Chapter Text
The movie finished filming at Cormorant Elementary School just a week before Christmas break. They invited the entire school to a showing of it next year as a thank you for letting them use the location, which the students were all very excited about and kept buzzing with talk of being in an actual movie that would be playing in theaters.
Gosalyn didn’t listen. She didn’t particularly care, either. Drake had finished earlier than the lead actors, so he’d been gone for two weeks already.
And he hadn’t said goodbye to her.
She tried to tell herself it was fine. It was. She’d known she wouldn’t see him again after the movie finished filming - it just had to happen eventually.
The last real conversation she and Drake had had ended in - well - it ended in Gosalyn avoiding him for a week straight. She’d said too much about her situation, and he hadn’t tried very hard to find her after that, so that was the end of that.
She just wished that . . . maybe . . . she had gotten to say goodbye.
“Merry Christmas, Gos!” Portia said cheerfully on the last day before break. She shoved a bag with tissue paper peeking out the edges. “I got you a gift!”
Gosalyn’s beak quirked up in a smile. “Thanks, Porsh,” she said, taking the gift and giving her friend a hug. Then she reached into her backpack and tossed a small wrapped square over to Portia. “I got you something too.”
Portia beamed with excitement, but she turned her attention back to the present she’d given Gosalyn. “Open yours first,” she pressed.
Gosalyn had thought about saving it until after school, but . . . now she shrugged and opened it right then and there. Inside the bag was a stuffed lion with soft fur and a fuzzy mane.
“Aw, I love it,” Gosalyn said, grinning, but she didn’t dare take it out of the bag and flaunt it around for her classmates to see. They would all tease her even more - she didn’t need to give them another reason to. “Thanks. Open yours!”
Portia unwrapped hers to reveal a Rubic’s Cube. “Oh, I’ve always wanted one of these!” she said. “And - wait. Is it Spider-Duck themed?”
“You bet.”
“Awesome,” Portia breathed, looking up at her best friend with a smile. “Thank you so much.” Then her expression faltered. “So, how long are you going to stay with your current foster family?”
Gosalyn gripped the bag a little tighter. She glanced at the floor, scuffing it with the heel of her sneaker. “Not that long,” she said. “Probably until this weekend.” She scuffed the floor harder. “Then I’ll be shipped off to another house. And another one. Until I’m an adult.”
“Cheer up, Gos,” Portia said softly. “I bet someone out there wants to adopt you. Besides -” She nudged her friend. “My mom said that if your new foster family approves, we could have a sleepover at my house during break! They have to let you do that, at least.”
“I hope so,” said Gosalyn, and she really did hope so. Hanging out with Portia - that would be the one bit of normalcy amidst the chaos of moving . . . yet again. She was already looking forward to it.
Surely her new foster parents would let her hang out with her best friend, right?
~
True to Gosalyn’s word, her case worker - a very nice duck named Nora Reeds - came the following Sunday evening to collect Gosalyn and her things. She didn’t have very many things, so it didn’t take long for her to pack.
After a brief conversation with the Du Ponts - even from her spot in the living room, Gosalyn could hear them telling Nora all about how she ended the semester with less-than-average grades - and an even briefer chorus of goodbyes, Nora took Gos back to her office, where she said they would be meeting her new foster family.
“You only have one foster parent this time,” Nora said cheerfully, as they walked through St. Canard’s foster system building. “And he specifically requested to foster you! Won’t that be nice?”
Gosalyn trudged beside Nora, gripping her backpack straps. Most of the families did that - they requested her because they thought she would be easy to take care of for a couple months. Then they found out she was rambunctious and spirited and bad at doing homework and always getting in trouble at school. This foster parent would probably be like the others.
As long as he let her hang out with Portia. That’s all she wanted.
They reached Nora’s office, and Nora unlocked it and let both of them in. Gosalyn shrugged her backpack off and glumly sat down on the couch pushed against the wall, clutching the overstuffed backpack in her lap. Nora sat at her desk and started shuffling papers around.
I can do this, Gosalyn told herself. She’d gotten through meeting foster families before - she’d survived it exactly three times. The fourth wouldn’t be any different. It would be awkward at first, but then they’d be on their way and she’d be at a new house by the end of the evening. Simple as that.
Someone knocked on the door, breaking her out of her thoughts.
“Come in,” Nora called.
Gosalyn drew in a deep breath. Here goes -
- and Drake walked into the office.
Gosalyn stood up so fast she dropped her backpack onto the floor with a thud. Her beak dropped open.
“Drake?” she said in disbelief.
Surprised, Nora looked at both of them. “Oh, you’ve already met?”
“Once or twice,” Drake said nonchalantly, winking at Gosalyn.
“That’s wonderful!” Nora said, beaming. She handed Drake a clipboard and the stack of papers she had put together. “Well, just go through this paperwork and sign your name, and you should be all set.” Her phone suddenly started ringing. “Oh. If you’ll excuse me, I need to step outside and take this. Feel free to get reacquainted!”
With a smile, she picked up her phone and slipped out of the office, closing the door behind her as she did so.
Drake took a pen from a cup on the desk and sat down on the couch. Gosalyn blinked, still shell-shocked. After a while she sat down too.
