into the closet.

Hyacinth prevented him. “I don’t know why you even let him get in here in the first place!” she said.

He silenced her with a hand — only briefly. Her expression suggested if he left it there she would bite him. “If I have to be in here doing damage control for your damn mouth, when my pie catches on fire, I’m going to have you scrub out the oven!” he said.

“Go stick your head in the oven!” she replied. “If I have to sit here and scream at you, it’s only going to upset him more!”

Mordecai withdrew, frowning. Trying to separate Hyacinth from the closet would only engage further screaming. It wasn’t as if he could drag her. She was so damn stubborn. “Keep that blanket on him,” he muttered. “It took me forever to get him under that blanket. He’s cold.”

“Thank you for that incredibly obvious statement,” said Hyacinth, sweetly. She had not even bothered to lean back out of the closet and she was trying to calm Milo by stroking his hair. “If I need another one, I will telegraph for it.”

Mordecai sighed again and departed for the kitchen, momentarily defeated.

Hyacinth dismissed him and all thoughts related to him, and refocused on the sick, hurt man in the closet. She crawled all the way through the door frame… like a certain character who might’ve been associated with a looking-glass… and entered Milo-land.

There was a forest of soft, fluffy things in Milo-land, headroom and visibility were nil, and the footing was uncertain owing to the pavement of shoes (ironic, that). Milo was clutching the skirt of Ann’s pink dress and shivering. He had withdrawn from her touch.

He knew she was still mad. Milo was really excellent at reading people, but when he was Milo this skill functioned best for negative emotions. The ones that might make people hurt him. Mad. Sad. Scared. He was aware that people could be happy sometimes, but he didn’t have a safety issue with happy people. He had so many other things he needed to be worried about that “happy” (or “loving” or “sympathetic”) rarely cleared the circuits.

When she tried to pull the dress aside so she could at least see him, he sobbed aloud.

He was making noises again. Why did she not feel at all glad to hear Milo making noises?

“All right, honey,” she said softly. “All right.” The problem wasn’t the dress, anyway. The problem was the closet. The dress and the shoes were not affixed to the closet.

Oh, wait. There we go. There’s an idea.

“Here, Milo, let’s have all the dress.” She stretched up one hand and pulled it from the hanger. It landed in a soft, if somewhat rustly, pile. Sounded like raked leaves. Milo hugged it. He shut his eyes and rocked back and forth with it.

Milo appeared to want hugging. Skeptically, Hyacinth attempted it. She didn’t go all-in right away, she was afraid to do that. She hugged him stealthily, like a shy kid on his first date. First one arm, then two.

Milo gave a little gasp. He did not tense up or pull away. He fell against her, still holding the soft folds of the dress, and he buried his face in her chest. Hyacinth had no illusions about the attractiveness of her chest. Milo was there for comfort. She stroked his cheek with one hand and allowed him to stay.

He was very warm. Some of that was crying, but some of it wasn’t. It seemed like he might’ve picked up a virus, or he already had one but he didn’t have the strength to stay on top of it anymore.

He had shed the blanket, and he was shivering. She found it and drew it over him, but the shivering didn’t stop right away. Whether that was cold or fever or fear, she wasn’t sure.

“I think you must feel awful,” she said. “Is that why you’re in here? Are you hiding from being hurt?” It had been more than twelve hours since she got those aspirin into him. Milo didn’t like medicine. He had gone for a dress.

Oh, honey. I know Ann tries to protect you, but she can’t make you better. I wish you’d let me try.

“Milo, do you believe I won’t hurt you?” She held his head. “Don’t nod, honey. Fingers.”

Three.

“Do you believe I don’t want to hurt you?”

One.

Well, that was hopeful.

“I know you really don’t like medicine. Is it because you’re afraid?”

One.

“But you took aspirin. Are you not afraid of aspirin?”

Three.

“Are you less afraid of aspirin?”

One.

“I have some things like aspirin. They come in bottles that say just what they do. They’re just to make you feel better…”

Milo interrupted her, Two. Two. Two.

