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The thing about being married to Kelley O'Hara is that Alex should have seen this coming.
"Babe," Kelley says, from somewhere on the floor of their hotel room, her voice carrying that specific tone that has preceded approximately ninety percent of the most chaotic moments of Alex's adult life. "Babe, come look at this."
Alex sets down her phone — game footage from the Sweden match, which she's supposed to be reviewing, which she will now never finish reviewing — and looks over the edge of the bed.
Kelley is lying on her stomach on the carpet. Y/N is also lying on her stomach on the carpet. They are facing each other from approximately two feet apart, both of them completely still, like two animals about to engage in some kind of territorial negotiation.
"Kelley, what are you—"
Y/N moves.
Not in the wobbly, uncertain, one-limb-at-a-time way she's been doing for the past few weeks, tentatively testing the limits of her own mobility like someone reading the instructions before assembling furniture. She moves *fast* — a sudden, determined scramble, hands slapping the carpet with purpose, knees churning, entire small body propelling itself toward Kelley with a focus that belongs on a training pitch.
She closes the two feet in approximately one second.
Then she grabs Kelley's face with both hands and blows a raspberry directly into her nose.
"She's *fast*," Kelley announces, muffled and extremely delighted under Y/N's grip. "Alex. She's so fast. Did you see that? She's been holding out on us. She's been sandbagging."
"We are not ready for this," Alex says. She doesn't move from the bed. "We are genuinely, fundamentally not ready for this."
Pbbbt.
Y/N offers no comfort on the matter.
---
The crawling had technically started three weeks before camp, which meant Alex had three weeks to develop what she privately called *situational awareness* — the constant, low-grade alertness of a person who now shares a living space with something small, fast, and entirely without object permanence concerns or consequences. Three weeks to babyproof what could be babyproofed, to establish mental maps of what was on the floor, to recalibrate her understanding of how quickly ten months and twenty-two pounds of determined human being could cover ground.
Three weeks was not enough.
She'd started with the living room. Cabinet locks on everything below three feet. Outlet covers. Corner guards on the coffee table that Y/N immediately identified and began attempting to remove with the patient, methodical focus of a safecracker. Alex replaced them with a different brand. Y/N identified that the new ones had a different mechanism and began attempting to remove those instead, apparently taking notes.
Then she'd done the kitchen. Then the hallway. Then she'd caught Y/N — home from daycare, theoretically contained in the playroom — sitting in the doorway of the home office, not inside it, just at the threshold, studying the room's contents with strategic patience, like a general surveying terrain before committing troops.
"She's doing recon," Kelley had said, delighted.
"She's ten months old," Alex said.
"Talented ten-month-old," Kelley said.
The first morning of camp, Y/N escaped from the play mat in the hotel room while Alex was in the bathroom for four minutes. She had crossed the room, located Kelley's training bag, and was investigating the contents with the focused intensity of a customs inspector when Alex found her.
"She unpacked my bag," Kelley reported, holding up what appeared to be a shin guard that had been thoroughly gummed. "The zipper, Alex. She found the zipper. She worked the zipper. She's got fine motor skills beyond her age."
"She cannot have shin guards," Alex said, and began the process of re-packing Kelley's bag while Y/N watched with an expression that suggested she was already planning her next move.
She was.
---
Breakfast on the first morning of camp is when the team learns.
They learn because Y/N, who Alex has placed in her high chair with a selection of appropriately-sized fruit pieces and a set of stacking cups, finishes her breakfast in approximately six minutes with brisk efficiency and then simply looks at Alex and looks at the high chair tray latch and then looks back at Alex with an expression that could generously be described as *warning you.*
"She's not going to—" Christen starts.
Y/N works the latch.
It takes her forty-five seconds. Alex watches it happen with the specific helplessness of someone watching a slow-motion event they cannot stop in time. The tray swings open and Y/N leans forward and slides out of the chair with the practiced ease of someone who has done this before.
She has done this before. Three times, in the hotel room, before Alex added a secondary buckle to the travel high chair.
Alex had not added the secondary buckle to the restaurant high chair.
"Y/N," Alex says, firmly, in the voice that is meant to communicate that this is Not a Choice.
Y/N stops. She sits on the floor, looks up at Alex with those big blue eyes — Kelley's mischief, Alex's color, a dangerous combination — and blows a raspberry. Then she turns ninety degrees and begins crawling toward the buffet table with terrifying purpose.
"She's so fast," Tobin says, watching from three tables away, already standing up. "Why is she so fast? She's got no leverage. How does she have no leverage and all the speed?"
"O'Hara genes," Kelley says, and she sounds genuinely proud about it, which Alex will address later when she has the bandwidth.
It takes three people to redirect Y/N from her apparent goal of reaching the scrambled eggs station. Sonnett cuts off the right flank, appearing from nowhere with the reaction time of someone who has been tracking Y/N since she left the high chair. Mal blocks the center aisle by the simple method of sitting down cross-legged on the floor directly in Y/N's path, which startles Y/N into stopping and staring at her. Naomi scoops Y/N up from behind, holding her aloft with the confident grip of someone with eleven younger cousins and zero anxiety about babies who don't want to be picked up.
Y/N expresses her feelings about being picked up.
"She said a word," Mal reports from the floor, where she's still sitting. "Did she say a word? That sounded like a word."
"It was not a word," Alex says, receiving her daughter from Naomi with practiced ease. "It was frustration. She does vowels when she's frustrated."
"It sounded like it started with a D," Mal says, looking slightly worried.
"She doesn't know that word," Alex says.
A beat.
"She doesn't," Alex says again, with slightly less certainty.
Y/N is placed back in the high chair. Alex secures both latches. She looks at her daughter. Her daughter looks at the latches with the patient, evaluative focus of someone taking a problem seriously.
"Please don't," Alex says.
Pbbbt.
"That's not an answer."
---
By mid-morning, the team has developed what no one has named but everyone is participating in: a Y/N early-warning system.
It isn't coordinated. Nobody announced it. It simply emerged organically from collective necessity and a shared understanding that something small and determined is now operating in their space, and that small and determined thing has a top speed that is genuinely alarming given the length of its legs.
The system works like this: whoever spots Y/N on the move in an unauthorized direction says "she's on the move," and at least one person immediately pivots to intercept. Response times have improved significantly since 8 AM, when it took fifteen seconds to reach Y/N before she reached the server door in the restaurant. By 10 AM, the average response time is down to four seconds. Alyssa is the fastest responder, possibly because goalkeeper reflexes translate more directly to baby-retrieval than anyone anticipated, or possibly because Alyssa has, according to Sonnett, been "actively training for this since she heard Y/N learned to crawl last week."
"I have not been actively training," Alyssa says.
"You asked me to time you in the hotel corridor," Sonnett says.
"That was a coincidence."
"You asked me specifically to shout 'she's on the move' before I started the timer."
Alyssa declines to comment further.
At training, Y/N is positioned in her stroller on the sideline — harness double-buckled, play tray secured, a collection of toys arrayed in front of her — and for the first forty-five minutes, she is content to watch. This is actually one of her great pleasures, watching training, and has been since she was small enough that watching was all she could do. She tracks the ball with the focused attention she apparently inherited from both parents, her head swiveling, her eyes sharp. She reacts to things happening on the pitch — a good pass generates an approving pbbt, a missed shot gets a sympathetic sound that is somehow already distinct from her other sounds, as if four months of raspberry practice have given her an entire vocabulary.
But she is also watching the sideline. Specifically, she is watching the equipment bag.
Alex knows she is watching the equipment bag. Alex has been aware of this surveillance since they arrived. The equipment bag contains, among other things, a collection of small orange cones, and Y/N has been interested in small orange cones since the previous camp, when she identified one from her stroller and stared at it for six uninterrupted minutes.
"She's still watching the bag," Kelley reports during a water break, coming off the pitch.
"I know," Alex says.
"She's been watching it for forty-five minutes."
"I know."
"You have to admire the patience."
"I have to admire nothing," Alex says, but she's already moving the equipment bag three feet further from the stroller, which Y/N tracks with her eyes the whole time, recalculating.
---
The incident with the cones happens at 10:47 AM.
Alex will be able to tell you the exact time because she checks her watch immediately afterward as a reflex, the way you mark the time of any significant event. She will also be able to describe the sequence in detail, because she replays it afterward with the specificity of a film review, trying to identify where the defensive collapse occurred.
It happens during a brief administrative pause — coaches conferring over a formation question, players dispersed across the field for a recovery stretch, the specific loosely-organized three minutes that exist in every training session where nobody is quite where they're supposed to be.
Kelley is talking to Christen. Alex is momentarily, briefly, for approximately ninety seconds, looking at her phone to respond to a message from her mother, which has been waiting since breakfast and which her mother has followed up on twice.
Y/N is in her stroller with her harness buckled.
What Alex has not fully reckoned with, even after three weeks of crawling and three weeks of evidence, is that Y/N has been working the harness buckle every time she's been in the stroller for the past four days. Methodically. Patiently. The way she worked the high chair latch. The way she worked the cabinet locks. Building understanding through repetition.
The harness has a specific release mechanism — two tabs that must be pressed simultaneously while pulling the center piece forward. It is designed to be difficult for small children.
Y/N has been a dedicated student.
"She's out," says Tobin, from somewhere to Alex's left.
Alex looks up.
Y/N has covered twenty feet of pitch in the time it took Alex to register Tobin's words and look up, which means she was moving before Tobin saw her, which means the escape happened with a speed that has genuinely startled everyone in her vicinity. She is now crossing the open grass at a crawl-sprint that belongs in a different context — head down, chin up, arms churning, the expression on her face not playful but focused, purposeful, the expression of someone who has identified an objective and is executing.
The objective is the equipment bag.
Alex is moving. Several other people are also moving. There is a brief, collective sprint across the training pitch that will later be described by multiple witnesses as "embarrassing" given the combined athletic credentials of the people involved.
Y/N reaches the equipment bag first.
She reaches inside. She finds what she is looking for. She pulls it out.
She puts the cone on her head.
Time stops.
Y/N sits on the USWNT training pitch, an orange traffic cone on her head, both hands pressed flat on the grass, looking out at approximately thirty professional athletes and staff members who have all stopped moving simultaneously. Her expression is one of pure, incandescent satisfaction — the expression of someone who has been planning something for a very long time and has finally, finally, executed it.
Then she looks directly at Alex.
Pbbbt.
The sideline explodes.
Not all at once — there's a beat first, a collective held breath, and then Sonnett goes first with a noise that isn't quite a word, and then Rose sits down on the grass because apparently standing is no longer available to her, and then it cascades, thirty people losing it simultaneously, some doubled over, some grabbing each other's arms for support, Sam Coffey actually sinking to her knees in what looks like genuine physical defeat.
"She waited," Tobin manages, from the grass. "She waited until everyone was looking. Did you see that? She put the cone on and then she looked at Alex. She timed it."
"She planned this," Christen says, her hand over her mouth. "She has been planning this since we got here. She's been watching that bag all morning."
"She really has," Kelley says, and she sounds almost awed, like even she is impressed. "She really, genuinely planned this."
Alex reaches Y/N. Alex kneels down. Alex takes the cone off her daughter's head. Y/N looks up at her — blue eyes bright, tiny teeth visible in a grin that is one hundred percent Kelley, that is so thoroughly, unmistakably Kelley that Alex almost can't be anything but fond about it.
"You are so much like your mother," Alex says quietly.
"Hey," Kelley protests from behind her, but she's laughing too hard for it to land.
Y/N reaches for the cone.
"No," Alex says gently, moving it out of reach.
Y/N looks at the cone. Looks at Alex. Produces a deeply philosophical raspberry, as if to say: *I have made my point. The cone was mine. History will record this.*
"Posting this everywhere," Sonnett announces. She has been recording since before Y/N left the stroller. She has multiple angles. "This is the content I was put on this earth to share."
"Please don't put my ten-month-old's thievery on the internet," Alex says.
"Already happening," Sonnett says. "The people deserve this."
---
Lunch becomes a controlled chaos exercise that Alex privately compares to running logistics for a small, unpredictable, extremely popular summit that keeps escaping from its scheduled venue.
The team has divided, loosely, into two camps regarding Y/N's mobility.
The first camp — primarily Tobin, Sonnett, Rose, Mal, and Sam — views it as a feature. They are delighted by every unauthorized excursion, every successful investigation, every time Y/N finds something new to examine or pulls herself upright using someone's leg as a support beam and stands for four or five triumphant seconds before sitting back down again with the satisfied air of someone who has made a point. They cheer her accomplishments. They narrate her journeys. ("She's going left, she's going LEFT, she found the water bottles, she is so pleased with herself, she's *tasting* a water bottle cap—") They have collectively taken approximately three hundred videos since this morning.
The second camp — primarily Christen, Alyssa, Lindsey, and Naomi— views it with the careful preemptive concern of people who understand physics, hot surfaces, small objects, and the inexorable connection between all three. They are Y/N's most reliable interceptors and they do not try to stop her from crawling; they simply appear between her and whatever she's identified as her target, offering an alternative — a toy, a stacking cup, their own hands to pull on — so that Y/N doesn't experience the interception as a defeat and go immediately for a second attempt via a different route.
She does this anyway. She has learned to read the defenders.
"She went around me," Christen reports at lunch, slightly breathless, having deposited Y/N back in Alex's arms after a pursuit that took her across half the restaurant. "She faked left. A head fake. She is ten months old and she executed a *head fake* on me."
"She learned that from watching Kelley play FIFA," Alex says. "I'm not even joking. She watches the screen when Kelley plays. She has been watching for two months."
"That can't be — she's retaining that?"
"She retains everything," Alex says. "Everything. We found out last week that she can wave on command, but only in Spanish, because one of her daycare teachers has been teaching her for three weeks and we didn't know. She will not wave when we ask in English. She just looks at us."
Christen looks at Y/N, who is currently sitting in Alex's lap eating a dissected piece of soft pear with remarkable focus.
"Hola, Y/N," Christen says.
Y/N looks up. Waves.
"She's bilingual," Christen says. "She's a bilingual head-faking escape artist."
"She's also cutting a third tooth," Alex says, "which accounts for approximately forty percent of the chaos today, but unfortunately we can't verify which forty percent."
As if to weigh in, Y/N finishes her pear piece, surveys the table, identifies Tobin's unattended dessert plate approximately six feet away, and goes still with the particular focused stillness that is now recognized camp-wide as a pre-movement tell.
"I see her," Tobin says, without looking up from her phone. "Y/N, that's my brownie."
Pbbbt.
"That's not a rebuttal."
Pbbbt.
"That's still not—okay, fine." Tobin breaks off a corner of the brownie, the smallest possible piece, and holds it up. "Can she have this? Is this okay? I don't actually know what ten-month-olds can eat."
"Not chocolate," Alex says.
"Rude," Tobin says, to Y/N. "She said no chocolate. I tried, kid."
Y/N stares at the brownie with the stoic resignation of someone processing an injustice. Then she turns her attention to Alex's lunch plate instead.
"Also no," Alex says.
Pbbbt.
---
The afternoon break before the film session is, technically, free time — rest, recovery, optional gym, phone calls home. For Alex it is the thirty-five minutes she has been mentally hoarding since morning: a window to put Y/N down for a nap, sit in a quiet room, and return to the Sweden game footage she abandoned at 7 AM.
Y/N does not nap.
Y/N has been operating on a nap schedule that suggests she is deeply skeptical of the concept, and today — after the scrambled eggs pursuit, the cone hat, the shoe investigation, and the ongoing campaign to understand every buckle and latch in her environment — today of all days she does not nap.
She lies in her travel crib. She produces a series of conversational raspberries at the ceiling. She investigates the mesh side of the crib with her fingers. She attempts to understand the fitted sheet.
Alex sits in the chair beside the crib.
"Please sleep," she says.
Pbbbt.
"Y/N. You have been awake since five forty-five this morning."
Pbbbt-pbbbt.
"I know you had a good day. The cone was very funny. The cone was genuinely, objectively funny and you have extremely good timing and your other mother is never going to let me forget it. But right now you need to sleep."
Pbbbt.
"That's not an argument."
But she doesn't leave. She stays in the chair, and Y/N narrates, and outside the window the afternoon sun starts its slow lean toward evening, and eventually the raspberries get slower and quieter and further apart, and eventually they stop. Y/N is asleep with her arms flung wide and her mouth slightly open and her face entirely peaceful. Alex stays for another ten minutes just watching her.
The Sweden footage remains unreviewed.
---
The afternoon film session brings new dimensions to the problem.
The meeting room is carpeted. Enclosed. No hot surfaces, no accessible equipment hazards. Alex and Kelley are both present. The team is present. Thirty-two responsible adults to one mobile infant.
What Alex has not factored in is shoes.
Standard practice is to remove shoes before film sessions on the carpeted meeting space, and the shoes are arranged in a loose circuit around the perimeter — thirty-two pairs, various brands, various states of being laced or unlaced, all at floor level, which is Y/N's current operating altitude.
Y/N discovers the shoes within ninety seconds of being released onto the carpet.
"What is she doing," Lindsey says, watching Y/N approach a sneaker with the methodical calm of a professional.
"She's very interested in shoes," Alex says. "She finds them and she investigates them systematically and then she moves to the next one."
"Investigates how?"
"She examines them. Touches them all over. Smells them, usually. Then she tries to remove the insole."
A pause.
"She's very specific," Alex continues. "She has interests. Shoes are one of them. Orange objects are another. Things with zippers. The TV remote but not the streaming one — she has opinions about which one is worth her time. And, lately, the dog next door, who she has named, or at least produced a specific raspberry for, that sounds different from her other raspberries."
"What does it sound like?"
Alex produces the raspberry in question.
Everyone turns to look at her.
"I have been living with a baby for ten months," Alex says, with dignity. "I have developed communication strategies."
Y/N, across the room, hears her mother's voice, looks up from her third shoe investigation, and produces the exact same raspberry back.
"She recognized it," Kelley says, quietly delighted. "Alex. You just had a conversation."
"We have a lot of conversations," Alex says, and there's something in her voice she doesn't bother hiding, because there's no point: the helpless, enormous, slightly bewildered love of someone who has been having raspberry conversations with their ten-month-old and finds this entirely normal now.
The film session begins. Y/N completes her shoe circuit — all thirty-two pairs, examined in order, three insoles successfully removed before interception, one shoelace untied — and then sits in the middle of the carpet and looks around for the next project.
She identifies Coach Hayes' whiteboard markers.
She looks at them.
She looks at Alex.
"No," Alex says, preemptively.
Y/N looks at the markers again, in case the situation has changed.
"Y/N."
Pbbbt.
She appears to redirect, crawling toward the corner where Alyssa is sitting, and Alex registers this with the specific relief of someone watching a crisis avert. When Y/N is in Alyssa's orbit she is, historically, either settled or at least manageable.
Y/N reaches Alyssa. She grabs Alyssa's sock with both hands and pulls herself upright, standing for a triumphant, wobbling five-count before sitting back down. She looks up with the expression of someone who has arrived somewhere and knows it.
"Hi," Alyssa says quietly, reaching down to offer two fingers.
Pbbt.
Soft. Almost conversational.
"Hi," Alyssa says again, and Y/N settles at her feet with her toy rings, stacking them with focused industry, occasionally looking up to check that Alyssa is still there, fundamentally content.
"She always does that," Kelley says quietly to Christen, watching from across the room. "Finds Alyssa. Every single camp. It's like she has a compass."
"Safe hands," Christen says. "Literally and figuratively. Babies know."
Y/N stacks her rings in the wrong order, examines the result, removes two, restacks them correctly, and looks up at Alyssa as if checking for acknowledgment.
Alyssa catches it, gives a small nod.
Y/N goes back to her rings, satisfied.
---
The incident with the tactical whiteboard happens at 4:15 PM.
There are differing accounts. The consensus is that Y/N used the session's shift toward a defensive shape discussion as cover, timing her movement to when the room's collective attention was at its most focused on the board.
The first anyone knows about it is when Coach Hayes steps back from the whiteboard to assess her diagram and finds that her blue marker — set down on the tray approximately forty seconds ago — is no longer on the tray.
Everyone looks at the tray.
Everyone looks at Y/N.
Y/N is sitting directly in front of the whiteboard's lower half. She has the cap off the marker. She is examining the tip with scientific interest. There is already a curved blue line on the bottom section of the board — approximately eight inches long, confident, sweeping gently left.
