It only gets worse. She becomes so very big, and she hates it, and yet after a while she is just resigned to the fact that she's enormous and that people are going to try and touch her and that maybe she should not, as that one time on the train, threaten to fucking shoot someone if they so much as think of laying a hand on her, so help her god. She aches and she fucking waddles and most of the time she spends her days at the house in Stickney. She steps on Kando once, gets hissed at, and cries over it. It's lucky that she can go do things for herself: pedicures, prenatal massage, and so forth. It's lucky that she's as healthy as she is, because if she weren't, carrying twins would be that much more difficult on her -- and they are already very, very difficult.
The twins are active. They spin and kick and bat at the walls of her uterus and hug each other and turn away from each other and wake her up a dozen times a night. She is lucky she does not have to work, lucky that she can go to her yoga classes, lucky that she can stay in bed all day if she needs to. Which she does. Because near the end, when her blood pressure becomes a bit erratic, Dr. Katz puts her on a couple of weeks of bedrest.
Danicka hates Dr. Katz a little that day. This is around Thanksgiving. She is over the hurdle of being upset that she's not going back to school, and she knows they're in what people keep calling the Home Stretch, but for that day alone, she really, really hates her doctor.
Thanksgiving is a simple affair. She is too far a long to travel to New York City, and they've already decided as a family that they're all going to come to Chicago again and whether Danicka has the babies by then or not, they'll have a much quieter holiday together, and maybe not for a full week. Thanksgiving, then, is Danicka and Lukas and a small turkey and mashed potatoes and he does most of the cooking but she helps where she can. They watch A Christmas Story on the couch. They Skype with their families a little. After some time in October, Danicka told Lukas not to wake her if she falls asleep, so when she dozes off on the couch, he doesn't try to carry her upstairs but stays down there with her in the living room, even if the couch is bad for her back, because the two hours she'll catch there are worth it to her.
At the turn of the month, Danicka ends up in the hospital with a false labor. It's a pain in the ass, and she goes home feeling stupid, and Lukas wasn't there and they get into a brief fight when he finds out because she didn't call him, she wasn't going to call him, and at the end she tells him yes: she promises. She will make sure someone tells him. The War is not more important to him than this. His pack is not more important to him than this. These are his pups. She cries on his shoulder, but softly, because she feels bad, and she is sorry.
After that, Sarka comes to stay with them. Renata is fine with her siblings, even the proto-cub. She stays in one of the downstairs bedrooms, where a basic Queen-size bed from IKEA has been erected and some equally basic furniture arranged around it. Danicka got halfway through directing its decoration before she gave up; she hadn't the energy or the decision-making power. It is plain and simple and later on they'll do something real with it, but for now it is a guest room that does what it needs to do: it gives her half-sister a place to stay while the twins finish gestating.
The other downstairs room is where the bookshelves and desks and computers are now. The room beside Danicka and Lukas's, once the 'study', is now a nursery. It is not overly decorated, but it is softly touched. The walls have been repainted a gentle, neutral cream. There is a thick, plush rug in one corner on top of the regular carpet, extending several inches on two sides from the futon mattress also aligned to the corner, when its time, will have a soft, light sheet on it and no more. The room now has a glider rocker and ottoman. The room has one wall of dark photo frames full of portraits from last Christmas: Daniel and Anezka, Jaroslav and Marjeta, Miloslav, Sarka with Renata and Milos and Irena and Emanek. The largest photograph is the one of Lukas and Danicka in their gifts from Katherine, Lukas's arms framing her body, Danicka's head turned to grin at him in that lopsided way she has. The portraits aren't very high up. Nothing in the room is. But that one wall is positively dominated by pictures of family. Those pictures just happen to be placed behind the glider rocker, where the twins will see them when they are being patted, held, rocked.
The nursery is extraordinarily simple and quiet. The window has blackout curtains underneath airier ones that will let some light filter in if only they are pulled. It is large and lets in a great deal of light. The ceiling light fixture has been changed to soften the light it gives off, and a dimmer switch has been installed. There are firm bolster pillows between wall and futon mattress, and above that, a mirror against one wall, placed lengthwise. There's a hook in the ceiling over the bed, and Danicka says they'll hang mobiles later. She read a book. She read all the books, and this is the one she liked best. Across the room there is a little low shelf with three segments, and each section has a lightweight basket inside, but there's nothing in those baskets yet. Nearby there is a three-foot-high armoire with a miniature mattress atop it, the drawers repurposed to hold diapers, to hold wipes, to hold washcloths and baby lotion and extra covers for the changing mattress and a tube of Butt Paste -- no really, that's what it's called -- and a number of other things.
Danicka refused, adamantly and repeatedly, to have a 'baby shower'. She has offended plenty of people and she gives zero fucks, but she has already set up accounts that will become trusts for the twins and while donations to these funds will be accepted, nothing else is requested.
The shelf is sturdy enough to be used as leverage when the twins start pulling themselves up. That was important to her. The armoire will later be a dresser full of children's clothes. If they roll off the mattress -- which, as newborns, will be enormous to them -- they will fall a scant two inches, at most, to the soft pile of the rug on top of the carpet. But truth be told: they won't even be sleeping in there at first. Danicka has a basinet that attaches to the side of her bed with Lukas where they can co-sleep without truly co-sleeping. Where she can keep them close. Where, when her body is weakest, she can nurse them without having to get up, without even completely taking them from bed. She's read that this will help them learn to sleep through the night, too. She hopes.
--
For a night and a day, she feels particularly drained, but given how drained she's been lately, it's hardly worth mentioning. She is exhausted from serving as the habitat for two forming human beings. She sleeps a lot. Sarka has been a lifesaver, and Danicka hasn't even been crying or angry as much. She's just waiting now, distracted and if anything a bit impatient, until that night. That night she wakes again, and again, and the twins are doing somersaults. She goes very slowly downstairs and she thinks to herself about her bag by the door that has been by the door for four weeks. She thinks to herself that of course, now, when family is due to fly in on Sunday. But she doesn't call for her sister, and she doesn't grab her phone to call Lukas. Because what if she's wrong again?
Danicka pads as quietly as she can to the kitchen to refill her water, and Kando mews and rubs on her leg. Danicka's fist clenches around the refrigerator door when the first contraction startles her completely, sharply, into wakefulness. It feels nothing like that other time. She gasps, and pants, and momentarily, it's over. She decides not to climb up the stairs again, but goes to the couch and turns on the television at its lowest volume. Time goes by and she feels it again, just as hard, and her hand nearly breaks the remote.
She swears under her breath, dizzily.
By not the third or the fourth contraction but the fifth, Danicka starts calling for Sarka. She calls her in Czech, wakes her up in the middle of the night, and they go.
--
Dr. Katz told her that if she went past her due date by X days, they would need to schedule a C-section. She told her that they would want to be prepared just in case a vaginal delivery didn't work out, because Danicka is quite lean and the twins are, to use the doctor's words, robust. But this isn't past her due date. This isn't even on her due date yet. Danicka claws at the handgrip of the car door that her sister drives as they head for the hospital, balls up her fist, smashes the side of it against the door panel and swears again.
Sarka is annoyingly calm.
--
Sarka is calm when she rings Lukas's phone from the hospital, once they have Danicka in a room. It rings and it rings and perhaps it goes to voicemail because he is fighting, because he is sleeping, because something. He gets the message or he doesn't. He comes or he doesn't. He can or he can't.
