You Set My Heart Aflutter (Dad/Tavros)

"One nearly dragged John into the pond" Robert grinned. "I swear, it was as big as he was!"

"Oh, wow, he must have been pretty young then," Tavros replied with a smile, wondering what John looked like when he was that little. Human children were far more adorable than he had ever found grubs to be, which probably explained why humans raised their young rather than trolls. Not to mention, you would have to go searching through quite a few grubs just to find which one was 'yours' and usually the grubs were pretty heavily protected from adult trolls.

"What's, um, parenting like?" He asked out of curiosity, watching Daisy shake her feathers again in a blur before joining the other birds on the mother duck.

"Well, its a lot like taking care of a baby animal, only, you know that what you're taking care of, was something that you helped make. It'll always be a part of you that'll live and grow and look up to you" Robert replied. "But at the same time its different, because you want to be the perfect parent, but you never can be because its all about learning and growing with your child"

"Sounds like a very life changing experience," Tavros replied with a soft smile, prodding the mother duck away before reaching over to pick up the shampoo again. He waited until the birds were a good distance away before pouring a little bit into his hand and lathering his hair with it.

"Oh it is. Its something you can never truly be ready for." Robert admitted. "Even if you think you are."

Tavros made sure to rub his scalp thoroughly with the pads of his finger tips, not his finger nails, ensuring the cleanliness of his lathering before he dunked his head in the water again. He pulled back out and ran his hands over his hair, rinsing the lingering shampoo suds out before dunking once more just to be sure. "Did you think you were ready? When you became a parent?" He asked once he came back up and was pushing his soaked hair back, keeping it out of his eyes.

"Gosh no. John was such a surprise!" Robert chuckled. "Ah and what a handful he could be! Some days I just couldn't believe how much energy he had when he had already run me ragged."

"What would he do, usually?" Tavros asked, picking up the conditioner and repeating the process he had with the shampoo, waiting to dunk his head in the water until after Dad answered him.

"Oh what wouldn't he do? John was so adventurous, he was just into everything. No playpen could hold him after he learned to walk." Robert laughed. "I'll show you a home movie sometime"

"It sounds like he was a handful," Tavros replied with a smirk, rinsing the conditioner out from his hair. When he resurfaced again, he rubbed at one of his eyes painfully due to the suds that managed their way in there, grimacing slightly.

"Here, let me" Robert smiled, producing a wash cloth from the counter and dabbing at Tavros's eyes. "Is that any better?"

Tavros laughed when Dad dabbed at his eyes with the washcloth, pulling away and squinting at him with a broad grin plastered to his face. "You treat me like such a grub," he teased, dipping his fingers in the water and flicking them at the man.

"Is that a bad thing?" Robert smiled. "I treat you just like I treat John. Its only fair."

"I guess," Tavros muttered, reaching over for the bar of soap on one of the corners of the tub. "It's just that, I'm not a grub any more, so, um, I shouldn't be treated like one?"

"Ah, well then I apologize if I have offended you by treating you like a human child." Robert gave a teasing little smirk. "I could always just lay off making sweets. Adults don't get sweets from their parents."

Tavros made a low whine at the human's comment as he washed his shoulders with the soap, giving him a fake pout. "That's cruel, Dad," Tavros grumbled, lathering the bar of soap along his arms and rinsing them off.

"Well its true." Robert smiled. "Its part of being treated like my child, cakes and sweets. If you're not my child, why should I make them"

"Well, your children can still be your children, even if they're an adult. You know, still treat them like your offspring, but like they're grown up too, because they're both. If that, uh, makes any sense?" Tavros frowned, not sure if he was explaining this correctly.

Robert laughed. "Its true, I suppose, but you've got to remember what I told you about parenting. Most of the time, the parent is learning along with the child. You have to forgive me, but I'm still trying to learn to treat John like an adult and not the little boy that crawled into bed with me every night because he was afraid of the owl outside his window"

Tavros laughed at that, almost losing his soap as he did. "I guess I can understand how that would be a, uh, difficult thing to adjust to." The human, parent-to-child relationship was a fairly foreign concept to someone like Tavros, the closest comparison being some of the animals he had come across that actually raised their young. Of course trolls had their lusus to care for them, but it was a much different system as they depended on each other for their survival, not solely relying on one to care for the other while expecting nothing in return.

Another thing Tavros found interesting was how pleasant the adult human could be in contrast to the adult troll. There was also always going to be the exception of human adults possibly being more aggressive than some of the more mild, troll adults, but overall, when a troll came to complete adolescence, most of them seemed to be stuck in a perpetually violent state of mind. It also brought around the sound reasoning of how terrible and dangerous an idea it would be for a grub to crawl into an adult troll's recuperacoon. "It's really sweet, how much you care about your young."

"We kind of have to" Robert chuckled. "They're our next generation, and if we don't take care of them and raise them, our entire kind would die out."

"Yeah, but you don't have to make him cakes for his survival," Tavros joked, then reconsidering as another thought occurred to him. "Um, unless there's nothing else to eat, I guess, in which maybe you would, sort of have to. But that wouldn't sound so terrible, having nothing but cake to eat."

"You don't want that though, you'd get fat if that was all you ate" Robert pointed out.

"True," Tavros agreed, though he still couldn't help but wonder what kind of scenario you would have to be in where the only source of food was cake. "But the point is that you give him extra care, because you care, not because you have to."

"I suppose that's true isn't it." Robert chuckled softly. "But I just want to be the most caring parent I can be"