The marker is removed from Y/N's hands with the swift efficiency of someone who has been running baby interceptions all day. Y/N surrenders it without protest. She has already done what she came to do.
She looks at the line.
She looks at Coach Hayes.
Pbbbt.
The quality of this raspberry is difficult to describe. It has the tone, several players will later say, of an artist presenting work. Not asking for approval. Offering it.
Coach Hayes looks at the whiteboard. She looks at Y/N. She looks at the whiteboard again, tilting her head.
"Actually," she says, with perfect sincerity, "that's a more direct run to the back post than what I had. Well done, Y/N".
The room comes apart.
It takes a while to come back together. Sonnett is on the floor. Sam has her face in her hands, shaking with laughter. Sam is capturing every second from three separate angles. Tobin is leaning on Christen for structural support. Rose has tears running down her face.
Y/N looks at all of this. She takes it in. She produces another raspberry — longer, more satisfied — and raises both arms.
"That's her victory raspberry," Kelley announces. "She does that at home when she figures something out. Arms up, long raspberry. That means she nailed it."
"She did nail it," Coach Hayes says, laughing now, a real laugh. "She put it in the right place. I have players who don't put it in the right place."
The line stays on the board for the rest of the session. Nobody erases it. By the end, one of the assistant coaches has quietly added a small arrow indicating the run direction.
Y/N, later, when asked about it by Kelley, will produce a self-satisfied pbbt and move on.
---
The second training day brings rain, which changes the texture of everything.
It rains in the specific way that England rains when there's a match in two days and nobody needs this — steady, committed, unhurried, the kind of rain that has opinions about itself. Players arriving at breakfast are already damp despite umbrellas, irritated in the low-level way that bad weather before competition produces in people who have been in camp for five days and are starting to feel the particular cabin fever of too many people in a hotel for too long.
Y/N is unaffected by the rain. Y/N has no feelings about the rain. Y/N has been awake since five-thirty, has already escaped the play mat twice, has eaten her breakfast with suspicious efficiency, and is now, from her position in Alex's lap, observing the room with the focused attention of a wildlife photographer waiting for movement.
There is a new element in the restaurant this morning: the England team is staying in the same hotel.
Alex realizes this approximately thirty seconds before Y/N does. She registers the new uniforms, the unfamiliar faces, the separate cluster of tables at the far end of the restaurant. She has time to think: *this is fine, we'll stay on our side, it won't be a thing* — and then she feels Y/N go still in her lap with the particular stillness that means she has identified a target.
The target is the England section.
More specifically, the target is Ella Toone who is sitting at the nearest England table, eating yogurt, and who has the specific quality of being entirely unaware she is being studied. She is also, Alex notices, wearing bright orange trainers.
Y/N has already catalogued the orange trainers.
"Don't even think about it," Alex says quietly.
Pbbbt.
"Y/N."
Y/N looks at the orange trainers. Looks at Alex. Looks at the trainers.
"We are not crawling into the England section," Alex says. "We are not doing international diplomacy via baby visit. These are professional footballers trying to eat their breakfast before a match against us in forty-eight hours."
Y/N appears to consider the diplomatic implications of this situation and find them irrelevant.
It is Kelley, returning from the buffet with a plate stacked with considerably more food than is necessary, who tips the scales. She sits down, glances at Y/N's trajectory, and says: "Oh, she found the orange shoes."
"Don't say it out loud," Alex says. "Don't confirm it. Don't give her validation."
"She's definitely going over there," Kelley says, with the serene confidence of someone who has accepted the situation.
"She's not going over there."
"She's absolutely going over there. Look at her face. That's her 'I have made a decision' face."
"She has many faces and they all look like that."
"This is the specific one," Kelley says. "I know this one. This is the one she makes before she does the thing."
Alex tightens her arm around Y/N, who is vibrating slightly with the suppressed energy of someone being physically prevented from their objective.
Christen, across the table, leans over. "For what it's worth, one of the England staff members had a baby last year. I've seen the team with her at international events. They're going to love this."
"That is not the point," Alex says.
The point is moot approximately forty-five seconds later, when Alex is handed a menu by a passing server, both hands occupied for three seconds, and Y/N is gone.
"She's on the move," Rose says, conversationally.
Alex looks up. Y/N is already ten feet away, navigating between chair legs with the practiced ease of someone who has been doing this for three weeks, heading directly for the England section with the focused determination of a heat-seeking missile that has identified its target.
What happens next happens faster than Alex can traverse the distance.
Y/N reaches Toone with the orange trainers. Ella looks down to find a small person with enormous blue eyes gripping her leg and pulling herself upright to standing.
Y/N stands for her impressive five-count. She looks up at the midfielder. She takes in the orange trainers from close range, which appears to be even better than anticipated.
Then she sits back down, grabs the nearest trainer with both hands, and begins her investigation.
"Oh," says Ella, looking down with the expression of someone experiencing something unexpected and entirely charming. "Oh, hello. Who are you?"
Pbbbt.
"She says that's her name," Kelley offers, having appeared from nowhere at Alex's shoulder. "She's Y/N. She's ten months old. She's been interested in your shoes since you sat down."
"She can just — have them, I don't mind," Ella says, watching Y/N examine the trainer with meticulous focus. "She's gorgeous. How old is she again?"
"Ten months," Alex says, arriving. "I'm so sorry. She escaped. She does this. She identified your shoes from across the restaurant."
"I love that," says Alessia Russo, two seats down, already reaching for her phone. "Can I—"
"Everyone can," Alex says, with the resigned acceptance of a parent who has long since made peace with her child's public profile. "She loves an audience. Don't encourage it too much or she'll never leave."
Y/N has completed her trainer investigation. She looks up at Ella, appears to make a favorable assessment, and produces a soft and genuinely friendly raspberry, the kind she reserves for people she has decided she likes.
"Was that—" Ella starts.
"She likes you," Kelley says. "That's her 'you're okay' raspberry. It's a compliment."
Ella looks absolutely delighted. "I got a raspberry from an American baby. This is the best camp I've ever been on."
"Don't let her hear that," Alex says, already reaching for Y/N. "She'll come back tomorrow."
She will, in fact, come back tomorrow. But that comes later.
---
The evening before the match, the team gathers for a final film session and tactical walkthrough. It is organized, focused, the particular energy of a group of people who have been in camp for five days and are ready to do the thing they've been preparing for. Coach Hayes keeps it tight — forty minutes, key points, no complications.
Y/N is, in theory, with the team's childcare person for this session. Clara, twenty-four, studying sports science, impeccably qualified and entirely capable, has handled Y/N twice before at previous camps.
Clara appears at the door of the meeting room eleven minutes into the session.
"She's fine," Clara says, quickly, reading Alex's face. "She's completely fine. She just — she really wanted to come to this one. She kept going to the door."
Alex closes her eyes.
"She kept going to the door," Alex says. "She doesn't have object permanence sophisticated enough to know this meeting is through this door."
"She might," Clara says, with the careful diplomacy of someone who has been alone with Y/N for eleven minutes and has learned things. "She got to the door and she knocked on it. Like, she actually knocked. Three times."
There is a pause.
"She knocked," Alex repeats.
"With her fist. Twice, then once. Like a pattern."
The meeting room looks at Alex. Alex looks at Kelley. Kelley has the expression of someone trying very hard not to look as delighted as she is.
"Just bring her in," Coach Hayes says. "She can sit in on the session. She contributed more to the set piece board yesterday than some people."
Several people laugh. Y/N is brought in. She is placed in Alex's lap, surveys the room with the satisfaction of someone who has successfully negotiated entry into a venue, and settles in.
She watches the film for the next twenty-nine minutes with what can only be described as genuine interest. She tracks the ball on the screen. She produces raspberries at various junctures — approving ones when a movement pattern is clean, questioning ones when something changes unexpectedly. At one point she produces a sharp, emphatic pbbt at exactly the moment Coach Hayes says "no, that's the wrong run, she should be tracking the near post" — and the synchronization is so perfect that the entire room turns to look at her.
Y/N looks back at the room.
Pbbbt.
"She's a tactical genius," Tobin says. "I'm not joking. I genuinely think she understood that."
"She's ten months old," Alex says.
"Talented ten-month-old," Kelley says, and this time she and Alex say it in unison, and Alex puts her face in her hands briefly, because this is her life now, this is the specific shape her life has taken.
---
Match day.
The stadium is larger than the training facility, naturally, and busier, and louder, and full of the specific electricity of a competitive international fixture. There's a crowd that fills the lower tiers. The press box is occupied. Both sets of players are warming up at opposite ends, and the stadium's energy has that pleasant, pre-match hum that Alex loves even after fifteen years of feeling it.
Y/N has never been to a stadium for a competitive match. She has been to training facilities, to smaller venues, to team events. She has not been to this — the full thing, the noise and the light and the crowd and the grass extending in both directions.
She is, Alex will later describe, absolutely beside herself.
Not distressed. The opposite. She is vibrating at a frequency that suggests she has been waiting for this specifically, that something in the scale and noise and energy of it has triggered something fundamental. She is up on Clara's hip, turning her head in every direction, trying to take in everything simultaneously, making sounds that are not raspberries — brighter, more urgent, the particular vocalizations of someone encountering something new and finding it exactly right.
"She loves it," Clara says, bringing her down to the family section where she'll watch from a designated area with some of the other players' children and families. "She's been like this since we pulled up to the stadium."
"She's going to be impossible to settle after this," Alex says, pulling Y/N close for a moment before warm-up. "She's going to want to come to every match."
Pbbbt.
"Yes," Alex says. "Exactly that."
She hands Y/N back to Clara and jogs toward the pitch. She is already late for warm-up and Kelley is waving at her from the tunnel with the universal hand gesture of *let's go*.
She goes.
---
The match goes well, technically speaking.
The United States are the better team for most of it — crisper in transition, more cohesive in shape, executing cleanly on the patterns they've spent the week working on. The England side are organized and committed but having trouble building out from the back, and by the sixtieth minute the scoreline is 2-1 in favor of the US, with the second goal coming from a combination play off a set piece that bears a suspicious resemblance to the diagram that now has both Coach Hayes' original arrows and Y/N's blue curved line.
Nobody mentions this on the broadcast.
Alex, subbed on in the sixty-second minute, is three minutes into her time on the pitch and working a sequence of passes on the right side when she hears it.
She hears it before she processes what it is. It's not crowd noise — the crowd noise is constant, a texture rather than an event. This is different. This is a disruption, a shift, a ripple of laughter and alarm moving through the near sideline section of the crowd.
She looks toward the touch line.
Y/N is on the pitch.
She is not near the touch line. She is not just barely on the pitch. She is fifteen feet onto the grass, in the corner of the playing area, having navigated the gap between two stewards who were watching the match rather than the family section, and she is moving at her full speed — that head-down, determined, arms-churning sprint-crawl — toward a small orange cone that a ball boy placed approximately twenty feet inside the pitch when he set up his station.
Alex stands completely still for one full second.
Then she says, out loud, to no one: "Of course it's the cone."
The match has, technically, not stopped. The ball is at the other end of the pitch. Neither the referee nor the far-end players have noticed. But the near-end players have noticed. The England defenders nearest the corner have noticed. One of them — Ella, the player with the orange trainers, who Y/N investigated at breakfast two days ago — has already stopped moving and is staring at Y/N with an expression that transitions rapidly from startled to helplessly charmed.
Two stewards have started toward Y/N from different angles. They are jogging with the specific uncomfortable energy of people who need to resolve a situation without making it worse, which is difficult when the situation is ten months old and has a clear objective.
Y/N reaches the cone.
She grabs it.
She does not put it on her head this time — she's learned something in the days since the training pitch. Instead she holds it in both hands, turns it over, examines it with the thoroughness of someone who waited two days for this, and produces a long, satisfied, thoroughly vindicated raspberry at it.
The referee — a Scottish woman who has been officiating international football for eleven years and has, until this moment, seen everything — blows the whistle. Not to stop play. The ball is still at the far end. She blows it because she is laughing, quietly but genuinely, and the whistle is what happens when she tries to compose herself and doesn't quite manage it.
Ella crouches down next to Y/N. "You made it," she says, in that particular tone adults use when they have entirely abandoned dignity in favor of sincerity. "You actually made it onto the pitch."
Pbbbt.
The near section of the crowd — who can see this clearly — produces a noise that is not a football noise. It's warmer than that, more surprised, more delighted.
Alex reaches Y/N at approximately the same time the two stewards do. She kneels down and holds out her arms and Y/N looks at the cone and looks at Alex and clearly weighs the options. Then she holds the cone out to Alex — *here, hold this for me* — and lets herself be picked up.
"You absolute menace," Alex says quietly, holding her daughter tight against her chest, the cone now confiscated into her free hand. Y/N, against Alex's shoulder, produces a happy, muffled raspberry that vibrates against Alex's collar bone. "You planned this. You saw the cone from the family section and you planned this entire thing."
Pbbbt.
"I know."
She carries Y/N back to the touch line. The crowd is still making that warm, delighted sound. From somewhere in the family section, she can hear Clara's voice, apologetic and slightly frantic — "she went under my arm, I didn't see her, I'm so sorry—" and she waves to indicate that it's fine, that everyone is fine, that the primary emotion here is not anger.
Coach Hayes is at the touch line. She has her arms crossed. She has her coaching face on.
She also has, very faintly, the expression of someone trying very hard not to smile.
"She got the cone," Hayes says.
"She got the cone," Alex confirms.
"She's been looking at that cone since warm-up."
"She knows which cones are which. She has a favorites list."
Y/N looks at Coach Hayes from Alex's arms. She looks at the cone. She looks at Hayes again.
Pbbbt.
"She says she's sorry," Alex says.
Hayes looks at Y/N for a long moment. Then she says, in the driest possible tone: "I've seen worse breakdowns in defensive tracking tonight. At least she knew where the ball wasn't."
From the far end of the pitch, something happens — a challenge, a call, the natural forward movement of the match — and Alex turns to hand Y/N back to Clara, who has materialized at her shoulder, already reaching.
"Secondary harness," Alex says. "Extra strap. On the carrier, on the stroller, on everything. Use the ones in the bag, not the standard ones."
"I'm so sorry," Clara says again.
"Don't be," Alex says, and means it, and jogs back onto the pitch.
---
The final whistle goes at 2-1. A good result. A clean performance. The kind of match that validates a week of preparation and sends everyone into the post-match debrief feeling solid.
The post-match handshakes take longer than usual, because several England players take a detour to find Alex specifically and ask about Y/N, and one of them — Ella — produces her phone and shows Alex that someone in the crowd caught a clear video of Y/N on the pitch, cone in hand, producing her raspberry, and that it is already at forty thousand views and climbing.
"The comments," Ella says, scrolling, "are almost entirely people saying she should start. Multiple people have made formal arguments for it. Someone did a statistical analysis."
"She's ten months old," Alex says.
"The statistical analysis accounted for that," Ella says gravely. "They projected her out to 2040 and concluded she'd still have better cone awareness than several current internationals."
Alex puts her face in her hands.
"She came to visit your shoes again this morning," Alex says from behind her hands. "She remembered which table you were at. She went directly there."
"I know," Ella says, sounding fond. "I saved her a corner of my toast. I couldn't help it. She looked at me with those eyes."
"Don't feed her," Alex says. "She will remember. She will expect it every time."
"I know," Ella says, and looks entirely unrepentant. "Worth it."
---
Kelley finds Alex in the family area after the debrief, when the stadium has mostly emptied and Y/N is asleep in the carrier against Alex's chest, her cheek pressed flat against Alex's shoulder, one small hand gripping the collar of her shirt.
She has been asleep for exactly the amount of time it took Alex to complete the handshakes and the debrief and the walk back, which means she fell asleep the moment the action ended, which means she was running purely on event-generated adrenaline for the final thirty minutes, which means she was watching the match from the family section with the same focused attention she gives training, and the thought of that — of her ten-month-old daughter following a competitive international football match — is something Alex is going to need to sit with for a while.
"There she is," Kelley says softly, reaching out to touch Y/N's head. "My two girls."
"You are aware," Alex says, "that your daughter infiltration a competitive international pitch this evening."
"I am aware," Kelley says, with enormous serenity.
"You're proud of her."
"I'm very proud of her. She got the cone, Alex. The specific cone she identified from the family section. She went directly for it. Do you know how far that was? She navigated around two stewards and approximately forty feet of unfamiliar surface and went directly to the specific cone."
"She cannot be on competitive international pitches during the game," Alex says. "This cannot become a pattern."
"Of course not," Kelley says. "We'll get better carriers. More straps. Clara's already ordered a new system."
"More straps," Alex says. "Yes. And also a broader conversation about—"
Pbbbt.
The raspberry is soft, sleepy, muffled against Alex's collar. Y/N hasn't opened her eyes. She is producing raspberries in her sleep again, the residual habit, the dream-practice.
"She's dreaming about the cone," Kelley says, with certainty.
"She is absolutely dreaming about the cone," Alex agrees.
Kelley slides her arm around Alex's waist, and they stand like that for a moment in the emptying stadium, the floodlights still up, the grass bright and green below, the cone in question now in Alex's jacket pocket where she put it after taking it back from Y/N, because she needed to do something with it and she didn't think about it and now she's been carrying it since the sixty-fourth minute.
She takes it out. Looks at it.
Kelley takes it from her and examines it. "It's just a regular cone."
"It is just a regular cone," Alex confirms. "She has wanted this specific type of cone since the first training session. She identified one at the last camp and stared at it for six minutes. She's been planning this since she learned to move."
Pbbbt.
"She's going to be so proud when she's older," Kelley says. "We can show her the video. We can tell her about the forty thousand views. We can show her the statistical analysis."
"We are not showing her the statistical analysis."
"The statistical analysis is actually very well-constructed," Kelley says. "The methodology is sound."
"She is ten months old."
"Talented ten-month-old," they say, again, simultaneously, and Alex puts her forehead against Kelley's shoulder and laughs quietly, because what else is there to do, because this is the shape of her life and she would not change it, not the cone or the whiteboard or the head fakes or the thirty-two pairs of shoes or the bilingual waving or the raspberry that vibrated against her collar bone on the pitch of an international stadium.
She reaches up and adjusts Y/N's position in the carrier. Y/N doesn't wake up. She makes a sound that is almost a word and might be a raspberry and is probably somewhere between the two, and her small hand tightens on Alex's collar, and she settles back into her specific sleep-breathing, slow and even and entirely at peace.
"Best camp ever," Kelley says quietly.
Alex thinks about it for exactly one second.
"Best camp ever," she agrees.
Outside, the stadium lights begin to go off, section by section, and the night comes in around them, and Y/N sleeps on through it all — dreaming, probably, of orange cones and her own name in forty thousand comments and the particular satisfaction of the pitch grass under her palms, and all the beautiful, chaotic, improbable places her small life is already taking her.
The fact that everything fell into place for her farewell to be in style—reaching 500 matches with the club of her life, taking all four possible titles this season—means her story was already written. She gave us every possible title, there is nothing to hold against her. I feel lucky to live in Alexia's era, to see alongside her how women's football has grown; it is simply thrilling.
Part of being a legend is knowing when to leave, I am glad to know, and this is what she conveys to me in her video, that she is leaving in peace. She said at the time that she would leave while she was still at her best possible level, and boy, did she give us a magnificent season.
I will always be able to say that I saw Alexia Putellas Segura play with Barça's colors, and although it has been through a screen and not live as I would have liked, I still do not rule out the idea that one day that dream might come true for me, thank you for everything, I will continue to support you in whichever team you decide to go to.
The first in so many things, the footballer who changed everything. A legend, a leader, an example.
Alexia is Barça and Barça is Alexia.
Our captain. Our 11.
That bow, which you have dedicated so many times to your fans, is for you today. Thank you for everything. LA REINA.
Una historia perfecta.
---
It will take me a few days to continue processing this, I just ordered an Alexia shirt that has not arrived yet, I don't know how I will feel when I hold it in my hands. If today I am a sea of tears, I can't imagine tomorrow on her last match.
It seems like we need to make a blood sacrifice to the football gods if we want to win the UWCL finals, in 2024 it was Ona in Bilbao, this year it’s Mapi in Oslo. Last year none of our players bled and that’s why we didn’t get the trophy.
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Trapped in a relentless 24-hour time loop, YN has tried everything to evacuate the facility, alert the Swiss authorities, and stop the mercenaries. Every single attempt ends in failure, resetting the clock. You quickly realize you can't stop them on your own. You need an army.
