The Epic (After)Birth - Robert and Alice and Fabian - TBD

[babyjosephine]

12 May, 1984

It was still May 12th, and Alice would hardly have minded the world staying on May 12th for a million years more. Outside it was probably dark, but she wasn’t looking. Her attention was fixed on the hospital’s bassinette near her bed, and for as long as she lived, she would never find anything more interesting than the little boy inside it.

The room was quiet. The rush of initial visits had long ago come to an end when she started to feel too drowsy to appreciate the friends and family gathering around. Even Robert was asleep now.

Gently, mindful of the aches and pains and the searing discomfort that would hopefully not last too much longer, Alice sat up and eased out of bed. She paused at the rails for a moment to stretch her back, then took a step closer and picked Fabian up. That was his name. Fabian Ferris Fitzwilliam. Cruel but sweet and chosen by Robert.

Fabian was sound asleep and so tiny that Alice wondered whether or not there was another baby still yet to be born—she had grown so big and he weighed only five pounds. Healthy five pounds, of course. With black waves that shocked her when she saw them but enchanted her now. He was so beautiful. Every mother thinks the world of their child but Fabian was so beautiful.

Alice was already crying before she had climbed back into bed. Pregnancy had made her so emotional that the tiniest gust of wind could make her break down, and it seemed that motherhood wasn’t going to ease the drama. If anything, the infant was enhancing it. She had wanted a child for so long that to have one, to be holding one that wasn’t a niece or a nephew, was almost alien. She could barely reconcile that this was her son and his life was now a part of hers.

She couldn’t wait to go home. To buy clothes that were small enough to fit him (everything was much too big). To spend her days not alone in the kitchen but showing off her baby and taking care of him the way she had practiced for. Making him smile and laugh and helping him sit up and strengthen his unfocused eyes and fall in love with him in a way she had fallen in love with no one before.

Alice sniffed, almost laughing at herself, and rubbed her eyes before gently smoothing the back of her index finger against Fabian’s cheek.

Comments

[halfaustere.livejournal.com]

Robert had, indeed, fallen asleep in the chair by Alice's bedside – it was a folding chair, as opposed to an armchair, because the hospital had run out of more comfortable chairs and gave their staff the worst options possible. He had really appreciated that, loudly, to the supervisor.

He had been asleep in the chair for about an hour and a half before Alice woke and picked up their baby – their baby, he could scarcely think it – and that was when he began to slide sideways out of the chair, still while asleep.

When he hit his head on the wall, he woke up abruptly, tossing his head about and whispering a violent 'ow' under his breath, not aware that his lover and child were awake after all.

[babyjosephine]

Alice looked sharply at him, careful not to jar Fabian, and after assessing the situation, started to laugh. "Honey."

[halfaustere.livejournal.com]

Robert quickly shifted to face in her direction.

"Oh!" he said, and it was somewhat louder than he meant, and he softened his tone, "You're awake."

After a pause:

"I did not just do that."

[babyjosephine]

Alice was trying very hard not to laugh very hard, but Fabian was still asleep and his warm weight against her chest was reason enough to be quiet. "Do what? Did you do something you haven't done before?"

[halfaustere.livejournal.com]

"Uh. Yes. Except no. I didn't do anything except sleep in this chair."

Still wearing his scrubs.

Then again, he often slept in scrubs.

[babyjosephine]

Alice shifted Fabian so that she could gently rub his back. "Oh, didn't you? If you're still tired, I'm sure the wall will now leave you alone."

[halfaustere.livejournal.com]

"That wall is quite rude. Has it given you trouble?" Robert grinned, a secretive, knowing grin, and then pulled himself up to stand over her, looking at their sleeping baby boy.

His heart shot into his feet and back up to its normal place again.

He'd never seen anything more beautiful than Alice and a newborn, their newborn, something that was both of them, forever, together like that. He was completely stricken by it, just then, and stood there caught in his stare.

[babyjosephine]

Alice looked up at him. The look on his face stopped her from making a cheeky remark. Instead, she shifted Fabian to the crook of her arm and reached up to touch Robert's cheek. "There's room for you."

