authors note: FLUFF!

It was a fairly average afternoon, after a particularly nasty morning which had been filled with nothing but rain. Not that Luhan and Xiumin minded, today was an oddly quiet one where they had nothing really planned, no schedules to speak of and just a mini break from everything. A very unusual occurrence but one they were glad to have.

They had planned to go to the zoo with Ai, as they had been promising to take him since the start of the year, but the weather had put those plans on hold.

Not that Ai minded in the slightest of course, he had plenty of toys and games to keep him occupied and it was nice to just get time alone with his parents. Because whilst he loved his cousins to absolute pieces, they were just sometimes far too loud and made him want to hit something in order to get them to just stop. Not that he would ever hit, that would just make him naughty like Tai and he really didn’t want to be sent to the naughty seat and have his favourite teddy taken off him for the rest of the day.

So the morning had been spent playing Hungry Hungry Hippos with his Daddy, followed by Kerplunk, Operation and then the electronic junior version of Monopoly which made his mother yell at them playfully for making a complete and total racket.

After lunch, Ai went down for his nap as per usual with next to no complaint whilst Luhan read him a story about a very hungry caterpillar that lulled him happily into dreamland.

When he woke up a couple of hours later, Ai found himself in the unusual position of both of his parents being curled up on the sofa, fast asleep. Blinking the youngster looked towards the television set which appeared to be showing some form of grown up TV show that he had no hope in understanding but he didn’t want to just stare at it blindly because that would be boring. Plus he knew that it was never a good idea to wake his Mummy up because it just caused problems so he would have to find something else to do for a little while.

The games were a big no no, they were loud, made lots of noise and that would not be a good thing in the slightest. Ai was troubled for a few long minutes, wandering around the living room in his Donald Duck onesie before his eyes fell on the toy box in the corner. It wasn’t a proper toy box like the one that he had in his room, which had bright happy wild animals painted on the outside, it was more just a large cardboard box that had any leftover toys thrown into it for collection by respective parties when they inevitably returned to the house to play with Ai. It was a fun box for Ai because there were all sorts of toys left by the twins and Sooyeong had an obsession with fluffy things that bordered on the insane so he always enjoyed playing with those.

But what caught his eye today was that sitting on the top of everything else was a large colouring book which Ai was pretty sure that Yueliang had been playing with last time she stayed over when she was feeling a little on the poorly side and had opted to just sit quietly in the corner and draw. Padding over he picked up the book and smiled at the large cartoon lion on the front before returning to the coffee table in front of his parents.

Setting the book down, Ai headed back to his bedroom – they lived in a single story house though Ai had never questioned as to why this was – to find his crayons before returning. Whilst he probably had the freedom to do whatever he wanted to do right now, Ai was far happier with the idea of sitting colouring in front of his parents whilst they slept through their boring grown up show.

Opening the book, after he got himself settled down with a large cushion and his crayons all neatly arranged in a pattern that resembled the rainbow, Ai carefully turned the pages that had already been coloured in until he found a particular one that he liked because it was a large princess castle complete with a princess and a knight which was perfect in his opinion.

He opted to colour the princess’s long flowing dress green and made the knight have purple armour before colouring the sky a deep blue and the grass in a yellow colour because he did not want it to clash with the dress. The castle was coloured a very bright looking pink and the turrets were given red tops. Taking a break for five minutes to find his special litter crayons, Ai went over some of the key aspects of the picture to give them extra sparkle before drawing a miniature version of himself in the middle of the field.

Once he was finished with all of the colouring, he smiled brightly and picked up his special multicoloured rainbow crayon to write ‘Ai’ next to himself, ‘Appa’ next to the knight and ‘Mama’ next to the princess.

“Oh Ai, you little sweetie,” Xiumin said with a gentle chuckle towards his son, causing the young boy to look up.

Ai smiled brightly, “Does Appa like?”

“Yes he does,” Xiumin said, pulling the youngster into a hug and trying not to burst into laughter for fear of waking Luhan up before he had a chance to save the picture, “and I’m sure Mama is going to love it just as much.”

Ai let out a happy noise as he was picked up and Xiumin gathered the drawing into his fingers, “Why don’t we surprise Mama and get this laminated and framed hmm? Then I can make you some tea.”

“Yay! That sounds good!” Ai said, happily clinging to Xiumin’s neck as they made their way into the kitchen.

Around ten minutes later the picture had been carefully cut out of the colouring book, laminated and put into a little slide frame that they seemed to have acquired a number of times over before it was lovingly stuck on the fridge door where everyone would be able to see it. Needless to say Luhan was a mixture of overly happy with the picture and slightly put out by the fact that even his son did not consider him to be manly in the slightest but everyone agreed that it was a wonderful picture and Yueliang didn’t even complain that it had been out of her colouring book in the slightest.