Elijah is a bit like a feral cat. Penny said that he’s like an orange cat once, and Mischa, with the experience of cat-sitting Ricky’s cats many times, had to agree.
Fast and reactive, he’s bold and constantly moving. He eats quickly, talks quickly, moves quickly. He jumps and ducks and attacks and is constantly so Elijah. He knows everything and nothing at the same time. He scares Mischa with how much wisdom is stored in his barely five feet tall body, and then attempts to communicate with his neighbors’ cat by meowing on the tops of his lungs.
Sometimes it feels like he has an additional pair of eyes on the back of his head, because it makes no sense for him to know when people are creeping behind his back.
He is also very energetic. The normal for 10-year-olds energy, where he jumps around with excitement and blabbers on and on and his thoughts run even faster than Penny and Ricky’s when they are in The Zone. He’s goofy and playful and sometimes takes things too far, especially insults, and his moods are a goddamn rollercoaster, but he took Mischa’s heart and ran away with it like in track. He has issues with paying full attention to things he doesn’t like, like Science lessons or grammar, or his parents’ lectures on his language and behavior.
The latter one might be also because he doesn’t want to listen to them, but that’s a different story.
But he’s got other energy too. The one where he jumps a little too high, when he moves a little too rapidly, when his thoughts are a bit too scattered. When his eyes are wide all the time and he counts the cracks in pavement when they’re walking home from school or biting his nails until they’re tiny. When he needs other people to reach out to him instead of approaching them like he normally does.
He’s still a ten year old, weird energy or not. So it’s no mystery as to why he appears on a sunny June day at Mischa’s basement door, with scraped knees and blood running down his tibias. He’s holding himself up on the doorframe, the other hand clutching his skateboard.
“Jesus fuck, what happened to you?” Mischa says, quickly moving out of the way so Elijah can hobble in.
“I fell off my skateboard.”
Mischa eyes him up and down.
“That’s not how a fall off skateboard looks like.”
Elijah’s nose scrunches and he looks away.
Mischa sighs, like a tired mother when her kids break yet another vase, and walks up the stairs to retrieve the first aid kit. He used up the bandages and antiseptic he had in his own when Constance and Noel had a rollerskating race.
When he walks back into the basement Elijah is sitting on his bed, legs swinging anxiously and nibbling on his thumb nail. As soon as he sees Mischa’s feet on the stairs, he places his hands on his sides, looking more worried than a kid who busted his knees open should look like.
He kneels down in front of Elijah and presses the wet rag to his tibias, first right, then left. Elijah sits quietly,
“I told you, you should get the… Knee things.”
“Patches.” Elijah suggests in a quiet voice.
“Yeah, yeah, whatever.” Mischa clicks his tongue as he fiddles with the pack of sterile wipes. If Elijah’s knees weren’t bleeding, he would make fun of Mischa for not being able to open it.
He finally manages to open it and he quickly pours antiseptic. When he looks back up, Elijah’s eyes are drilling holes in his skull, eyes wide, pupils so wide his eyes seem black.
“Don’t move. I’m sterilizing.” And he presses a wipe to Elijah's left knee.
“Shit!” Elijah’s knee knocks upwards and slams right into the right side of Mischa’s jaw. Mischa immediately jumps back, hand flying to his jaw, groaning painfully. “Oh my god, Mischa, are you okay? Fuck, I’m so sorry, fuck,”
“Itsh’ okay.” Mischa slurs. Elijah’s expression turns more worried, more horrified. It makes Mischa’s stomach churn painfully.
“Did I knock out a tooth?” Mischa runs his tongue over his teeth, not finding any moving out of place.
“Don’ think sho.” He tries moving =his jaw back and forth a few times, smashing teeth against each other. “Nope.”
Elijah takes a deep, shuddering breath. “I’m sorry.”
“Itsh’ okay. Serioushly.” He looks at Elijah and raises his eyebrows up, seeing that the boy is practically vibrating in his seat from anxiety. “You didn’t mean it.”
“I’m still sorry. I shouldn’t have done it.”
“Itsh… What is it called? Inshtinct. You just tried to protect yourshelf.”
Elijah still doesn’t seem convinced.
“I can’t convinshe you to not worry, kid.” And for a moment, Elijah’s eyes twinkle with vulnerability, with trust, and Mischa’s heart teleports to his throat.
Then Elijah comes back.
“I’m not a kid.” He snorts and crosses his arms over his chest.
“You’re ten.”
“Eleven in twenty-three days.” He’s quick to correct Mischa.
“That’s not a big difference.”
“It is! A year closer to being a teenager.”