[halfaustere.livejournal.com]

He hesitated, not sure if she was actually right about that – it wasn't the biggest bed ever, after all, but it was wider than a twin, and he was happy to get quite close. So, giving in, Robert perched on the edge of the bed to kiss Alice's forehead, and then leaned over to kiss Fabian's, too.

While his arm found its correct place around Alice's shoulders.

"You're beautiful," he said to them both at once.

[babyjosephine]

Alice was in too good of a mood, too serious of a mood to shrug off the compliment. But she did blush.

"Does it feel real?" she murmured, keeping her hand on his face.

[halfaustere.livejournal.com]

"Not yet."

But it was real, and he could tell – he'd touched her, and touched little baby Fabian, and felt them live. He'd helped deliver his own child. He'd been a terror before the delivery, too, hounding the obstetrical staff to make sure they did everything right, but they did, and it went well, and there they were.

And it was still too amazing to feel real.

He turned his head to kiss the palm of her hand.

[babyjosephine]

"I know," Alice said. She couldn't wait to go home and make everything feel real. "It doesn't feel like he's ours. I keep waiting for babysitting to come to an end."

[halfaustere.livejournal.com]

"He looks like us," Robert pointed out, brushing his hand lightly across the tiny head of dark hair. "Enough like us I can see us both in him – already. So he must be ours, see, we have proof."

But Robert was just as shocked and surprised by the entire thing.

[babyjosephine]

Alice smiled and looked at her son's face (she still couldn't believe she had a son at all). His eyes, when actually open, were the beautiful blue of his late grandmother. "He didn't get that hair from me," she said. "And I saw you in Dawn's children. And me in my nieces and nephews. Especially Samantha."

She sighed and attempted to look bereaved. "They're going to come in and take Fabian away and leave a tenner on the chair."

[halfaustere.livejournal.com]

"Eventually he'll have to get fingerprinted and examined by a neonatologist," a word that did not roll elegantly off Robert's lips no matter how hard he tried, it was just awkward, "to make sure he's still completely healthy, no matter how unneccessary that might be -- but I'll make sure everyone knows he's quite a bit more expensive than that!"

[babyjosephine]

Alice made a face at her sleeping baby. "No one is fingerprinting my little boy," she said, lifting him a little closer to her face. She rubbed his little sleepy cheek. "He's only just finished being born. He hasn't done anything wrong."

[halfaustere.livejournal.com]

Robert laughed, kissing the side of her chin. "Nobody thinks he's a criminal. It's for safety."

He did not say in case anyone kidnaps him or gets him mixed up with someone else's baby, because there was no sense at all in scaring her.

[babyjosephine]

"I'm not going to lose him," she said, still to Fabian more than to Robert, because her boy's face was so sweet and so new and somehow belonged to her. She had been the babysitter and the godmother and the aunt to so many children. This one was all hers.

"They can do all of those silly things whilst I'm holding him."

[halfaustere.livejournal.com]

"Yes they can, actually." She had a good point, a reasonable point and an accurate one at that. "And of course you aren't going to lose him. I shan't either."

[babyjosephine]

"You'd better not," Alice said, looking up at him for only a second. Fabian was in total control, though he was likely unaware. She took hold of his tiny little hand and kissed his tiny little fingers. Then she started crying again. She had only cried several thousand times since he was born.

"He's so perfect!" she wailed.

[halfaustere.livejournal.com]

Robert, then, found tears welling up in his own eyes as he pulled her a little bit closer (as if it was possible) and smiled rather stupidly down at the tiny little person who wasn't really doing much of anything except sleeping and being warm and looking good in a blanket.

That is, until he woke up and started to cry, because everyone else was crying, so what did they expect, really?

[babyjosephine]

Alice's eyes welled up even faster, but she stopped herself from crying and sat up a little straighter to better cradle her son against her shoulder.

"Oh, honey," she said, all watery. "Shh." She rubbed his very tiny back and listened to his very tiny cries, which broke her very maternal heart into several dozen pieces. "Don't cry. I'm sorry."