Word Count 2.2K
Warnings-None
Masterlist
⏱️ Extra Time Masterlist ⏱️
AN- Here you go another unhinged part.
Previous Part
For a few seconds, the tunnel is dead silent. The teams just stand there, looking at you, trying to process the fact that their morning pitch walk has just turned into a Die Hard movie.
Katie is the first to break the silence.
She looks at the snapped baton in your hand, and cracks her knuckles.
"So," Katie says, a dangerous grin spreading across her face. "When you say 'kill'... are we talking metaphorical, or can I actually stab a man?"
"Katie, what the fuck!" Leah snaps, grabbing Katie by the back of her training jacket. She looks at you, her brain trying to rationalize the completely irrational. "You're insane. This is insane. We have the Champions League Final tonight! We can't just... become a militia! What about the police?"
"I told the police," you reply flatly. "They locked me in an administrative closet because they thought I was hysterical. Then the stadium blew up. Leah, I promise you, there will be no trophy presentation tonight because the trophy, along with the entire VIP tier, will be vaporized at exactly 8:43 PM."
Leah rubs her temples, looking like she is rapidly developing a migraine. "Okay. Okay, fine. Time loops. Mercenaries. Sure. Why not? I’m having a mental breakdown."
"You're not having a breakdown," a voice cuts in.
The crowd of players parts slightly as Alexia steps forward. She doesn't look panicked. She doesn't look stressed.
She stops right in front of you her eyes scanning your face for any sign of a lie.
You stand up a little straighter, acutely aware that your hair is a mess and you haven't had your morning coffee. Do not fold, you tell yourself. You are a hardened time loop veteran. Be cool.
"You have died seventy-five times?" Alexia asks softly.
"Yes," you say.
"Trying to save this stadium."
"Trying to save you," you correct, the words slipping out before you can filter them. "I mean all of you. Obviously. But mostly you. I mean specifically, in the last loop, a guy put a gun to your head. Because nobody disrespects the Alexia Putellas on my watch."
A few of the Barcelona players in the back row clear their throats. Katie snorts loudly. Leah just covers her face with her hands.
Alexia stares at you.
A silence stretches through the tunnel.
You can feel the heat rising to your cheeks. Smooth, YN, you think. Very professional. John McClane never accidentally confessed his undying love to a hostage in the middle of a briefing.
"Well," Alexia says entirely unfazed. "We certainly can't have that, can we?"
Behind you, Katie bursts out laughing. "You could have just asked for her number! You didn't have to invent a terrorist plot to get her attention."
"I am not inventing anything!" you snap, spinning around to glare at her. "And for the record, Katie, you get a yellow card at the 41st minute for tackling Ewa Pajor into the advertising boards. Do you want me to tell you what the ref says to you?"
Katie’s laugh abruptly cuts off. She narrows her eyes. "She deserved it."
"See? She believes me!" you say, gesturing wildly to Katie. You look back at the captains. "Look. I know this sounds like a psychotic break. But we have exactly fourteen hours until the most heavily armed men you've ever seen walk through those doors. We have no police support. We have no military."
Leah takes a deep breath. She looks at her tea, looks at you, and then dumps the tea directly into a nearby trash can.
"Right. Okay. Fine," Leah says, stepping up next to Alexia. They exchange a look an unspoken truce. "If we're doing this, we need to know the pitch. Where are they breaching?"
"Lower Tunnel B," you say, pulling out your master radio and keying up the stadium blueprint on the digital screen mounted on the wall. "They sever the lines to the security feeds, lock out the master console, and flood the VIP tiers."
Alexia steps up to the screen, her eyes narrowing as she studies the blueprint.
"If we let them get past the loading dock, they control the midfield. We can't allow that. We trap them in the loading dock before they can fan out."
"No, that's too risky," Leah argues immediately, pointing to the stairwells. "They have weapons. If they bypass the press, we're completely exposed at the back. We need a low block. Fortify the VIP access points, let them come to us, and hit them on the counter-attack."
"A low block?" Alexia scoffs softly, looking at Leah. "Against armed mercenaries? You want to invite pressure? This is why you leave gaps on the left flank, Williamson."
"Oh, I'm sorry, do you have a UEFA Pro License in counter terrorism?!" Leah snaps back.
"Ladies!" you shout, clapping your hands together. "We are not arguing about football tactics! This is actual life or death!"
"Tactics are tactics, YN," Alexia says, not breaking eye contact with Leah.
"Okay, question," Katie interrupts, raising her hand like an overly excited schoolchild. "You said they have assault rifles. What do we have?"
You look at Katie. Then you look at the Arsenal and Barcelona squads, who are all currently wearing tracksuits and holding water bottles.
"We have... unparalleled team chemistry?" you offer weakly.
Katie stares at you. "Are you taking the piss?"
"We need a war room," Alexia declares, turning her back on the blueprint. "Somewhere secure. Somewhere without broadcasters tripping over cables."
"Conference Room 4," you say immediately. "Third floor, administrative wing. It has no windows, reinforced doors, and a direct line to the catering kitchen. Follow me."
Ten minutes later, the entire starting lineups for Arsenal and Barcelona plus a few key substitutes are crammed into a conference room. The rival squads sit on opposite sides of the table, glaring at each other as if the Champions League trophy is sitting right in the middle.
You stand at the head of the table drawing a map of the stadium’s lower levels on a whiteboard.
There's a knock at the door. Daniel pokes his head in, looking terrified. He’s pushing a catering cart loaded with drinks.
"Um, YN?" Daniel squeaks, looking at the two most famous football teams in the world glaring at him. "I brought the... the refreshments you demanded?"
"Thank you, Daniel. Leave the cart, save yourself," you say without turning around.
Daniel practically sprints away, abandoning the cart in the doorway.
You walk over to the cart and grab the first cup.
"Alright, listen up," you say, sitting a pepsi down the table. It slides and stops exactly in front of Leah .
Leah blinks, looking down at it. "That’s... that’s exactly right."
"Katie," you say, grabbing a black coffee and sliding it down the left side. "Black. Two shots of espresso. Enough caffeine to kill a small horse."
Katie grabs the cup, takes a sip, and grins. "She’s good."
"Kika," you say, sliding a Energy drink to Kika.
You move down the line, sliding drinks with the precision of a Vegas blackjack dealer. You don't pause. You don't look at labels. You just know.
The room is silent except for the sliding of cups. The initial skepticism is rapidly evaporating, replaced by a slightly disturbed awe.
Finally, you reach the last cup on the cart.
You pick it up, walk over to the Barcelona side of the table, and place it gently in front of Alexia.
Alexia looks at the cup, then looks up at you.
"How?" she asks quietly.
"Like I said," you reply, leaning against the edge of the table. "I've been here a while. I know everything about this day. I know that at 11:00 AM, Mapi is going to accidentally lock herself in a bathroom stall. I know that at 2:15 PM,Pere is going to spill coffee on his notes."
"I know this day," you say, your voice hardening as you look around the room. " So. Let's talk weapons."
You walk back to the whiteboard and uncap a black marker.
"Katie," you say. "You asked what we have. The answer is anything not bolted down. I have access to the stadium maintenance closets, the groundskeeper's sheds, and the catering kitchens. We need to improvise."
"Improvise?" Leah asks, looking alarmed. "You want us to fight trained killers with mops?"
"I fought them with a mop in loop fourteen," you say deadpan. "It did not go well. No, we're going to be smarter than that. We need crowd control, traps, and blunt force."
You start writing on the board.
"The groundskeepers have high-pressure water cannons used for cleaning the stands. If we hook those up to the hot water lines in the locker rooms."
Aitana leans forward. "Scalding water. I like it. But they have guns. They'll just shoot us from a distance."
"Not if they can't see us," you counter. "We raid the pyrotechnics stash for the trophy ceremony. Smoke grenades. Flares."
"Oh, brilliant," Katie says, slamming her hands on the table. "I call the flare guns! I've always wanted to shoot a flare gun indoors!"
"No one is giving Katie a flare gun," Leah says immediately, massaging her temples again. "She’ll burn the stadium down before the mercenaries even arrive."
"She’s right, Katie," you say. You point to a section on the whiteboard labeled SPORTS EQUIPMENT. "I have eighty practice balls, three ball launchers, and the T-shirt cannons. If we crank the PSI on the T-shirt cannons, they can launch a rolled-up XXL jersey with enough force to crack ribs."
The room falls silent again.
"Okay, let's keep it simple," you say, wiping the football diagrams off the whiteboard with the sleeve of your jacket. "No more talk about formations or defensive lines. This isn't a match. This is Home Alone on steroids. We need traps, we need distractions, and we need to hit them hard."
You draw a stick figure of a mercenary and draw a giant X over him.
"We funnel them into the loading dock," you continue. "Once they're inside, we hit the lights. Total darkness. Then, Mapi, Aitana, you're on pyrotechnics. You pop the ceremony smoke canisters in the vents. We blind them. Then, the T-shirt cannons and the high-pressure water hoses go off."
Katie stands up, pushing her chair back with a loud screech. "Right, I need a wee. Do not assign me to anything boring while I'm gone. If I don't get to hit someone with something heavy, I'm going to riot."
"Noted," you say, watching her march out of the conference room.
The door clicks shut behind her. Leah immediately leans forward, resting her head on the table.
"We're all going to jail," Leah groans. "If we survive, UEFA is going to ban us for life, and then we're going to a Swiss prison."
"We are not going to prison," Alexia says. She looks up at you. "So we blind them. We soak them. Then what? They still have assault rifles. A wet man with a gun is still a man with a gun."
"That's where the element of surprise comes in," you say, tapping the whiteboard. "They are elite mercenaries. They are expecting armed guards, local police, maybe the military. They are not expecting athletes to drop from the ceiling with fire extinguishers and modified sporting equipment. We overwhelm them before they can even pull the trigger."
"I like it," Mapi says, grinning wickedly. "It’s completely insane, but I like it."
"We'll need to barricade the upper VIP doors," you add, pointing to the higher levels. "If even one of them slips past the loading dock, they have the high ground. I need someone strong to stack the catering tables against the—"
*BZZZ-CRACK.*
A loud, terrifying electrical snap echoes through the room.
Everyone jumps. You whip your head toward the door.
Katie is standing in the doorway. In her right hand, she is holding a stun gun. She casually pulls the trigger again.
*BZZZ-CRACK.* Blue electricity arcs between the metal prongs.
The entire room stares at her in stunned silence.
Leah lifts her head off the table, her eyes wide with absolute horror. "Who the fuck gave Katie a taser?!"
"I found it," Katie says, looking entirely too pleased with herself.
"You found it?!" you shout, your security instincts flaring up. "Where?!"
"In a locker downstairs," Katie shrugs, admiring the blue sparks. "Some guard left it next to his boots. Finders keepers."
"Katie, put that down before you electrocute yourself!" Leah demands, standing up.
"Relax, I know how to use it," Katie says, pointing it at a potted plant in the corner of the room. "Watch."
"No, do not—" you start.
*BZZZ-CRACK.*
Katie lunges forward and tases the ficus. The voltage scorches the leaves instantly.
"Beautiful," Katie whispers, her eyes shining.
Alexia slowly turns to look at you, one eyebrow raised. "I think we found our frontline assault."
"God help us all," you mutter, rubbing your temples. "Alright. Fine. Katie gets the taser. Let's go build some traps."
Principles and Pacifiers (Alessia Russo/Leah Williamson Baby! Reader)
Y/N has feelings about her beloved pacifier being taken away, even if it is for her own good.
The decision had been made by the pediatrician at Y/N's one-year check-up, delivered in the calm, practical tone of someone who gave this particular piece of advice several times a week and understood it was not going to land well.
"Before eighteen months," she'd said. "The sooner the better, honestly. The longer you leave it the more attached they get."
Y/N had been sitting on the examination table at the time, pacifier in her mouth, looking at the pediatrician with the focused assessment she gave to all new faces. The pediatrician had smiled at her. Y/N had smiled back around the pacifier—the gummy, four-toothed smile that she deployed when she wanted someone to understand she was a person of considerable charm.
It had not saved her.
"She's very attached to it," Leah had said, which was the understatement of the year. Y/N's relationship with the pacifier—the specific one, the green one with the small lion on the shield, not the blue one or the yellow one or any of the three replacement green ones they'd bought when they thought they'd lost the original—was not casual. It was not the relationship of a baby who liked a pacifier. It was the relationship of someone who had found a specific object that improved life significantly and had absolutely no intention of discussing its removal.
"They all are," the pediatrician had said. "It won't be fun. A few days and she'll forget about it."
Leah and Alessia had looked at each other over Y/N's head.
A few days was, in the pediatrician's world, a neutral descriptor. In Y/N's world, a few days was an eternity, and Y/N's world was the world they all lived in.
They'd agreed on a date. They'd discussed the approach—cold turkey was apparently better than gradual reduction, which sounded, to Leah, like something someone said who was not going to be in the house when it happened. They'd psyched themselves up for it in the specific way you psyched yourself up for things that were necessary and bad.
And then England camp had come up.
Leah had looked at the calendar. Then at Alessia. "We could wait until after camp," she'd said.
"The pediatrician said before eighteen months," Alessia had said.
"She'll be fourteen months at camp. That's before eighteen months."
"We said we'd do it," Alessia had said. "If we don't do it now we'll find another reason to wait. And then another."
Leah had looked at the calendar again. At the camp dates. At the squad she was going to be spending the week with.
"They're going to hate us," she'd said.
"They'll understand," Alessia had said, which was either optimistic or naive, and they would not know which until it happened.
The pacifier was last seen at six forty-five on the Monday morning of camp.
Y/N had it in her mouth in the car, which was standard—the pacifier came out for meals and went back in and lived in her mouth for most of the rest of the time with the comfortable permanence of something that had always been there and would always be there. She was content in the car seat, the lion on her lap, the pacifier doing its work, watching the journey with the alert interest she brought to car travel now that she was upright enough to see things properly.
She was, Leah thought, very happy.
She was about to be significantly less happy.
"We do it when we arrive," Alessia said, from the passenger seat.
"We could do it tonight," Leah said. "When she's tired. She might not—"
"We've been through this," Alessia said. "If she's tired it's worse. We do it at the start of the day when she's got energy and people around her and things to distract her."
"The people around her are going to experience the consequences of our decision."
"They'll be fine."
"Alessia."
"They love her," Alessia said. "They'll help."
Leah looked in the rearview mirror. Y/N looked back at her with the pacifier, with the lion, with the expression of someone who was having a perfectly good morning and expected this to continue.
"I'm sorry," Leah said quietly, to the mirror.
Y/N blinked at her. Entirely unbothered. No idea.
They arrived at camp at quarter past nine.
Y/N's arrival at camp was always an event—the dressing room or the corridor or wherever the squad had coalesced would reorient itself around her in the way it always did, the gravity of her presence pulling people in. Today was no different. They came through the main entrance and Lotte was already there—Lotte was always there—and the smile she had for Y/N arrivals was already on her face.
"She's here," Lotte said, reaching for her.
Y/N reached back—the transfer reach, the approval, the come-here—and Lotte took her and Y/N settled on her hip with the green pacifier and the lion and the contentment of someone arriving somewhere they liked.
"She looks great," Lotte said. "She's gotten so—she's taller, isn't she? She's taller than last camp."
"She's walking everywhere now," Leah said, which was true. The walking had taken over from the crawling almost completely since the London Colney morning, had become Y/N's primary mode within a week and then her only mode, the crawling set aside with the decisive efficiency she brought to outgrown things.
"She's walking so well," Lotte said, watching Y/N look around the entrance corridor with the inventory expression. "She's going to be running by—"
"Don't," Leah said.
Lotte looked at her. Then at Alessia. She had the instinct, which she'd developed over a year of paying attention, that something was different this morning. "What's happening?"
Leah and Alessia exchanged a look.
"We're taking the pacifier away," Alessia said.
Lotte looked at Y/N. At the green pacifier in Y/N's mouth. At Y/N, who was looking at the corridor, unaware, perfectly happy.
"When?" Lotte said.
"Now," Alessia said.
Lotte looked at them both for a moment with an expression that was difficult to read—somewhere between sympathy and the specific look of someone who was already calculating exit routes. "Okay," she said. "Do you want me to—should I—"
"Hold onto her," Leah said. "If she'll let you. After."
Lotte looked at Y/N again. "I'll do my best," she said, which was an honest answer and therefore not as reassuring as it could have been.
Alessia reached over and took the pacifier out of Y/N's mouth.
Smoothly. Quickly. The way you did it—not slowly, not hesitating, because the pediatrician had said decisive and they had both taken notes.
Y/N went still.
The particular stillness of someone who has just experienced something and has not yet processed what it means. She looked at the space where the pacifier had been—not at Alessia, not at Leah, just at the air in front of her mouth, as if the pacifier might still be there if she checked carefully enough.
It wasn't.
She looked at Alessia. At the pacifier in Alessia's hand. Back at Alessia.
Her face did something complicated.
"We're going to be brave," Alessia said, in the tone she used when she was explaining something to Y/N directly, the tone that respected Y/N's capacity to understand the general shape of a situation even if not every specific word. "The pacifier is—we're going to try without it. You're one now. You're a big girl"
Y/N looked at her.
Then she looked at Leah.
Then she looked at the pacifier in Alessia's hand.
Then—
The sound that came out of Y/N Williamson-Russo was not a cry, exactly, in the sense that it was not the cry of someone in pain or afraid or urgently needing comfort. It was something more specific than that. It was the sound of someone who had understood exactly what had happened, who had processed it completely, and who was now communicating their position on it in the clearest possible terms.
It was, in short, outrage.
Pure, focused, one-year-old outrage, delivered at a volume that suggested she had been conserving this capacity for exactly such an occasion.
Lotte's arms tightened around her instinctively. Y/N did not want Lotte's arms. She wanted—she looked at Leah, arms out, the transfer reach—
Leah reached for her.
Y/N looked at her.
The arms went down.
The look Y/N gave Leah in that moment was one that Leah would not forget for some time. It was a look that contained, in the compressed language of a one-year-old who had spent her life developing increasingly sophisticated means of communication, a complete and thorough assessment of the situation and Leah's role in it. It said: you knew. You were in the car. You looked at me in the mirror and you said sorry and I didn't know what you were apologizing for and now I do and I would like you to understand that I understand.
It said, very clearly: no.
"She's not coming to you," Lotte said, in the tone of a reporter describing a natural disaster. Accurate, but pained.
"I can see that," Leah said.
Y/N was crying—properly now, not just the outrage announcement but the real version, the tears—and she had turned her face into Lotte's neck and was holding on with both hands in the way she held on when she wanted to stay somewhere, the grip that was decisive rather than desperate.
"She's—she wants to stay with me," Lotte said. There was something in her voice that was very carefully not triumphant and also not entirely successful at this.
"She doesn't want her mums," Alessia said. She sounded calm. She looked calm. Leah had lived with Alessia long enough to know that the calm and the actual internal state did not always correspond.
"She'll come around," Lotte said.
Y/N, against Lotte's neck, produced a sound that communicated what she thought of this assessment.
The team room.
In the team room, there were people, and people meant witnesses, and witnesses meant the news spread with the efficiency that news always spread at camp, which was immediately and comprehensively and with editorial additions.
Georgia heard about it before she saw Y/N. Keira told her, in the corridor, in the economy of Keira's language: "Pacifier's gone. She's furious. Not going to her mums."
"She's—" Georgia started.
"Furious," Keira confirmed.
Georgia had arrived in the team room to find the evidence of this firsthand.
Y/N was on the big sofa between Lotte and Lauren James, because Lauren had arrived and Y/N had immediately reached toward her and Lauren had accepted her and now she was there, going between the two of them with the slightly chaotic energy of someone who was very upset and was managing it by distributing herself across as many people as possible.
Leah and Alessia were on the other sofa. Three feet away. Looking at their daughter.
Y/N had noticed them. She had looked at Leah with the look—the one from the corridor, the I understand exactly what you did and I have not forgotten—and then she had turned her face into Lauren's shoulder with a definitiveness that was, objectively, quite impressive for someone who was twelve months old.
"Oh," Georgia said, taking in the full situation.
"Georgia," Y/N said.
Or not said—produced a G sound that was in the direction of Georgia's name, the babbled consonants that were developing into something increasingly specific, that everyone who knew her had learned to parse. She had her arms out toward Georgia.