If he does, if he comes, if he can: by then it is far enough in that as soon as he walks into the room, someone gasps and Danicka is sweating, panting, looking at him and the color drains from her face even as her eyes light up in gratitude. Maybe he stays but he can feel her hand gripping him and pulling away at once, and he knows this isn't going to work. He knows it, has to know it, long, long before Danicka is willing to admit it.
Danicka is willing to admit it when she is sobbing and it has been hours and Dr. Katz is bluntly, professionally, compassionately telling her that it's her decision, but.
But.
That is when Danicka looks at him and she is already so tired that her will is nearly depleted and without a word they both know: the last thing they want is for a surgeon's hands to shake because that man sitting beside Danicka's head in scrubs terrifies her to the core. Dr. Katz is strong and strong-willed but it is the middle of the night and she is tired, too. She balked, even, when Lukas came in the room.
So he leaves. And Sarka goes in. Because Sarka is kin, and Sarka is Danicka's blood, and this is what women do, this is what kin do, isn't it? If this were a hundred years ago, even fifty years ago, wouldn't this be how it was done? Her mother is gone; her sister is here. This is the way.
--
This is the way they are born:
sofuckingquickly. After all that. After months of waiting. After hours of labor and sweating and swearing and crying and panting, once the decision is made to remove them by an incision instead, it's over with shocking speed. Danicka isn't shocked. Danicka can't really feel most of her body in that moment and yet, at once, there's a wet white cloud around her mind that is suddenly filled with the sound of cries. One cry, then another cry twining with it, both shrill and angry and she wants to tell them she knows it sucks, that they're not really fully developed yet because that's how humans are, she's really sorry they have to be born before they can do things like open their eyes and walk, like horses. She doesn't say any of this. She tries to mutter a bit, and later, her sister will tell her that what came out was
shhh,
shhhhhhhhh.
it's okay. shhh. pups, it's okay.
--
This is how they are born:
Sarka telling them to go get Lukas now, nevermind all the other nonsense of cleaning and stitching and so on, go get him now or she will. So someone goes to get him and Danicka is high off her ass, basically, but she's muttering pups. heeey, pups. pups, shhhh. you're so loud, babies. and she gets the most bizarre, goofy grin on her face when she lolls her head and sees him. Hey! she says, like he just showed up to a party she's throwing. I made pups!
No one knows why she keeps calling them pups except for him. And her sister.
Pups. Two of them.
--
This is how they are born:
together. On a waxing moon, and on a Friday, which the poem says means they will be loving and giving, and if either of them grow to be garou they will not be the galliard daughter of his journey to the underworld, but for a moment there, she is so, so far away. She is a dream, and these very pink, very angry, very five-odd-pounds-each girls are incredibly real. They have wisps of dark hair on their oddly shaped scalps and they have tapered fingers and clipped umbilical cords and miserable little fat faces that ease, a little bit, when they are brought closer to their mama, who is gradually regaining her senses and not acting like an idiot anymore.
Mostly.
"Which one are you?" she asks one of them, cooing, whispering, laughing it. She's a little shaky; she was shaking when they finished delivering the twins, but they brought her back. She went from three people to one very rapidly and then they put her back together and now she is trying to remember what that feels like. They leave the twins alongside her as long as they can, but she needs to be unconscious in a way she has never, ever needed to be unconscious, and
Lukas says goodbye to her, he'll see her later, but she murmurs Říkal jsem ti to.
Which is fair. She did try to tell him they were having girls.
--
The next couple of days are a bit easier. Danicka is regaining her strength rapidly, healthy thing that she is, kin-to-Thunder that she is, and the doctors think she's remarkable. She is nursing and eager to go home and Sarka is really the only lactation consultant she needs and Sarka changes diapers as willingly as anyone and Danicka positively pitches a fit every time they try to take the girls from the room. It takes them time to decide who will be Eliška and who will be TaÅ¥ána, but they decide to name the girl who came out first Eliška, and the girl who came out second TaÅ¥ána. The hospital manages not to mangle their names too badly on their bracelets, but again: Danicka rebels against letting them out of her sight, and by the second day in the hospital she is fucking demanding to be discharged, and
god help them if they get in her way.
Meanwhile: the family has descended. They came on Sunday, as planned, and that is the day that Danicka is growing terribly impatient with the hospital. Miloslav and Renata and Irena and Emanek and even Milos come, but the cub has to go back sooner than the rest of them. They will not be staying in the house this time, other than Sarka, and Irena and Emanek feel Very Grown Up to be staying in a hotel with their sister even if they're surrounded by grownups as well.
But they're there, waiting at the house, when Danicka and Eliska and Tatana come home on the morning of Christmas Eve.
Danicka herself sits in the rocking chair while Marjeta holds Tatana and Renata holds Eliska. She looks at her family, now two larger. Her mother and her brother are dead. Two children that might have been were not. But her father is returned to her, her sisters, her sisters' many children, and her mate and his dam and sire and sister and his sister's mate have come to inhabit and illuminate those dark, painful empty places that Danicka once thought would devour anything that tried to fill them. She thinks of what she has lost, and had taken from her, and given up.
She thinks, closing her eyes and listening to the voices filling her house and the beginnings of one of of her daughters' cries,
that she has been repaid.
LukasPeople keep calling it the Home Stretch. People have another saying, though. Something about the last mile being the longest. And that last mile for Danicka -- for Lukas, even for poor trod-upon-once Kando -- is long indeed. Long. And exhausting. And frustrating. And full of senseless little blow-ups, melt-downs, crises, catastrophes; full, too, of tender little kindnesses, sweet little moments that they themselves might not remember in the deluge of memories to follow.
Thanksgiving, for one. Danicka leaning back against a mountain of pillows, cutting lettuce for a salad on a folding table designed for breakfast in bed. Lukas churning potatoes because that's his job, yes it is, sitting at the foot of her bed while they watched Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade reran on TV. Lukas getting up every twenty minutes to check on the turkey; Lukas trying very hard to make spiced orange sweet potatoes; Lukas's crest falling when that comes out underwhelming. Danicka, snuggling against Lukas's side, later that night when the salad is tossed and the potatoes are mashed and the turkey is carved,
while they watch their Christmas movie,
while Lukas puts a hand on Danicka's belly to include the pups in his embrace.
In a way, when the pups do come, they come almost too soon. They've spent nine months preparing and yet somehow when it happens it still feels sudden. It feels unexpected.
Lukas isn't home. He'd arranged to be home in the two weeks around the due date, but this is not around the due date. So he's two states away. He's with his pack and a small supporting cadre of kin, and they're camped out in a dingy motel across the road from a dismal warehouse. They're sleeping in shifts. They've got binoculars trained on the inlets and outlets of that warehouse, staking out their quarry like detectives in an old movie, and when the call comes it's not Lukas or one of Lukas's packmates that picks up.
It's one of the kinsmen, their escort from the local Sept. The kinsman answers quietly, listens silently for a moment. His face pales, and one can hardly blame him: he doesn't know Lukas, and generally speaking, he doesn't want to be the messenger that tells an Adren Ahroun Shadow Lord
that his mate was giving birth.