[halfaustere.livejournal.com]

"I'm sure he's not upset or offended," Robert managed, smiling a little and stroking his hand over his son's head. "Simply attempting to converse. We make funny sounds and tears he can already relate to."

[babyjosephine]

"It's going to break my heart every time he cries," Alice said, because the sounds of her nieces and nephews crying had always made her teary, too, and she was only their aunt. Fabian was her son, and a son she felt she had waited a lifetime for. She wanted him to always be happy and to always know that he was loved. And for most of the last twenty four hours, she had been partially drugged or in extreme pain.

She turned her head and kissed his very small head covered in very dark hair. "You're so tiny, little mister," she whispered, gently rocking him. "I thought you would be twice as big, the way you were taking up space in my tummy." And the way she gained over fifty pounds.

[halfaustere.livejournal.com]

"He'll eat a lot," was Robert's guess, back to being all smiles and no teary hesitations. He expected that Fabian would, in fact, eat a lot, because he had quite a bit of weight still to gain – but he, too, had been surprised at the newborn's size. Smaller than he'd expected. Not too small to be dangerous, but smaller than probably anyone expected.

Fabian, whose current expressive abilities were limited to screaming, crying and blinking, blinked. With eyes almost the same blue as Andy's. Almost.

"And that hair!" Robert, unaffected by eye color as all babies' eyes look essentially the same, color-wise, was back on the hair again. "It really is a shame odds are it'll be gone in two days."

[babyjosephine]

Alice couldn't tear her eyes off her son. Everything about him was significant and beautiful and there was so much left to learn. Soon he would be interacting with a new environment and she would be on her way as a mother.

She gently rubbed his cheek with the tip of her finger, then quietly brushed her fingers over his fine, black hair.

"Must you be always ruin everything with your medical nonsense?" she said, speaking as though to Fabian, because she was looking at him, but harpooning each word directly at Robert. There were nine months of hormones, twenty years of longing, ten years of resignation, a natural inclination towards the blunt, left-over pain from her parents' recent deaths, and twenty four hours of exhaustion and pain crippling her ability to self-censor.

She never self-censored as it was.

She returned to gently brushing Fabian's cheek with her finger, hoping to get him to react, to open his little mouth the way that her nieces and nephews always did. Maybe to inspire a sound or a squirm.

"Can't you just enjoy the fact that you have a son? Are you going to remind me that when he smiles it isn't a smile, and that he can't understand me or see me and that everything he does is rooted in reflexes and that I could be removed from the room and replaced by a warm pillow and he wouldn't know the difference? This isn't a lecture to a bunch of overeager, overstimulated university students! This is a baby! Our baby! And when he smiles, it will be a smile, and he'll be smiling because he knows it's me, and you're not taking that away before we even get started! Throw the goddamn cards out the window. I'm tired of them and they were wrong."

She had waited a very long time to have a baby!

[halfaustere.livejournal.com]

"Well of course it's really a smile!" Robert, slightly taken aback and slightly unsurprised at once (she had a right to extreme reactions, he couldn't blame her and couldn't get upset, and kept that in check) had always hated when people said smiling in infants was just a reflex, even if it was true. It ruined a lot of the beauty of spending time around babies.

"I wouldn't say something like that. It's horrible to say things like that, I agree with you there, and he knows you. Probably hasn't got much of a clue who I am outside of the sound of my voice right now, but he knows you and has always known you and will always know you. He'll get used to the rest of us, and we'll all have to deal with being second to you, because you're the only familiar thing that smells just right."

Fabian, as if he understood, crinkled his nose.

[babyjosephine]

Alice was immediately distracted by it, and her heart immediately threatened to split into several lovestruck pieces. She was so in love with her son, and she hadn't quite expected this sort of intensity.

Gently, almost afraid to break him, she shifted the baby so that he was resting across her chest on his tiny stomach. He was much closer and easier to kiss, and Alice ran her hand down his back to keep him warm.

"You're finally here," she whispered to him. "I've been waiting a long time for you, little man."