Georgia looked at Leah.
Leah made a gesture. Go ahead.
Georgia sat on the sofa and Y/N launched herself across Lauren's lap toward her and Georgia caught her and Y/N grabbed her face with both hands—the checking, the confirming—and then buried herself against Georgia's shoulder and made the sounds of someone who had been very wronged and was telling the relevant party about it.
"I heard," Georgia said. "I know. It's not fair."
"It is fair," Alessia said, from the other sofa. "It's developmentally appropriate and the pediatrician recommended it and—"
Y/N looked at Alessia.
The look.
Alessia stopped talking.
"Don't make eye contact," Keira said, appearing in the doorway. She said it with the tone of someone advising on a tactical situation, which was essentially what it was.
"She's my daughter," Alessia said. "I'm not going to avoid eye contact with my own—"
Y/N maintained the look.
Alessia looked at the ceiling.
"Smart," Keira said.
The first hour was the worst hour, or so Leah told herself repeatedly, because it had to get better at some point and believing that required assigning the worst to an early period and declaring it over.
Y/N moved through the squad with the desperate energy of someone who had been catastrophically betrayed by her primary caregivers and was now assembling a coalition of alternative support. She went from Georgia to Lauren to Lotte—Lotte had come back into the rotation and Y/N had accepted her with the fullness of someone consolidating allies—and then to Keira, who received her with the specific economy of someone who understood the gravity of what had happened and was taking it seriously.
"No pacifier," Keira said, to Y/N, in the tone of someone confirming the terms of a grievance.
Y/N looked at her. Made a sound that was confirmation and complaint simultaneously.
"I know," Keira said.
"She knows it's gone," Leah said, from the sofa. "She's not confused about it. She just—she's angry."
"She's very angry," Lauren said, who had been watching Y/N work through her network with the expression of someone witnessing a logistical operation.
"She keeps looking at us," Alessia said. Not with the plea of parents wanting their child back, but with the observation of someone cataloguing data. "She's tracking where we are."
This was accurate. Y/N, despite her strategic positioning among the squad, kept looking at Leah and Alessia. Not warmly. Not with the transfer reach or the face-confirming gesture or any of the expressions she used for people she was pleased to see. She looked at them with the steady, communicative gaze of someone who needed them to understand that they had done this and she knew they had done this and she was not going to pretend otherwise.
"She's telling you she's angry," Georgia said. "She's not going to not tell you. She's very honest."
"She's one," Leah said. "She shouldn't be able to hold a grudge with this level of precision."
"She's been doing everything with this level of precision since she was seven months old," Georgia said. "Why would grudges be different?"
Y/N, currently in Keira's lap, looked at Leah again. Held the look for three full seconds. Then looked away.
"She's punishing you," Lotte said.
"I know," Leah said.
"Intentionally."
"I know."
"She's one year old and she's punishing you intentionally and it's working," Lotte said, with the gentle wonder of someone watching something extraordinary unfold.
"I'm aware," Leah said.
Alessia tried at twenty past ten.
She crossed the room—Y/N was with Georgia again, had cycled back to Georgia in her rotation, which was becoming: Georgia, Lauren, Lotte, Keira, Georgia—and she crouched down in front of the sofa where Georgia was sitting with Y/N on her knee.
"Tesoro," Alessia said, in the Italian, the soft one. "Come here."
Y/N looked at her.
The look had evolved slightly from the first one. The first look had been pure outrage. This one had something else in it—something that was not softening, exactly, because Y/N was not yet ready to soften, but that was more complicated than outrage. The look of someone who wanted to go to the person in front of them and was choosing not to on principle, which required active work to sustain.
"Come here," Alessia said again. "I know you're angry. You can be angry. Come here anyway."
Y/N looked at her for a long moment.
Then she turned her face into Georgia's shoulder.
"She's reconsidering," Georgia murmured. "But she's not ready."
"She's going to make her work for it," Lauren said, from the other side of the sofa.
"Good," Keira said, from the armchair, which made everyone look at her. "She should work for it. Y/N's allowed to be upset. She's allowed to need time."
Alessia looked at Keira.
"That's not—I'm not suggesting you did something wrong," Keira said, with the precision she brought to all clarifications. "You made the right call. She's allowed to feel how she feels about it anyway."
"She is," Alessia said. She looked at Y/N, still in Georgia's shoulder, still choosing not to come. "She really is."
She stood up and went back to the other sofa.
Y/N, from Georgia's shoulder, watched her go.
"She watched you walk away," Georgia said, quietly, to Alessia's back.
Alessia sat down beside Leah. "I know," she said.
Lucy arrived at the team room at half ten having been in a phone call, took one look at the situation—Y/N in Lauren's lap, Leah and Alessia on the other sofa, the geography of it immediately legible—and said: "Pacifier?"
"How did you know?" Leah said.
"You told me last week you were thinking about doing it at camp," Lucy said. "And also she's on that sofa and you're on this one and she keeps looking at you like you've personally offended her."
"She's very expressive," Alessia said.
"She's very Leah," Lucy said, sitting down.
"People keep saying that," Leah said.
"People keep being right about it," Lucy said. She looked at Y/N, who had registered her arrival and was now doing the assessment. "Hi, you. I heard about the pacifier."
Y/N looked at her.
Then at Leah.
Then back at Lucy.
"I know," Lucy said. "It's a lot." She held out her hand and Y/N—with the dignity of someone deciding to extend trust on a limited basis—reached toward her and took two of Lucy's fingers in her small hand and held them.
"She's doing the check thing," Lotte said.
"She's been doing it all morning," Lauren said.
"She needs the constants," Leah said, which was what had been said about the teething camp, which felt like both a long time ago and exactly the same situation. "When something changes she needs to confirm the things that haven't."
"The pacifier was a constant," Georgia said.
"A very important constant," Leah said. "She's had it since she was a hours old. That's—she doesn't remember not having it."
"And now she doesn't have it," Keira said.
"And now she doesn't have it," Leah agreed.
Y/N, who had released Lucy's fingers and was now sitting in Lauren's lap looking at the room with the expression of someone conducting a review of available options, looked at Leah.
Leah looked back at her.
Y/N's lip wobbled.
Not the angry wobble—the other one. The one that was underneath the anger, the one that had been there since the beginning of the morning, that the outrage had been sitting on top of.
"Oh," Georgia said, very quietly.
Y/N's lip wobbled again. She looked at Leah with the look—not the grudge look this time, not the I understand exactly what you did look—a different one. The one that was just her, just the specific person she was under all the performing and the checking and the precision, the one that was small and tired and wanted something familiar and didn't have it.
Leah stood up.
Y/N looked at her. The arms didn't come up—she wasn't ready, was still in the not-going-to-her place—but the look had changed, and Leah had been reading her for twelve months and she knew the difference.
She crossed the room and crouched in front of Lauren's lap. At Y/N's level. Not reaching for her, not taking her—just there.
"Hi," she said, in the nighttime voice.
Y/N looked at her.
"I know," Leah said. "I know it's not fair. I know you miss it."
Y/N made a sound. Smaller than the morning's sounds. More honest.
"It's going to be okay," Leah said. "I promise it's going to be okay. Not today, maybe. But it will be."
Y/N looked at her for a long moment. The assessment—the one she'd been running since she was twelve hours old, since that first look in the hospital, the one that had never really stopped, just got quieter as the result became obvious.
Then, slowly, with the careful deliberation of someone who was not fully conceding but was making a significant gesture, Y/N leaned forward.
Not the full transfer. Not coming to her. Just—leaning. Her small forehead against Leah's forehead, the contact, the confirmation, the same thing from both sides.
The room was very quiet.
"There," Georgia said, barely audible. "There she is."
Leah stayed still. Didn't reach for her, didn't pull her in, just held the contact and let Y/N dictate the terms.
After a moment, Y/N sat back. Looked at Leah with the expression that was—not forgiven. Not yet. But something.
Then she looked at Lauren, on whose lap she was still sitting, and held out a hand toward the lion, who had been set aside at some point in the morning and needed to be retrieved, and Lauren handed him over, and Y/N clutched him and looked at the room and did not blow a raspberry, which would have been too much like normal, but she looked at the room.
"Progress," Keira said.
"Marginal progress," Lotte said.
"Marginal is still progress," Lucy said.
The training session was at eleven, which meant Leah and Alessia had to go to the pitch and Y/N had to be with someone who was not on the pitch. This arrangement had worked for months, the rotation of the squad and the staff, but today it had a different quality because Y/N was not her usual self and everyone involved was aware of this.
Esme Morgan had a lighter session today—she was managing something minor, nothing serious, a precautionary reduction in load—and had volunteered without being asked for Y/N duty.
"She'll be alright with me," Esme said.
"She might not want us to go," Leah said.
They both looked at Y/N, who was in Esme's arms and who was, in fact, looking at Leah with a complicated expression.
"She wants you not to go," Esme said, accurately reading the expression. "But she's not going to tell you that. She's still on principle."
"She's one," Leah said.
"She's very principled," Esme said.
Leah looked at Y/N. "We're going to the pitch," she said, directly, because she had learned that direct was always better. "You're staying with Auntie Esme. We'll be back."
Y/N looked at her. At the pacifier that was no longer there. At Leah.
Then she put her face in Esme's neck.
Not—not the angry way. The other way. The way she'd leaned her forehead against Leah's earlier. The way that was not the grudge but was underneath it, the tiredness and the missing of the familiar thing.
Leah pressed a quick kiss to the top of her head. Y/N didn't pull away.
"Be back at lunch," Leah said, to Esme.
"We'll be fine," Esme said, rubbing Y/N's back in the circular motion, the one that had always worked. "Go."
Leah went.
She looked back once, from the doorway.
Y/N was watching her go with one eye from Esme's shoulder. The expression on her face was the most complicated thing Leah had seen from her in a year of very complicated expressions.
It said: I'm still angry. But come back.
"I'm coming back," Leah said, to the doorway, to the eye.
Y/N turned her face further into Esme's neck.
Leah went to training.
What happened during the training session, relayed to Leah and Alessia at lunch through multiple sources with slightly varying accounts that they had to triangulate into a coherent picture:
Y/N had been, according to Esme, reasonably manageable for the first twenty minutes. She had not been happy. She had made her feelings about the morning known in a sustained and specific way. But she had been in the range of Esme's competence and had allowed herself to be walked around the corridor and then brought to the team room where Ella Toone had been doing video review.
Ella Toone had made several faces at Y/N, which had not received the usual enthusiastic response but had received a look that Ella described, in her account to Leah, as "more thoughtful than normal. Like she was watching to see if I knew. About the pacifier."
"She wasn't judging you," Leah said.
"She absolutely was," Ella said. "She was deciding if I was on her side."
"What did you do?"
"I told her it sounded really difficult," Ella said. "And that her mums were doing the right thing but that didn't make it less hard. And she looked at me for a long time and then she leaned toward me."
"She came to you?"
"She decided I was trustworthy," Ella said, with the satisfaction of someone who had passed an evaluation they had not expected to face.
The more chaotic section of the morning, according to Esme, had been when Jess Carter arrived.
Jess Carter had not been told about the pacifier before she arrived at the team room. She had arrived with the cheerful energy of someone looking forward to a mid-morning break, had seen Y/N in Esme's arms, had said "hi, love, how are you," and Y/N had looked at her with the look and produced a sound that communicated the full situation in one sustained expression.
"She told me," Jess said, in her account. "Everything. All of it. The whole morning. She was very thorough."
"She was telling everyone," Esme said. "She told anyone who came through."
"She needed people to know," Ella said. "She was building her case."
The case had been built, by ten past eleven, across approximately six members of the England squad, all of whom had received Y/N's account of events and had responded with varying degrees of sympathy and practical support. The practical support had involved, according to Esme's account:
Jess Carter finding a new texture for Y/N to chew on—a clean silicone wristband that Jess had been wearing, offered and accepted as a legitimate substitute for the pacifier, which was not ideal but was not a pacifier and therefore fell outside Alessia's specific prohibition.
Ella Toone walking Y/N around the corridor three times because the movement helped and Y/N had indicated, through the pointing gesture she'd developed since she started walking, that she wanted to go places.
And the arrival of Alex Greenwood, who had finished her session early and had found Y/N in the corridor in Ella's arms and had said: "Is this the pacifier situation?" and Y/N had looked at her with the look and Alex had said, completely seriously: "That sounds incredibly difficult and I want you to know I think you're handling it very well," and Y/N had stared at her for a full five seconds and then reached toward her.
"She wanted me specifically," Alex said, in her account, which she delivered with the careful precision she brought to all reporting. "I want that noted."
"It's noted," Leah said.
"She came to me and she held my collar and she didn't cry," Alex said. "For about ten minutes she just—held my collar."
"She does that when she needs to feel something solid," Leah said.
"I know," Alex said. "I held very still."
Lunch.
Leah and Alessia came off the pitch at twelve thirty and went directly to the canteen, because the session had been good but lunch was not the point of the day today. The point of the day today was the one-year-old who had been without her pacifier for five hours and forty-five minutes and who was not, by anyone's account, happy about this.
Y/N was in the canteen.
She was in Alex's arms, which was where she'd apparently been for the past hour, and she was eating banana—Jess Carter had acquired banana from somewhere—with the focused application of someone for whom eating was at least a reliable pleasure even on a day that was otherwise going badly.
She looked up when Leah and Alessia came in.
The look was back.
Slightly less intense than the morning version—the edge of it had worn down, which was either improvement or exhaustion, and it was difficult to tell which. But it was there. The I know what you did and I remember.
"Hi," Leah said.
Y/N looked at her. Then at the banana. Then at Leah.
"Can we sit down?" Leah said, to Alex, to the table, to the general situation.
"Please," Alex said, with the tone of someone who had been holding a one-year-old for an hour and was very fond of said one-year-old and also would not say no to some assistance.
They sat. The table was Alex and Jess Carter and Ella Toone and now Leah and Alessia, which meant the people Y/N had been deploying throughout the morning were now all in the same place, which Y/N appeared to find satisfactory—she looked around the table with the inventory expression, confirming everyone's presence, before returning to the banana.
"How is she?" Leah said, to the table.
"She's been communicating her feelings effectively," Jess said. "She told everyone."
"She kept looking at the door," Alex said. "The whole time you were at training. Every time someone came through she looked."
"She was checking," Leah said.
"She was checking when you'd come back," Ella said.
Y/N, following this conversation about her with the attention she always brought to conversations about her, looked at Leah. The look had shifted again—not the grudge look, not the forehead-lean look, something in between. The look of someone who was still angry and also very tired.
"Nap after lunch," Leah said.
Y/N continued to look at her.
"She usually naps with the pacifier," Alessia said, quietly, to Leah.
Leah knew. She had been thinking about this all through training, the specific problem of the nap, which had always been a pacifier moment—the settling into sleep, the comfort of it, the particular way Y/N had always gone down with the green lion pacifier and her lion and the circle on her back. Without the pacifier, the nap was going to be—
It was going to be a project.
"We'll manage," Leah said.
Y/N held out the last piece of banana toward Leah.
Leah looked at it. The offering. The same thing she'd done at London Colney when she'd given the lion—sharing with people she wanted to acknowledge, people she was working something out with.
"Thank you," Leah said, taking it carefully.
Y/N watched her eat it.
Then she held out her arms toward Leah.
The transfer reach. The come-here. The first time all morning—the first time since the corridor, since the pacifier had been removed.
Leah reached for her immediately, without hesitation, and Y/N came to her and settled against her chest with the weight of someone who has been somewhere else all morning and has decided, on balance, to come home, at least temporarily, under the terms she has decided are acceptable.
She put both hands in Leah's collar.
She did not look up at her.
She was still angry. She was making this clear. The collar-grip was not forgiveness, it was proximity, it was the acknowledgment of a constant while maintaining the position.
"There she is," Georgia said, from the doorway of the canteen, where she had arrived with the timing that suggested she'd been watching for this moment.
"She came to me," Leah said. Not triumphant. Just—something.
"She was always going to come to you," Georgia said. "She just needed to do it on her own terms."
Y/N, in Leah's arms, maintaining the collar-grip, looked at Georgia over Leah's shoulder with an expression that communicated: this is conditional and I want that noted.
"Noted," Georgia said, to Y/N directly.
The nap.
The nap was, as anticipated, a project.
They took Y/N to the room—Leah carried her, Y/N allowing this under the established temporary terms—and Alessia set up the travel cot and the room was dim and quiet and had all the components of nap time except the specific green pacifier that had been a component of nap time since Y/N was three weeks old.
Y/N knew it was missing.
She looked at Leah with the look—the specific one, the I know what you did—and then looked at the travel cot with the expression she reserved for sleep situations that were not going to go smoothly.
"I know," Leah said. "I know it's not there. It's not going to be there. But you can sleep. You've done it before."
Y/N looked at the travel cot.
"You sleep without it sometimes," Alessia said. "In the night, when you've spat it out and you don't wake up. You can sleep without it."
Y/N did not appear to find this argument compelling.
What followed was forty-five minutes of the specific effort that was the nap without the pacifier, which involved: the chair by the window, both of them taking turns because forty-five minutes was long and Y/N was not making it easy, the Italian from Alessia and the nighttime voice from Leah and the circle on the back and the lion who was present and clutched and was doing his best.
Y/N was furious about the nap. She made this known. She was not crying—or not only crying—she was specifically and pointedly communicating that this situation was unacceptable and that she held both her parents responsible.
She looked at Leah with the look while Leah was trying to settle her.
"I know," Leah said.
She looked at Alessia with the look while Alessia was trying.
"Lo so," Alessia said. I know.
She looked at both of them, together, from the travel cot during one of the attempts to put her down, with the look that incorporated both of them simultaneously, which she had not done before and which required a certain degree of binocular coordination that was impressive for someone who was twelve months old.
"She's looking at both of us at once," Leah said.
"She's maximizing the reach of the look," Alessia said.
"She's efficient," Leah said.
"She gets it from you," Alessia said.
"I don't—"
Y/N looked at them both.
They both stopped talking.
"Dormi," Alessia said, to Y/N. Sleep.
Y/N looked at her.
"Per favore," she added. Please.
Y/N looked at the lion. Then at the air where the pacifier wasn't. Then at Alessia.
Her eyes were heavy. The forty-five minutes was in her—the protest had taken energy and the energy was running low. She looked at Alessia with the look that was the tired version—still present, still communicating, but reduced by the simple mathematics of a one-year-old who had been awake for five hours and was one year old.
Alessia sat beside the travel cot and put her hand through the bars, not grabbing, just—present. Available.
Y/N looked at the hand.
She picked up the lion. Held him against her chest. Looked at Alessia's hand.
Then she put her small hand on top of Alessia's and lay down.
She was asleep in eight minutes.
Both of them sat by the travel cot for a moment after the breathing changed, both of them not moving.
"She held my hand," Alessia said, very quietly.
"She needed a constant," Leah said.
"I know." Alessia looked at Y/N sleeping—the specific peace of it, the way she looked when the work of being awake was done and what was left was just her, just the person she was when nothing was required of her. "She's still angry."
"She's asleep and still angry," Leah said.
"She'll be angry when she wakes up," Alessia said.
"I know."
"And tomorrow."
"And tomorrow," Leah agreed.
"But it'll be less," Alessia said. "Each day it'll be less."
"The pediatrician said a few days," Leah said.
"The pediatrician said a few days to forget about it," Alessia said. "That's different from forgiving us."
They looked at Y/N sleeping with her hand where Alessia's had been, with the lion, without the pacifier, in the room that was dim and quiet and theirs.
"We did the right thing," Alessia said.
"We did the right thing," Leah agreed.
Neither of them moved for another few minutes.
She woke up from the nap angry.
This was not surprising. She had gone to sleep angry and she was a person who was continuous with herself, who did not reset in the way that some babies reset between sleep and waking. She woke up with the look already in place, with the full recollection of the morning and the pacifier and exactly whose fault it was.
She looked at Leah, who was in the chair.
The look.
"Hi," Leah said.
The look continued.
"Did you sleep?"
The look did not acknowledge this question.
"She slept," Alessia said, from the bed where she'd been reading. "She slept well, actually. Two hours."
Y/N looked at Alessia. The look moved to her.
"You feel better," Alessia said, not as a question.
Y/N looked at her for a long moment. Then she stood up in the travel cot—she did this now, stood straight up in the cot, which had required a cot-rail adjustment—and held out her arms toward the door.
