Dayton: The Junior Guardian Chronicles: Episode 70

Dayton backed into her room and kicked the door shut with her heel, Ezra steady on her shoulder like he weighed nothing and somehow still changed everything. 

She lifted her hand up beside her neck. “Switch.” 

Ezra hesitated for half a beat, then stepped onto her palm. Dayton moved him with practiced care and set him down on her bed near the pillow, like placing something fragile that could still argue with you. 

“I’m gonna put pajamas on,” she said, already turning. “I’ll be right back.” 

She went to her closet, yanked out a soft set, then padded to the bathroom. When the door clicked shut behind her, she didn’t even make it to the sink. She leaned her back against the door and let the day hit her all at once. 

Armed officers in the hallway. 
SEA voices. Orders. 
A Little acquired. 

Not her dream Little. Not even close. But still… a Little. Still the thing she’d trained for, studied for, wanted. 

And she hated that a tiny part of her was excited anyway. Even if it was Ezra. Even if it was him. 

After she changed into her pajamas, Dayton cracked the bathroom door and peeked out. 

Ezra was trying to navigate her bed like it was a terrain map. The folds of the comforter rose into soft ridges that slowed him down, and her mattress was plush, the kind she loved because it felt like sinking into a cloud. 

For him, it was… too much cloud. 

Each step pressed him down into the down comforter, the fabric swallowing his feet and tugging at his balance. From Dayton’s angle it looked like he was trudging through fresh snow, leaving tiny dents behind him as he fought for traction. 

Dayton watched for a second longer than she meant to. It was weird, seeing Ezra of all people moving across her bed like it was actual terrain. 

She could hear him in her head. Dayton. The way he used to say her name, sharp and careful, like he was placing it on the desk in front of the whole class. He’d work her into lessons just to make her the example, like he couldn’t resist it, like he knew she hated it and that was the point. 

She’d never had a teacher do that before. There wasn’t a handbook for it. No right answer. Just the hot, helpless feeling of being stuck in the seat while everyone watched. 

All she’d known how to do was vent to her friends and tell herself it didn’t matter. 

Now he was leaving tiny dents in her comforter like footprints in snow. 

Dayton stepped fully out, making sure he noticed her. She walked back to the bed and watched her shadow loom over him as he craned his head to look up. 

The teacher who had made her life hell now had to tilt his face toward hers. He lived in her room now, in the habitat she’d built, eating the food she bought. 

She lowered her hand onto the comforter. 

“If you need to use the bathroom or whatever,” Dayton said, “you should probably come.” 

Ezra stepped into her palm. Dayton carried him back into the bathroom and set him in the sink. Then she tore off a few tiny squares of toilet paper and handed them to him. 

“The sink has a stopper,” she said, pointing at the drain, “so you can’t, like… fall in or anything.” 

Dayton grabbed her cleanser and dotted it across her face, beginning her nightly routine. 

“Just yell if you need something,” she added, turning toward the mirror and angling her body so she was focused on her own reflection. “If you don’t, I’m gonna assume you’re good.” 

“You’re just going to stay here?” Ezra asked from the sink, looking up. 

Dayton paused with cleanser on her fingers. “I mean… I’m doing skincare. It’s not like I’m here to supervise your bathroom experience.” 

Ezra’s eyes narrowed. “You can still see.” 

Dayton rolled her eyes like he was being dramatic. “No, I literally can’t.” She kept her back angled, gaze on the mirror. “You’re in the sink, I’m at the counter. Unless I’m crouching down like a weirdo, I can’t see anything.” 

She went back to rubbing in the product, voice casual. “If you need something, yell. If you don’t, I’m going to keep pretending you’re not in here because that’s… normal.” 

Ezra held still for a second, like he didn’t know what to do with kindness that still had rules. 
 

The sink walls rose around Ezra on a slant, glossy porcelain curving up and away like a white canyon. At full size it would’ve been nothing, a normal basin, a place you didn’t think about. At four inches, it was architecture. 

The surface wasn’t truly smooth, not up close. Fine hairline scratches crisscrossed the porcelain like pale veins, and the tiny scuffs near the drain looked like worn footpaths, as if generations of toothbrushes and rings and dropped earrings had carved a history into it. Along the lowest curve, where water always found its way, the porcelain held a faint chill and a thin dampness that clung to the air like cold breath. 

The stopper sat pressed into the drain, a metal disk with a rubber ring. Dayton had pointed to it like a safety feature, and it was. Still, Ezra couldn’t stop seeing the seam around it, the narrow edge where metal met porcelain, as a boundary line. A place things could slip. A place a life could snag. 

Above him, the faucet arched out like a steel bridge. The aerator at the tip looked like a grated vent, a tiny honeycomb that could turn a stream into a storm. Even the handles were enormous, their edges catching the light in hard, clinical highlights. A single water droplet clung to the underside of the spout, perfectly round, trembling with its own weight. It looked like glass. It looked like it could fall and hit like a marble. 

The air smelled like soap and mint, and underneath that, the clean chemical sweetness of whatever products Dayton used. Sterile comfort. Clean-girl perfection. A space designed for someone who didn’t have to think about survival while brushing their teeth. 

