Dawn Chorus (Proxies x Reader)

Third Job

"It attacked you with a dog? How were you supposed to know what to do from that?" I ask, then the rest of his explanation sinks in. "You stole a kid?"

"K-kid was f-f-f-fine," Toby grumbles. He shrugs a little. "D-dog dr-dragged me ar-round, would l-leave me beh-b-be near the d-dayc-care."

"I-" I mutter.

It is all I can manage to say in response to that. A dull ache starts to spread from between my eyes. Toby shambles around Tim and Hoodie to plop down on the wood next to me. A slight tremble stretches from his shoulders all the way to into his hands. He drops his head hard on my shoulder, curls up tight against my side. Instinctively, my arm wraps around him to cradle him close. He fits awkward against my side, not soft and snug like my siblings or mom, but sharp and tight. I feel both relaxed and on edge as he digs into my side as if to hide beneath my arm.

"Anyways," Tim says, drawing attention back to him, "we'll be here a few days figuring out what it is we have to do, so we need supplies and we need to start looking for signs."

"What, like getting pelted by house sparrows?" I snap, letting that bubbling feeling leak out.

I don't understand the depth or source of my anger, but it is sizzling my insides and making me feel sick. Tim cuts me a glare, pulls his lips thin, but makes no remark back.

"If He could manipulate things around you like that, He already would have," Hoodie says. "We'll have to look without you around.

You make things quiet."

Maybe it isn't good at what it does then. I bite back the urge to respond. With Toby clinging to my side, I can't so much as shift to dispel some of my irritation. That's probably why it is visible on my face.

That's probably why Tim turns and snaps at me, "Don't. Either of you, just don't. I'm not putting up with your bickering."

"Do-do you nee-n-need our mi-iddle names?" Toby asks with a snicker.

The jacket aimed for his head smacks me in the face instead, one cold zipper stinging my cheek bone. The fabric slips slowly off my face, uncomfortably coarse and would perhaps be a little stiff if not so age worn. It smells so heavily of cigarettes it almost smothers the scent of blood and death and Tim, the smells of Tim that aren't cigarettes and blood and death at least. The scent of people is so hard to describe, beneath the soaps and deodorants, colognes, perfumes, detergents. We've amassed a wide variety of ways to hide how we smell. Tim is so fucking clean, like my mom, constantly washing the sheets, scrubbing his room, scrubbing himself when he remembered. I'm not surprised the smell of Tim is faintest on the jacket. I am surprised I recognize it beneath all the other scents, and its calming familiarity. Guess you don't spend several months lying in bed next to someone and not develop familiarity and comfort with their scent.

Toby is cackling and even Hoodie quietly chuckles. Tim grumbles something. But it's all distant as I sit in the warmth of the coat and my own stale breath.

"Give me my jacket back," Tim eventually grumbles, "and maybe learn to stop stirring shit."

"No," I respond, mostly to the request for his jacket.

To make this clear I scrunch some of the fabric up in my fists and pull my knees in as close as I can.

"You g-gave it up," Toby says in my defense.

"Come on, it's freezing," Tim says.

I hear the shuffle of fabric and his steady steps.

"Give it up peacefully, sunshine."

I pull down the coat, just enough to view the space in our tarp tent. Tim is far closer than I had anticipated by his footsteps, hovering over me with his face twisted in annoyance as it so often is, but the corners of his lips twitch and his eyebrows struggle to stay scrunches in.