"She wants out," Leah said.
"She wants the squad," Alessia said.
Both of these were true, and both were the same thing.
The afternoon.
The afternoon was different from the morning in the way that afternoons after difficult mornings were sometimes different—not resolved, but shifted. The sharp edge of the outrage had softened into something more manageable, the way a wound stopped being acute and became instead the steady ache that was less dramatic but not nothing.
Y/N moved through the afternoon with the squad in the way she always moved through camp—visiting, checking, distributing herself—but today with a different quality. Less performance. More seeking.
She found Keira in the team room and went to her specifically, walked to her across the room with the walking that was still new enough to feel like an event even when it wasn't intended as one. She climbed onto the sofa beside her—she could do this, had worked out the mechanics in the first week of walking, the knee-up-first system—and sat beside Keira and leaned against her arm.
Keira looked down at her.
Y/N looked at the room.
"You're alright," Keira said. It was not a question.
Y/N made a sound.
"It's one day," Keira said. "Then two days. Then it'll just be how things are."
Y/N appeared to be processing this.
"Things change," Keira said. "You get used to the new way. It takes time but you get used to it."
Y/N looked at her. Then at the door. Leah and Alessia were not in the team room—they were giving her space, the specific space that said we're here but you don't have to come to us, you can come when you're ready.
"They did it because it's better for you," Keira said. "Not because it was easy for them."
Y/N looked at the door.
"Your mums are having a hard day too," Keira said. "Just so you know."
Y/N looked at Keira.
"Just so you know," Keira said again.
At four o'clock, Leah was in the corridor.
Not pacing—she wasn't pacing, she was walking at a measured pace with a specific destination, except she'd done this particular stretch of corridor three times in the past twenty minutes and it was possible these things were not entirely distinct.
Georgia found her on the third pass.
"She's with Lauren," Georgia said. "She's alright."
"I know she's alright," Leah said. "She's always alright."
"You're not alright," Georgia said.
"I'm fine."
"You've done this corridor three times."
"I'm thinking," Leah said.
"You're thinking in the corridor," Georgia said. "About what?"
Leah stopped walking. Looked at the wall. "She looks at me," she said. "Every time. This specific look—she knows it was us. She's not confused about it. She knows and she keeps—every time I come into the room she gives me the look and I—"
"You feel terrible," Georgia said.
"I feel—yes. I feel—it's the right thing. I know it's the right thing. The pediatrician said, and Alessia said, and logically I know that we—but she looks at me like I've—" Leah stopped. "She's one year old. She's had it for a year. That's her whole life. I took something from her that's been there for her whole life."
"And you gave her things that'll be there for her whole life too," Georgia said.
Leah looked at her.
"You," Georgia said, simply. "Alessia. Everything. Every time she needed settling or holding or someone to confirm the constants—that was you. That's been you for twelve months. The pacifier was twelve months. So were you."
Leah looked at the wall.
"She's going to be angry for a few days," Georgia said. "And then she's going to forget the pacifier and she's not going to forget you. That's the difference."
"She's not going to forget she was angry," Leah said.
"She's going to forget she was angry," Georgia said. "I promise. I've seen kids—I have nieces and nephews and cousins and I've seen—the things they're furious about at twelve months, they don't remember. But the people who were there?" Georgia shook her head. "They remember those."
Leah was quiet.
"Come on," Georgia said. "She's been asking for you."
"She hasn't—she's been with Lauren—"
"She keeps looking at the door," Georgia said. "Every five minutes. Looking at the door and then looking at Lauren. She's been doing it all afternoon." She paused. "She's waiting for you to come back."
"She's angry at me."
"She's angry at you and she wants you back," Georgia said. "Those two things are the same. That's what love looks like when you're one year old and you don't have words for it yet."
Leah looked at her.
"She wants her mum," Georgia said. "Both of them. She's been punishing you all day and she's tired of punishing you and she wants to come home."
Leah walked back to the team room.
Y/N was on Lauren's lap when Leah came in. She looked up—the look, still there, the look—and Leah didn't stop walking, came across the room and crouched down in front of Lauren's lap and was at Y/N's level and said:
"I know you're angry. You're allowed to be angry. I'm still here."
Y/N looked at her.
"I'm still here," Leah said. "I'm always still here. That part doesn't change."
Y/N looked at her for a long time. The assessment—the same one, always the same one, just updated with a year's worth of data that only ever reached one conclusion.
Then she held out the lion.
Not offering—not sharing in the banana sense. Holding him out like: hold this for me. Take this. I need my hands.
Leah took the lion, carefully.
Y/N reached toward her.
Both arms. The full transfer reach. The come-here.
Leah picked her up and Y/N put her face against Leah's neck and held on—both fists in her collar, the grip that was decisive and specific, the grip that was not temporary—and Leah held her back with both arms and the room was quiet in the particular way it went quiet when something that had been in suspension resolved.
"There," Lauren said softly.
Georgia, in the doorway, said nothing. She didn't need to.
Alessia appeared a moment later—she had known, had the instinct that she always had for the moments that mattered—and she came and put her hand on Y/N's back, the circle, and Y/N reached out her arm toward Alessia without lifting her face from Leah's neck, the one-armed reach that meant: you too. Both.
Alessia took her hand. Y/N's fingers closed around hers.
She held on.
Still angry. Probably still a little angry—Y/N was, as established, a person of principle and long memory. But holding on. Because that was the other thing she was, underneath the principle and the memory and the look: a person who knew where home was, even when she was angry with it.
Even when it had taken the pacifier.
That night.
The bedtime without the pacifier was long, which they had anticipated, and hard, which they had also anticipated, and contained moments of the look, which by now they were practiced at receiving and holding and not collapsing under.
But Y/N went to sleep.
Not easily. Not quickly. But she went.
Alessia did the chair and the Italian and the circle and Leah sat on the edge of the bed and watched and at some point Y/N stopped looking at the air where the pacifier wasn't and started looking at Alessia's face instead, which was different—which was the beginning of the adjustment, the beginning of the new thing.
She fell asleep holding Alessia's finger through the bars of the travel cot.
They sat in the quiet of the room afterward.
"She'll be angry tomorrow," Leah said.
"Probably," Alessia said.
"And the day after."
"Less," Alessia said. "Less each day."
"And then she'll forget it."
"She'll forget the pacifier," Alessia said. "She won't forget today."
"Is that—" Leah started.
"It's good," Alessia said. "She should remember today. She should remember that things she needed went away and it was hard and she got through it and we were there." She looked at the travel cot. "That's a good thing to know. That's one of the most useful things anyone can know."
Leah looked at Y/N sleeping—the rise and fall, the lion tucked in beside her, the small hand where Alessia's had been.
"She held on today," Leah said. "Even when she was angry. She kept—she gave Lauren the look. She gave Keira the look. She let them hold her but she kept checking where we were."
"She always knew where we were," Alessia said.
"She needed to know," Leah said.
"She always needs to know," Alessia said. "That's who she is. She's always going to need to confirm the constants. We've known that since the teething."
"Since before that," Leah said. "Since the beginning."
"Since the beginning," Alessia agreed.
"We're the constants," Leah said.
"We're the constants," Alessia said.
Outside, the camp was quiet. The England squad was in various states of end-of-day unwinding, some of them in rooms, some still in the corridor, some in the team room where Georgia was probably still on the sofa and Keira probably in the armchair.
All of them who had held Y/N today, received her look, passed her assessment, let her hold their collars and their hands and their faces—all of them part of the day Y/N would always have had, the day the pacifier went and the world did not end, the day the constants held.
"Sleep," Alessia said, to Leah.
"In a minute," Leah said.
Alessia got up from the chair by the travel cot and came to the bed and Leah lay down and Alessia lay beside her and outside Y/N slept without the pacifier for the first time in her life and was alright.
Better than alright.
She was herself, exactly herself, with the lion and the people and the hand-memory of the constants that had been there all day even when she was furious at them.
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may god bless the dinosaur that died to make the fossil fuel that was treated to become petrol in the car that took her mom to the hospital to give birth to her
The USWNT training facility had survived World Cup campaigns, Olympic preparations, and countless intense training sessions. What it wasn't prepared for was Y/N Y/M/N O'Hara-Morgan's newfound mobility.
"I still think this is a terrible idea," Alex said, eyeing the brightly colored push walker that Kelley was enthusiastically assembling in the hotel hallway. The plastic contraption was covered in buttons that played annoying jingles, and had wheels that Kelley had assured her were "totally safe for indoor use."
"She needs to practice," Kelley defended, snapping the last piece into place with a triumphant click. "The pediatrician said walking practice is important for her development."
"The pediatrician probably didn't mean in a hotel full of professional athletes preparing for a crucial match," Alex pointed out, but she was already softening. Y/N was bouncing excitedly in her arms, clearly recognizing the walker from home and eager to get her hands on it.
Y/N squealed and reached for the walker with grabby hands, her entire body wiggling with anticipation. "Dada! Dada!" she babbled excitedly—her word for pretty much everything she was excited about.
The moment her tiny hands gripped the walker's handle, Y/N was off like a shot. Well, more like off like a very determined turtle with turbo boosters. The walker's wheels squeaked against the hotel carpet as she pushed forward with the focused intensity of someone on a mission.
"Where is she going?" Alex asked, slightly panicked as Y/N picked up speed.
"I don't know, but she's committed to it," Kelley laughed, jogging after their daughter.
The Meditation Room Incident
The first victim of Y/N's walker rampage was Christen Press, who was attempting to do a meditation session in the hotel's designated quiet room. The peaceful atmosphere was shattered by the sound of squeaking wheels and off-key electronic music playing "The Wheels on the Bus."
Christen's eyes flew open just in time to see a pink walker burst through the door, propelled by a determined ten-month-old in a onesie covered in tiny soccer balls.
"Hiiii!" Y/N babbled proudly, coming to a stop right in front of Christen's meditation mat. She grinned up at her aunt, showing off her six tiny teeth.
"Hi, sweet girl," Christen said, unable to be annoyed despite her interrupted meditation. "That's quite the ride you've got there."
Y/N demonstrated by backing up and ramming the walker gently into Christen's knee, then dissolving into giggles. The walker's buttons played a victory jingle. "Bah!" she announced, smacking the walker handle.
"Oh no, she's discovered ramming," Kelley panted, appearing in the doorway with Alex right behind her. "That's new."
"She's very gentle about it," Christen observed as Y/N backed up and did it again, clearly delighted by this new game.
"Just wait," Alex said ominously.
The Hallway Adventures
After escaping the meditation room, Y/N set her sights on new territories. The hotel hallway stretched before her like a highway, and she was determined to explore every inch of it.
"Has anyone seen my room key?" Trinity Rodman's voice echoed from somewhere down the hall.
Y/N, hearing a familiar voice, immediately pivoted her walker with surprising agility and headed toward the sound. She found Trinity on her hands and knees, searching under a decorative console table.
"Tee tee!" Y/N announced, parking her walker directly behind Trinity. It was her attempt at "Trinity" and had stuck as the player's special nickname from the baby.
Trinity jumped, nearly hitting her head on the table. "Jesus, Y/N! You're like a ninja in that thing."
Y/N clapped her hands together and babbled something that sounded vaguely like agreement, bouncing in her walker.
"Right, I totally understand," Trinity agreed, giving up on her key search to admire Y/N's walker. "That's pretty cool. Can you do tricks?"
Y/N demonstrated by spinning in a circle, which resulted in her getting slightly tangled with the walker and needing Trinity's help to straighten out. But she was undeterred, immediately backing up and trying again. "Babababa!" she chattered, clearly proud of herself.
"She's got determination, I'll give her that," Trinity said as Kelley finally caught up, slightly out of breath.
"She's got her mom's stubbornness and my competitive spirit," Kelley panted. "It's a dangerous combination."
"Where's she going now?" Trinity asked as Y/N suddenly took off again, her walker wheels squeaking a rhythmic pattern against the carpet.
"Your guess is as good as mine," Kelley sighed, jogging after her daughter once more.
The Gym Discovery
The next stop on Y/N's tour was the hotel gym, where several players were getting in extra training. The automatic doors slid open just as Y/N reached them—impeccable timing that made it look like she'd planned it—and she rolled right in.
"Uh, guys?" Sam Coffey called out from the treadmill. "We have a visitor."
Sophia Smith looked up from her stretching to see Y/N pushing her walker determinedly toward the weight area, where Naomi Girma and Emily Fox were doing strength training.
"Oh no," Emily said, immediately recognizing the potential for disaster. "That's a lot of heavy equipment for a tiny human."
But Y/N wasn't interested in the weights. She'd spotted something far more entertaining: her reflection in the floor-to-ceiling mirrors. She parked her walker in front of the mirror and stared at herself with absolute fascination.
"Bah!" she said to her reflection, reaching out to touch the mirror.
Mirror Y/N didn't respond, which seemed to confuse her. She waved. Mirror Y/N waved back. This was clearly the most amazing thing that had ever happened. "Bababa!" she babbled excitedly, slapping the mirror with her palm.
"She's discovered mirrors," Naomi observed, smiling at the toddler's wonder. "This could take a while."
"Bébé!" Y/N announced, pointing at her reflection—one of her few clear words. Then, with the logic only a small child could follow, she backed her walker up and rammed it gently into the mirror, as if trying to reach the other baby.
"Okay, maybe we should redirect her before she breaks something," Emily Fox suggested, moving to intercept.
But Y/N had already lost interest, distracted by the rhythmic beeping of Sam's treadmill. She pushed her walker over to investigate, parking it dangerously close to the moving belt.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa!" Sam hit the emergency stop button and hopped off. "Y/N, that's not a toy for babies."
Y/N looked up at Sam with wide eyes, then pointed at the treadmill. "Dat?"
"That's a treadmill, but it's not for you, sweetie," Sam said, crouching down to Y/N's level.
Alex appeared in the doorway, having finally tracked down her wayward daughter. "Y/N Y/M/N! How did you even get in here?"
"The doors opened for her like she owned the place," Sophia reported, clearly amused. "I think she's magic."
"She's something," Alex muttered, scooping Y/N away from the exercise equipment. "Come on, troublemaker. Let's find a safer place for your racing."
Y/N whined in protest, reaching back toward the gym, but then caught sight of something shiny on Alex's jacket and was immediately distracted, grabbing at the zipper pull.
Restaurant Chaos
By lunchtime, word had spread through the team: Y/N was mobile, and she was chaos incarnate.
The hotel restaurant became her personal racetrack. The long aisle between tables was apparently designed specifically for walker racing, at least according to Y/N's logic. She zoomed back and forth, her light-up shoes flashing in tandem with the walker's light-up wheels, creating a disco effect that was both adorable and slightly headache-inducing.
"Coming through!" Kelley called out as Y/N nearly took out a server carrying a tray of drinks.
"Oh my god, she's like a tiny drunk driver," Lindsey Horan observed from her table, moving her legs just in time as Y/N careened past.
"Vroom!" Y/N contributed helpfully, which was apparently her interpretation of the sound things make when they go fast. She grinned widely at Lindsey as she passed, proud of her speed.
Alyssa, who had been quietly eating her lunch at a corner table, watched Y/N's chaotic path through the restaurant with growing amusement. Every few passes, Y/N would catch sight of her favorite aunt and change course slightly, as if making sure Alyssa was watching her impressive walker skills.
"She's showing off for you," Alex said, joining Alyssa at her table after one particularly dramatic turn that Y/N executed near the salad bar.
"I'm very impressed," Alyssa called out to Y/N, giving her a thumbs up.
Y/N's face lit up at the praise. She clapped her hands together, lost her grip on the walker momentarily, and bonked gently into a table leg. "Uh oh!" she said—her universal expression for when things went wrong.
"I think she needs a pit stop," Alyssa suggested, standing up and walking over to intercept the toddler. "Hey, speedster. Want to take a break and have some lunch with me?"
The offer of Alyssa's company was apparently more appealing than continued walker racing. Y/N abandoned her vehicle immediately, reaching up with grabby hands. "Lala!" It was her version of Alyssa's name, and the goalkeeper secretly loved it.
Alyssa lifted her easily, settling the toddler on her hip as they returned to the table. Kelley appeared with a small plate of cut-up chicken nuggets, apple slices, and the inevitable mac and cheese.
"She's been zooming for almost an hour straight," Kelley said, setting the plate down. "She's got to be hungry."
But getting Y/N to sit in a high chair when her walker was still visible across the restaurant proved challenging. She kept craning her neck to look at it, making distressed sounds and pointing.
"Walker stay," Alyssa assured her. "You can go back after lunch."
Y/N looked uncertain, babbling something that might have been a question, her little eyebrows furrowed with concern.
"I promise," Alyssa confirmed solemnly, holding out her pinky.
Y/N hooked her much smaller pinky around Alyssa's, sealing the deal even if she didn't fully understand the gesture. Only then did she settle down to eat, though she insisted on trying to feed Alyssa every third bite, as was her custom. "Lala!" she'd say, shoving a piece of chicken nugget toward Alyssa's mouth.
Rose Lavelle decided to get involved, positioning herself at one end of the aisle like a goalkeeper. "Come on, Y/N/N! Come get me!"
Y/N, having been released back to her walker after lunch, accepted the challenge immediately, pushing her walker with renewed vigor toward her Auntie Rose. She babbled excitedly as she went, a stream of "bababababa" that seemed to mean she was having the time of her life. At the last second, Rose scooped her up, walker and all, spinning them both around as Y/N shrieked with laughter.
"You're encouraging her," Alex called from across the restaurant, but she was smiling despite herself.
"Someone has to teach her proper attacking runs," Rose defended, setting Y/N back down and pointing her in a new direction. "Besides, look at her form. She's a natural."
"Her form is that of a drunk baby giraffe," Lindsey pointed out, but affectionately.
Tobin Heath wandered over, sipping her coffee. "I don't know, I see potential. She's got that unpredictable movement pattern that would confuse defenders."
"Are we seriously analyzing a toddler's walker technique?" Becky asked from her table, though she was fighting a smile.
"Absolutely," Tobin confirmed. "Look, she's got this wide stance for stability, but she's not afraid to commit to the turn. That's advanced stuff."
Y/N, completely unaware of the tactical discussion happening about her, had discovered that if she pushed the walker really fast and then lifted her feet, she could coast for a few seconds. The first time she tried it, several players gasped, afraid she'd wipe out. But she stuck the landing, put her feet back down, and looked around with an expression of pure delight. "Ooooh!" she cooed, impressed with herself.
"Oh no, she's discovered coasting," Kelley said, her mom-anxiety kicking in. "That's how kids get hurt."
"That's also how kids learn physics," Christen pointed out philosophically.
"I'd rather she learn physics in a few years when she's less likely to break bones," Kelley muttered.
Y/N attempted the coasting move again, this time with even more speed. She got about six feet before her feet touched down, and she immediately pumped her fist in the air—a gesture she'd clearly learned from watching her moms play. "Ahhhh!" she squealed in triumph.
"Yes, that was amazing!" several aunties chorused encouragingly.
This proved to be a tactical error, as Y/N's new trajectory led directly toward Vlatko, who was reviewing game footage on his tablet at a corner table.
"Coach, incoming!" Emily Sonnett shouted, but it was too late.
Y/N crashed gently into the coach's chair, looked up at him with her biggest smile, and announced, "Hi!" Then she pointed at his tablet with interest. "Dat?"
Vlatko looked down at the toddler, then at Alex and Kelley's mortified faces, then back at Y/N. His stern expression cracked into a reluctant smile. "Hello, Y/N. Excellent approach speed. We could use that kind of determination on the attack."
The entire restaurant erupted in laughter.
Vlatko turned the tablet screen to show her the paused game footage. "See? Soccer."
Y/N studied the screen with intense concentration for all of three seconds before making a dismissive sound and pushing her walker away to find more interesting pursuits. She'd spotted someone's water bottle and was much more interested in that.
"She's got opinions," Vlatko said dryly, returning to his work as the team dissolved into laughter again.
The post-lunch entertainment came when Pinoe had the brilliant idea to create a "drive-through" using chairs and a makeshift window made from a cardboard box.
"Welcome to McDonald's, can I take your order?" Pinoe said in an exaggerated customer service voice as Y/N pushed her walker up to the window.
Y/N babbled something enthusiastically, slapping the cardboard box.
"I'm sorry, our ice cream machine is broken," Pinoe deadpanned, which sent the older players into fits of laughter while the younger ones looked confused.