“So mature.” Elijah lets out a frustrated groan and falls onto the mattress, landing on his back. Mischa gets up, knees cracking, and he has to hold onto his bed frame to straighten up.
“I don’t want to get old like you.” Elijah says when Mischa is putting the antiseptic and wipes on his desk, probably to be brought back to the kitchen in next ten business days. Or never. He might just keep it for emergencies.
“Excuse me?” Mischa's head snaps towards Elijah, who bursts with rambunctious laughter.
“Soon you’ll have wrinkles and osteoporosis and shit. And you will smell like old people. I can secure you a place at a retirement home, my classmate’s dad has a business in it.”
“At least I won’t be tripping every time I try to do a trick that is out of my skill.” Mischa smirks as Elijah shoots up from his place on the bed, looking at Mischa both angrily and confused.
“What- How? Was Ezra spying again?” He stumbles
“I just know you too well.” Elijah subtly shows him the middle finger from behind his back. Mischa shows him it too, much less subtly. “Are you hurt anywhere else?”
The boy looks at him for a split second like he’s debating a life or death matter. “I scraped my palms a little.”
Mischa sighs and walks up to Elijah again. “Okay, let me clean them.”
“No!”
Mischa stops dead in his tracks.
“Why?”
Elijah’s nose scrunches up again. His whole face moves up when he does that, bangs - he's been asking him to let Ocean cut them for at least a month, and he keeps just fucking refusing - covering his glasses.
“Because.”
“Eli.”
The boy looks at him again, fierce determination in furrowed brows and narrow eyes.
“No.”
Mischa suppresses the urge to shake the stubbornness out of the kid. “Listen, I will fucking hold you down if you don’t sit your ass down and let me help you. Okay?” Elijah looks at him angrily for a few more seconds before sighing and nodding resignedly. “Great. Palms up.”
His palms are worse than Mischa thought. Scrapped from the tips of fingers to wrists, covered in dirt, gravel and both fresh and old blood, and there is a big, nasty cut on the hill of his left one. “Jesus, Eli.”
There is no response. Mischa doesn’t know if it’s better or worse. He prods at the cuts and scrapes, feeling Elijah’s muscles in hands and wrists flex from the pain. Gently places clean bandages
“Thank you.”
“No problem.”
Elijah keeps staring at him like he's a bomb bound to explode in next ten seconds if Mischa doesn't cut the right cord.
“I tried to do it myself.”
Boom. Bomb went off.
“What?” Mischa perks up.
“I tried to bandage myself at home. Because I fell while doing a trick and got the big cut. And then I couldn’t fucking do it, and I thought maybe Constance could, y’know,” He starts picking at his nail again. “Fix it. And then I fell off the fucking skateboard just as I was passing Garden Lane, and- And I just walked here.”
“Why didn’t you come here in the first place?”
He shrugs. Mischa knows. And he knows that Elijahs knows he knows.
“You should’ve come to me with the first cut. It looked really nasty.”
“You looked nastier after some fights.” That’s not exactly a lie. He had more cuts and bruises on his face than he can count, and Elijah has seen a lot of them. His ear still looks weird from the one blow he received from a buzzcut senior in his sophomore year, because he didn’t go to a hospital. Obviously.
“That doesn’t matter.”
“It’s before noon. I thought you were asleep.”
“Eli, the matter is...” He really feels like a stressed, overworked mother of toddlers, despite being seventeen years of age, working half-time in a supermarket and his biggest concern is how to stop his hairline from receding (it’s genetic, his mama once said. He really hoped the gene would miss him. It didn’t.) “The matter is that you can barge in at any time. Middle of night, noon, afternoon, evening. Even call, text, something, tell me or Penny or any of our friends you need help, and we’ll be there.”
“Even if it’s eleven at night and I need a hot glue pistol for a school project?”
And Elijah feels like a stubborn, rebellious teenager who sneaks out and gets his older friends to buy him cigarettes, despite being ten, haven’t touching cigarette in his life and crying over Toy Story movies every single time they watch it. Mischa is a stressed mother of a toddler in a 10-year-old's body.
“No. Then you piss off.” Elijah giggles wetly. He’s back. The thought makes Mischa warm inside.
“But-”
“No buts. This only applies to emotional support or when you’re, you know, bleeding all over your bed.”
Elijah looks like he’s about to spat something back, fight and banter for the next few hours, be the snarkiest version of himself Mischa is so used to.
But he nods and smiles gently, and it makes Mischa’s stomach do a somersault before he smiles too.
And if Elijah’s eyes are a little glassy, Mischa doesn’t point that out.
That’s just how it is.