He pats my chest. “No, Little one. You don’t need it. I’m going to use my quill to inject you with an anesthetic in a minute. It will put you to sleep for a while so the doctor can repair your knee. He’ll take the catheter out and diaper you when he’s done. When you wake up, you’ll be in a crib in another room.”
Before I can ask more questions, Dankin returns. He’s smiling. “Don’t you fret, Little one. I’ll have every tendon and ligament fixed in no time.”
“But… Are you sure?”
Nanish leans over me. He kisses my lips briefly before nibbling a path to my neck. After licking the sensitive skin behind my ear, his quill pierces me deep.
My only reaction is to gasp at the sharp sting before my eyes grow heavy and everything fades.
Chapter Twelve
Bamgin
It’s been two hours since Dankin finished the surgery. I’m anxious to look into my Little girl’s pretty orange eyes again, but she’s still sleeping deeply. I’ve been pacing for so long my legs should be tired. Instead my adrenaline is pumping too hard for that.
Nanish is pacing, too. He pauses and pats my back. “She’s going to be fine. Dankin said everything went perfectly. It didn’t even take him very long.” He glances at her. “Maybe I gave her too much anesthesia.”
I shake my head. “You didn’t. She’s just exhausted. We filled her head with so much information that she might have passed out without anesthesia and still been sleeping now.”
Nanish nods. “I know, but I want her to wake up.”
“Me, too. She will. And then we’ll hold her and feed her and make sure she uses her diaper on her own, but after that, we need to head home. Prolonging our transport will only make it harder to separate from her. Six months. We’ve waited over a hundred and thirty years to find her. We just need to be patientfor six more months, and then the rest of our lives will be filled with her smile, her sparkling eyes, and her laughter.”
“Did you see the look on her face when we told her there would be no more basketball?”
I winch. “Yes. She was devastated. It broke my heart.”
“She doesn’t understand.”
“How could she?” I ask. “There’s no way for Little girls to grasp the extent to which we will go to protect them. For most it takes weeks or months to accept the kind of submission that’s expected from them. How many safety rules we will have. The coddling she will experience twenty-four hours a day.”
Nanish exhales. “I wish we could skip time about seven months, pass right by the voyage and her recovery once we get home. I’m eager to get to a time when she’s sitting on her little bottom in her playpen, looking up at us with wide eyes and a smile, lifting her tiny arms for one of us to pick her up.”
I nod. “We’ll get there.”
A rustling sound in her crib has both of us rushing over to check on her.
I lower the railing.
She whimpers as she blinks her pretty eyes open. She’s been sucking so hard on the pacifier that a ring indents her cheeks when I pop it out of her mouth. She’s so precious.
“Did he fix it?” she asks without hesitation, her voice soft.
I smile. “Yes, Baby girl. Good as new. There’s a soft brace on your leg, but it only needs to stay in place for a few days. We’ll exercise your leg during the trip home. We would have done that anyway, so it won’t be any different.”
She glances back and forth between us. “You’ll be awake, and I’ll be asleep?”
“Yes, Little one,” Nanish says. “We will monitor you closely the entire time.”
I stroke her hand. “Right now, we need to give you a bath to cleanse your body from all the impurities on Earth. Then we’ll give you another bottle. You also need to empty both your bowels and your bladder into your diaper before we can leave.”
She winces. “Gross. Can’t I use a bathroom?”
“Nope.” I keep my voice light. “We don’t have bathrooms for Little girls on Eleadia. You will learn to let us take care of you in every way, that includes changing you. Eventually you’ll stop fighting the urge and relax your bladder muscles. There’s no need for you to bother to hold your urine in. Some Little girls learn to pee themselves every time they feel the urge. Others need medical intervention to force them to become incontinent. That’s up to you. If you’re too strong-willed and stubborn to keep your diapers wet, we’ll have the doctor put in a catheter for a while or use a numbing agent to prevent you from controlling the muscles at the base of your bladder.”
It’s a lot of information, and maybe I shouldn’t have dumped it on her moments after she’s woken up from her surgery, but it all would have needed to be said eventually. There’s never a perfect time to inform a female that she will be diaper trained and remain that way for the rest of her life.
She swallows hard, tears running out of the corners of her eyes. “I don’t want to use a diaper,” she complains.