Twenty minutes later the moonbridge in Chicago fairly erupts. Crackling lightning, the scent of ozone -- one Shadow Lord, black as night. He doesn't stop for pleasantries. He literally hits the ground running, from Caern's heart to bawn to border to the streets,
the roads,
the back of a cab. His car is still in Ohio. He gives the name of the hospital, and the cabbie can hardly drive because Lukas is leaning almost into the front row, he has his elbows on the shoulders of the seats, he doesn't have a seatbelt on, and he smells like adrenaline and lightning and animal musk.
So no wonder he can't stay in the delivery room. No wonder he skids in, and she looks at him and she looks happy and grateful and flinching at once. He takes his mate's hand. He feels Danicka gripping, gripping, tugging away, and the minutes go by and they slide into hours and this isn't working, no.
He leaves. He kisses Danicka before he goes, lightly on the mouth, ferociously atop her head. Sarka stands up when she sees him, and she understands at once, even when he fumbles for the words to tell her that
she has to go in because his mate and his pups-to-be can't stand him.
In the delivery room, there are other fathers, sisters, older kids. None of them come close to him. He drinks two cups of coffee, he jitters his feet, he wracks his hands through his hair, he holds his head in his hands. A fucking eternity goes by, and then the sound of a nurse calling his name snaps his head up, snaps his eyes across the room to her, makes her jump. He sees the clock over her shoulder. It's been less than an hour; he doesn't know how that's possible, but that's hardly in his mind. He shoves past the nurse. She doesn't try to stop him. He bursts into the room and Danicka
looks
positively loopy, grinning at him, telling him she made pups. She made them. He blurts a laugh that's three shades away from a sob, and he goes to her, and someone must be cutting onions because he scrubs the heel of his hand across his eyes and fairly climbs into bed with her. A nurse hands them little bundles of pastel pink and pastel blue, and the truth is Lukas can't tell one from the other at all. They are both impossibly small. They are both unspeakably fragile. They are both alarmingly loud, at least until the nurse swaddles them up tight and secure with their clenched little fists by their wrinkled little faces.
There's a golden window, a handful of minutes after birth. After the straining and the trauma of emerging from that weightless warmth into a too-bright, too-dry, too-harsh world. Before the new straining and the new trauma of Being An Individual: learning to breathe properly, learning to nurse and pee and poo, getting over that initial jaundice because human babies are just not really fully developed yet. All that hard, grumpy, crabby work: it's on the horizon, but it's not here yet, and just for a few moments the pups are calm, they are held by the one whose voice and scent and presence they remember from their pre-life, from those very first sparks of electricity that leapt between their nascent neurons.
The pups open their eyes. They are so tiny, and their eyes don't work properly yet. The world is a collection of smears and blurs to them. Their parents can see them, though: their wisps of fine, dark hair and their unimaginably thin little eyelids; their tiny fingers with their tiny fingernails; the toothless mouths that don't quite know how to smile yet.
Lukas lets them hold his fingers. Just for a little while. Just for as long as they can stand, which isn't very long at all. And he nuzzles Danicka heavily, animalistically alongside her temple, and he wraps his free arm around her. She leans against him. She asks one of the pups: which one are you? And Lukas replies,
Not Bob,
and they both laugh, loopy and happy, until there are tears in their eyes.
It is Christmas Eve. The house is overflowing with their family, which is two larger this year than the year before. There is noise everywhere, there are presents piled under the tree, there's the scent of cooking both good and bad, successful and burnt in the kitchen, and Emanek is setting the table while Milos takes over the very important job of Mashing The Potatoes. One of their daughters is being held by her grandmother, which is the only grandmother she will ever know. The other is in the arms of her aunt, who was there when she came into the world.
Anezka is playing Reversi with Miloslav. Daniel is carrying on some sort of serious debate with Jaroslav, which is growing rather heated, except there's a glint in Jaroslav's eye every so often that suggest he's just being contrary on purpose. Renata is texting her boyfriend, wondering if next year it would be okay to invite her boyfriend for Christmas, except next year it won't even be the same boyfriend because she's like, 17. And Irca:
Irca is helping Lukas hang two more ornaments on the tree. They are very special ornaments, because they are moons:
a pair of gibbous-moons, a disc of silver with a crescent cut out one side, leaving only the rim there.
Danicka[half moons!]
DanickaIt is unlikely that they will ever laugh, or joke that the pups were so intimidated by their father's presence that for a while, they just refused to come out of their mother. It's unlikely that the sting of that will ever be taken out for Lukas, who knows that their next -- well, litter of pups will find it any easier. Who knows that even acclimating his new children, his first children, to his rage and his strength will be a long, ardurous process that won't be any easier than Danicka's pregnancy and will require much more personal work and self-control on his part. They won't joke about it. They won't laugh.
But they do laugh in the delivery room, which is also an operating room, because Danicka is high and so happy and her hair is stringy and limp with sweat and her face is both pink and shockingly pale at once and because she won't stop laughing or babbling nonsense. Like asking one of their daughters which one she is as though she's expecting an answer. Like laughing when Lukas says Not Bob because she can't yet feel that laughing hurts like a bitch.
Their daughters whine, and twitch, and one of them has a voice like a fire engine and an upset, screwed-up little face and the other one is holding her own fist in her mouth, sucking on it to comfort herself. Stupid world. Stupid cold, dry, noisy, brightly-lit world.
Of course they stir, when Lukas touches them. Strokes a cheek with his fingertip. They stir and wriggle and kick the way they would when he'd hold their mother while they were still inside. The one in blue, the louder one, squirms and grips his finger and nearly starts howling. The other one tries to put her fist back in her mouth, even while it holds his finger. Right now their eyes are a blurry, incredible blue-grey, but they've read books: that could very well change as days and weeks and even months go by. They don't keep them open long. They rely on scent. They know these scents as intimately as they know one another's. Even the one that smells like a predator. They recognize him.
--
Danicka comes from a long line of kin who were never renowned for their prowess in battle or their wealth or mortal power. Danicka's bloodlines are strong, particularly on the Dvorak side, but it is the kin of the Musil heritage who seem positively made to procreate. She is recovering quickly, and was not even averse to it if Lukas preferred to just heal her, thank you, because she is an eminently practical person and it seems impractical to hobble herself when she's got a house full of family plus a new pair of twins.
The twins are actually doing very well with all the family. They sleep a lot. They sleep even when they're being passed around. Irena and Eman have to be reminded occasionally to lower their voices, but they are old enough to remember after the first couple of times. Irena, in fact, works surprisingly hard at using a soft voice around the twins. Everyone holds them. Yes: when they are asleep or going to sleep or just waking up they spend time in the arms of their grandmother, their aunts, their sort-of-uncle, their grandfathers, their cousins. When they are a little more alert, they are set gently into Irena's arms, or Milos's. He is entranced by them, seems filled with ideas about charms of oak bark that he lets spin around his mind while he mashes the potatoes.
Irca sits very straight and very still while she holds the very-loud-daughter they've decided will be Tatyana, second-born, blue-blanketed at birth though she has other blankets at home. She doesn't say a word and is almost holding her breath. Babies are not bizarre to her, or confusing; she has a baby brother of her own. Renata and Milos are even more familiar with infants. Eman is the only cousin older than the twins, which is a role he already seems to be taking quite seriously, informing everyone with an enduring, put-upon sigh that since they don't have a big brother of their own he guesses he will have to take care of them.
"All the way from New York?" Danicka teases, still relaxing in the rocking chair as Eman lays out cutlery.
