Pigment (Millard Nullings X Reader)

CENSORED

Miss Peregrine came in, and excused everyone to go sit down. Finally!

I zoomed over to take my seat, while Millard on my left took his. There was this unsaid rule of the house that everyone has arranged seating. Children near the end of the table, and the oldest on the side Miss Peregrine sat on. On the rare occasion, someone would switch seats with someone else (Hugh was able to switch Enoch so he could sit next to Fiona a couple years back). 

I looked over to see where Jacob would be sitting, only to make eye contact with him. He waved at me, and being the polite person I was, I waved back, and Jacob began to make his way towards Millard's seat. Is this what Emma felt like when I first came down to dinner? I jumped up from my seat, and tried to stop Jacob from sitting down, but the damage was already done. 

Millard jabbed his fork into Jacob's thigh, and said, "Excuse me!"

"Mr Nullings, there is a reason that we made the clothing rule!" Miss Peregrine said. 

Millard slid out of his chair, and made his way out of the dining room. I couldn't help but laugh, and invited Jacob to sit down in his seat. 

"How many times must I tell you," Miss Peregrine called out after Millard. "Polite persons do not take their supper in the nude!" She sighed, and began cleaning her glasses.

"If it makes you feel any better," I said as I leaned over towards Jacob. "When I first had dinner here, I actually sat in Millard's lap for a good fifteen seconds before he said anything. And to make it worse, I thought the chair was the one talking."

"Oh yeah, that might just be a bit worse than what I just experienced" Jacob snickered. "Are you okay?"

I just noticed he was wearing Victor's clothes. But I just smiled, and told him, "Yeah, it's fine. Just kind of sad you're not wearing that silly The Beatles shirt is all."

"What's wrong with The Beatles?" Jacob asked, sounding offended. "They're a classic!"

"Why?" I asked, laughing. "I saw them in concert once with my cousin, and they are good, I love their stuff. It's just that, isn't it a little....girly for you to like them?"

"In the present, gender marketing no longer exists," Jacob said with fake mockery. "There are three genders, and anyone can be gay."

I was confused. "Well, I hope everyone's gay. I mean, you don't want them to be depressed, do you?"

"What?" Then something clicked in his mind. "Oh, no, gay means you're attracted to the same gender."

"Really?" I exclaimed. "That's so cool! I'm happy that they finally figured out  that not everyone is the same. My cousin, Heather, was in love with a woman. She never told anyone but me, though. And maybe Victor."

Dinner started, and Jacob seemed almost too excited at the complex and bizarre foods being passed around. He tried a little bit of almost everything, and soon asked Claire why she wouldn't eat. The young girl lifted a piece of food to the mouth in the back of her head, ate it, and made Jacob gasp.

Millard came back sooner or later in only a jacket. I snorted at this, and Millard quickly found a new seat. I was picking at my food, and flicked a piece of corn at Millard when Miss Peregrine wasn't looking.

"Nice outfit, Nullings," I joked.

We all began eating, and the kids saw this as the perfect opportunity to bombard Jacob with questions. Miss Peregrine quieted them all down, by using the answers Jacob gave them as a way to show them that the present is still mundane and boring. (Although, from what I could tell, a lot seemed to change from when I left. I obviously asked questions, and apparently America got their first black president! How cool is that?)

"Do you mind if I ask how old you all are?" Jacob said.

Horace replied with, "I'm eighty-three."

"I'll be seventy-five and a half next week!" Olive chirped in excitedly.

"I'm either one hundred seventeen or one hundred eighteen," Enoch said. "I lived in another loop before this one."

"I'm nearly eighty-seven," Millard said with food in his mouth.

"You're bloody disgusting!" I told Millard. Then I faced Jacob and politely said, "I'm just barely fifty-eight; my birthday was last week. I'm the baby of the family, you could say."

Everyone was looking at Jacob now. Quietly, he told everyone how he was only sixteen, and a few kids giggled. I rolled my eyes, and finished eating. A new energy was brought into the room, one might say. Just this thing of adrenaline passed through everyone at the idea that Jacob was so new and exciting. A grandson of Abe Portman, only sixteen, doesn't know he's peculiar....

Then a large boom sounded from outside the house.

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