"That's a very specific McDonald's reference," Sophia said.
"If you know, you know," Pinoe replied sagely.
Y/N, unbothered by the ice cream situation, accepted a pretend bag of food from Pinoe and zoomed away to "eat" it at another table, which in reality meant she parked her walker and tried to feed pretend fries to anyone who would play along. "Num num!" she said, offering invisible food to Trinity, who played along perfectly.
"This is the best team bonding we've had in months," Crystal observed, watching Y/N make the rounds with her invisible fries.
"We should just make her the official camp entertainment coordinator," Emily Sonnett suggested.
"She already is, unofficially," Alex said, watching her daughter with a mixture of exhaustion and overwhelming love.
The Conference Room Olympics
The real chaos began when someone—later investigations would point to a conspiracy between Emily Sonnett and Lindsey Horan—suggested they should let Y/N "practice in a more open space."
That open space turned out to be the hotel's large conference room where the team was supposed to be having a film session.
"This is definitely a bad idea," Becky Sauerbrunn said as they cleared a path through the chairs.
"This is definitely a GREAT idea," Sonnett countered, already filming on her phone. "This is going to get so many likes on Instagram."
"We're not exploiting the baby for social media clout," Alex said firmly.
"We're not exploiting, we're documenting," Sonnett argued. "There's a difference. This is for posterity. Future generations need to witness this."
"Future generations like... next week?" Lindsey teased.
"Exactly! Next week me is going to want to remember this."
Y/N was released into the conference room like a tiny, adorable tornado. The open space was a revelation to someone who'd been navigating narrow hotel hallways. She pushed her walker in wide, gleeful circles, squealing with delight.
"Go Y/N!" Mal Pugh encouraged from the sidelines, where a group of players had formed an impromptu cheering section.
"This is better than film," Crystal Dunn declared, watching Y/N execute what could generously be called a turn (it was more of a controlled crash into a wall, followed by a redirect).
"Way better than watching us lose possession in the midfield for the hundredth time," Pinoe agreed.
The really entertaining part came when several players decided to create an "obstacle course" using their gym bags and shin guards. Y/N approached the challenge with the seriousness of someone competing for a gold medal, her little face scrunched up in concentration.
"Look at her form," Tobin deadpanned as Y/N carefully navigated around a duffel bag. "Beautiful technique. Really using those legs."
"Ten points for artistic impression," Ash Harris added as Y/N accidentally backed into a pyramid of water bottles, sending them scattering.
"Uh oh," Y/N said, looking at the scattered bottles. But before Alex or Kelley could rush over, she'd already moved on, unbothered by the chaos in her wake.
The obstacle course quickly evolved into a full team production. Rose and Mal started adding new challenges—a tunnel made from training bibs, a slalom course using water bottles, and what they called a "jump" which was really just a shin guard laid flat that Y/N had to push over.
"This is the USWNT Baby Olympics," Lindsey announced in her best sports commentator voice. "And here comes O'Hara-Morgan, approaching the tunnel obstacle. The crowd is on their feet!"
Y/N, feeding off the energy, pushed her walker toward the tunnel with determination. She had to crouch down to fit through it, which meant essentially crawling while pushing the walker, but she managed it, babbling triumphantly the whole way.
"AND SHE'S THROUGH! The judges are conferring, but that looked like a flawless execution to me!" Lindsey continued.
"Solid 9.5," Tobin declared, holding up a piece of paper with a hastily drawn "9.5" on it.
"I'm giving it a 10," Rose argued, holding up her own sign. "That was Olympic gold material."
Y/N clapped for herself, clearly understanding that everyone was celebrating her achievement, even if she didn't understand why.
The session was briefly interrupted when Y/N discovered that one of the wheels squeaked louder if she dragged it sideways. For a solid five minutes, the conference room was filled with the most obnoxious squeaking sound imaginable as she experimented with different angles and speeds, completely fascinated by the noise she could make.
"That's it, I'm filing a noise complaint," Pinoe joked, covering her ears.
"Against a baby?" Alyssa asked, amused.
"Against whoever invented that demon walker," Pinoe clarified.
"I think it was Kelley," Christen said innocently.
"I didn't invent it, I just bought it!" Kelley defended. "It had five-star reviews!"
"From who, people who hate their teammates?" Pinoe shot back.
Y/N, sensing she was the topic of conversation, pushed her walker over to the group and parked it right in front of Pinoe. She looked up at her aunt with big, innocent eyes and offered her sweetest smile.
"Okay, you're cute, I'll give you that," Pinoe conceded. "But that squeak is still annoying."
Y/N, as if understanding, deliberately dragged the wheel to make it squeak again, then giggled mischievously. "Eeeee!" she squealed, delighted with the noise.
"Oh, she knows exactly what she's doing," Becky observed. "That's not an accident, that's psychological warfare."
"She learned from the best," Kelley said proudly.
"That's not the compliment you think it is," Alex muttered.
But through it all, Alyssa had been keeping a close eye on Y/N, smiling at every wobbly turn and excited babble. She'd been sitting cross-legged on the floor, content to be a spectator to the chaos, but always tracking Y/N's movements like she tracked the ball during a match—with focus and careful attention.
So when Y/N suddenly stopped mid-squeak, looked around the room with those big eyes, and then spotted Alyssa across the conference room, the goalkeeper knew what was coming. Y/N's face lit up like she'd just discovered treasure, and she immediately changed course, pushing her walker with renewed determination toward her favorite aunt. "Lala! Lala!" she called out, her little voice urgent with excitement.
"There she is," Alyssa said warmly as Y/N parked her walker right in front of where Alyssa was sitting on the floor. "Come here, little speedster. Did you have fun with your races?"
Y/N abandoned her walker immediately, practically throwing herself into Alyssa's lap with the confidence of someone who knew exactly where they belonged. She settled against Alyssa's chest, her small body fitting perfectly in the curve of Alyssa's arms, thumb finding its way to her mouth as the excitement of the last hour suddenly caught up with her.
"Lala," Y/N mumbled contentedly around her thumb, her other hand clutching at Alyssa's training shirt.
"Yeah, I'm here, sweetheart," Alyssa murmured, automatically adjusting to hold Y/N more securely. "You did such good driving today."
Y/N yawned hugely, her little body relaxing completely into Alyssa's embrace. She made a soft, contented sound—not quite a word, just a sleepy hum.
"Getting tired?" Alyssa asked softly, already knowing the answer but giving Y/N a chance to respond.
Y/N shook her head against Alyssa's chest in denial, but her eyes were already drooping. Another yawn followed immediately after, completely undermining her protest.
"Sure you're not," Alyssa agreed, gently smoothing down Y/N's baby-fine hair, which had gotten slightly sweaty from all the activity. "Just resting your eyes a little bit, right?"
"Mmm," Y/N hummed, already halfway to dreamland. She made a little sound that might have been "stay" or might have just been sleepy babbling.
"I'm not going anywhere," Alyssa promised, pressing a soft kiss to the top of Y/N's head. "You can sleep right here."
Across the room, Alex and Kelley watched the familiar scene unfold with identical soft expressions. They'd seen it a hundred times—Y/N seeking out Alyssa when she needed comfort, stability, or just a safe place to rest. It never got old.
"Every single time," Kelley whispered to Alex. "She could have any lap in this room, and she always picks Alyssa."
"Can you blame her?" Alex whispered back. "Look how safe she feels."
Within minutes, Y/N was fast asleep, her breathing evening out into the gentle rhythm of deep sleep. Her walker sat abandoned in the middle of the floor like a forgotten toy car, its mission of chaos temporarily complete.
The team's attention shifted from obstacle courses to quietly gathering for the film session they were supposed to be having all along. Players moved with exaggerated care, setting up chairs as silently as possible, communicating in whispers and hand signals.
"Should we move her?" Alex whispered, appearing at Alyssa's side with a light blanket—one of many they'd learned to keep in the diaper bag for exactly these situations.
"No, we're good," Alyssa whispered back, adjusting her position so she could see the screen while still cradling Y/N. She took the offered blanket and draped it carefully over the sleeping toddler. "She's comfortable. I don't mind."
"You sure? She might be out for a while," Kelley added, crouching down beside them. "We can take her back to the room."
"Really, it's fine," Alyssa insisted quietly. "I want to watch the film anyway, and she's not bothering me. You two go sit down."
Alex and Kelley exchanged a look—one of those silent parent communications that conveyed an entire conversation—before nodding and finding seats near the front of the room.
"Is she out?" Emily Sonnett whispered loudly from her chair, earning several "shh!" sounds from her teammates.
"Dead to the world," Alyssa confirmed softly, feeling Y/N's weight go completely boneless in that way sleeping toddlers do, like they're made of warm sand.
"She had a big day of terrorizing camp," Tobin said with a grin, keeping her voice low. "That takes a lot out of a person."
As Vlatko started the game footage, discussing formations and defensive strategies, Alyssa felt Y/N's small hand curl around her finger, even in sleep. It was instinctive, that need to maintain physical connection, and it made Alyssa's heart squeeze in her chest every single time.
The film session proceeded with a strange dichotomy—intense tactical discussion happening on screen and in Vlatko's commentary, while the room itself maintained a hushed, almost reverent quiet out of respect for the sleeping toddler. When players needed to ask questions, they raised their hands and spoke in library voices. When Vlatko pointed out defensive mistakes, he did so with slightly less volume than usual.
"That's a good catch on the positioning," Becky said quietly during one analysis, and several players nodded their agreement in silence rather than voicing it.
About twenty minutes into the session, Y/N stirred slightly, making a small whimpering sound in her sleep. The entire room froze, two dozen professional athletes holding their breath as they waited to see if she'd wake up. But Alyssa just rubbed gentle circles on her back and hummed something too quiet for anyone else to hear, and Y/N settled immediately, burrowing deeper into Alyssa's embrace with a soft sigh.
"Goalkeeper magic," Rose mouthed to Mal, who grinned in response.
It was true that Alyssa had a certain magic with Y/N—had from the very beginning. There was something about her calm presence, her steady patience, and her genuine delight in spending time with the toddler that made Y/N feel safe and loved. And in return, Alyssa got these moments: a tiny human who trusted her completely, who sought her out in a room full of people, who knew instinctively that Alyssa's arms were a safe place to land.
"Next time," Kelley whispered to Alex during a pause in the film, "we're bringing the walker with a volume control."
"Next time," Alex countered, keeping her eyes on her sleeping daughter, "we're leaving the walker at home."
"You know that's not going to happen," Kelley said with a knowing smile. "She loves that thing. And honestly, watching her zoom around made everyone's day better."
"It did, didn't it?" Alex admitted, unable to argue with that logic. The team had been loose and happy, stress from training replaced with laughter and joy. That was worth a little chaos.
"Besides," Kelley added, "we're only here for a week. How much more damage could she possibly do?"
This was later remembered as the question that should never have been asked.
The Training Field Invasion
The next morning brought new adventures. Y/N woke up with what Kelley called her "chaos energy" fully recharged, immediately making grabby hands toward her walker before she'd even had breakfast.
"Breakfast first, walker later," Alex negotiated, managing to get half a waffle and some strawberries into her daughter before Y/N started getting restless and whining, reaching toward where the walker was stored.
"Lala?" Y/N asked hopefully, looking around the hotel restaurant.
"Auntie Alyssa is at training," Kelley explained. "But we'll see her later, okay?"
Y/N's face fell into what the team called her "dramatic pout"—bottom lip out, eyes wide, the whole performance. It was devastatingly effective. She made a sad sound, somewhere between a whimper and a whine.
"Oh no, not the face," Alex groaned. "That face could end wars."
"Or start them," Kelley muttered. "Okay, how about this: you can have your walker, and we'll go watch training. Maybe Auntie Alyssa will take a break and come say hi."
The pout transformed instantly into a megawatt smile. Y/N clapped her hands together and bounced in her high chair. "Lala! Lala!"
The training facility was technically off-limits to non-essential personnel during practice, but Y/N had long ago been granted honorary essential status. Alex and Kelley set up in the observation area with a good view of the field, and Y/N was released with her walker to explore the safe, enclosed space.
This lasted approximately forty seconds before Y/N spotted a ramp leading down to the field level and decided she needed to investigate. The walker picked up terrifying speed on the slight incline, and both moms lunged forward in panic.
"Y/N! STOP!" Kelley shouted, even though Y/N barely understood complex commands yet.
But Y/N, with the fearlessness of someone too young to understand consequences, just squealed in delight at the speed, her eyes wide with excitement. She hit the flat ground at the bottom still going strong, and her momentum carried her right through an open door and onto the edge of the training field.
Several players looked up at the sound of squeaking wheels and excited baby babbling. Training came to an immediate halt as everyone processed the sight of a ten-month-old in a walker rolling across their practice pitch.
"Is that..." Trinity started.
"Yep," Rose confirmed, already jogging over. "That's Y/N."
"How did she even get down here?" Sophia asked, impressed despite herself.
Y/N, unbothered by her audience, was having the time of her life. The training field was smooth and flat—perfect for walker racing. She pushed off with her little legs, quickly gaining speed, babbling excitedly. "Babababa! Vroom!"
"She's going for the goal!" Emily Sonnett narrated in her commentator voice. "O'Hara-Morgan with the approach—well, without the ball, but she's got the spirit!"
Alyssa had been working with the other keepers on the far end of the field, but she turned at the commotion just in time to see Y/N zooming toward the goal she'd been defending moments before.
"Y/N!" Alyssa called out, jogging over with a huge smile. "You're supposed to be in the observation area, not on the field!"
"LALA!" Y/N shrieked in absolute delight, her face lighting up like she'd been given the best present ever. She immediately tried to push her walker faster toward her favorite aunt, her little legs pumping furiously. "Lala! Lala! Lala!"
"I see you, I'm coming!" Alyssa laughed, meeting her halfway and crouching down as Y/N approached. "But you're interrupting practice, little one."
By this time, Alex and Kelley had made it down to the field, both slightly out of breath and looking apologetic.
"We are so sorry," Alex said to Vlatko, who was watching the scene with his arms crossed. "She found a ramp and we couldn't stop her. It all happened so fast."
"She's got good speed," Vlatko observed, and it was impossible to tell if he was amused or annoyed. "Maybe we should time her."
"Please don't encourage this," Kelley begged, but several players were already pulling out their phones to clock Y/N's velocity.
Y/N, meanwhile, had abandoned her walker the moment Alyssa got close enough, reaching up with both arms. "Up! Up!" It was one of her clearest words, and she used it liberally.
Alyssa scooped her up immediately, settling the baby on her hip. Y/N wrapped her arms around Alyssa's neck in a tight hug, babbling contentedly against her shoulder. "Lala, Lala, Lala," she chanted like a happy little mantra.
"I missed you too, sweet girl," Alyssa murmured, pressing a kiss to Y/N's temple. "But you can't be on the field during training. It's not safe."
Y/N pulled back to look at Alyssa's face, patting her cheeks with both hands. "Lala," she said again, as if that explained everything.
"Okay, everyone back to training," Vlatko announced, clapping his hands. "The baby has had her moment. Let's refocus."
But getting back to training proved difficult when Y/N decided that being in Alyssa's arms was exactly where she wanted to stay. Every time Alex or Kelley tried to take her, she'd cling tighter to Alyssa and make distressed sounds.
"Come on, baby girl," Alex coaxed, reaching for her daughter. "Let Auntie Alyssa get back to work."
"No no no!" Y/N protested, burying her face in Alyssa's neck. It was one of her newer words, and she wielded it like a weapon.
"I can hold her for a bit," Alyssa offered, already shifting Y/N to a more secure position. "I'm mostly done with my drills anyway. Just some light work left."
Y/N lifted her head and nodded solemnly, even though she probably didn't understand the question. "Lala," she confirmed, patting Alyssa's shoulder possessively.
So training resumed with the unusual sight of a goalkeeper doing light exercises while carrying a ten-month-old. Y/N seemed perfectly content with this arrangement, watching everything with wide, curious eyes and babbling commentary that only she understood.
"This is the weirdest training session we've ever had," Sam muttered to Sophia as they ran passing drills.
"I don't know, remember that time a bird stole Pinoe's armband?" Sophia countered.
"Fair point."
Alex and Kelley had retreated back to the observation area with Y/N's walker, but they kept a close eye on their daughter. They watched as Y/N pointed at things and babbled questions at Alyssa, who responded to each one as if they were having a real conversation.
"She's so good with her," Alex said softly, not for the first time.
"Y/N's lucky to have her," Kelley agreed. "We're all lucky to have her."
After about twenty minutes, Y/N started to get squirmy, a sure sign she wanted down to explore. Alyssa set her carefully on the ground at the edge of the field, well away from any active drills, and Y/N immediately toddled off to investigate a line of cones that had been set up.
"Dat?" she asked, pointing at the bright orange cones.
"Those are cones," Alyssa explained, staying close. "We use them for drills."
Y/N reached out to touch one, fascinated by the texture. She knocked it over, then looked up at Alyssa with concern. "Uh oh?"
"It's okay, you can pick it up," Alyssa encouraged.
Y/N tried to pick up the cone, but it was almost as big as she was. She managed to lift it a few inches before losing her grip, and it clattered back to the ground. She tried again, more determined this time, grunting with effort.
Several players had stopped to watch the toddler's struggle with the cone. There was something compelling about her absolute determination to accomplish this task she'd set for herself.
On the third try, Y/N managed to lift the cone and take two wobbly steps with it before setting it down triumphantly. She looked around at her audience with pride, clapping for herself. "Ahhhh!" she squealed in victory.
The entire team erupted in applause.
"That's my girl!" Kelley shouted from the observation deck.
Y/N, energized by the praise, tried to pick up another cone. This became her new mission: relocating cones one by one to a new location about five feet away. It made absolutely no sense, but she was committed to it.
"She's reorganizing our training equipment," Rose observed with amusement. "Bold choice."
"Should we stop her?" Trinity asked.
"Nah, let her work," Tobin said. "She's learning problem-solving skills or something."
Vlatko watched the scene for a moment, then shook his head with what might have been fondness. "As long as she's supervised and not in the way of active drills, she can stay. But this is a one-time exception."
"One-time exception," Alex repeated skeptically. "That's what you said last time when she interrupted the team meeting."
"And the time before that when she crawled onto the field during cool-down," Kelley added.
"This child has no respect for training schedules," Vlatko said, but there was a hint of a smile on his face as he watched Y/N successfully move another cone.
By the time training ended, Y/N had relocated approximately seven cones and was starting to look tired. She plopped down on the grass and pointed at her walker, which was still up in the observation area. "Dat!" she demanded.
"You want your walker?" Alyssa asked, crouching down beside her. "We have to go get it."
Y/N considered this, then simply raised her arms. "Up!"
Alyssa laughed and scooped her up once more. "Alright, lazy bones. Let's go get your wheels."
As they walked back toward the observation area, Y/N's head drooped onto Alyssa's shoulder, her energy finally depleting. She made a sleepy sound, somewhere between a sigh and a yawn.
"Someone's tired," Alyssa murmured, rubbing gentle circles on Y/N's back.
"Noooo," Y/N protested weakly, even as her eyes started to close.
"Sure you're not," Alyssa agreed, the same way she had the day before. It was becoming their routine.
The Business Center Adventure
By day three of camp, Y/N had become a legend. Her walker adventures were the talk of team meals, and players had started sharing photos and videos on their private team group chat with captions like "Walker Watch: Day 3" and "Y/N's Reign of Terror Continues."
The hotel staff had also become familiar with the squeaking wheels that announced Y/N's presence. One maintenance worker had even jokingly offered to oil the wheels to make them quieter, but Kelley had declined.
"The squeaking is how we track her," she'd explained. "Without it, we'd never know where she is."
"Fair point," the maintenance worker had conceded, watching Y/N zoom past with single-minded determination.
It was during this third day that Y/N discovered the hotel's business center—a small room with computers, printers, and importantly, a long stretch of smooth tile floor that was perfect for walker racing.
"This is my nightmare," Alex muttered as Y/N zoomed between the desks, her wheels making a different sound on the tile than they did on carpet. It was somehow even more annoying—a high-pitched squeal that echoed off the hard surfaces.
Y/N seemed to love it, squealing along with the wheels. "Eeeee!" she contributed helpfully, clearly delighted by the acoustics.
An older businessman was trying to work on his laptop, shooting increasingly irritated looks at the speeding toddler. Alex kept apologizing profusely, trying to corral Y/N without causing a scene.