"I can just, y'know, fly here sometimes," is the obvious answer from the boy, who does not understand yet how expensive flying is.
Danicka catches Lukas's eye when he turns from the tree, her eyes glinting, a smile playing in the curve of her mouth. Marjeta is leaning back on the couch, Tatyana held in the crook of her arm, the sleeping infant's face placid and far away. Renata, hearing her cell phone vibrating from her purse, got up a little while ago and gave Eliska to her mother, and Sarka is actually pacing the room back and forth with the firstborn, who -- despite not being louder -- is the one who takes longer to go to sleep. Sarka just hasn't stopped pacing yet, and the movement is hypnotic and familiar. Then again, she's done this half a dozen times. Carrying an infant is something she can do one-handed while managing three other things. Carrying an infant to whom she can devote all her attention is, in fact, a luxury she hasn't known for over two decades.
Irena flops on the ground beside the tree, lying on her back with her hands on her stomach, staring up at the lit-up tree covered in moons of varying phases. There are names on the back, sure, but she tries to remember whose is whose without them. Who is Anezka and who is her mother. Even the ones who have the same phase -- like Danicka and Milos -- she tells apart by a certain difference in the coloring and pattern of the patina. Danicka's more green, Milos's more violet. Her eyes drift closed slowly, open slowly.
Danicka's eyes are on Lukas. She doesn't hold out her hand or say a word, but still, somehow, she asks him to come over to her.
LukasWithout either of them actually discussing it, those moon-phase tree ornaments have become a little tradition in their family. When Lukas turns away from that lit-up, heavy-boughed tree, there are two half-moons gently turning amidst the needles and the lights. His eyes pass over his family gathered, come to a rest on his mate. She doesn't say anything; doesn't beckon. Doesn't have to.
He comes to her, large and warm and quiet, squeezing in beside her on that rocker. It's a tight fit. The rocker skates and wobbles, creaks, and then they make it work. His arm drapes her shoulders. He did, in fact, heal her just about the minute they left the sight of the hospital nursing staff; crushed a gourd between his hands and spilled a little clear water into her hair. It's not just sentiment. It's also practicality: Sarka helps, and Lukas tries so hard to help, but the truth is in the end the twins need the care of their mother because their father
is as terrifying as he is familiar.
The twins are not in Lukas's immediate vicinity right now, though. That aches a bit, but it settles him that he can see them, and that they're in the arms of his loved ones. His eyes follow them, skimming from one baby girl to the other, and then he turns his head and kisses Danicka's temple, squeezes her a little closer.
"Tatyana bit me earlier," he informs her. "She tried, anyway. All gums for now. I think she was upset that my finger was not a nipple."
DanickaThe rocker is not built for two. Danicka huffs, asks him what are you doing and eventually he just lifts her up and deposits her on his lap, because it isn't just 'tight fit', fitting the two of them side by side in the rocker would be breaking the laws of physics. And she grumbles at him, muttering about how she just had a baby, while he ignores her and glomps her up and squeezes her, and she gives him a Look worthy of Kandovany. The rocker can barely move under his weight; it wasn't meant to hold someone his size, much less someone his size plus Danicka. Most of their family members are staring at them by the end, and Danicka is disgruntledly settling again on his lap.
Tatyana currently has her face turned against Marjeta's chest, but she's not rooting or even moving. She is zonked out. Eliska, too, limp within her swaddling, tucked safe close to Sarka. Lukas watches them, and Danicka follows his gaze, thinking of all the times in the past few days when he has approached the twins to touch them, or try to hold them, or help someone with them, and they have started working themselves up to squalling, and then those grunts and attempts to fight out of their swaddling have turned into shrieking of mind-altering volume, setting off instinctive reactions in all adults present that are both painful and frightening.
But: he can stay over here, while they're sleeping, and look at them, and they sleep as deep as they ever did before. He can even touch them a little when they're asleep, without setting them off.
Their second-born bit him earlier. Danicka lifts an unimpressed eyebrow. "Imagine if that was your nipple," says she, muttering it.
Lukas-- which of course makes him burst into a round of laughter that has some of their family looking at them again. Emanek demands to know what's so funny. Several times. Which only makes Lukas press his lips together in a failtastic attempt to hold in laughter, shaking his head. It's Irena who saves the day, scowls at her younger brother and telling him he's being rude and prying and it's probably just boring adult stuff anyway.
There's a twinkle in Lukas's eye. "That's right," he echoes, perfectly grave. "It's just boring adult stuff."
And later, after the spotlight has moved on from them -- he nuzzles Danicka behind her ear and whispers: "If I imagined that, I'd have nightmares. Now stop talking about your nipples, or I'm going to forget that you just had a baby. How many abstinence days did Dr. Katz order again?"
DanickaDanicka shushes him. The family looks at him. Marjeta flat-out gives him a Look she hasn't used on him since he was Irena's age, all raised eyebrows and pursed lips, and he's fighting to control himself while Irena scolds Eman and Eman (quietly) reminds her that she's not his boss.
And then Lukas is nuzzling at her, muttering about her nipples, and she just shifts slightly and -- in part because sitting on a normal rocking chair on the lap of someone unbalances the whole thing, tensing up her back and generally proving uncomfortable -- gently gets off of him. She's wearing yoga pants, because of course she is, and is in a long pink oxford that unbuttons easily. She goes over to Sarka, and even from his angle Lukas can see how her face lights up when she slides her arms under her sister's to take Eliska back.
It isn't hard for him to see that she was physically uncomfortable. Or that she was otherwise uncomfortable with the way he was nuzzling her and talking to her with their family all clustered together in that relatively small living room. And it isn't hard to see, at all, how much she adores those girls. When she's beaming at Eliska, who cannot see her because she's sleeping, and carrying her over to the couch and sitting down by Marjeta so that she can hold one daughter and reach out and touch the other, resting her hand atop Tatyana over the blanket. She can sense their heartbeats, even when she isn't quite sure she can feel them.
And look: sitting by his mother, so peaceful, so familiar now, when once upon a time Danicka would hide behind her father and refuse to look at Lukas's mother.
LukasSurely it's inevitable that Lukas's crest falls a little. Danicka gets up, and his arms around her loosen -- his hand follows hers, holding on a moment longer as he looks at her questioningly. Then she's too far, and he lets go. He's quiet for a while, then, his smiles coming a little slower; his replies a little rarer. After a while he gets up and goes to the kitchen and checks on dinner
which is ready, so he calls them all to the table.
There are so many of them now. He and his mate. His father and mother, her father, her sister. Her sister's four younger children. His sister and his sister's boyfriend. The two babies, too small to do much more than lay about and gurgle and occasionally bite on fingertips. Fourteen souls in all, and twelve of them capable of self-feeding. So Lukas runs upstairs to get the basinets, unhooking them from the bed to set them near the dinner table where the pups can turn their heads and see them as they eat. The kids eat sitting on the floor around a low coffee table, and this year Renata has graduated to the adults' table, which means it's more of a squeeze than usual, but they make it work.
And on the table are the fruits of their labors: a full days' worth of cooking, more or less, with just about everyone pitching in to do something. There are those pierogis again, Daniel's contribution; there are those stuffed peppers that Marjeta made; the roast that Jaroslav trimmed and Sarka seasoned and Emanek watched in the oven -- running back every five minutes to shout the latest reading on the meat thermometer until Milos quietly pulled him aside and explained that if he kept opening the door the oven will never build up enough heat to cook.
