Title: Objectively Less

Summary: He doesn't understand until it's his fifth birthday and Mommy doesn't have a cake.

Notes: Just some Carl wangst. Muffled Daft Punk in the distance.

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Carl knows something's wrong the minute he's home from the hospital. If he cries at the same time Herman wants something, needs something, is just around, he has to wait and cry and go hungry, or bored, or whatever he was crying about to begin with.

But at that age he doesn't understand that Mommies and Daddies have favorite children, even if they don't admit it. Mommy isn't subtle about it, but at this age he thinks he's simply...slow. Yeah, that's it. Mommy is showing him that he needs to catch up, move faster. So he can be like Herman.

Even if Herman hits him or yells so loudly Carl's eardrums wince or makes Mommy pay less attention to him, he wants to be like Herman.

He doesn't understand until it's his fifth birthday and Mommy doesn't have a cake for him.

Herman had a cake last week, he can remember that. He can't remember if he ever had a cake before this (he never does afterwards, that's for sure), but this missing one will always stick out in his mind. He is going to ask Mommy if she wants to see this really super awesome magic trick he's been working on when Herman cuts him off and asks if he can have Carl's (old, he says; never plays with them anymore (a lie), he says) toys sold off to feed his own ever-growing army.

Herman has just turned ten and spends his time down at the playground, leading conquests for the slides, the swings, the beaver dam forts at the pond.

She says yes.

Carl's face is so-often covered with the soot of failed spells Mommy once commented, "It's like your skin secretes it naturally." Rubbing at his visage so fiercely he wondered if it was going to come off, like in the movies Herman makes him watch so he can watch Carl squirm.

Carl asks about the trick. She says no.

All his life his brain has been telling him to run faster, catch upcatch up, and today he realizes that that will never happen. He's spent days upon nights upon weeks working on a trick Mommy doesn't want to see. And then Herman just shows up and it's goodbye attention, affection. She doesn't love him (and Carl holds that thought in the back of his mind for so much of his childhood), or maybe she does but certainly not as much as her 'special' ant son.

What's so special about Herman? Carl thinks. All the answers his brain supplies him with leave such a sour taste on his tongue that he excuses himself from the table.

Carl now understands that unless Herman's achievements are buried in cockroach dust he will never catch up, like the tortoise only winning because the hare had fallen asleep.

Tomorrow and the next day and so forth he'll put the knowledge off as she was tired, he didn't practice enough to begin with. And he'll go back to being Herman's wannabe so Mommy can learn to love him.

But his fifth birthday, his fifth birthday he knew.