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."

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[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.