And there's the mashed potatoes Lukas started and Milos finished. There's the salad Danicka put together, and the soup Renata made that Miloslav at least served as an advisory board for, and -- lastly -- some sort of ghastly concoction Anezka and Irena thought up, which appears to be just about every imaginable kind of meat available in the fridge topped with ... is that cranberry sauce?
In a traditional Christian household, now would be the time for grace. They are Shadow Lords, however, and they serve different gods. As everyone takes their seat, Lukas looks around the table -- just to see. Just to remember. And then he smiles and picks up the mashed potatoes and starts to pass it around the table, and someone else says let's eat! and
so they do.
DanickaDanicka never thinks of Lukas as a dog. But she does think of him as an animal, and that animal is certainly canid. That animal is the one she imagines in the back of her mind giving a soft whine as she walks away, trying to follow, tail down, when Lukas's crest falls and he holds her hand lingeringly, trying to understand wat i do wrong? :[ She squeezes his hand, and gives him a gentle smile, because it wasn't really anything. And because of that, she comes a bit closer to him, leaning over to kiss the top of his head, her fingers momentarily in his thick, dark hair. She smells him. Breathes in, exhales, and goes to get her firstborn from her sister.
She looks so happy. And yes, it's cliche and maybe a bit fetishizing-of-motherhood to say, but she nearly shines with it when she curls up on the couch next to Marjeta, cradling Eliska in her arm, looking at Tatyana, overburdened by joy. This time last year, she and Lukas were rushing upstairs to gaspingly, eagerly fuck each other senseless because a house full of children was making them eager to climb all over each other. Hard to imagine it was only a year ago. But a very, very long year it was.
After a while, Danicka comes into the kitchen carrying Eliska. So far, though the fraternal twins currently look identical, Danicka is having no (admitted) trouble telling them apart. Eliska is less fussy, Tatyana has the louder cry, Eliska nearly always has a finger or her own hand in her mouth, Tatyana is a little bit longer, and so on. She has the girl up against her chest, tucked in the crook of her arms, and smiles at Lukas while he's checking dinner and Eman is rushing in because it's his job to check the oven. The family is called. The table is set, and the basinet is put in the hall just outside the dining room, twins tucked together inside of it. They're in eyeline, but buffered from the noise of the family meal a bit.
Even if Danicka probably is going to get up to stare at them four or five times.
Maybe Lukas, too.
And Marjeta. Miloslav might get up, but he'll be going to the kitchen to get water or across the hall to the bathroom and he just won't come back. He won't admit that he is going to stand and stare at his daughter's twin daughters, so reminiscent of his own twin daughters, only with dark hair instead of air. He wonders how that happened. He had black hair and all of his children came out blonde. How did that happen?
But for now, dinner: no real 'set' menu, just whatever anyone felt like making. Even if it's nigh unto inedible, thanks to Anezka and Irena, who are more alike than most people at the table. Anezka is, after all, Irena's second-favorite aunt. Sort-of aunt.
They don't say grace. The Musils are familiar with a moment of silence before eating, and Milos's lasts a bit longer, his eyes distant, but no one stirs him and no one is rushed and of course Eman and Irena's moment of silence really is a moment and that's about it, and in her own, Danicka is looking at Lukas, smiling at him softly. His eyes catch him as they circle the table full of his family, who four years ago he didn't have. He didn't know Danicka yet at Christmas of '08. He was estranged from his sister and parents. Sarka and her children were stuck in Prague and Danicka had never met them.
Now this. Now all of them, together, rousing to start passing platters and spoons and pouring wine, starting to talk about plans this year, which are much milder. Lukas and Danicka are going to visit Katherine a day or two after Christmas, after the family has gone back to New York and LA, and his pack will be there so, for the sake of the twins it will be a very short visit, enough for the pack to get a look at -- and whiff of -- the pups. Some of the people at the table are relieved that they won't need to dress up, but regards are sent to Katherine, to the pack, and so on. They actually have to take the girls in for their first well-baby visit later this week, too.
Not spoken of at dinner is this: Dr. Katz wants to see how Danicka's incision is healing, but she's been persuasive over the phone about not doing so. Lukas has been even more persuasive when he's taken the phone. They'll figure out something, some way of hiding the fact that she's been supernaturally healed, that there is no longer an incision, and no scar that will ever be seen.
Dinner goes on, and the kids finish first, and they want to play a bit so they get all their gear on and go out to the snow in the back yard. Renata helps clean up, as does Milos, as does Daniel. Danicka does, in fact, check on her newborns five or six or seven times, and so she eats very slowly, but she eats well. Sometimes, yes, she feels a hard pang of sadness when she looks at the twins outside of herself, no longer held together within her, even as hard as that was. Sometimes she feels a little scared that her life is changed somehow, and she's filled with moments of anxiety, but that is all. They pass. She looks at Eliska and she looks at Tatyana and she smiles, oh
she smiles like that, adoring. She nurses them, and she thinks of when they will finally be big enough for her to squeeze as tightly as she longs to.
--
After dinner is cleared and leftovers put away and dishes scraped and put in the dishwasher -- and thankfully there are many hands to do this -- the family gathers to watch a movie in the living room. Irena and Eman are called in, and Renata is informed that she will put that phone away or she can hand it over, thanks to Sarka, and Milos settles into the sheer normalcy of it all as he leans against the foot of the couch. They watch something in stop-motion, glitchy and classic, in the dark. The twins wake, and fuss a bit, and Danicka sits in her rocking chair nursing one, then the other, handing them to Sarka or Marjeta to be burped. There is something blessedly easier about handling twins when there are two other well-experienced mothers in the room.
This is why under the tree, Sarka and Marjeta's gifts are some of the most expensive things Danicka has ever bought for anyone. But they don't know that yet.
Danicka is the first to fall asleep. In her rocking chair, with her blouse buttoned back up, her breathing coming steady, steady. She misses half the movie. The twins are awake then, alert, one slobbering on her fist and the other staring at her father's face with eyes that don't go very wide yet but seem unable to blink for a while. Eliska gurgles. Tatyana kicks, wiggling herself against Lukas's arm.
LukasThere's something unspeakably comforting about gathering in the living room like this. About circling a television the way primitive man circled a fire. About the enclosing walls, the quietly huffing heater, the smallness of the house and the room that makes it seem all the more full of warmth. About the people gathered, the men and women related to him by blood and by love; young and old, three generations' worth, wolves and kin, the circle of his family closed around him.
Lukas is sitting in the corner of the couch. He is nearer to Danicka to anyone, though he hasn't tried to squeeze himself into her chair with her this time. His arm is relaxed on the arm of the couch, though, and his trailing fingertips graze hers. Milos is beside him, slouched down the way only teenagers can slouch, which is not at all how Milos usually carries himself. No one snaps at him to sit up straight. All of them, perhaps, understand how rare it is now for him to be able to do this. To settle into normalcy like this. To feel, just for a few days, like a boy
and not a cub. An almost-Cliath.
Sometime in the course of the movie Lukas looks over at his mate. He looks over at her often, actually -- but at some point he notices she is falling asleep, and smiles tenderly, and leans over to lift Tatyana ever so carefully out of her mother's arms. The little girl-pup is so tiny, so very new. She stretches and arches and wiggles in her father's hands, which seem enormous in comparison. She settles against his chest, quiet for a few precious moments. Lukas doesn't even dare look at her; he's already made the children cry -- more than once -- because he stared too long, too intently, with too much amazement and awe.
