A Spoonful of Sugar

It was a somewhat unusual day at the Bito household. Daisukenojo was sick, both parents were gone for work, and the responsibility of looking after her brother fell onto young Raimu. This, unfortunately, included the near-impossible task of getting him to take his medicine. And so, she found herself standing outside her sibling’s room, fighting in an intense battle of wills.

“Come on, Beat. You know you have to take it.” The young girl coaxed as she leaned against the door, small cup of cough syrup in hand.

On the other side of the aforementioned door was Beat, sitting on his bed with a stubborn scowl etched on his face. “Nu-uh. I ain’t takin’ it, Rhyme!”

“A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down, you know,” His sister’s patient voice was softened by him sticking a couple of pillows over his ears.

“I don’t see no sugar wit you,” He argued, despite the fact that he couldn’t actually see her at the moment. Take the medicine? That kind that you received when you went to the doctor’s office that they seemed to make specifically to make you want to lose your lunch the second it entered your mouth? Screw that.

Though she could normally deal with her brother calmly, Rhyme’s patience was wearing thin after a good twenty or thirty minutes of the pointless argument. This was getting them nowhere. It showed just the smallest bit in her next words, which lacked just a bit of the gentleness they usually carried. “Beat, if you don’t come out here to take it, I’ll have to come in there and force you to.”

The familiar yell that was characteristic of her brother told the girl that she had gained the upper hand. She could make out the sound of fantic shuffling around and a loud thud a few second later, causing the girl to wince slightly. “D-don’t come in yet, yo! I’m-- uh, not dressed yet! Yeah!”

Beat looked around his room frantically, trying to find an escape route of some sort. He didn’t pay too much attention to Rhyme’s response of, “You’ve been in your pajamas all day, though.” and tried to make one of his own, which probably ended up sounding more like a mix up of random words, a few of which he was pretty sure didn’t mean what he thought they did. He went into full-on panic mode as his sister began to count down from twenty, and in a last ditch effort, he tugged on the window on the other side of his room. Jammed, like every other time he tried to open the damn thing. As the last few seconds approached, he made a dive for his bed, crawling under the multiple layers of blankets and making himself a cocoon for defense.

The entire world seemed to hold its breath as the door creaked open and Rhyme stepped inside. “Beat?” Her eyes glanced around the room, but settled on the slightly twitching ball of sheets atop the bed. “I know you’re in there. Come on, you’re making this a lot worse than it has to be.”

The muffled response that came from cocoon!Beat was unintelligible.

Rhyme was an intelligent girl. She knew that there was no way she could pull Beat out of his sanctuary, and even on the off chance that she did, there would still be the matter of trying to get the medicine down his throat without spilling any or him just spitting it out. No, Raimu Bito was nowhere near as strong as her brother, but brains over brawn, right? She just had to think outside the box, was all.

And the solution to her life’s problems seemed to appear in a flash of heavenly light as she noticed something out of the corner of her eyes. Beat’s skateboard. It was perfect. Quietly, the girl set her plan into motion, quietly making her way over to the object in question. Smiling, she snagged it and strolled out of the room casually.

“Bwah! Yo, what’chu doin’ wit that?-!”

And that was the signal to start running. Her room was on the other side of the house, but she was sure she could make it with her headstart, courtesy of Beat getting caught up in all of his blankets in his haste and hitting the ground a little bit less than gracefully. As long as she could make it to her room and lock it before her brother reached her, she could pull this off. She would hide the skateboard in her room, come out, and refuse to reveal its location after he took his medicine. It was the perfect plan.

Or, at least, it would’ve been, if she had taken into account that some of the medicine would spill out of the cup and onto the ground because of how fast she was going. The red-ish liquid conveniently landed right in front of her feet, causing her to slip up and fall. Her poor brother, who was only a couple feet behind her, couldn’t react soon enough and in no time there was a groaning Bito dogpile in the family room. At that moment, they both decided that the situation couldn’t possibly get any worse.

That is, until their parents walked in two seconds later.