Maybe, baby

[ktfe]

Who: Kay and Aaron
Where: Old!Home
When: Cassie's two and a half, and they've settled in tidily to the parenting routine. Not much has been done yet on their long-term, supernatural goals.

Cassie's first year, she had demanded all of their attention. That had been a mixed blessing; she had left her parents little time to dwell on the events before her birth, had stridently and at length assured them -- through baby wails and eventually laughs -- that everything had turned out if not for the best, then at least well.

During that first year Kay and Aaron had snatched intimacy when they could. They had been meticulous about birth control, a little overwhelmed by one baby (as so many new parents are) much less two. But Cassie had hit birthday #1, had been weaned, had begun to say words -- in every way stopped being an infant, started turning into a tiny person.

It had begun to feel less like having another would be a disaster, and more like it would be a reasonable progression of events. Neither of them, after all, had said anything about stopping at just one. They'd both gotten less stringent about the enforcement of condoms.

When the inevitable occurred, it was a Tuesday morning in that gentle lull period before they had to be out of bed. Even Kay had gotten into the habit of waking up a little bit before Cassie would demand breakfast and playtime. Aaron would be just waking up too.

The redhead had checked in with her body, first thing on waking -- another habit she'd gotten into at certain times of month. Now she rolled over, casting an arm over Aaron, nuzzling her still squint-eyed face into his neck.

"Morning," she mumbled, grinning against him. "I'm pregnant."

Comments

[aaron_agate]

The intervening time between the terrible events of the Orphaners' downfall, Cassie's birth, and Aaron's eventual reintegration into his old life had given the man a lot of perspective that he would never otherwise have obtained. How one could become so familiar with changing diapers, being one of the more mundane levels of perspective. How to track down the outlying branches of the Orphaners and tidy them up into something manageable being a rather more lofty one.

Sometimes it was nice to wake up early enough just to hold the woman and enjoy the fact that he was managing to pull all of this shit together... not quickly, certainly, but very meticulously. On the occasional morning like this, he would often drowse, arm cast over the small redhead as he contemplated the upcoming day. It meant that when she made her announcement, he snapped to full alertness much more swiftly than usual, tensing just a little in a moment of panic over the unexpected news.

"Just now?" he wondered, bleary but wide-eyed.

[ktfe]

His alarm didn't scare her, not really, but his exclamation did catapult her into a state of gentle snark. Still grinning with her face mashed against his shoulder, she drawled in her early-morning mumble, "obviously, that's what I meant. You're a real rogue when you're asleep." She crept a hand up so that it mashed against the side of his face, patted his cheek. "Morning wood, am I right?"

[aaron_agate]

"If that's true then why've I still got some?" he asked, voice muffled as she settled her hand against his face. There wasn't much else that he could think to say just now, but he was still processing -- pregnant, really?!

"This is a good thing, right?" He asked, slipping out of snark mode for a moment just to make sure that her announcement wasn't a thing of peril. Though he was still reeling, it had been up for discussion earlier, and it hadn't been dismissed.

[ktfe]

"Near 's I can tell, it is," she confirmed. Pushing down the blanket, she hauled herself up, leaned over him and kissed him, considered climbing atop him. How much time did they have before Cassie woke up for the day? "We've already been through the will-we-won't-we bullshit, we're firmly in the 'we will' stage."

She stifled a yawn, working to blink more sleep out of her eyes. Yeah, you know, she would sit on him for a bit. She slid a leg over his nice, warm waist and settled in on all fours atop him, leaving her more or less able to snuggle in. Before she quite did, though, she raised her eyebrows at him and asked, just in case his feelings were more complicated, "unless it isn't a good thing?"

[aaron_agate]

"No, no, it's a good thing," Aaron replied, arms coming up to wrap around her as he thought about it with growing clarity. "It's something we can even handle. It'll give our daughter someone to lavish affection on," and someone else (hopefully) fireproof to play with! "It'll give us another reason to test the limits of our sleep schedule... oh, yeah, I'm all for it." This was creeping firmly back into snark territory, but it was a fond kind of snark... and in fact he was running his hands up and down her back gently, the same kind of fond he reserved only for her.