He watches the television. He pretends to, anyway. His attention is turned in, and out again: to that patch of his chest, his arm, his hand, that is in contact with his daughter. To those neurons in his brain that process the clean scent of her, and the fragile weight of her, and the warmth of her that tells him:
yours. yours. your pup. yours.
Across the room, Tatyana's sister gurgles. And a silent laugh shivers Lukas's chest, makes him look across the room to his mother, who shifts the baby with thoughtless ease and begins to pat her back. Marjeta is engrossed in the movie. She doesn't even have to look away; motherhood, apparently, is as much a motor memory as riding a bike. Swimming.
DanickaThere is only so much healing even a gourd blessed by Gaia's spirit-children can do. Danicka has no mark from giving birth to twins, but that is only when speaking of physical marks. Her body is adapting to rapid hormonal changes, and she is still. So. Tired. And she begins to drift off, and Lukas rescues Tatyana, but Tatyana is really in no danger: even in sleep, Danicka's arms support the child as though they were made to do so. And Tatyana stares awkwardly at Lukas, saying hello to him with twitches of her limbs that she has so much more room to move now. She's the biter, the wailer, the one who is a little taller, but she is also a little thinner, a little fussier.
When they put her by Eliska she drops right off, though. Peacefully. Right now, though, she settles against Lukas's chest, listening to the deep thudding of his heartbeat until it starts to make her drowsy. Her belly is full of milk. They changed her after dinner, when she and Eliska first woke. She can smell her mother and her father and the smells of all these people, all this sensation, will stay with her on some level for the rest of her life. The only real decor in her nursery are photographs of these people, this family.
One only has to look at this house now, with the 12-seater van outside and the living room painfully crowded and the nursery full of photos,
to know that co je doma, to se po ítá.
--
No one disturbs Danicka. Tatyana drowses in Lukas's arms, even though he's pretending not to notice her, even though every cell in his being is tuned to her warmth against his chest, her breathing, her smallness, her fragility, her sameness. She is his. And he belongs to her.
Eliska gurgles, and is patted, and burps, and has her miniscule and terrifically soft lips patted dry as she tries to work up the energy to cry a bit and then just gives up. She stuffs her curled fist in her mouth and closes her eyes again, cradled to the soft strength of her only living grandmother.
The movie draws to a close, and some of them are actually just talking now: Milos is telling Daniel that he's actually started learning guitar, and Renata wants to join that conversation and is assuring Milos that girls will like that, and Milos is red in the face when he insists that's not why, but his voice is quiet. Irena wants to watch another movie, Emanek lost interest somewhere in there and started drawing in the dark, which Sarka says will ruin his eyes. Danicka stirs because someone turns on the kitchen light, her eyes opening and her nostrils flaring as she breathes in, looking around immediately for her children.
Who are right over there, all of three days old. They don't open their eyes much. Their skin is like rice paper and still quite ruddy. Danicka smiles, seeing one of them still in Lukas's arm, sleeping. Moments like this are golden: they will not happen often. The moon outside is waxing and every. single. night he's burning off his rage, he's trying to, he's making himself as companionable and easy on them all as he can, but he's still an Adren Ahroun of one of the darker, more savage tribes of a savage nation.
Danicka looks from her to Eliska, steady and calm and self-comforting Eliska, and exhales slowly in a sigh. "Let's put them to bed," she murmurs, and she means Lukas, and that is why when she leaves her rocking chair she goes to get her firstborn from her mother-in-law. She also means: she's going to go to bed.
LukasIt's a risk, burning off his rage like that. Coming home as often as he can, as banked as he can; his rage down to a pilot light, a simmer at the core of him. He has to trust in the defenses of his den, those spirits grown strong and loyal after so long. He has to trust that if anyone had the audacity, the sheer stupidity to intrude here, his outrage would fill him so full of wrath in an instant.
And he does trust that. It's not even supposition or theory; he knows it. If anyone attacked him here, if anyone attacked his den where his mate and his pups sleep, he would fucking
shred them.
That is not what Lukas is thinking of now, though. Right now, he is thinking amorphous and circularly of his family, the warm darkness, the contentment of a den full of those who feel and smell familiar, same, his as he is theirs. He is smiling a little without realizing it, the corners of his mouth turned up, and when Danicka wakes he looks over at her. He looks so happy. See, his eyes say to her. See, I have our pup, she's quiet, she's sleeping, I'm a good mate, I'm a good father. Yes I am.
He rises when Danicka does. Very very slowly, and very very carefully. She collects their firstborn. He bends to kiss his mother; says goodnight to the rest of them as quietly as he can. Step by step he follows his mate up the stairs, an infant in each of their arms -- the bassinet in his free hand, thudding lightly against the wall a time or two as he negotiates the turn in the stairs.
They set the babies on their mattress while they hook the bassinet back to the edge of their bed. And then Lukas doublechecks and triplechecks to make sure nothing will come loose or tumble off in the night. They lay the girls to sleep, and tuck them in, and as Lukas straightens he folds his arms tighttighttight around his chest like he's giving himself a hug. His shoulders round up with sheer pleasure. He smiles down at his pups, Eliska who is calm and quiet and opens her eyes more than her sister; Tatyana who squeals and kicks and cries and bites.
"Goodnight, pups," he whispers. Because that's what they are: his pups.
DanickaGrowing up, Danicka never felt safe. As an infant, as a child, as a teenager, as an adult, she can't remember feeling safe. She learned to sleep anyway. She learned to eat despite it. But she never truly felt like she was... safe.
And tonight she feels that. She can't quite remember when she started feeling safe. But she feels safe in this house, with the oak and the magnolia in the back yard, with the spirits of glass and water thrumming just beneath her awareness. She feels safe when she gets up from her chair, carrying one twin as Lukas carries the other and drags the basinet. Tatyana stirs, sleeps again. Eliska sucks her fist loosely, and Danicka whispers to her: oh, puppy, that's a bad habit. but she doesn't take her fist from her mouth.
Danicka sits down with one baby, the other just a few inches away, while Lukas sets up their bed alongside their parents' bed. She smiles, quiet and still in the dark. She likes that they do not try to be perfectly silent, or perfectly still, around their sleeping infants. They will have to learn to sleep through minor disturbances. She waits, patiently, while Lukas fusses over the co-sleeper they bought, until she finally whispers that she thinks it's good.
So: she sets down Eliska first. In three days, they've learned this. Eliska sleeps heavier, sleeps more easily. Tatyana will, too, but only if she goes into the crib second and is tucked alongside her twin. Then she sleeps like the lights are all off, the world is forgotten. So Eliska is set down first, and they are both swaddled still, because the night is cold and they are not used to the air yet. Then Tatyana goes beside her, but on the far side, because -- again in three days -- they have learned that Eliska is the one who needs to be held, who needs closeness, who needs her parents to comfort her sometimes.
Danicka looks up and sees Lukas hugging himself. Her brows quirk up and she huffs a laugh, stifling it. He looks sofuckinghappy that tears spring instantly and hormonally to Danicka's eyes. She reaches for him, standing, and unfolds his arms from his body, wrapping her arms around his waist, putting her head against his chest,
just where their daughter did.
