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vocab_drabblesFandom: Overwatch
Author: luminious
Rating: G
Word Count: 1000
Characters/Pairings: Jean-Baptiste Augustin, OC, Roseline Mondésir
Warnings: Childhood trauma, children suffering due to war, loss of a sibling, implied child soldier indoctrination at the end, etc for anyone uncomfortable with that.
Summary:
A truly adorable sight.
It’s a relief that in the aftermath of the Ominic crisis she still looks more or less the same—he gets to have a peaceful last memory of her appearance before her casket is shut and buried beneath Mother Earth alongside their parents.
I.
PORCELAIN WHITE RIBBONS AND SHIRTS with jumpers tinted like merlot (one ending in trousers that stop just past the end of a bandage-covered knee the other a long skirt covering half of two stocking-clad calves), shiny black shoes with tiny golden emblems, and bright, wide smiles—these are the uniforms Jean-Baptiste and his younger sister Suzette wear and leave their school in, and these are the expressions of the young siblings whenever they get enough allowance together to buy dozens of desserts at the local street markets or play soccer with older kids at one of the many fields and parks within Gonaïves.
Even though he is older by two years it always seems Jean-Baptiste is chasing after Suzette rather than the other way around; if she isn’t spending hours that could’ve been dedicated to completing homework instead exploring abandoned gingerbread houses, or bribing food vendors for half-price deals on akasan and mangos, she’s begging the neighbors to let her play with their dog or cat or in some cases even their donkey stead of remembering to iron her uniform.
“Hey, hey, Jean, let’s go bother Antoine into letting us play with his video games!”
“Mama, I helped clean the fish last time! Can’t I join Daddy in fishing this time?”
“See, Grandma Marie-Rose, I got an almost perfect grade on my exam! I just forgot to do the last question but, otherwise, I got everything I did do right!”
She’s always talkative, explorative, and the brightest little girl in the room, often with a little piece of dous makos or tablet cocoye in her hands ready to be devoured, her hair no matter how energetic she is always staying in its usual style of six stocky, spiraled pigtails with plastic barrettes and silk laces holding them.
A truly adorable sight.
It’s a relief that in the aftermath of the Ominic crisis she still looks more or less the same—he gets to have a peaceful last memory of her appearance before her casket is shut and buried beneath Mother Earth alongside their parents.
II.
It isn’t easy for Augustin to get used to the orphanage at the tip of Port-de-Paix. He originally spends time in the orphanage in his hometown, and is able to visit the unmarked graves of his sister, mother, and father easily—always recognizing their non-unique tombstones by always remembering how many steps he takes to get to the trio’s part of the ever-growing graveyard—but Gonaïves ends up deemed too damaged by authorities for children without close relatives and a stable home to continue just barely living in.
He doesn’t talk much at the new orphanage, and the other kids don’t speak much to him—
Having lengthy conversations reminds him too much that he was the (often too soft) straight man to his little sister's wildest ideas.
He still gives the sickly kids parts of his food though, and still makes sure to read to the youngest kids who cry at night for their parents, just as he did at the orphanage in his hometown.
Soon, Jean-Baptiste ends up spending all his time in the library they’ve made for the children, so invested in the books it becomes easy to ignore all the shelves damaged by the catastrophe of six months prior and the day-nightmares of seeing his neighborhood come crashing down in dust and cultivating into flames painting the sky a too pronounced smoky red.
Eventually, it is how he meets her.
III.
“I can’t believe you’re reading those books at our age. That’s…incredible!”
“It’s nothing, really. I just wanna know all I can for when I become a doctor.”
Like magnets, the two children connect in an instant.
Roseline Mondésir is not much different from him, helping the little kids out and having her nose in a book far more often than she speaks, but while Jean-Baptiste chooses fantasies with fluffy endings and warm stories Roseline is almost exclusively reading as many textbooks about health as possible.
“Ayiti was once known as the Pearl of the Antilles,” she once tells him with bright eyes captivating even behind her foggy, rectangular glasses, “how lovely it would be to be part of the group that returns it and us its people back to such glory!”
Roseline is very ambitious and very astute; inspiring, all in all, and in time some—but not all, never all—of Jean-Baptiste’s unhappiness at leaving the orphanage in Gonaïves wanes like the tides near boats at the shores Roseline and him watch them at.
IV.
“Congratulations on getting into pre-med!” Jean-Baptiste omits as he pats the back of Roseline, and then he ends his sentence by calling her Ros as he has for the past two years like he would his sister Suz, and while it is not a replacement feeling of the times Jean-Baptiste spent with his sibling long gone—can never be—it makes him happy.
No doubt Suzette is watching from above with her cheeky smile anyway; he’s sure she would’ve very much liked Roseline, and it’d no doubt be funny seeing Suzette try to get used to his sister who was an opinionated wildfire.
Alas, it was not meant to be.
Instead, Jean-Baptiste stands alone, now freshly eighteen just like Roseline, the former preparing to enter the Caribbean Coalition while the latter was getting everything she needed before starting university.
“This calls for a celebration at Lefort’s, Dr. Let’s go!”
“You’re quite right on that, soldier,” Roseline responds, getting up and out of her seat at the library she’s spent more than half a decade at every afternoon for this very accomplishment.
Mondésir grins, and it’s as if Suzette is smirking at him and asking him to sneak her some kremas their mother’s making for their second cousins in Miragoâne.
(He knows though that, unlike Suzette, Roseline would question him if she were to learn he’d been wondering about joining Talon, and so he hides his letter of request to join the group as he takes Ros’ by the arm and drags her to their favorite bar.)
[FIN.]
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