[ktfe]

"Well, there we are, then, it's settled," she drawled, in a similar state. She grinned, at the prospect and at what she knew would come with it -- rarely did a second kid make anyone's life less of a madhouse... but that wasn't really the point, was it? She nuzzled in, kissed him again. "If this one takes, it's time for sibling #2."

[aaron_agate]

"All of those other names are still fresh on my brain, even," Aaron replied, chuckling. "And I just can't wait to be put on fetch quests for charcoal again. Pretty sure you massacred the last stash. This time I plan on sticking around for the last few months, too." Again with the swerving into and out of snark-territory. That last bit, he managed to hide behind the same tone... but it was heavy. It was a little hard and even now it was still a little too soon.

He squeezed her close, giving a sardonic half-grin that echoed apology for bringing their conversation there.

[ktfe]

Well, whatever: as far as she was concerned, bringing the conversation here meant that they had an opportunity to add a new layer of healing overtop of old wounds. She wriggled her hands under his shoulders, hugged him close with her arms and with her thighs. "Good," she told him, and meant it emphatically. "I hope you're as good a foot masseuse as Joey was."

[aaron_agate]

"I'll be a pro by the time I'm done with you," Aaron replied, coming around to a drawl again. "Feet, legs, any old part. I'll be able to rub you in my sleep." That, of course, earned a darker grin.

[ktfe]

"Oho," Kay drawled right back, grinning at him. "In your sleep? I'm not having that shit," she protested, "if you're rubbing me, you damn well better be paying attention while you're doing it." The double entendres go on, and just to capitalize, she leans up and kisses him again, rolls her hips against him. There was talk of morning wood, after all, and she's in a good mood -- a really good mood.

[aaron_agate]

This kiss did a good job of shutting him up, but her hips did a better one. He grinned up at her, eventually shifting his grip so that his hands encircled her hips, suggested she might want to scootch down a little. When their lips parted, and he was finished savouring the pleasant surprise, he retorted, "I can't say I'm not looking forward to the sex with you on top for a while... if we ever get a chance," he amended. He could hear stirring of the young-child sort where Cassie was getting ready to raise her morning bout of hell. Sighing, he smacked his hands over Kay's behind, groping her and kissing her one more time. "I'm saving you for dinner," he told her, voice a growl.

[ktfe]

Although she let out a little 'auugh' at the timing of their first child's awakening (first! Hypothetically, no longer only!), she couldn't say she hadn't been expecting it and so she nuzzled in and growled back, "you better had," before rolling off of him, resigning herself to rising from bed.

Time to get another day started, and if they both had a little more spring in their step, so be it.

(And a timeskip)

[aaron_agate]

The next couple of months had been nothing if not attentive ones! Aaron was making good on his promise to keep her foot-rubbing on schedule, even if she wasn't at a stage where she needed it yet. He was also beginning to launch a new series of proposals with a few of the people that he had managed to coerce into business with him... not everyone who had worked for the outlets that the Orphaners employed had been terrible people, themselves. He was planning on truly rewriting the now defunct group from the ground up just to make sure that they never had a chance to regrow again. It involved a lot of tracking down, persuasion, blackmail... one or two strictly less than legal games of cat and mouse. It meant that on the whole he was here and there and back again with some regularity.

Of course it had to be a period of time when he was just wrapping up a case of suggested identity transferal when the bad news came in. Aaron had not yet discovered the joys of business-class teleportation, which meant that he was jet-lagged and very frustrated... but some things took back-seat when a partner's anguished summons took the lead. He was home as fast as he could be.

[ktfe]

It had been in a moment of weakness that she'd called him in such a state, and she'd ended up regretting it -- not because he didn't have a right to know, not because she didn't desperately want him home, but because of the way she'd called.