LukasLukas is quite amenable to this alteration, really. He wraps his arms around his mate instead, tighttighttight just as he did around himself, though perhaps not quite as tight because she is his mate and he does not want to squish her. It's a gradient, this: the way he hugs her, the way he hugs his sister or Milos, his aging parents, Irena, Emanek, and allll the way down the scale of tight to gentle: his tiny, ever-so-new daughters, who he's still learning to hold with the thoughtlessly firm gentleness of a more experienced parent.
Danicka lays her head against his chest. He squeezes her, smiling, pressing his nose into her hair. His eyes close. He inhales. She smells like herself, like Danicka, like mate. Like their children too, he realizes: or rather, the other way around. His pups smell like her, too.
"Miluju t ," he whispers. "Sometimes I feel like my heart is imploding, I love you so much."
DanickaDanicka breathes him in, too. She thinks he smells like the pups, or the other way around. She closes her eyes and thinks: he smells like Lukas. Her own. Her eyes droop closed again, and he tells her that he almost feels like his heart is imploding.
"Shh," she murmurs. "It's not going to implode. Stop worrying."
But she's teasing him.
--
Downstairs, the family is rather taking care of themselves. Eman and Irena don't have to go to bed until 9:30 these days, and they usually push it til ten during school holidays if they can get away with it. Right now, they're watching another movie, and Miloslav and Lukas's parents are actually the ones talking about heading back to the hotel. It is bewildering to everyone that Renata is driving now, but driving she is, and she stays with her brothers and sister and Daniel and Anezka and her mother. She's lazing on the couch, her arm down, playing with Irena's hair idly. Irena is lax from the attention, her cheek on the couch cushion, her eyes on the screen.
Upstairs, Danicka pulls away from Lukas only to go wash up for bed, slipping into the bathroom between their bedroom and the nursery.
LukasIt's a little while before Lukas joins Danicka. They are still very new to this parenting thing. Both of them. Lukas -- planner, strategizer, worrywart -- lingers over his daughters to make sure they're not going to somehow tumble to the ground. By the time he joins her in the bathroom, she's already brushed her teeth.
He pulls the stopper up on the sink. While it fills, he pulls his sweater off, and then his shirt, tossing them into the hamper. His washcloth drops into the sink, soaking through slowly. The cords in his forearm flex when he cranks the faucet off, then swishes the washcloth around, wrings it out a little, bends at the waist to wash his face.
For a little while, they're quiet, comfortable with each other's presence as they wash up for bed. As he's rinsing out the towel and wringing it a final time, Lukas straightens up and finds Danicka's eyes in the mirror.
"Hey," he says quietly. "I didn't mean to make you uncomfortable earlier." A pause. "Or make you feel exposed."
DanickaThey are three days into This Parenting Thing. They know they're going to be good parents; given their personalities, neither of them would have agreed to this whole having-children decision if they hadn't thought they could do it, and do it not just reasonably well but exceptionally. They had a few conversations about it before deciding. They had countless conversations about it while trying. They had even more conversations about it after discovering that she was pregnant.
There are many important things they agree on: they will not try to find out if either child is garou, but they will be prepared for either or both or neither to change. They will give them good, strong names that share their parents' heritage but, just in case, can be Anglicized -- if the children want to, and if they do, they won't be shamed for it. They will learn manners and orderliness and responsibility, like tucking their chairs in when they leave the table and cleaning up their own messes and helping take care of the house and the garden and the cat. They will be allowed to keep their room as they like it, so long as it is safe and not completely gross, because their room will be the only place in the world for a long time that will belong to them, and Danicka is rather adamant that they feel like they have a safe place that belongs to them.
They will read to them as often as possible. They will see their parents reading, too. They will learn, at some point, to walk themselves to one of the small schools in the area, none of which is more than a 15-minute walk from their house, because if there is anything that Danicka cares about even more than their safety, it is that they should not grow up feeling afraid. They'll learn to do laundry and dishes and other chores and how to change a flat tire if they have to and then, Danicka says, they can teach her how to do that, and check and change their own oil and drive safely and do a budget and all of these things. They will know how to take care of themselves, which is, to Danicka, far more important than learning how to take care of others.
She and Lukas have discussed Danicka's own plans, even: when to go back to finish school, who will take care of the girls, what the logistics will be and multiple options thereof. The truth is that between Danicka's investments, Lukas's investments, and Danicka's future income, the girls could be living in the largest, most luxurious penthouse in Chicago proper, going to international schools that teach French right alongside English from day one, and directing servants to clean up after them. It's never been in question, however, that this is not how they will raise them. It's not even how Danicka and Lukas want to live, themselves. They have a little house in a safe neighborhood near a grocery store and a dentist and some little schools, and it is a wonky house with Awakened trees and windows and a snobby orange cat, and they have enormous savings accounts and trusts already set up for the girls twenty-odd years down the line.
As said before: they will be prepared, should either, or both, of the girls change.
--
Lukas lingers over them now, though. They are asleep and deeply so, and right now his presence nearby does not wake them up. Look: tonight one of them fell asleep in his arms, the first time this has ever happened, and she was not terrified or screaming or unable to sleep. Look: he stands over them in the dark, a dark thing himself, and they don't wake.
Maybe in the middle of the night, when they stir for a feeding, they will cry because he's there, a blurred shadow in the dark that smells like family and feels like abject terror. Maybe Lukas will have to go sleep on the couch. Maybe he will have to sleep in the nursery, or just outside the bedroom door, flopping down in lupus because he can't bear to go too far from any of them. But that is then. Right now: they sleep, breathing so quietly in their small bodies that it's hardly discernible.
Danicka flosses. She has flossed and brushed her teeth by the time he comes in, and she smiles at him in the mirror, smirking a little, a droplet of water hanging on her lower lip. Her body is larger than it was when she got pregnant, but much smaller than it was a week ago. She can't quite cope with the rapid change. Nor has she felt entirely comfortable while naked for some time, and she certainly doesn't feel attractive or even Like Herself now. Her shirt stays buttoned, large and comfortable and easy to unbutton when it's time to nurse, even if she has something else to wear to bed.
Lukas fills the sink, which Danicka has always told him this is a horrible way to wash his face, he's just spreading bacteria around. She is at the other sink, her hands washed with hand soap, her face wet with warm water, her fingertips foaming face wash over her skin gently before she rinses again with cupped water from her palms. Not a washcloth in sight. She rinses a second time with cold water, very very very cold water, patting herself dry with a hand towel that she hands to him when she's done.
And he is speaking quietly to her, because the bathroom door is still open a crack to the dark bedroom where the twins are sleeping. Her features adopt a soft look, brows tugging together.
"I don't feel sexual, laska," she murmurs back to him. Not 'sexy'. She doesn't want him to respond with earnest declarations of her beauty or her appeal to him, doesn't want him to mistake her words for saying she doesn't feel attractive, even if -- at times -- she really doesn't, lately. Her word is precise, and precisely chosen, but the endearment rolls off her tongue before she even thinks of it.
Danicka steps over to him, slipping her arms around his waist from the side, tucking herself up under his arm and against his chest, closing her eyes. "I just don't even feel normal in my own skin yet. My hormones are still roller-coastering. And I'm tired. And I have these stabs of panic that something is going to happen to them, or you, or just... feeling overwhelmed all of a sudden, or then I'm suddenly so intensely, bizarrely sad that they're born and not with me anymore, and..."