"I'm so sorry, we'll just be a minute—Y/N, come here—I'm really sorry—"
But Y/N had discovered that if she pushed off really hard, she could make the walker drift on the smooth tile, almost like sliding. She giggled maniacally each time she managed it, completely oblivious to the businessman's growing frustration.
"Could you please control your child?" the man finally snapped, his voice sharp with annoyance.
Alex's mom-guilt kicked in immediately, her cheeks flushing. "I'm so sorry, she's just—Y/N, no—"
But then Alyssa appeared in the doorway, back from her morning recovery session, and Y/N's attention immediately shifted.
"LALA!" she shrieked, abandoning her racing circuit to push her walker toward her favorite aunt at top speed. She moved so fast that she nearly crashed into a filing cabinet, but managed to correct course at the last second.
Alyssa's face lit up at the sight of the speeding toddler. "Hey, troublemaker! What are you doing in here?"
Y/N reached Alyssa and immediately made grabby hands, bouncing in her walker. "Up! Up! Lala!"
"Okay, okay," Alyssa laughed, lifting Y/N out of the walker. The toddler immediately wrapped her arms around Alyssa's neck in a koala hug, chattering happily. "Lalalala, babababa, dat, dat!"
"You're telling me all about your adventures?" Alyssa interpreted, swaying slightly with Y/N in her arms.
"I'm so sorry," Alex said, moving to collect the walker. She shot an apologetic look at the businessman, who had already returned to his laptop, still looking annoyed. "We'll get out of your way."
As they left the business center, Y/N waved over Alyssa's shoulder at the grumpy man. "Bye bye!" she called cheerfully, one of her clearer phrases.
The man's expression softened slightly despite himself, and he gave a small wave back.
"You're too charming for your own good," Alyssa told Y/N, booping her nose gently.
Y/N giggled and tried to boop Alyssa's nose back, but her coordination wasn't quite there yet, and she ended up poking Alyssa's cheek instead. "Boop!" she announced proudly.
"Close enough," Alyssa agreed, pretending the cheek boop was exactly what Y/N had been aiming for.
The Pool Incident
The real chaos came on day four, when someone had the brilliant idea that Y/N might enjoy playing in the hotel's pool area. Not in the pool itself—she was too young for that without proper swim gear—but in the shallow kiddie pool section that was only a few inches deep.
"This is either the best idea or the worst idea," Kelley said as they set up in the pool area, laying out towels and baby-safe pool toys.
"Why not both?" Alex suggested, already anticipating the chaos.
Y/N, wearing the world's tiniest swim diaper and a rash guard covered in cartoon fish, was absolutely beside herself with excitement. She'd been to pools before, but never one this big, and certainly never with so many of her favorite aunties around.
"Wawa! Wawa!" she chanted, pointing at the water with both hands. It was her word for water, and she used it for everything from bath time to her sippy cup.
"Yes, water," Alex confirmed, carrying her toward the kiddie pool. "But we're staying in the shallow part, okay?"
Y/N nodded enthusiastically, even though she definitely didn't understand the concept of shallow versus deep.
The moment her toes touched the water, she squealed in delight. The water was warm, heated to a perfect baby-friendly temperature, and only about four inches deep. Y/N plopped down on her bottom with a splash, laughing hysterically as water splashed up around her.
"Splash splash!" she announced, smacking the water with both hands to create more splashes.
Several players had gathered to watch, because apparently "Y/N experiencing the pool" was more entertaining than actually swimming.
"She's like a little duck," Crystal observed, smiling at the toddler's enthusiasm.
"More like a little chaos gremlin," Kelley corrected fondly, staying right beside Y/N in the water.
Y/N discovered that if she kicked her legs really hard, she could create even bigger splashes. She demonstrated this discovery repeatedly, soaking herself and anyone within a three-foot radius.
"I'm getting more wet watching her than I did during my actual swim," Trinity laughed, backing up slightly to avoid another splash attack.
Alyssa, who had been doing laps in the main pool, pulled herself out and wandered over to see what all the commotion was about. She was still dripping wet, her hair slicked back, and the moment Y/N spotted her, everything else ceased to exist.
"LALA!" Y/N shrieked, trying to stand up in the water. She wobbled dangerously, her baby legs not quite stable on the slippery pool bottom.
"Whoa, careful!" Kelley said, steadying her.
But Y/N was determined to get to Alyssa. She started trying to walk through the water, which was much harder than walking on dry land. Each step was exaggerated and wobbly, but she kept going, her arms outstretched toward Alyssa.
"I'm coming to you, sweet girl," Alyssa said, quickly stepping into the kiddie pool. "You don't have to—"
But Y/N was committed. She took three more determined steps before her legs gave out and she sat down hard in the water with a splash. Instead of crying, she laughed and immediately tried to stand up again.
"She's got that O'Hara determination," Rose commented from her lounge chair.
"And that Morgan stubbornness," Lindsey added.
Alyssa reached Y/N and crouched down in the shallow water. "You made it so far! I'm so proud of you."
Y/N beamed at the praise and launched herself at Alyssa, wrapping her wet arms around Alyssa's neck. "Lala wawa!" she announced, as if explaining that Alyssa was now also in the water.
"You're right, Lala is in the water," Alyssa confirmed, settling Y/N on her hip. "Should we play?"
"Yeah!" Y/N agreed enthusiastically, one of her newer words that she didn't always use correctly but loved saying.
For the next twenty minutes, Alyssa played with Y/N in the kiddie pool while her moms took a much-needed break. They showed Y/N how to pour water from one cup to another, how to make the rubber duck toys squeak, and how to blow bubbles in the water (though Y/N mostly just put her face in the water and came up spluttering).
"She's going to sleep so well tonight," Alex said hopefully, watching her daughter's enthusiastic playing.
"She's going to sleep well, or we're going to sleep well?" Kelley asked.
"Both. Hopefully both."
Y/N discovered that if she leaned forward in Alyssa's lap, she could sort of float on her belly while Alyssa held her. She kicked her legs wildly, propelling herself approximately nowhere, but she was absolutely thrilled with the sensation.
"Swim! Swim!" she announced, even though what she was doing was more like "frantic flailing with support."
"You're such a good swimmer," Alyssa encouraged, keeping a secure hold on Y/N while letting her feel the independence of movement.
"She's a natural," Tobin called out. "Future Olympic swimmer right there."
"Why not both?" Christen suggested diplomatically.
After about thirty minutes of intense water play, Y/N started to shiver slightly. Her lips had taken on a faint blue tinge despite the heated water, a sign that her tiny body was getting cold.
"Okay, time to get out," Alyssa decided, standing up with Y/N in her arms.
"No no no!" Y/N protested, but it was half-hearted. She was clearly getting tired, her movements slower and less enthusiastic.
"Yes yes yes," Alyssa countered gently, carrying her toward where Alex was waiting with a fluffy towel. "You're cold, sweet girl. We need to warm you up."
The moment Alex wrapped the towel around Y/N, the toddler snuggled into it with a content sigh. Alyssa helped pat her dry, making a game of it by pretending to find things behind Y/N's ears.
"Is that a fish?" Alyssa asked, pretending to pull something from behind Y/N's ear. "How did a fish get there?"
Y/N giggled sleepily, her eyes already starting to droop. "Fish," she agreed, though it came out more like "fiss."
Within minutes of being dried off and dressed in a fresh onesie, Y/N was fast asleep in Alex's arms, completely exhausted from her pool adventure.
"She lasted longer than I thought she would," Kelley admitted, gathering up their pool supplies.
"The water really wore her out," Alex agreed, adjusting her hold on her sleeping daughter. "Thanks for playing with her, Lyss. It gave us a nice break."
"Anytime," Alyssa said, and meant it. "She's the best pool buddy I've ever had."
The Great Escape
Day five brought what would later be known as "The Great Escape" or "The Time Y/N Gave Everyone Heart Attacks."
It started innocently enough. Alex and Kelley had set Y/N up in the hallway outside their room with her walker while they quickly packed for the team's move to a new hotel. The door was propped open so they could hear her, and the hallway was quiet—all the other players were at a team meeting that moms with babies were excused from.
"She's fine," Kelley assured Alex, who kept popping her head out to check. "She's just going back and forth in the hallway. There's nowhere for her to go."
This statement would prove to be wildly optimistic.
Y/N had been contentedly pushing her walker back and forth, babbling to herself, when she spotted something interesting: an open door at the end of the hallway. Not just any door—the door to the hotel's service stairwell, propped open by a housekeeping cart.
To Y/N's ten-month-old brain, an open door was an invitation. She pushed her walker toward it with determination, her little legs pumping fast.
Inside the room, Alex was trying to fold a portable crib while Kelley searched for a missing sock.
"Have you seen Y/N's purple socks? The ones with the non-slip bottoms?" Kelley asked, digging through the diaper bag.
"Check the side pocket," Alex suggested, wrestling with a particularly stubborn crib leg.
Neither of them heard the squeaking wheels fade into the distance.
Y/N reached the stairwell door and peered inside curiously. The stairs went down, which looked interesting, but they also went up, which looked even more interesting. The walker wouldn't fit through the doorway easily, so Y/N did what any curious baby would do: she abandoned it and started climbing.
Stairs were a relatively new skill for Y/N. She could crawl up them with supervision, but she'd never been allowed to try alone. Now, with no one watching, she approached them with the fearless confidence of someone who had no concept of danger.
She made it up three stairs, crawling determinedly, before she paused to look around. From this new vantage point, she could see more of the stairwell. It echoed interestingly when she vocalized. "Ahhhhh!" she called out, delighted by how her voice bounced back.
Meanwhile, back in the hotel room, Alex finally noticed the unusual silence.
"Is Y/N being too quiet?" she asked Kelley, that mom-sense tingling.
They both rushed to the door and looked out into the hallway. The walker was there, abandoned near the stairwell entrance. Y/N was not.
"Y/N?" Alex called, her voice tight with concern.
No response.
"Y/N!" Kelley called louder, already moving toward the walker.
They heard a faint babble echoing from the stairwell, followed by a giggle.
"Oh my god, she's in the stairwell," Alex said, her heart jumping into her throat. She ran toward the door with Kelley right behind her.
They found Y/N sitting on the third stair, looking extremely pleased with herself. She had pulled herself up to standing using the railing and was bouncing happily, completely unaware of the panic she'd caused.
"Mama! Mama!" she greeted them cheerfully. "Mama" had recently entered her vocabulary and she used it for both her moms indiscriminately.
"Oh thank god," Alex breathed, scooping Y/N up immediately. Her heart was pounding. "Baby girl, you can't just wander off like that!"
Y/N, sensing she was in trouble despite not understanding why, stuck her bottom lip out. Her eyes started to well up with tears.
"No, no, it's okay," Alex said quickly, her relief overriding any urge to scold. "You're okay. Mama's not mad. You just scared us."
"Scared us a lot," Kelley added, rubbing Y/N's back soothingly. "We need to be more careful about keeping the door closed."
Y/N sniffled and reached for Kelley. "Mama," she whimpered, her earlier confidence completely gone.
Kelley took her, cuddling her close. "You're alright, baby bear. But no more adventures in stairwells, okay? Stairs are dangerous without a grown-up."
"Kay," Y/N agreed, even though she definitely didn't understand. She was just responding to the serious tone.
They returned to the room, and this time the door was firmly closed with Y/N safely inside. The walker was brought in too, its wandering days temporarily suspended.
"We're not telling the team about this," Alex decided, still trying to calm her racing heart.
"Agreed," Kelley said. "They already think we're chaos parents. We don't need to give them proof."
Y/N, already recovered from the incident, pointed at her walker. "Dat?"
"No, the walker is taking a break," Alex said firmly. "How about we read some books instead?"
"Book!" Y/N agreed enthusiastically, distracted by the promise of her favorite board books.
Crisis averted, though both moms made a mental note to be extra vigilant about doors and wandering babies.
Later that evening, when they'd moved to the new hotel and were settling in, Alyssa stopped by to check on them.
"Hey, how was the move?" she asked, then noticed both Alex and Kelley looked slightly frazzled. "Everything okay?"
"Everything's fine," Kelley said quickly. "Just a long day of packing and moving."
Y/N, who had been playing with blocks on the floor, looked up at Alyssa's voice. Her entire face transformed with joy. "LALA!" she shrieked, abandoning her blocks immediately and speed-crawling toward her favorite aunt.
Alyssa laughed and scooped her up as soon as she got close. "There's my girl! I missed you today."
Y/N babbled excitedly at her, a long stream of sounds that included "Mama," "wawa," "uh oh," and various other syllables that might have been words or might have been pure nonsense.
"Wow, that's quite a story," Alyssa said seriously, as if Y/N had just told her something profound. "That sounds like a very exciting day."
Y/N nodded emphatically, patting Alyssa's cheeks with both hands. "Lala," she confirmed, then yawned hugely.
"Someone's tired," Alyssa observed, swaying gently with Y/N in her arms.
"She had a... big day," Alex said carefully, sharing a look with Kelley that promised they'd tell Alyssa about the stairwell incident later, when Y/N wasn't around to be reminded of her great escape.
Y/N's head dropped onto Alyssa's shoulder, her thumb finding its way to her mouth. Within minutes, she was dozing, lulled by Alyssa's gentle swaying and the comfort of being in her favorite aunt's arms.
"She really loves you," Kelley said softly, watching them.
"The feeling's mutual," Alyssa replied, pressing a soft kiss to Y/N's head. "This little one has my whole heart."
And if Alex and Kelley noticed that Alyssa's eyes looked a little misty when she said it, they were kind enough not to mention it.
5am thought: you ever think about how Zoey came over from America to find these two absolutely gorgeous women (who probably had the money for fancy ass skin and hair care routines since they were toddlers) who look like untouchable goddesses, then proceeds to watch as they get their asses kicked by Celine/eat shit trying to do a cool martial arts move/ do something undeniably weird cause they live together and privacy doesn’t exist sometimes and just goes “man I can’t not kiss them”
Tobin and Christen had briefly considered leaving Y/N with a babysitter during morning training.
They'd considered it for approximately thirty seconds before realizing they couldn't trust anyone else to prevent their daughter from eating literally everything in sight.
So Y/N came to training.
Hayes had approved it, saying something about "team bonding" and "it's good for morale." She clearly didn't realize what she'd agreed to.
They set up a small play area on the sideline—a blanket covered with age-appropriate toys, teething rings, soft books, and other things that Y/N was supposed to play with.
Y/N took one look at this carefully curated selection and made a dismissive "Pbbbth!" sound.
Then she spotted the real treasure: the equipment bag.
Filled with cones, pinnies, soccer balls, and—most importantly—things she'd never tried to eat before.
"Oooooh!" Her eyes went wide. She dropped to her hands and knees and started crawling toward the bag at impressive speed, making excited "Ah-ah-ah-ah!" sounds with each movement.
"Y/N, no!" Christen jogged after her, but Y/N was on a mission.
She reached the bag, sat up, and grabbed the first thing she could reach: the corner of a bright orange pinnie hanging out of the bag.
It went straight into her mouth.
"Nom nom nom!" She gummed the fabric enthusiastically, drool already making the orange material darker.
"Baby, that's been sweated in by like twenty different players." Christen pulled it away from her mouth.
Y/N's face scrunched up in outrage. "AAAAH! AAAAH!"
"Here, look, you have this nice teething—"
"NAAAAH!" Y/N knocked the teething ring out of Christen's hand with surprising force. It bounced across the grass.
Then Y/N's eyes locked onto something even better.
A soccer ball.
Rolling slowly across the field.
Completely unattended.
Practically begging to be tasted.
"Oooooooh!" Y/N's whole face lit up like she'd discovered treasure. She made urgent "Eh! Eh! EH!" sounds and started crawling toward it with single-minded determination.
"Oh no," Tobin said, seeing where Y/N was headed. "Not the ball. Please not the ball."
But Y/N was already there. She grabbed the ball with both hands—it was almost as big as she was—and tried to bite it, making eager "Nom!" sounds.
Her mouth didn't fit around the ball's curve. This did not deter her. She opened her mouth as wide as she could and pressed her face against it, gumming whatever part she could reach while making frustrated "Mmmmm! Mmmmm!" sounds.
"She's trying to eat a soccer ball," Emily Sonnett observed, jogging over. "That's... ambitious."
"She doesn't understand the concept of 'too big to eat,'" Tobin explained, gently pulling Y/N away from the ball.
Y/N made loud protesting "NAAAAH! NAAAAH!" sounds, reaching back toward the ball with both hands, her fingers opening and closing desperately.
"The ball is not food."
"BAAAAAAH!" Y/N shrieked. It sounded almost like "ball" but was mostly just an angry yell. "BAAAAH! BAAAAH!"
"I know you want it, but—"
Y/N lunged forward with surprising strength, nearly escaping Tobin's grip. She was making continuous angry sounds now—"Aaaah! Aaaah! AAAAH!"
"Someone's determined," Lindsey said, watching the struggle.
"Someone's always determined," Christen corrected. "Yesterday she spent fifteen minutes trying to eat a door stopper."
"Did she succeed?"
"No, but not for lack of trying. She approached it from multiple angles."
Y/N was still fighting to get back to the ball, making increasingly frustrated sounds—"Naaaah! Eh! Eh! NAAAAH!"
"What if we distract her with something else?" Sonnett suggested.
"Like what?"
"I don't know... grass?"
Everyone looked at Sonnett.
"What? Babies eat grass, right?"
"We are NOT encouraging her to eat grass," Christen said firmly.
But Y/N had heard the magic word. Her head swiveled around, her eyes scanning the ground.
Grass.
Grass was everywhere.
Green. Abundant. Definitely not something her parents had specifically told her not to eat (yet).
Her eyes lit up. "Ooooooh!"
She dropped to her hands and knees, leaned down, and before anyone could stop her, grabbed a fistful of grass and shoved it in her mouth.
"NOM!"
"NO!" Four voices yelled at once.
But Y/N was already chewing, making curious "Mmmmm?" sounds as she experienced the taste and texture of grass. Her face scrunched up. This was... not good.
She made a "Bleh" sound and spit out most of it, little green bits sticking to her lips and chin.
Then she looked at her hand. It still had grass in it.
Maybe she'd tried the wrong grass? This grass might be better?
She tried to eat that grass too.
"Y/N!" Tobin grabbed her hand before she could get it to her mouth. "We don't eat grass!"
"Blaaaaaaah!" Y/N protested, pointing at the grass with her other hand. "Bah!"
"Grass is for playing on, not eating."
Y/N looked at the grass. Looked at her mom. Looked back at the grass.
She made a thoughtful "Hmmmm" sound.
Then she leaned down and tried to lick the grass directly off the ground, making determined "Mmm-mmm-mmm" sounds as she attempted it.
"Oh my GOD," Christen said, pulling Y/N up. "You cannot lick the field!"
"She's really committed to the grass thing," Mal observed.
"She's committed to eating everything," Tobin said. "Grass is just today's victim."
Y/N was making angry "Mmmmm! Mmmmm!" sounds and trying to lean back down toward the grass. When that didn't work, she grabbed a chunk of Tobin's hair and tried to eat that instead, making quick "Nom-nom-nom" sounds.
"Ow! Baby, that's attached to my head!"
"Nom!"
"Not food!"
"NOM!"
Kelley jogged over, holding something behind her back. "I have a solution."
"If it's more grass, I swear—"
"Better." Kelley revealed her offering: a large sports bottle cap.
Y/N's eyes went wide. She made an awed "Aaaaaah!" sound.
It was plastic. It was bright blue. It had ridges for grip. It looked extremely chewable.
Perfect.
"Ooooooh!" Y/N reached for it with both hands, making urgent "Eh! Eh! Eh!" sounds.
Kelley handed it to her. Y/N grabbed it like it was made of diamonds, examined it for precisely half a second, then shoved it in her mouth.
"Mmmmm! Nom nom nom!" She gummed it enthusiastically, drool immediately coating the plastic.
"A sports bottle cap," Christen said flatly. "You're letting her chew on a sports bottle cap."
"It's clean! I just took it off a new bottle! And look—she's happy!"
Indeed, Y/N was blissfully content, sitting on the grass (not eating it, miraculously) and gumming her bottle cap with total focus. She was making continuous satisfied "Mmm... nom... mmm..." sounds.
"This is going to end badly," Christen predicted.
"Probably," Kelley agreed cheerfully. "But for now, crisis averted!"