She'd've had to be shockingly myopic not to remember the conversations they'd had the first time around: really, the arguments. They had fought over it, it had taken so much to get him to understand that losses happen, and they might happen to anyone, and they might happen at any time, and that they weren't the end of the world... didn't that mean that she should have been the one, in this situation, to stand solid?

But she'd gotten complacent, again, about how safe they were and had failed to steel herself against the possibility of loss and it had come down on her hard when it happened. It had been foolhardy to count it a sure thing before even the first trimester had passed. Hell, they had already told Cassie! The two-year-old might not have parsed entirely the gravity, but now they would have to explain...

And not just to Cassie...

She'd be lying if she said she wasn't feeling some fear at the prospect of breaking the news to Aaron. She felt delicate, she was miserable, and what if he blamed her? She'd never been entirely convinced that he wasn't going to, the first time around, come down hard on her if she'd lost the unborn Cassie.

That sequence of thoughts twisted a sob from her gut. This offpsring, so anticipated, would never have the chance to have a name. They'd never join Cassie, they'd never be held by Aaron. Fuck, she thought to herself, admonished herself, got ahold of herself.

By the time Aaron got home Kay was sitting in front of the fireplace, stoking the fire, her eyes red but no longer so puffy.

[aaron_agate]

The first thing that he did after dumping his briefcase and coat in the foyer was to storm the house in search of Kay. Luckily, that did not take long. He hurried to her side, taking in the fire, the red eyes and the way she was sitting... He didn't even bother to say a word before he scooped her up in a tight hug. This lasted for long minutes, unless she tired of him, unless she tried to throw him off. There was something heartwrenching and horrifying about the way that she was sitting. Things did not bode well... but at least he wasn't making demands immediately.

[ktfe]

She didn't shake him off, there was no way she could have shaken him off even though she was dreading the conversation and still reeling from the reasons for it. She did crumble in his grip, though, reprising her hunched posture as she curled against him. It was good that he was so tall. Those rare times that she wanted to just disappear into someone else, she could...

But even though he made it so easy for her to want to collapse into grief, she didn't let herself go down that road any further. She had to be the leader, here; she was the one with experience, right? So she took a deep breath, which only shuddered a little on its way in, let it back out, swallowed, pulled away a little bit. Enough to look up at him, though the moment she saw the worry in his eyes she wished she hadn't.

"Aaron, I..." Faced with a plethora of ways to say the same thing, Kay found herself stymied. She sighed and let her head fall again, forehead thumping against his sternum and told him in a voice throbbing with exhaustion and resignation, "I lost it." God, like you lose a, a glove, or a grocery list. There had to have been a better way to say it, but if there was, she didn't have it.

[aaron_agate]

The blonde didn't say anything for some time, which was probably for the best. He was trying to figure out what she meant at first, and then, when it clicked into place, he was trying to find the words with which to reply. The first few he discarded as either being irrelevant, poorly timed, or perhaps even a little bit combative; judgmental. What finally came out, as he continued to squeeze her tiny, almost frail feeling body up against him like a piece of folded origami was, "Well... shit."

It wasn't a great thing, but it was about as honest a reaction as someone could have in the moment. He'd been building up tragic scenarios in his head all night, each worse than the last. This was pretty high up there... one of those things that he had been simultaneously worrying about and then wiping off as catastrophizing.

[ktfe]

"Yeah," she echoed, the blase' agreement a reflex more than anything, and she winced after she'd let it out.

It was only then that she pulled away again. She'd gotten her solace, she'd gotten him home, and now she didn't really know what else to do. This was going to be hard. She rubbed her hands over her face, looked down at the fireplace with its little blaze, told her partner, "Cassie's at Joey's for the afternoon." It had seemed like they would need the time without their eldest -- maybe only...