“You’re my new foster parent?” she said.
“I hope you’re not disappointed or anything,” said Drake, a hint of a tease in his voice.
“No, I just -” Gosalyn fumbled through her words. “- how?”
“Well, you know.” Drake started going through the paperwork and scribbling information down. “I did some research. Figured out how to get approved to be a foster parent. And you mentioned you’d be moving soon, so I called and checked to see if I could foster you.” He grinned at her. “Luckily, no one had claimed you yet, and I got to you first!”
Claimed. That was a much better word than assigned.
Gosalyn’s heart was still thundering in her chest. She glanced down at her backpack on the floor.
“I thought I’d never see you again,” she mumbled.
“Hey.” Drake nudged her, and when she looked up, he smiled. “I told you I’d see you around.” Then he flipped a page of the paperwork over and squinted at it. “Your birthday is October nineteenth?”
“Oh. Yeah.”
He gave her a funny look. “That was three months ago . . . why didn’t you tell me?”
Gosalyn shrugged. She didn’t feel like explaining that it had been the first birthday without her grandpa there, so she came up with “I dunno” and was saved from elaborating further when Nora came back into the room.
Drake finished the paperwork up quickly and handed it to her, and just like that, he was officially Gosalyn’s legal guardian - for the next five months. Nora gave Drake the spiel she gave all of the foster parents while Gosalyn finally picked her backpack up off the floor and shouldered it. She had heard the spiel many times before - it was all things like how Nora would check in on them once a month, what to do if there was an emergency, if he needed any babysitters, etc. etc. - and she could probably memorize it if she wanted to.
“If you need anything,” Nora finished, clasping her hands, “call me or the agency and we’ll get it sorted out.”
“Thank you very much,” Drake said, nodding. Then he turned to Gosalyn, who was waiting by the door. “Ready to go?”
Gosalyn’s beak split into a grin.
“So ready,” she told him.
~
When they got to Drake’s apartment, Gosalyn took a solid two minutes to look everything over.
“So this is where you live?” she said, scanning the house. “It’s small.”
“My deepest apologies if it’s not to your standards, Lady Waddlemeyer,” Drake said dramatically, closing the door behind them with a push.
Gosalyn snickered. “No, I like it,” she said. “It’s . . . cozy.”
“Is that your way of saying it’s too small?”
“No, I mean it!” And she did - it was smaller than the Du Ponts, but it looked well-lived in. The kitchen was connected to the living room, and a small table with four chairs around it had been artistically set between the rooms. There were movie posters hanging on the living room walls, a blanket haphazardly tossed over the couch, and - the best part - she couldn’t see a basket of fruit on the kitchen table. The Du Ponts lived off of fruits and vegetables. The absence of the fruit basket gave her hope that Drake wasn’t like that.
“Kitchen, living room, and bathroom,” Drake said, pointing to each thing in turn from the front door. “Bedrooms are over there, including yours. Wanna see?”
Gosalyn lit up and nodded eagerly.
Drake gestured for her to follow him. She did, walking through the kitchen and living room, over to a short hallway with two doors on either side. Drake opened one of the doors and Gosalyn bounded through it.
As far as bedrooms went, it wasn’t anything fancy. There was a bed with offwhite blankets pushed against the wall, a short dresser that seemed to double as a desk, and a full-length mirror hanging on the wall. There was also a window by the bed that overlooked the city. Gosalyn could even see the Audubon Bay Bridge in the distance.
“I, uh, didn’t have time to decorate it or anything,” Drake said nervously, rubbing the back of his neck. “It’s kinda sparse . . . I couldn’t fit a desk in, so you’ll have to use your dresser to do homework . . . but we can go shopping and fill it up if you like -”
“It’s perfect,” Gosalyn interrupted, gazing around the room.
Drake’s hand fell to his side. “Really?”
She turned around to beam up at him. “Really.”
He beamed back. “Great,” he said. “Well, I’ll leave you to get situated while I make dinner. Yell if you need anything.” He paused on his way out. “Actually, don’t yell - the neighbors might get mad.”
Gosalyn laughed, earning another smile from Drake before he left. She took off her backpack, plopped it onto the bed, and sat down next to it.
But a minute had barely gone by before Drake poked his head back in the room. “So I was thinking,” he said casually. “Maybe after dinner I can show you some of my favorite Darkwing Duck episodes, if you’re up for it.”
Gosalyn grinned. “That old black-and-white show?”
“For the last time, it is not in black and white,” he huffed, rolling his eyes, but Gosalyn just dissolved into laughter again. “Alright, it’s decided. We’re gonna watch it. You can’t get out of it now.”
“Oh no,” Gosalyn said dramatically, pushing herself off the bed. “Old cartoons - what torture.”
“I’ll get you to like it one way or another,” Drake said, wagging a finger at her as he disappeared into the living room again.
“Whatever you say!” Gosalyn called, then turned around and zipped open her backpack to unpack its contents.
It was strange, she mused, as she looked around her new room while putting her clothes away in the dresser. She’d been in four different foster homes in her lifetime, and this bedroom was probably one of the smallest ones she’d had. But this one - the smallest one - with only one foster parent this time -
This was the first one that felt like a home.