The entire Precinct called her Officer Sno. Some within it called her “The Cold Front” when they thought she couldn’t hear them and that was just fine, actually. She didn’t need those assholes getting into her life and discovering things. The only one who knew all of the truth was Avi, and he kept things to himself.

It was Avi who had found the twins again. She’d been concerned about them. Poor little tykes. They’d been dealt a bad hand. Absentee father who was so superstitious that the shrink he was visiting insisted he wasn’t ready to be an adult, let alone a decent parent. Their mother had died of a horrible infection and her sister had perished of allegedly unrelated heart problems not long after.

Following that, it was a series of terrible fostering attempts on the Starlight side of the family, and then… then they’d run away.

Considering that their last accommodations had been a plastic playhouse in the backyard, Sno didn’t blame them. Anything could have happened to them in the year between their last known residence and this latest sighting… in the same apartment building as her partner. Two floors up and across the hallway.

With another familiar name.

La’ming Ton.

Sno’s genetic mother. At least this time, she was an official adult and allegedly putting her life together. Though her finances were stable, they came to her bank account through a convoluted system of anonymised transfers that meant her income was one not entirely smiled upon by society at large. Sno had to calculate La’ming’s age.

If I’m a hundred and forty, she’s two hundred and eleven. Seventy-one years between mother and child. Gamgam and Peepums had always blamed La’ming’s youthful parenthood on her. They’d called it a scandal. Sno had spent eighty years believing that before she asked, What about the two hundred-year-old guy who fathered me?

He had sailed through his life without any kind of consequence or expectations towards assisting in the daughter he’d made.

Enough about him.

This was about two other babies left without a family. Now in the alleged care of someone who should -according to Gamgam and Peepums- never have one. Sno had to be certain that La’ming wasn’t letting them play with rat poison or keeping them in the bathtub or something.

That was why she was here. Knocking on her mother’s door. Crisp and Severe in the Neverwinter PD uniform.

Thundering footsteps. The door swung wide open.

Two nearly-identical faces, each with mismatched eyes, stared up at her. Clean faces, good. New clothes, better. Screaming blue murder and slamming the door… nope.

The Taaco twins were the ones screaming, “IT’S A RAID! IT’S A RAID! GO! GO! GO! GO!”

What. The. Shit? Sno knocked a little more forcefully.

When La’ming opened the door, she said, “What the hell did you do to those babies?” Then she realised who she was talking to. “Nono?”

“Snocoun,” she said.

Somewhere in the distance, one of the twins yelled, “It’s the Blue Wave! Gittouttahere!”

“You look… You look amazing.”

“This is not a familial visit,” said Sno. “I’m here on CPS business.” The flat had fallen ominously silent. “Those twins are missing minors and it’s my duty to see to it that they’re safely housed in appropriate accommodations.” She didn’t need permission to enter while children were at risk and La’ming didn’t stop her.

The flat was tidy. Clean. Middle-of-the-road thrift furniture, some shabby chic going on. Books and toys appropriate for minors scattered around. Tolerable. The CPS would give this a grudging pass.

Sno knew for a fact that her grandparents had stopped sending private eyes after her mother when La’ming had a decent enough income to afford rent at this flat and a modicum of furniture.

All the fun of it had gone out when they could no longer let Sno find photographs of the dives in which La’ming was staying. Realising that they thrived off of La’ming’s screw ups was Sno’s first piece of detective work.

Working out that La’ming had illegally adopted these kids wasn’t even enough to work up a sweat.

“So,” Sno picked up a copy of The Tubby Little Puppy and paged through it. “Why them?”

“And not you?” said La’ming. “We both remember that phone call a month before your Seventy-first birthday. You know why not you.”

Because an Elf’s Seventies were the most chaotic, disorganised, misunderstood years of their lives. Perhaps worse than the Terrible Twenties, when the lifespan differentials really started to stick out. Seventy was when a young Elf was handled all of the expectation and none of the respect. Treated like children, expected to react like adults, given choices that could reflect on their entire lives…

And her mother had gone into a terribly early Luume and got pregnant by a man who should have known, acted, and done better…

“Just ‘why them’… mother.”

La’ming fussed around in the kitchen, making tea. She had fresh fruit, and honey in a jar instead of a sugar pot. Fresh vegetables in the fridge, too. “They were living in a cardboard box next to the dumpster. That asshole kid in five B had just chucked some garbage bag down and konked out Koko. Lulu was crying, she… she was acting like her world was ending. I remember that feeling. Too well.”

The night she’s left baby Nono at her parents’ place, she’d said, was the worst night of her life. The entire two years of being underage, pregnant, and then a parent had been two years of the worst days of her life… but that day. That day topped them all. The worst of the worst.

“He,” corrected Sno. “They’re both boys.”

“Lulu says different.”

Oh shit… Sno re-evaluated everything, including why certain foster homes had felt it necessary to ‘drive the devil’ out of the twins. It wasn’t just lingering superstition about heterochromia or ‘witch eyes’. It was lingering transphobia whenever Lulu tried to tell anyone who she really was.

No wonder living on the streets was preferable to being in the system.

“The good news is that that counts as extenuating circumstances,” said Sno. “I can force some paperwork through and get you registered as a sympathetic foster house inside of a month.”

“Great. Now all we have to do is talk two scared babies out of Mak’arune’s place. They’ve probably battened down all the hatches by now. What did you even do to them?”

They’s been three when their mother died, and didn’t understand that the dead body she carried them away from would never wake up. They weren’t much older when their aunt had perished, too. Time and time again, she was on duty to take them away from places where they insisted they were doing okay in. Time and time again, she took them away from family.

“It’s my bad luck to have been on duty every single time they’ve had to be taken away from a situation.”

La’ming handed over the tea. Had some herself. “Right. So they think you’re going to arrest me.”

“I wish…”

La’ming glared at her.

“…sometimes.”

“Fair enough. We’ve all been through shit. Anyway, talking them down from whatever disaster scenario they’ve leaped to. Koko’s really good at those. Scarily accurate for six.”

Six. Shit. They were twice the age they’d been when their birth mother died. Once again, perspective swirled for her. More than the dizzying realisation that she was twice the age her mother had been when… and there was still that sense of anticipating a disaster from Gamgam and Peepums.

Drinking tea gave the twins time to realise that the usual chaos of Sno’s visits wasn’t happening. Therefore Sno drank tea. In silence, because smalltalk with her mother inevitably ended up in an argument.

Then, after the tea was done and the cups were rinsed, it was downstairs to 2D, where Mak’arune made hats for Etsy and babysat the twins when La’ming was working online.

La’ming had to show the twins that she was okay, she was not being arrested, and that Officer Sno -the ‘Blue Wave’ who washed away their lives- was not going to sweep through and turn the world upside down.

The news that Officer Sno was their sister… that just about worked as enough topsy-turvy for these kids. But that was life. Awkward, complicated, and too weird to believe if it were set into fiction. Messy, too.

La’ming’s higher-paying customers were no longer paying for La’ming’s correspondence courses. That money was going to Lulu’s transition fund. The spell to change her body to match her mind and soul was not cheap, nor were the experts who would be working it.

Like it or not, La’ming Ton was working on being a better mother than she had been a literal lifetime ago. That was why Sno chose to help her out.

[TAZ Prompts Remaining: 8]

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