He shifted his feet. The porcelain was cold under him, slick in a way that made him hyper-aware of his balance. The slope wasn’t vertical, but it was relentless, always pushing him toward the center like gravity had opinions. If he really needed to, he could probably climb out. Test the incline, find the point where the curve met the counter, use the faucet base like a ledge. 

But “probably” wasn’t a plan. And “not easy” was an understatement. 

He hated the way his brain automatically mapped the sink like an obstacle course. 

He hated even more that his brain automatically checked where Dayton was. 

Relying on people had always bothered him in the abstract. Now it wasn’t abstract. Now it was physics. Now it was: if she walks away and closes a door, you become a sound no one hears. 

His mind circled back, infuriatingly, to her earlier jab. The district. Room and board. The clean little lie of independence. He’d told himself it was the dignified choice, the adult choice. He’d chosen an institution because institutions didn’t come with eye contact, or obligation, or the humiliating intimacy of being cared for by someone who remembered your worst moments. 

He’d chosen the district so he wouldn’t have to owe anyone. 

And look how that worked out. 

Dayton hummed to herself at the counter, some pop song he didn’t recognize but instantly hated because she was too comfortable. She dotted cleanser across her cheeks like she was icing a cake, then started rubbing it in with small, brisk circles. 

“You’re supposed to do it for like a full minute,” she said, half to herself, half to him, voice echoing lightly off tile. “Because if you don’t, it doesn’t count. That’s what they say.” 

Ezra glanced up. 

He couldn’t see her face directly without tipping his head back, but he could see her hands moving in the mirror. The mirror showed a version of Dayton that looked older than thirteen for a second, lit by bathroom light and routine, then younger again when she made a little face at her own reflection like she was judging her skin for personal betrayal. 

She rinsed, water rushing in the faucet with a roar that became weather at Ezra’s scale. The sound filled the sink, bounced off porcelain, turned the whole basin into a drum. The air shifted, cool and damp, and tiny mist speckled the inner walls, turning the scratches into glittering lines for a second before they vanished. 

He flinched anyway. Not because it would hurt him, not exactly, but because it reminded him how quickly the world could become too loud to think. 

Dayton patted her face dry with a towel, the fabric making a soft, relentless rasp. Then she reached for a toner bottle. 

“You do toner after cleanser,” she announced, like she was hosting a tutorial. “It’s not… totally necessary, but it makes you feel like you have your life together.” 

Ezra’s throat tightened. “You’re narrating.” 

Dayton didn’t even look down. “I’m talking,” she corrected, and you could hear the smirk in it. “It’s different.” 

She applied toner with a cotton pad, then leaned closer to the mirror, scanning. “Okay, and then moisturizer.” She grabbed a small jar, scooped a little, and dabbed it on. “Also, I’m making a note,” she added, tapping her phone with her elbow like it was nothing, “to look up little-safe skincare. Because you’re not gonna be crusty.” 

Ezra stared at her. 

“I’m not—” 

“You’re a person,” Dayton said, still casual, like she’d decided that part without asking his opinion. “People do skincare. Also, you’re tiny. You probably get dry faster. That makes sense, right?” 

He hated how quickly she turned his body into a checklist. 

He hated that a part of his brain, traitor that it was, nodded along with the logic. 

Down in the sink, reality waited with the same calm it always did. The toilet paper squares she’d handed him lay folded near the stopper like tiny white flags. One corner fluttered when the bathroom vent clicked on, a faint breath of warm air stirring the basin and making the paper lift and settle again. 

Ezra looked at the squares and felt his face go hot, even though no one was looking at him. Even though Dayton was turned toward her mirror, busy with her own pores and her own normal. 

This was the part no training manual for him existed for. 

The part where the body still needed what bodies needed, and dignity had to be negotiated with porcelain. 

He forced himself to breathe, steady. 

He could either do it now, in the relative privacy Dayton had created by not watching, or he could wait and risk needing help later. That was the math. That was the new kind of adult decision-making: not what was ideal, but what was survivable. 

He turned slightly away from the mirror, toward the curve of the sink, toward the smallest scrap of shadow where the faucet’s arch cut the light into a crescent. Toward the place where he could pretend, for thirty seconds, that he was alone. 

Dayton, still at the counter, capped her moisturizer and smoothed her hands together. “Okay,” she said, satisfied, like she’d completed a ritual that kept the world from falling apart. “Then I do lip balm because my lips get dry and I refuse to suffer.” 

She glanced down then, just briefly, not at him so much as at the sink in general. 

“You good?” she asked, voice neutral. Not teasing. Not sweet. Just… procedure. 

Ezra swallowed. The words came out controlled, clipped. 

“I’m fine,” he said. 

Dayton nodded like she believed him, or like she chose to. She went back to the mirror and reached for a sheet of pimple patches, the little circles catching the light like tiny stickers of authority. “If you’re not, yell. That’s the deal.” 

Ezra stared at the stopper, the folded paper, the slanted white walls, the bridge of the faucet above. 

The deal. 

He hated that there was a deal at all. 

He hated even more that the deal was… workable. 

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