Chapter Text
Sam has been described as many things. An adventurer, an engineer, a master builder. Never has he been described as parental, or anything along those lines. It makes sense, he’d never been in any situation where you could even think to bring up the word. It was a foreign concept to him; he’d never had any parental figures in his life, nor did he know anyone with kids, or even a parental side to them.
He’s also now learned that the title could never be earned by himself in the first place. You see, Sam had been commissioned by a village to upgrade their automatic farming system. It was a simple task (he’d actually just been commissioned to repair it, but he ended up upgrading it. Not that he was paid extra for that, they hadn’t even noticed. He was fine with that though, as long as it would help them, he was happy.), one which he’d finished fairly quickly. The villagers hadn’t wanted him to stay however, so he left. He decided to follow the river they lived by, just so he could listen to it’s calming babbling. Or whatever you called river noises.
He’d had anger issues as a kid and he found the best way to calm himself was to listen to some specific sound. His go to thing, given the area he had lived in, were rivers.
It was also next to a lovely field of sunflowers, which the villagers were steadily destroying. It was a bit upsetting, Sam personally thought nature was something beautiful to be protected, preserved even. It didn’t matter, in the long run. He’d probably never come back to this village. He still chose to enjoy the beauty of the field while he could.
And it was while he was admiring the fields surrounding the river, as well as the river himself, that he heard it. At first, he hadn’t had any idea what the noise had been. He just knew it was an awful noise that was really hurting his head. Eventually he deduced that it sounded like crying, something akin to a ghast, but with less power to it’s voice.
And then he’d found it. Caught between the river bank and the river itself was a tiny little basket, a crumby one at that, with broken handles, as well as torn blankets poking out of it’s opening. In swaddled up inside those torn and dirty blankets was a child. An infant, with little strands of midnight black hair, faintly blue when the sun shown down on it just right, skin a near gold color, and eyes closed shut. The child was fairly dirty, and if Sam squinted hard enough, he could even see a few bruises and scratches.
The baby was very clearly the source of the crying, but unfortunately for Sam he had no idea what to do. The child likely came from the village, considering the river flowed away from the village, in the direction he’d just been walking in.
He approached cautiously, afraid any sudden or loud noises would frighten the child more than it (he? She? Referring to the child as an it felt so dehumanizing ) already was. Once he was close enough, he bent down and slowly lifted the child from out of the blankets. It was a boy. The centaur-like creeper hybrid slowly rose back up, basket on one arm, as he cradled the child.
And then he saw it, felt it too. A blink and you miss it movement. The child was shivering. Possibly from fear, but more likely, and much more frighteningly, from the cold. The child was wet, and considering he was just in a river that made sense. The blankets he was just in looked faintly wet as well, and it didn’t comfort Sam with how uncomfortable and scratchy the material looked.
As soon as he made this revelation, he dropped the basket and quickly removed his hoodie (he had to remove his armor to get to it, and he decided it was okay if he left his chest plate off for a bit), wrapping the child up in it as soon as it was free from his body.
The child was still screaming, so he tried to comfort him, rocking him back and fourth as he tried to come up with a lullaby he could sing. Despite having traveled essentially all of the world at this point, he came up empty, and his rocking hadn’t helped at all.
He began to make his way back to the village, picking the basket up and setting it carefully on his back so it wouldn’t fall off as he walked.
He continued rocking the baby in hopes he’d feel better, or maybe even calm down. Sam would take anything at this point.
-
He’d made it back to the village in record time, and returned the child to them. They thanked him (although it hardly felt like they were grateful) and took the child away to return him to his rightful family.
Despite knowing full well the child was safe and home again, Sam couldn’t pull himself away from the village again. Deep down, that one special part of him, the one driven by instinct, the creeper, told him that the child still wasn’t safe yet. So he set up camp outside the town, in the forest. He wasn’t going to leave until the feeling went away and the voice shut up. Not that he’d be able to anyway; that part of him had more control than he’d like to admit, even with all of his therapy and anger management.
As he began to go collect firewood, he realized the sunflower field he’d seen earlier was in view of his camp. The thought came from nowhere, and brought a smile to his face.
-
It had been in the dead of night that he awoke to the smell of smoke. Despite setting up a camp, he’d fallen asleep next to the sunflower field. Thinking back, he remembered getting bored and look for someplace to tinker in peace. The presence of the village irked him in a way he couldn’t describe. The sunflower field calmed him down significantly, so he’d stayed there.
After a moment of searching the sky, he saw the source of the smokey smell: actually smoke. The pillar of smoke he was seeing was in the direction of the village, which made his blood run cold.
He ran (or galloped, since he was a centaur essentially) to the village to discover it had been pillaged. Because of the distance from the field to the village, he hadn’t heard anything. He’d only been alerted to it because the fire was getting dangerously close to the forest. He put as much of it out as he could before continuing into the village to look for survivors, or maybe even to help stop the raid, if it was even still happening.
The lack of screams or any general life made him doubt it.
But then, he did hear a scream. A rather familiar one at this point. Running around, he eventually found it.
Outside the house where the crying was the loudest was a couple, they’d bled to death hours ago from being shot by arrows. They were clearly fleeing. Going inside, Sam found the baby from earlier, abandoned on a counter and dangerously close to falling off.
They’d abandoned him.
It wasn’t like there was a ton of damning evidence, in fact there was a chance they’d really just had no choice to run.
But that voice was telling him that wasn’t the case.
He carefully picked the baby up, and as he did everything clicked. The baby was tiny little wings, still featherless, on his back. He was a hybrid. So they’d abandoned him. He’d already known how the people here felt about hybrids, he’d seen the way they’d looked at him while he was here. Understood why they hadn’t wanted him to stay.
And just as they had kicked him out, they’d done so to a child. An infant. He didn’t feel as bad for never having come help them, with this sudden revelation.
But this left a new problem; what would he do with the child?
The answer was obvious. He’d find him a home.