She sighs softly, the breath skipping over his skin like a stone on water. "You are the hottest fuck I've ever had in my life, it's just that sex is the last thing on my mind right now." Her face turns, her kiss touching the outer curve of his pectoral muscle. "Also, our living room is small. I'm pretty sure your father heard you whispering in my ear about my nipples."
There's a smile on her face when she tips her head back, looking up at him. "You didn't make me feel exposed, baby. I wasn't really upset with you. Just uncomfortable. And I didn't want to break the rocking chair.
"If you like," she says, "I've seen glider rockers that look like armchairs and are big enough for two people to squish together on. If one shows up in the living room or nursery at some point, I will not think you're being silly."
LukasThey've had playful little arguments over that before: how he seems to think washcloth + filled sink is a valid way to bathe his face, while she prefers running water and her cupped hands. Spreading the bacteria around, she's teased him, only half-joking. I like my bacteria, he's responded once or twice when he was feeling particularly immature. They're mine and I love them.
He might say the same about his pups now, and far more seriously. They're mine. I love them. It's unequivocal, and sometimes -- only three days into this whole parenting thing -- the depth and absoluteness of his devotion to his pups startles him. It's almost frightening.
They aren't talking about their pups right now, though. They're talking about them, which is a topic that -- at least for these first few months or years -- will soon seem rare. The pups will dominate their thoughts, their waking hours, their conversation: Eliska's making that sound again, can you see if she's wet? Tatyana burped up, can you hold her a minute while I change my shirt? Do you think we should try the pureed peas today? We're out of diapers, I'm going down to the Jewel-Osco. Get some potatoes while you're there, I'm making pierogis -- and so on, and so forth, squeezing aside conversations about the house, the cat, dinner, her plans for school, his time with his pack, all that. The conversations about them, and particularly the more intimate details of their life and love, will end up relegated to private moments like these. In the car, driving to the sitter's. In the bathroom, brushing their teeth. In the bedroom, late at night, with the house quiet and their daughters asleep -- whispering to each other from their pillows.
She doesn't feel sexual, she tells him. And she chooses that word carefully, because: yes. At once she sees him turning to her, brow furrowing, aching to tell her that she's never been more beautiful to him. Or more desirable. Or hotter, frankly. She is the mother of his pups. She is the love of his life, and all the lifetimes before this. She is vibrant and fertile and lovely and strong and,
and,
and.
But no: sexual, she says. She doesn't feel in her skin yet, and her hormones are all awry, and her bones are trying to put themselves back into shape, and her circulation is adapting to not having to perfuse two additional bodies. She's -- sad, too, because she's alone in her body again, and this more than anything else has him embracing her tightly where she tucks under his arm; has him wrapping both arms around her and bending to her and doing his best, really, to just glomp her up entirely.
"I want you more than I can say," he whispers. "And I love you more than life. I think Eliska and Tatyana are perfect and beautiful and ... so deeply a part of us that I think they'll be with us no matter how far away they are. But -- I get it, I think. I get how you feel, in a away. From my own standpoint. It's a little bit overwhelming, all of it. We didn't even expect them for a few more weeks, and now they're here, and ...
"It's wonderful. But it's hard, too, and it's not perfect, and there are adjustments to make and a million things we hadn't even thought of and couldn't have planned for. Everything's still up in the air and changing every minute. That's not even taking into account the sheer physical stress you've been through -- " he takes a breath, blows it out against her hair, somewhere between whuff and sigh. "I'm just trying to say I understand, baby. I didn't mean to push you. I'll wait as long as you need."
A small, mortified pause.
"And I certainly didn't mean for my dad to overhear. God." He gives her another squeeze. "Let's go to bed and I'll try to look my dad in the eye tomorrow without turning into a beet."
DanickaTheir arguments, in the past, were almost never playful. They were soul-searing, world-shattering things. Playfulness, gentleness -- they did not learn these things with each other so much as slowly expose them. Neither of them trusted the other not to hurt them where they were vulnerable, humiliate them, break their heart. Laugh at them. They found gradually that they could laugh together, or even just curl up and snuggle without needing to fuck something visceral out of their systems, or tease each other gently. Even now they're still finding where the sore spots are, and how deep those sore spots go sometimes.
They've known each other for just under four years. That isn't very long, for most couples. Shocking that they share a house, share their families, have a rather stable marriage, just had twins. And not shocking: they have known each other their whole lives. For many lives. They have known each other, perhaps, since their souls were born.
So they can playfully argue about face-washing technique, and still not lose sight of the fact that Lukas would rip the world in half if anything attacked their den, his mate, his pups. He'd throw himself into silver fire for them. Danicka knows. She is aware of it the way she has been since the first time she told him that she would welcome his children, if they came: his rage can only grow. His protectiveness can easily turn dark, and isolating, and controlling, if he does not watch himself and if she does not watch him, too. They love each other and trust each other and they are comfortable with each other, it's true, but some of that trust comes from knowing that they will stop each other if they have to.
--
Lukas's words make Danicka smile. He wants her and he loves her and their babies are perfect and and and. She quirks a brow when he says that he gets how she feels, but he doesn't mean not feeling herself within herself, going from three people to one lonely person in the blink of an eye, having one's physical systems completely out of whack. The overwhelming nature of it all. The moments of panic, the moments of uncertainty, the worry -- this, he gets, because he is going through it right alongside her.
He whuffs. She tucks herself closer, closing her eyes. "You weren't," she murmurs, when he says he wasn't trying to push. "I know you weren't." And nuzzles him right there on his chest, and ksises him again, because. Because because.
Danicka has to stifle sudden laughter against him. "Oh, god, baby," she chuckles, and lifts a hand to cover her mouth. "Maybe he didn't hear you. Don't worry." One more kiss over his heart. Her arms squeeze him, then slide away. She starts unbuttoning her shirt, shedding it into the hamper with Lukas's, underneath which she is wearing -- and continues wearing -- the most comfortable bra she has ever owned, primarily because it has removable, changeable pads in the cups for when she fucking lactates in her sleep, which she thinks is rather annoying but, well, she decided she wanted to breastfeed so there she is.
Her pants come off as well, and then she reaches for a long-sleeved nightgown that goes down to her knees and has buttons from solar plexus up to the neckline. This is practical, too: it's comfortable, for one, and it's warm for the wintry nights in the household, and its sleeves are long because when she has to sit up against the headboard in the middle of the night and draw one twin, then the other to her breast, she won't shiver herself to death and she won't have to yank all the blankets up. Hell: if she wants she can arrange some pillows and lie on her side while they suckle. She shakes out her hair, combs it, and she goes padding downstairs to say goodnight to their family.
It says something, perhaps, that Danicka is comfortable going downstairs in her nightgown to hug parents and siblings and nieces and nephews, whoever is down there, before coming back upstairs
and going to the bathroom again,
and then getting in bed on her side, the side with the basinet with its folded-down side and her sleeping daughters. She reaches a hand out from the covers and puts it over their swaddled little bodies, closing her eyes and feeling them breathe. When Lukas comes in behind her, enormous and warm and dark, she breathes in deeply, exhaling slowly. It's her first night home since the twins were born. It's the first time he's been able to sleep like this with her since the hospital. As his arm comes around her, she sighs, infinitely comforted, reminded of normalcy.
"Miluju t ," she murmurs. "Miluji svou rodinu."
