Klaus woke up groggy, heavy, and thoroughly betrayed by his own bed — which had apparently decided, sometime overnight, to glue itself to his back. He lay there for a long, blissful moment, savoring the specific kind of stillness that only existed on Saturdays, when the household's usual military-precision wake-up schedule took a day off.
That was the deal. That was the system. Saturdays meant extra sleep, and extra sleep was sacred.
Someone, apparently, hadn't gotten the memo.
The door swung open, and his mother stepped in already smiling — the kind of smile that meant she'd made a decision and he wasn't going to like it. Before he could even summon a proper glare, she'd scooped him up and started dressing him with the brisk efficiency of someone assembling furniture.
He was, to put it delicately, furious.
"Look at who's looking cute today," Anna cooed, entirely unbothered by the flat, unimpressed stare he leveled at her in return. It was the stare of a man who had plans, and those plans had involved a mattress for several more hours.
She tucked him into the stroller next. It was, objectively, an undignified way to travel. It was also, he noted with some resentment toward his own biology, extremely comfortable — the kind of gentle rocking motion that made his eyelids traitorously heavy within minutes. He let them fall shut. If he was going to be kidnapped from his own bed, he'd at least reclaim the sleep somewhere else.
"We're here!" Anna's voice cut through the haze, bright and pleased, directed at his father.
Klaus cracked one eye open. The park sprawled out in front of the stroller — green, loud, and packed with people doing whatever it was people did in parks on Saturday mornings that apparently outranked sleep.
"Well, would you look at that," he muttered, low enough that only he could appreciate the sentiment. "I'm in a fu—" he caught himself, mostly out of habit rather than any real self-restraint, "—a park. Instead of my bed. You'd better have a good explanation, Mother."
Anna, blissfully unaware she was on trial, was already unbuckling him.
That was when he saw her.
A stroller had pulled up beside his, and in it sat a baby with a mess of bright red hair and eyes the color of a clear sky, radiating an amount of raw, uncontained energy that seemed almost unfair for something that small. She was kicking her legs, babbling at nothing in particular, vibrating with the kind of enthusiasm Klaus hadn't felt about anything since his last successful nap.
He closed his eyes. He could already feel the exhaustion this child's mere existence was going to cost him.
While the parents fell into easy conversation a few feet away — the universal language of adults who'd just realized their kids were roughly the same age — Klaus and the red-haired menace regarded each other in silence. It was, briefly, a perfectly civil standoff.
Then he turned his head away, deciding he'd rather look at a tree.
She apparently took this as a personal challenge and attempted to turn as well, matching his movement — except Rosie, it turned out, had none of his years of practiced composure behind her tiny limbs. She overcorrected, tipped sideways, and toppled directly into him, sending them both sprawling into the grass in a tangle of limbs and outraged baby noises.
Klaus went down first, absorbing what he privately felt was an unreasonable amount of impact for someone her size. He started to push himself back up, ready to lodge a formal complaint with the universe, when a sound stopped him cold.
A camera shutter.
He looked up just in time to see his mother, phone raised, laughing so hard she had to lean on Rosie's father's shoulder for balance. Rosie's father wasn't doing much better, already scrolling through the photo with the delighted expression of a man who had just acquired premium blackmail material for a future birthday slideshow.
Klaus stared at the lens. The lens stared back.
There would be no negotiating this. The photo existed now, immortal and undeletable in whatever cloud storage his mother used, ready to resurface at every family gathering for the rest of his natural life.
Beside him, Rosie had recovered with the resilience only very young children possess, already reaching for a fistful of grass like the collision had never happened. She looked, if anything, delighted by the whole encounter.
He decided then and there that he did not trust her.
The rest of the outing passed in a blur of careful avoidance — Klaus steering his tiny, uncooperative body away from her stroller at every opportunity, and Rosie, seemingly delighted by the game, doing her level best to close the distance every time. By the time Anna finally announced it was time to head home, he'd developed what he was fairly certain qualified as a strategic retreat pattern.
As they loaded back into the car, sun-warmed and thoroughly exhausted in a way that had nothing to do with cultivation or system quests, Klaus allowed himself one final, weary thought.
This had, without question, been the worst outing of his short, second life.
He had a feeling — the kind that settled somewhere low in his gut and refused to leave — that it wouldn't be the last time that girl knocked him off balance.