[aaron_agate]

The forethought was something that Aaron could appreciate on a general level, but he was still processing the first bomb that Kay had dropped. His tired, jet-lagged mind was still running on a midnight hour, which made this all the more difficult to process... which was probably why it seemed to be striking first emotionally, rather than through the layers of defences that he usually had in place. "I'm sorry," he apologized, running a hand through his hair as he watched her pull away. This was really hitting him... he didn't have any words of consolation to go with the apology. He was having a hard enough time keeping stolid in the face of a loss that had been utterly and entirely potential. Having Cassie first somehow made this worse; before when Kay had seemed intent on aborting consciously, Aaron had had no context. Now he did. Now he knew what it was they were going to be missing...

"When did it happen?" Why did it happen? The implications hadn't hit him yet, just the raw wave of that primal question.

[ktfe]

Her response was a little dazed, too. She had to collect it before she could offer it, but when she did she told him, "last night sometime?" She shook her head, rubbed her face again reflexively. "Everything was fine last night, but I woke up and..." she spread her hands, shrugged helplessly. It wasn't even that she'd woken up bloody; she had checked in with the growing thing most mornings, and that morning, the life that had been there the night before just... hadn't been there anymore.

At least it was early. At least it was small. She wouldn't have to deliver; just one extra-heavy period and it would be gone... her face crumpled again at the thought and she covered it, fighting a keen.

[aaron_agate]

He didn't know the details, but he did see the way that her shrug turned into a fight not to crumple right up. "Oh, hey," he consoled, moving forward again to slip an arm around her -- not enough to trap her, just enough to give her an in if she needed. He was still struggling here. This was nine parts loss and one part anger, not directed at Kay... just the kind of directionless emotion that could get caught up inside when there was absolutely nothing he could do about something so painful and pointless and immediately present. It was an echo of the same feeling he'd had in the clutches of the Orphaners, even if most of that had been erased from his memory except in the broadest general sweeps...

Yet it was the sort of thing that Kay, he remembered, had mentioned was a risk. That was coming back to him now, even if it was more than a year and a lifetime ago. Kay, the ever-experienced one, trying not to vent it out to the heavens now... Aaron wasn't sure what that made him. He rested his head atop hers for a while, trying to figure out how things had gone wrong and coming up with nothing.

[ktfe]

Kay was beginning to feel embarrassed that she couldn't seem to get a grip, or that her grip kept slipping, so she fought harder to get control of her face, her body language. The truth was that even after so many years, even for a completely justified reason, there was a part of her that hated having him see her so unwound, so sloppy. Hormones, she told herself, making everything worse, but it felt hollow. Maybe technically true.

Still, as Aaron stood there with an arm around her, she finally sucked in a deep breath, and let it out in a sigh. Her shoulders slumped as she did, slowly letting go of some of what she was holding onto, and she finally experienced some success in stilling her besieged brain.

She turned her face in against her partner and sighed again, "shit."

[aaron_agate]

He gave a noise that was neither a laugh nor a cry, even if it was short. After a while he asked, "do you know how?" The question should have been neutral, it really should have been. He was beginning to bring some focus back, and it wasn't very pretty. What had changed between now and when Cassie had been born? Him, largely. The thought was enough to put an edge to the question, even if it gave Kay no insight as to the gears turning behind his face.

[ktfe]

There was something of a wince to the way she reacted to the question, but it was a wince and then a steeling. Both of minor proportions, but in their own way very telling. She didn't step away from him, but she did shake her head.

"No." There was a mournful shade to her tone, but also a guarded one. Knowing might be better than not, depending. But she never knew, with early losses, not outside of very rare circumstances when something outside was very plainly the cause. But there'd been no trauma and as far as she could tell, she'd been keeping healthy -- certainly no more stressed out than when she'd been pregnant with Cassie. She was careful with her words when she went on, wanting to avoid exacerbating the new tension in the air. If he still thought it was her fault somehow... "It's impossible to say."

[aaron_agate]

Impossible to say or know right now, right. Aaron frowned, hating the answer but seeing the verity in it... and really, this wasn't the place to blow his top. He didn't have the energy for it, even if he felt a little like a caged beast who was watching unreachable cage-mates being prodded mercilessly. It was all a directionless, slow-burning rage. The storm hadn't broken yet. He squeezed Kay, giving little in the way of verbal response. "Nothing you could do," he eventually stated, voice flat with the frustration, the need for and simultaneous fear of that being true.

