Infancy was humbling.
He had a full adult mind and absolutely no use for it. Couldn't sit up. Couldn't speak. Couldn't communicate anything beyond hungry or uncomfortable — and even those came out as the same sound. His mother decoded it through sheer determination.
He bore it. There was no alternative.
The first few months, his body ran entirely on its own schedule. Sleep arrived without warning and dragged him under mid-thought. Hunger was constant. The whole apparatus of infancy operated independently of him.
Deeply undignified, he thought.
But he watched everything he could from whatever position he happened to be in. His parents mostly, as his eyes slowly learned to focus and the world stopped being blurred shapes.
His mother was Diana Cross, née Hartley.
Islington, North London. She'd moved to Los Angeles seven years ago, met Robert at a dinner party eight months after arriving, married him eighteen months later, and stayed.
Her accent had softened at the edges from years in California. But it was still there. Unmistakably London — coming through strongest when she was tired, emotional, or on the phone with her mother back home.
She cooked British food with the conviction of someone making a quiet cultural argument. Proper Sunday roasts. Beans on toast executed with a seriousness it didn't receive in America. Tea made correctly — she had strong opinions about it.
She said biscuits and meant something entirely different from everyone around her. Corrected people without apology. Every time.
She maintained a very particular version of herself that California had not managed to sand down despite a decade of trying.
He respected that. There was something in it he recognised — the decision to remain yourself regardless of where you were. To not let the environment quietly reshape you.
He filed it away as a quality worth having.
His father was Robert Cross.
Architect. Pasadena born. Third generation Californian.
Quiet and steady. Words earned their place before being used. He came home every evening smelling like coffee and drafting paper, changed out of his work clothes efficiently, and reappeared fully present.
He had a chair at the kitchen table. A particular one. Nobody sat in it when he wasn't there — not because of any rule, just because Diana didn't and so Ethan didn't.
He read to Ethan at night from early on. Not children's books exclusively. Whatever he was reading himself — just slower, with more explanation when the words needed it. He operated on the assumption that Ethan could handle more than most adults would offer a small child.
He was right about that. In ways he couldn't have known.
He asked better questions than most adults too. Not what did you do today but what was the most interesting thing or did anything surprise you.
Ethan liked him for that. Not strategically. Actually liked him.
They were not an obvious pairing on the surface.
Robert — Californian in his bones. Unhurried. Practical. Comfortable with silence.
Diana — London in hers. Opinionated. Warm. Constitutionally unable to leave a quiet room quiet for long.
But they worked. Each filling what the other didn't have. Neither trying to change the other into something more convenient.
He watched them together and felt something that wasn't strategic at all. Just warmth. Plain and simple. The particular warmth of watching two people who had genuinely decided to be on the same side.
He hadn't expected to feel that so early.
He walked at eleven months.
Diana documented it with the energy of someone witnessing something historic. When he finally crossed the kitchen floor, she made a sound that brought Robert in from the other room at speed.
Robert took a photograph. Smiled the quiet smile he reserved for things that genuinely moved him.
That evening Diana called her mother in London. Ethan heard both sides from the living room floor — his grandmother's voice small and delighted through the phone, Diana's doing the thing it did when she was happy and trying not to show how much.
He was going to meet that grandmother eventually.
He was already curious about her.
He talked early. Full sentences. Carefully paced.
He held back vocabulary — let words arrive in a sequence that felt plausible for his age. Constant low-level discipline, operating at a fraction of actual capacity while making it look like actual capacity.
He managed it. Mostly.
There were moments when he slipped. Said something a beat too sophisticated. Diana would get the expression — the look of someone trying to locate the four-year-old inside the person they were talking to.
He learned to read it coming and redirect before it fully arrived.
He made one friend in the neighbourhood.
Danny, from two houses down. Seven months older. Devoted to baseball with the total uncomplicated commitment that only young children can sustain.
Ethan didn't care much about baseball. But he liked Danny. Funny. Generous. Spectacularly terrible at losing — not mean, just caring so much that the absence of winning was physically painful. He'd go quiet for ten minutes after a loss and then come back louder than before.
Ethan found it endearing every time.
He learned the game properly. Played it on weekends. Let Danny win sometimes and not others — which Danny respected more than consistent losing would have.
Simple friendship. Real friendship. He was genuinely glad of it.
School started in September of his fourth year.
The work was simple. He moved at a pace that didn't draw attention — completing things quickly without making the speed obvious.
He made two friends beyond Danny.
Clara, who was serious about drawing and didn't waste words. She drew on everything — notebooks, her own hands, occasionally the desk. Good already in the way that suggested she was going to be very good eventually. There was a calm self-possession about her that he found immediately interesting.
Marcus, who was loud and funny and had the natural chaotic energy of someone who would either do great things or exhaust everyone around him trying. Probably both, in sequence. Most of his jokes didn't land. He kept going anyway.
Ethan respected that.
The thing about growing up with Diana was that she made sure he knew where half of him came from.
Not aggressively. Just consistently. The way she talked about London, about Islington, about her childhood there. The British books on the living room shelves. The radio station she kept on in the kitchen.
She talked about her mother back home. Her brother Paul, who worked in music in London. The grandmother who'd be waiting for him the first time they made the trip.
He absorbed all of it. Not because he was filing it away for later use. Just because it was interesting. Because it was his — half of him coming from a place he hadn't been yet.
He was going to get there eventually. He could feel it coming the way you feel things that are already decided.
≪ SYSTEM UPDATE ≫
Host status: Year 3. Physical development on track.
Acting Fans: 0 / 10,000,000
Music Fans: 0 / 5,000,000
Zero and zero.
He looked at the numbers in the quiet of his room, Captain Buttons on the pillow beside him.
Still a long way to go.
But he was three years old. He had two maxed skills. And his mother was already talking about taking him to London.
Not bad, he thought.
He closed his eyes. Outside, Diana was in the kitchen making tea and humming something he didn't recognise.
He listened to it until he fell asleep.
The flight was booked for summer.