31_days | [April 2, 2007] [Princess Tutu] Picnic

Title: Picnic
Day/Theme: April 2: In the sunlight
Series: Princess Tutu
Character/Pairing: Autor
Rating: G

One of the happiest memories Autor had was of a picnic. The sun was shining brightly that day, but there was a breeze that kept the day from being too hot. It had blown through his violet-blue hair, moving the strands of it out of their carefully-styled look and making his hair a giant mess, but at that age he was too young to care.

He must have been…six? No more than seven years old, for sure. He couldn’t remember the exact year, but he knew for sure he was no older than seven—his mother had been there. He could remember her holding the picnic basket and humming some silly tune or another. Her hair was the same color as her son’s hair, tied in a loose braid to keep it in place. His father, pale and serious, had pushed his glasses up his nose and warned her to watch her step, but when he thought she wasn’t looking he had allowed himself to smile, just a little.

Autor could remember sitting in his mothers lap, sandwich in hand, telling his mother all about the bugs and leaves he had seen on the way to the picnic. She had seen them too, of course, but listened carefully to every word, nodding her head every now and then, ooh-ing and ahh-ing at the appropriate moments. At one point in his story, he had reached up to touch the sparkling earring she was wearing, but she swatted his hand away, telling him (not for the first or last time) that he shouldn’t grab at her earrings when she was wearing them, no matter how tempting it was.

After eating his food, he had gone down to the pond and watched the pollywogs swim, squinting to look past the sunlight glinting in the water. At one point, he borrowed an empty jar from his mother and dunked it into the water, catching a few pollywogs into it. He ran up to his parents and showed them, proudly carrying the jar like a trophy. This earned him one of his father’s rare smiles, which encouraged him to try to catch more. He threw his heart into capturing all of the pollywogs, not realizing that every single time he dunked the jar into the river to catch them, as many pollywogs would get out as he put in. It was a never-ending game, but the boy didn’t care. He would continue to try to capture the pollywogs, no matter how many slipped through his fingers. He wouldn’t give up, and was still working to capture them in his jar when his father called for him to come back. He had refused, and ended up having to be dragged away from the pond, kicking and screaming and saying he still had more to catch.

“Sometimes you have to know when to change your focus, Autor,” his father had lectured that day. Autor had thought to himself, a decade later, that what he had said that day could have been one of the most ironic things he had ever heard his father say to him. He may have inherited his mother’s hair color, but his stubbornness was inherited from his father.

Autor looked once again at the sunlight filtering through the library window, idly fingering the pages of the book in front of him. He wasn’t really an outdoors person, but that memory was still fresh in his mind, and he could rarely feel in a bad mood with weather like this. Maybe when (if?) he had children some day he’d bring them out to the pond to catch pollywogs…

BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!
“Lovey-dovey-donkey-lonkey! Lovey-dovey-donkey-lonkey! Lovey-dovey-donkey-lonkey! Lovey-dovey-donkey-lonkey! Lovey-dovey-donkey-lonkey!”

…Or, he could just not have children and save himself from the years of headaches.

“Would you PLEASE be quiet?!”