[ktfe]

Then, she did pull back. Tender feelings too easily spark against the kind of slow roil that seemed to be happening inside Aaron, leaving Kay too ready to take offense before she took harm. "There wasn't," she echoed. Her fear of being blamed seemed to be coming to a head. Hell, she wasn't even working this time around -- not when Aaron was gone so much, not except sometimes when he was home for a stretch. But even then! She had been far from the stage where heavy lifting would have been an actual problem.

She gesticulated, convinced that the flatness was accusation, that what he was gearing up for was a reprise of an old argument. "Aaron, short of hiring a damn nanny, I couldn't have been taking it easier!"

[aaron_agate]

Her response was predictably defensive, but rather than blast back at her, Aaron raised his hands -- not up, not defensive -- to either side, palms out and placating. "I didn't say that," he told her, voice still flat. If anything, it was mirroring more closely the dullness of the post-returned Aaron that Kay had had to endure for some time up to and around Cassie's birth. "I'm just... it's not... I don't know what to do."

He hadn't meant for that truth to come out. It was too vulnerable a position to reveal to the woman, given that it had been her loss primarily at this stage in the game. He ought to be supporting her, oughtn't he? Yet here he was. He couldn't take the words back, but he could at least square his shoulders and clamp down on the pained expression that had managed to leak with the admission.

[ktfe]

Her brows furrowed, and then drew up in the middle. Feathers, ruffled out of fear, took a while to smooth back down as Kay tried to read him, heart rabbiting.

But that had to be sincere, didn't it? She never saw him like this, no more than he ever had opportunity to watch her break down. She couldn't understand what was driving the particular apathy. It was alarming. It had been hard, when he'd come home after his missing year. Recovering had taken so long, they'd both been on a kind of pained eggshells.

Maybe it had been a comparable kind of hard to losing a pregnancy this early. She dropped her own hands, chewed on her lower lip, trying to let go of the defensiveness she'd flung up. "Mourn," she told him bleakly.

[aaron_agate]

"You fucking want to explain that?" he asked, the bite definitely lacking in his response despite the bitter vitriol the words should have implied. "Fuck... I'm sorry. Death was something he hadn't really ever built up a tolerance against. Where he was from, nobody died. They got merged, integrated, bettered. They got a pass to the other side where life went on, albeit sheltered and secretive. He had never had to consider the idea of a stillborn life. How did he mourn something that he had banked so much love on when it hadn't truly come to be a reality yet?

"How should we mourn?" He asked, more quietly, more in the spirit of actually getting anywhere with their afternoon, even if he sounded distinctly hurt and therefore timid.

[ktfe]

Slowly, she finished calming, in no small part softened by the pain of empathy. Nevermind that he was uniquely ill-equipped to deal with the loss of death: she wasn't going to tell him that experience didn't make it a hell of a lot easier. That wouldn't help the hurt in his voice.

"There's a whole industry built on that question," she murmured: then, hissing through her teeth at her own sardonic comment, she stepped forward instead, put her arms around him. It was hard for her to offer him physical solace, being more or less half his size, but... but now she gave it a game try, reaching high to put arms around his shoulders, pull him in in case he wanted to hide his face against her. "I don't really know," she answered more honestly, quiet. "Everyone's different -- every time is different."

Dissatisfied, she thought of ways she'd heard of other people coping with this particular loss. A lot of them were things she'd laugh or scoff at, at times when she had the luxury of not being close to such a loss. Certainly she couldn't see them making a tiny coffin and having a tiny burial. But there were other things and, thrown a life-preserver, you don't bitch about the color it is.

"It was... going to be our baby." She was almost whispering, tentative in her own right. "I don't know, do you want to... to give it one of the names we'd talked about?" She bit her lip, too: referring to the baby as an 'it'. She had checked the sex. She'd never told him, she'd been holding it as a surprise, or for when he asked. Even more quietly she mumbled, "it was going to be another girl."