“Okay. That’s not okay. Why isn’t that okay?”

Three.

“No, Milo, not you. I’m asking me. You just let me hold you and think.”

He sighed. He seemed willing to allow that for quite some time, but she wanted him out of pain and she wanted him out of the closet.

Milo didn’t like medicine. Milo would take aspirin, so it wasn’t that he couldn’t swallow pills. Milo wouldn’t take cough syrup either.

Milo wouldn’t take a tranquilizer and Milo wouldn’t drink alcohol.

Milo had a serious panic attack and hurt himself in the basement when he accidentally ate some of Calliope’s hash brownies. Ann was still mad at Mordecai about it. (She thought they were Mordecai’s hash brownies.)

“Milo, do you think I’m trying to get you high?”

One.

“Oh, gods!” She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. She pulled him back from her. He shivered and sobbed.

“No, honey, I still love you, I just want to talk to you. Hold Ann.” She helped him gather the dress. “Sometimes when people are very sick and they’ve had a lot of medicine, they talk. You’ve seen that, haven’t you?”

One, but she already knew he had. She was nodding for him. Mordecai had done a lot of talking when he was sick in the kitchen, and there had been others.

“You know that’s not always the medicine, don’t you? Sometimes it’s the fever, or the pain, and the medicine is to help make it stop.”

One.

“But are you scared of that happening to you?”

One. One. One.

She pulled down his hand and held it. “What I want to give you right now will not make you delirious, and it will not make you high. It’s for pain and fever, and it says so. Oh, and I have one for nausea, but that won’t make you high either. When I said feel better, I just meant less hurt and less sick. I didn’t mean feel good.”

One, but weakly.

“I don’t think you’re hurt or sick enough to start talking without wanting to, Milo,” she said gently. “Not with medicine or without it. Are you really that scared of it? Just talking?”

One. He cried silently.

“It’s all right, honey. Shh.” She held him. When he had calmed a little, she drew back from him and addressed him seriously, “Milo, I promise I won’t ever try to make you talk. Not with medicine, not by hurting you, not even just asking you. Believe me?”

One.

“Thank you, Milo.” She hugged him again. He snuggled against her and he damn near broke her heart.

She couldn’t let him do that for long. He was in pain. She coaxed him out of the closet with Ann’s dress and the promise of more hugs when he’d taken some medicine. He sat curled around the dress on the bed with wide, bruised eyes — and the plaid blanket draped over his shoulders.

She sat next to him and showed him all the bottles, close so he could read. There were three that said “fever” and “headache,” there was one that said “nausea,” and there was one that said “sleep.” She blinked at that one.

“Oh, I’m sorry. I don’t know what the hell I was thinking when I bought that one. We won’t have that one.” She chucked it out of the door.

Milo smiled at her. He took his medicine.

“Do you want to be held again?” she asked him.

He did. So she did. She rocked with him and she held his head against her. When she felt him going to sleep, she let him down on the bed. He blinked up at her and looked sad.

“No, I’ll stay. I don’t think I want you to be alone for a while. If it can’t be me, I’ll make sure it’s someone nice.”

One.

Mordecai came in a few minutes later with a piece of pie and a glass of ginger ale, and some aspirin from Hyacinth’s doctor bag. When he found Milo sleeping with adequate blankets and Hyacinth sitting on the edge of the bed, he left these on the dresser with wordless approval and went back downstairs.

◈◈◈

Hyacinth put the chalkboard in Milo’s room and wrote directions.

(Mordecai had her add that last one.)

Now people could take care of Milo. Well, within reason. She wasn’t going to ask Barnaby or the General to do it, but if they did happen to wander by, they would know not to give him any toast.

This way, Mordecai and Hyacinth and Calliope (Hyacinth counted Calliope among the competent members of the household, but only just) and the kids could stay a moment when they had a moment and switch out as needed. It also gave Milo a constant variety of friends that he was visibly happy to see.

He smiled a lot for someone whose head hurt. If that was a symptom, it wasn’t subsiding, but he didn’t seem to mind.