Daydreamer (Duff // Guns n Roses)

2 // Hearing Aids

Duff awoke to the soft sound of the television. Rays of sunlight peeked through the cheap white blinds covering his windows, and the footsteps of the people living in the apartment above him echoed down into his own living space.

He yawned and stretched, untangling himself from his sheet as he sat up. He realized that he'd have to take the girl by the police station at the same time it dawned on him that he didn't know her name. He yawned as he got up and shuffled into the kitchen.

The girl was watching TV intently, her hair a mess as she huddled under the blanket. It took Duff a minute to remember that he'd taken in a random child off the streets the night before, but he couldn't convince himself to regret his action when he saw how content she seemed. Less than 24 hours earlier she was shivering uncontrollably, and right now she was being so blissfully lazy it made the bassist want to go back to bed for the rest of eternity.

BUT NO...it now dawned on him that he had to take the child to the police station in hopes of A. Finding the girls' parents and B. Figuring out if the kid could actually hear or not (which he highly suspected she couldn't).

Duff showered quickly, throwing on some black skinnies and a Ramones shirt that almost looked like a crop top as he attempted to get his faded electric blue hair into a rather momesque bun. (A/N let's be real we all know Duff would look fucking amazing in a mom bun don't fucking argue with me).

He put the girl in a clean shirt and wrapped her in his denim jacket before slipping his shoes on and making his way down the few blocks to the police station. He wasn't sure what to do or say when he walked in, but apparently, he didn't need to do anything.

The woman sitting at the reception desk peeked at him over the rims of her glasses for less than a second before standing up so fast her chair slid back into the wall and a stack of papers flew off her desk.

"OH MY GOD, YOU FOUND HER! RON..."

The woman ran into the back, coming back out into the lobby a moment later with an officer who had donut crumbs and a coffee stain on his shirt. She took the girl from Duff, ignoring the very distressed look the kid shot him as she was ripped from Duff's arms.

"Sir, I can't believe you found her. She's been missing for days!" the woman addressed Duff. The poor bassist just stood there, dumbstruck.

Frozen, Duff said the first words that came to mind.

"I think she's deaf. She won't answer anything I say."

The woman just looked at Duff for a moment before shoving the girl back into his arms and rustling into the back office area once again and emerging with a weathered cardboard box. She set it on the reception counter. She rummaged through it for a moment before pulling out a round black case with a name written messily across it in silver sharpie.

Emerson "Emmie" Vanessa Sawyer

10 yrs.

Hearing aids

It took Duff a moment to register what he'd just read until the woman unzipped the case, took out two sparkly pink hearing aids, and carefully put them in the girls' ears.

The volume at which the woman then proceeded to speak made Duff want to react the same way the girl did.

"Emmie! CAN YOU HEAR ME?"

The girl immediately scowled at her, ripping her hearing aids out and balling them in her fist. Startled by the woman's barky and annoyingly loud voice, Duff rubbed the girl's back softy to calm her agitated state.

It broke his heart that she'd been through something traumatic enough to make her hate her ability to hear, but then again some kids were just more comfortable in quiet atmospheres; at the moment their current location was far from quiet.

It wasn't until Duff had somehow managed to calm Emmie into an annoyed glare that he was able to have a legitimate conversation with the woman, who seemed to be terrified of the 10-year-old's newfound hatred for her.

"Where'd you find her?" the woman (who'd introduced herself as Mrs. Parks) asked, rummaging through a filing cabinet for what Duff assumed was Emmie's paperwork.

"She was curled up on my front porch when I came home from work last night. It was too late to bring her here so I uh, put her in some clean clothes and let her sleep on the couch."

The woman nodded, huffing as she slammed one filing cabinet drawer closed and pulled open another while mumbling to herself.

"You're a saint for taking her in. She's been bouncing around from foster home to foster home since she was a baby. Nobody can seem to keep her calm enough to keep her around."

"Emmie's father died when she was two and her mother is constantly in and out of prison. She's just gone in for a five-year sentence without parental visits. Poor thing doesn't have anywhere to go so she'll just have to go to the children's home upstate."

Duff wasn't sure if it was the feeling of Emmie's tiny hands clutching his shirt, or the way she allowed him to hold and be close to her, but the words that came out of Duff's mouth in the next 30 seconds both surprised and scared him.

"I- I can foster her," he offered at the same time Mrs. Parks slapped a thick manilla folder on her desk.

"Ohhhh how amazing!" Mrs. Parks exclaimed, sounding like a cheesy old lady. She ruffled through the stack of papers before running a few through the copier and handing them to Duff.

"Sign these, and you'll need to have a seat so I can get you registered as a foster parent. You'll also need to submit to a background check and drug test. Child Protective Services will be making a series of rounds and checks by your home over the next few weeks to make sure you're fit to care for Emmie before you test to get your Foster Parenting License."

Overwhelmed, Duff took a seat with a clipboard stacked with papers - a pen in his hand and a now very content Emmie sat beside him. He spent the next three hours signing paperwork, taking a drug test (which by some God-given miracle he passed), and doing a background check before he was handed an envelope with about $200 cash and Emmie's sad box of belongings.

As he walked out of the police station holding Emmie's tiny hand, with her box of things tucked under his arm, Duff couldn't help but wonder just what the hell he'd gotten himself into...especially when Emmie shoved her hearing aids in her ears and started asking him question after question.