[aaron_agate]

At least her sardonic words hit a chord for him. He huffed a breathless laugh, then he sat down, dragging her with him. It wasn't entirely a controlled motion. Things were really starting to hit home. He didn't reply to her suggestion immediately, but that was certainly not because he had dismissed it... but it was too much at once.

Memories of the foolishness and earnestness of settling on Cassie's name came back to him now. The little they had talked about this baby -- this daughter -- had been entirely hopeful, and had completely circumvented the hard talk that Kay had given him to their first child. Maybe that was why losing it -- losing her -- was hitting so hard right now. He hadn't expected it whatsoever.

"We should... definitely do that," he finally replied, though his face was still buried against the side of her head where he had dropped it once they had sorted out their impromptu tangle. "I can only remember the ones from the discard pile, though."

[ktfe]

"Oh." Kay wanted to rub her eyes again. She kept her arms around him instead, kept them twined on the floor as they were and instead of rubbing her face, she pressed it against his neck. It was hard to think, her brain had been pounded to a pulp with grief and stress.

She closed her eyes. They'd had a couple of silly, lengthy talk about names, but it was so early that there weren't any yet that had begun to settle into solidity. And the discard pile was hefty.

Finally, she dredged a couple up, uncertain; they might have been ones they had decided against, for all she could recall. "Lillian?" Her voice was wobbly, weak. "Or Audrey?"

[aaron_agate]

"I like that first one," Aaron murmured, decidedly quieter than his usual. He wrapped his arm more tightly around her and squeezed, feeling unable to do much more than that at the moment. "Lillian's a good name." For a girl that will never be, he didn't add. He afforded them silence for a little while as he considered everything, unwrapping like long, loose strands, that they were going to miss. It was heart-wrenching and it didn't stop, but putting a name on it all seemed to help solidify things for him somewhat.

The firelight in the room was growing low. He rustled away from Kay and looked towards it, still thinking about it. "When Cassie gets back, I am going to lavish some fucking attention on that girl," he finally admitted. "And you... you too."

It had been a long time in coming, but he had finally worked his way to this point. "What can I get you?"

[ktfe]

Kay, after Aaron had scooted away, remained wilted for a moment. She straightened slowly, till she was sitting cross-legged, looking tired.

When Aaron asked, she looked at him and flickered a humorless grin. "Whiskey?" Then she rubbed her face with her palms and followed up, "no." The next days were going to be hard and ugly. A hangover wouldn't help. "I don't know."

[aaron_agate]

The laugh she got at that was as ugly as the joke was itself. "You could," he told her. "You're not getting that way unless it's you and me both, though. Sit here," he suggested, moving away to stoke the fire back to something palatable. Then, resting a hand on her head as he walked back to her, he passed her by after a short pause. There was the sound of fussing around in the kitchen. It was a few minutes before the kettle started to scream; from there, he returned to her with a cup of something hot and rich smelling. "Get up, get on the couch," he told her, setting the cup on a coaster before them and sipping from his own.

"We're going to sit here and say goodbye to Lillian and then we're going to get just a little bit smashed, or we're not. We can go outside and watch the night come on or we can go to bed."

[ktfe]

She'd followed up in his fire-stoking by adding another log to the fire towards when Aaron came back in with liquid sustenance. She wordlessly stood and went for the couch, flopping onto it with a sigh. A minute later, when Aaron had settled in, she picked it up and took a deep breath of the steam.

"Yeah," she said slowly, a tone of dawning approval creeping into her voice. She took a sip from the cup and sighed approval for the fortifying marriage of hot cocoa and -- bourbon? She thought bourbon. She looked to Aaron, her eyes clearer than they'd been. "We should watch the moon come up for her."

[aaron_agate]

"You got it," he told her, taking a sip as well. Then, holding his mug out, he offered to clink it against hers. "Going to miss you, little one." He was feeling drained, unable to really say anything more than that, but feeling strangely past the pain of actual crying.