Training resumed. Y/N stayed on the blanket with her bottle cap for an impressive seven minutes.
Then she got bored.
She looked at the cap in her hand. It was thoroughly gummed, covered in drool, and had small indentations from her determined chewing.
She made a "Meh" sound and tossed it aside.
Then she looked around for new entertainment.
Her eyes landed on Lindsey, who was stretching nearby.
More specifically, on Lindsey's shoelaces.
Long. Dangly. Moving interestingly when Lindsey moved.
Definitely edible.
"Oooooh!" Y/N's eyes went wide. She started crawling toward Lindsey, making her determined grunting sounds—"Uh! Uh! Uh!"
She reached Lindsey's feet, sat up, and grabbed a shoelace with both hands.
"Hey little—OH!" Lindsey looked down just as Y/N shoved the shoelace in her mouth. "Is she eating my shoe?"
"Nom nom nom!" Y/N confirmed, gumming the lace enthusiastically, making happy sounds.
"Y/N, no! That's been on the ground!" Christen rushed over and pulled the shoelace out of Y/N's mouth. It was covered in drool and had a small tooth mark impression.
"NAAAAH!" Y/N reached for it again, making desperate sounds. "NAAAAH! AAAAH!"
"Those shoes have been in locker rooms! Do you know how many germs—"
"AAAAAAAH!" Y/N's face was bright red now, her whole body straining toward the shoelace. "AAAAH! AAAAH! LAAAAAAACE!"
It didn't sound like "lace" at all—more like "LAAAAAAAH!"—but the intent was clear.
"I'm sorry about your shoe," Christen said to Lindsey. "And... the drool."
"It's okay. It's weirdly flattering? Like, out of everything here, she chose my shoelace."
"She has terrible taste."
"Literally," Tobin added.
Y/N was still crying, pointing at the shoelace and making heartbroken sobbing sounds—"Waaah! Hic-hic-waaah! Laaaah!"
"Baby girl, you can't eat shoes."
"LAAAAAAAH!"
"How about—" Christen looked around desperately for a substitute. Her eyes landed on the corner of the blanket. "How about this nice blanket corner?"
She held it toward Y/N.
Y/N stopped crying mid-sob. She looked at the blanket corner. Made a considering "Hmmmmm" sound.
The blanket was soft. It was fabric. It wasn't a shoelace, but it was acceptable.
She grabbed it with both hands and shoved it in her mouth, making cautious "Nom?" sounds.
She chewed experimentally. Made an "Mmmmm!" sound of approval.
"Nom nom nom!" She settled into serious gumming, drool soaking into the fabric.
"The blanket," Christen said. "She's eating the blanket we brought for her to sit on."
"At least it's clean," Tobin offered. "Relatively."
"We just watched her try to eat grass and a shoelace. The blanket is definitely the lesser evil."
Y/N continued happily gumming the blanket corner for the next few minutes, making contented babbling sounds around the fabric—"Nom-ba-da-nom-mmm."
Training continued around her. Players ran drills. Hayes shouted instructions. The team scrimmaged.
And Y/N sat on her blanket, systematically gumming every corner of it, moving from corner to corner like she was on a mission to taste-test the entire thing.
"She's been on that blanket for like fifteen minutes now," Alex observed during a water break. "That's got to be a record."
"Don't jinx it," Christen warned.
Too late.
Y/N had finished with the blanket corners. She looked around, assessing her options, making thoughtful "Hmmmm" sounds.
Then she saw it.
The water bottle Emily Fox had set down nearby.
Clear plastic. Full of water. Completely different from the bottle cap she'd had earlier.
New taste experience.
"Oooooh!" Y/N's eyes went huge. She started crawling toward it with purpose, making excited "Ah-ah-ah!" sounds.
"Someone grab the baby!" Fox yelled. "She's going for my water!"
But Y/N was fast. She reached the bottle, grabbed it with both hands—it was almost as big as her torso—and tried to bite the side of it, making determined "Nom! Nom!" sounds.
Her mouth couldn't get a good grip on the smooth plastic. This just made her more determined.
She opened her mouth wider and pressed her whole face against it, attempting to gum the entire side of the bottle, making frustrated "Mmmmm! Mmmmm!" sounds.
"She's trying to eat it like corn on the cob," Mal observed, watching Y/N work her way around the bottle, gumming different sections.
"Why is she like this?" Fox asked, retrieving her now-drool-covered water bottle.
"We ask ourselves that every day," Tobin said.
Y/N, having lost the water bottle, looked around for her next victim.
She spotted the cooler.
Big. Plastic. Interesting handles.
"OOOOOOH!" She crawled toward it, moving faster than she'd ever moved before, making urgent sounds—"AH-AH-AH-AH-AH!"
She reached it, pulled herself up to standing using the cooler for support—making proud "Uh! Uh!" grunting sounds with the effort—and grabbed one of the handles.
It went straight into her mouth.
"Nom nom nom!" She gummed the handle with impressive dedication, drool running down the plastic.
"The cooler handle," Christen said faintly. "She's eating the cooler handle."
"Do we stop her?" Rose asked.
"I mean... the cooler handle is probably cleaner than the grass she tried to eat earlier?"
"That's a low bar."
"We're working with what we've got."
They let Y/N gum the cooler handle for a solid five minutes. She seemed thrilled with it, making continuous happy sounds—"Mmm! Nom! Mmm!"—while methodically working her way along the handle.
She'd created a wet streak of drool along the entire length of it.
Then she got distracted by a bird flying overhead.
"Ooooooh!" She let go of the handle to point at the sky. "BIIIII!"
It didn't sound like "bird" at all—more like a prolonged "BEEEE!" sound—but she was very excited about it, bouncing on her wobbly legs and making excited squealing sounds.
The bird landed on the grass about ten feet away.
Y/N's face lit up with an expression that could only be described as predatory interest.
"Uh oh," Tobin said. "She's spotted prey."
"BIIIII!" Y/N dropped to her hands and knees and started crawling toward the bird at top speed, making her hunting sounds—"Uh-uh-uh-uh-uh!"
"She's going to try to eat the bird," Kelley said.
"She's definitely going to try to eat the bird," Christen agreed, jogging after her daughter.
Y/N was laser-focused on the bird, crawling with determination, making excited "Ah-ah-ah!" sounds.
The bird, being a bird with a functional survival instinct, flew away before Y/N could reach it.
Y/N stopped in her tracks. Looked at where the bird had been. Looked up at the sky where it had gone. Back at the ground.
Her bottom lip started to quiver.
"Noooooo," Tobin said, seeing what was coming. "Don't do it."
Y/N's face crumpled.
"BIIIIIIIII!" she wailed, pointing at the sky with her whole arm. "BIII! BIII! WAAAAAAAH!"
"The bird is gone, baby."
"WAAAAAAAH! BIIIIII!" Y/N was crying in earnest now, tears streaming down her face, making heartbroken sobbing sounds—"Hic-hic-waaah! BIII!"
"You can't eat birds anyway!"
"BIIIIII!"
"They have feathers! And diseases! And they fly!"
"WAAAAAAAH!"
This crying jag lasted a solid two minutes before Y/N's attention was caught by something else: the grass directly in front of her face.
Hey. Grass.
She'd tried grass before. It hadn't been great. But maybe this grass was different?
She made a thoughtful "Hmmm?" sound, her crying subsiding to hiccups.
Then she leaned down and tried to lick the grass, making curious "Mmmmm?" sounds.
"And we're back to eating grass," Christen said tiredly. "Great. Perfect. This is fine."
******
After training, Y/N was clearly exhausted. Her eyes were drooping. She was making little tired sounds—soft "Mmmmm" and "Uhhhh" noises. She'd tried to eat her own fist out of what appeared to be pure exhaustion rather than actual interest.
But she refused to sleep.
Every time Christen tried to put her down in the travel crib, Y/N would make loud protesting "NAAAAH!" sounds and pull herself up to standing, bouncing and making insistent "Uh! Uh! Uh!" sounds.
"You're tired," Christen said. "I can see you're tired. You're rubbing your eyes. You just yawned three times."
"Naaaah!" Y/N yawned again, making a little squeaking sound at the end of the yawn, but continued bouncing in the crib.
"If you just lay down—"
"NAAAAH! Uh! Uh!" Y/N bounced harder, making the crib rock slightly.
"Baby girl, you need to sleep."
Y/N's response was to grab the crib rail and try to gum it, making determined "Nom nom nom" sounds while drool ran down the plastic.
"You're literally eating the crib out of exhaustion."
"Nom!" Y/N confirmed, still chewing.
Tobin tried next. She picked Y/N up, cradled her, started rocking gently while humming a lullaby.
Y/N's eyes drifted closed.
Her breathing evened out.
Her little body relaxed.
Tobin smiled. She'd done it. The baby was—
Y/N's eyes popped open. She made a loud "BAH!" sound, grabbed a fistful of Tobin's shirt, and tried to eat it, making vigorous "Nom nom nom" sounds.
"You were almost asleep!"
"Nom!" Y/N pulled the fabric toward her mouth with both hands.
"Why won't you sleep?"
Y/N's answer was to gum the shirt more enthusiastically, making happy "Mmmmm!" sounds.
They tried everything. Rocking. Singing. White noise. Darkness.
Walking around the room while bouncing Y/N gently. Reading in a soothing voice. Even driving around the parking lot in the car (Y/N stayed awake the entire time, babbling happily and trying to eat her car seat straps).
Finally, after an hour and a half of attempted nap time, Y/N spotted something that changed everything.
Christen's phone, sitting on the nightstand.
Charging.
With a very chewable-looking charging cable attached.
"Ooooooh!" Y/N's eyes went huge. She made an excited gasping sound—"Ah!"—and started squirming in Tobin's arms, reaching toward the nightstand with both hands.
"No," Tobin said firmly. "You can't have the phone."
"OOOOOOOH! PHO! PHO!" Y/N was straining toward it now, making desperate sounds—"Eh! Eh! EH! EH!"
"Not for babies."
Y/N's face scrunched up. The pre-cry face was forming.
"Wait," Christen said, having a sudden idea. "What if we give her something that looks like a phone but isn't?"
She grabbed one of Y/N's toys—a plastic rectangle with buttons that lit up and made sounds.
"Look, Y/N! Phone!"
Y/N looked at it. Looked at the real phone. Back at the toy.
She made a "Hmph" sound and turned her face away dramatically.
"She's rejecting the toy phone," Tobin observed.
"She knows the difference."
"She's eight months old! How does she know the difference?"
"She's smart. Too smart."
Y/N, meanwhile, had started crying—loud, angry cries that clearly communicated her outrage at being denied the phone. "WAAAAH! PHO! WAAAAH!"
"Okay, okay, different approach." Christen had another idea. "What if we let her hold the phone but we hold her?"
"Is this a good idea?"
"We're out of good ideas. We're into desperate ideas now."
Christen sat on the bed, took Y/N into her lap, and handed her the phone.
Y/N's crying stopped instantly. She made an awed "Oooooh!" sound and grabbed the phone with both hands, examining it with wide eyes.
Then she tried to bite it.
"Nom!" She opened her mouth wide and attempted to fit the corner in, making eager sounds.
"Gentle," Christen said, keeping a firm grip on both Y/N and the phone. "Just hold it."
Y/N gummed the corner of the phone case enthusiastically, drool running down the side. "Mmmmm! Nom nom!"
But something was happening.
Her gumming was getting slower.
Her eyes were starting to droop.
The phone was working like a pacifier, and the combination of having what she wanted plus the exhaustion she'd been fighting was finally winning.
"Mmm... nom... mmm..." Her chewing was becoming rhythmic. Sleepy.
Her eyes closed.
Opened briefly.
Closed again.
"Is it working?" Tobin whispered.
"Shh!"
Y/N's mouth went still, the phone corner still resting against her lips. Her breathing evened out. Her little body went completely relaxed.
She was asleep.
Finally.
"Oh thank god," Christen breathed.
"Do we try to move her?"
"Are you insane? We don't move her. We don't breathe. We don't exist."
"But the phone—"
"The phone stays. The phone is her sleep aid now. We'll buy a new phone if we have to."
They sat there in silence for five minutes, making sure Y/N was truly asleep.
Soft snores confirmed it. Tiny, adorable baby snores, punctuated by little sighs.
Very carefully, moving at glacial speed, Christen eased the phone away from Y/N's mouth.
Y/N stirred. Made a "Mmmmm?" sound.
They froze.
Y/N's hand reached up, searching for the phone.
Tobin quickly replaced it with Y/N's soft lovey—a small stuffed giraffe.
Y/N grabbed it, pulled it to her face, and...
Started gumming the giraffe's ear, making sleepy "Nom... nom..." sounds without waking up.
"She's eating in her sleep again," Tobin whispered.
"At least it's the giraffe and not our electronics."
They successfully transferred Y/N to her crib, giraffe and all. She continued sleeping, still making occasional "nom" sounds and gumming the giraffe's ear every few minutes.
"That was exhausting," Christen said, collapsing on the bed.
"She fought that nap for almost two hours."
"Why? She was so tired!"
"Fear of missing out on taste-testing new things."
"She's eight months old. What does she think she's missing?"
As if to answer, Y/N made a sound in her sleep—"Nom-nom-ba-da"—and her jaw worked like she was chewing something.
"She's dreaming about eating," Tobin said.
"Of course she is."
They had approximately forty-five minutes of peace before Y/N woke up, refreshed and ready to resume her mission of trying to eat everything in the entire hotel.
It was going to be a long week.
And they were only on day two.
******
After Y/N's hard-won nap, the team had planned a low-key evening activity: a movie night in one of the hotel conference rooms. Someone had set up a projector, brought popcorn, and arranged couches and chairs in a cozy setup.
"This will be nice and calm," Christen said optimistically as they headed down to the conference room. "Just sitting and watching a movie. Y/N can sit in our laps. Nothing for her to get into."
Tobin looked at her wife. "Do you actually believe that?"
"I'm choosing hope."
"Bold strategy."
Y/N, refreshed from her nap, was in Tobin's arms making happy babbling sounds—"Ba-ba-ga-da-ma!"—and looking around with wide, curious eyes. Her head swiveled constantly, taking in every new sight, making interested "Ooooh!" and "Aaaah!" sounds at everything.
They entered the conference room to find most of the team already there, sprawled on couches with bowls of popcorn.
Y/N's eyes immediately locked onto the popcorn.
Her whole body went rigid. Her mouth dropped open. She made a sound like a tiny gasp—"Ah!"
Then she started squirming in Tobin's arms, making urgent "Eh! Eh! EH! EH!" sounds and reaching toward the nearest bowl with both hands.
"Someone wants popcorn," Rose said.
"She can't have popcorn," Christen said. "Choking hazard."
"AAAAAAAH!" Y/N clearly disagreed with this assessment, making her displeasure known with an ear-piercing shriek. "EH! EH! EH!"
"Baby, you're too little for—"
"EEEEEEEEH!" Y/N was reaching so hard she was practically levitating out of Tobin's arms, her fingers opening and closing desperately. "POP! POP!"
It didn't sound like "pop" at all—more like "PAH! PAH!"—but everyone understood.
"What if we give her the puffs?" Tobin suggested, pulling out the container of baby puffs from the diaper bag. "They're basically baby popcorn."
They settled onto a couch, Y/N in Christen's lap with a small pile of puffs on a napkin.
Y/N looked at her puffs. Looked at the bowls of real popcorn all around the room. Back at her puffs.
She made an offended "Hmph!" sound.
Then she grabbed a puff, examined it critically while making "Hmmmmm?" sounds, and reluctantly put it in her mouth.
"Nom," she said without enthusiasm, gumming it halfheartedly.
The movie started—some action comedy that half the team had voted for. Y/N seemed initially interested, making curious "Ooooh?" sounds at the bright colors on the screen.
For about ninety seconds.
Then she got bored.
She'd finished her puffs. The movie wasn't as interesting as the popcorn other people were eating. And she'd just spotted something fascinating.
Alex's bracelet.
Shiny. Dangly. Making interesting clinking sounds when Alex moved her wrist.
Perfect for eating.
"Ooooooh!" Y/N's eyes locked onto it like a missile tracking system.
She started squirming, trying to escape Christen's lap, making determined "Uh! Uh! Uh!" grunting sounds.
"Where are you going?" Christen tightened her grip.
"Uh! Uh! DAH!" Y/N pushed against Christen's arms, pointing at Alex with her whole arm.
"You need to sit still and—"
But Y/N had discovered she could make her body go completely rigid and slip down through Christen's arms like a little escape artist.
She dropped to the floor with a small "Oof!" sound, immediately got on her hands and knees, and started crawling toward Alex at top speed.
"Oh no," Christen said, scrambling after her. "Y/N, come back!"
"Uh-uh-uh-uh-uh!" Y/N's crawling sounds got more urgent as she closed in on her target.
She reached Alex's couch, pulled herself up to standing using the couch for support—making proud "Ah! Ah!" sounds—and grabbed Alex's wrist with both hands.
Then she tried to bite the bracelet.
"Nom!" Her little mouth opened wide, trying to fit the metal chain between her gums.
"Whoa, hey!" Alex said, looking down. "That's my bracelet!"
"Nom nom nom!" Y/N was fully committed now, trying different angles to get the bracelet in her mouth, making frustrated sounds when it didn't quite work.
"Y/N, no!" Christen arrived and tried to pull Y/N away from Alex's wrist.
"NAAAAAAAH!" Y/N held on tight, still trying to gum the bracelet, making defiant sounds—"Mmmmm! MINE!"
It didn't sound like "mine"—more like "MAH!"—but the possessiveness was clear.
"It's not yours, baby. It's Alex's."
"MAH! MAH!" Y/N's grip tightened on Alex's wrist, and she managed to get the bracelet between her gums, making triumphant "Mmmmm!" sounds as she gummed it.
"Okay, that's actually kind of uncomfortable," Alex said as Y/N's gums worked against the metal through her skin. "She's got a strong jaw."
"All that practice eating things she shouldn't," Tobin said, coming over to help extract their daughter from Alex's arm.
It took both parents working together to break Y/N's grip. She made loud protesting sounds the entire time—"AAAAH! AAAAH! MAH! MAH!"
Once freed, she immediately started crying, reaching back toward Alex's bracelet with both hands, making heartbroken sobbing sounds—"Waaaah! Hic-hic! MAH!"
"I feel bad," Alex said, looking at Y/N's tear-streaked face. "She really wanted it."
"She wants to eat it," Christen corrected. "There's a difference."
"What if I just let her hold it?"
"Alex, no—"
But Alex had already taken off the bracelet and was holding it out to Y/N.
Y/N's crying stopped instantly. Her eyes went wide. She made a gasping "Ah!" sound.
Then she lunged for it, grabbing it with both hands and immediately shoving it in her mouth.
"Mmmmm! Nom nom nom!" She gummed the bracelet enthusiastically, drool coating the metal, making ecstatic sounds.
"You just gave her jewelry to eat," Christen said flatly.
"It made her happy!"
"It's metal! And it's been on your wrist! Which has been... places!"
"It's fine! Look how happy she is!"
Indeed, Y/N was blissful, sitting on the floor with the bracelet in her mouth, making continuous satisfied "Mmm... nom... mmm..." sounds while methodically gumming each link of the chain.
"This is going to end badly," Tobin predicted.
It took eight minutes.
Y/N had thoroughly gummed the entire bracelet, leaving it covered in drool and showing small indentations from her gums. She'd made happy babbling sounds around it the whole time—"Nom-ba-da-nom-mmm."
Then she dropped it.
It fell to the floor with a small clink.
Y/N looked at her empty hands. Made a confused "Uh?" sound.
Then she spotted it on the floor and her face lit up.
She leaned down to grab it and put it back in her mouth.
But the bracelet had other ideas. As she grabbed it, it slipped through her fingers and rolled under the couch.
Y/N stared at where it had gone. Her mouth opened in shock.
"Oooooh!" she breathed, getting down on her hands and knees to peer under the couch.
She could see it. Just barely. The metal glinting in the dim light under the couch.
She wanted it.
She tried to reach under the couch, making determined "Uh! Uh!" sounds as she stretched her arm, but her arm was too short.
"Mmmmm!" Frustrated sound. She tried again, reaching harder, making straining sounds—"Nnngh! Uh! Nnnngh!"
Still couldn't reach it.
She sat up, looked at the couch, then back at the floor.
An idea was forming in her little brain.
If she couldn't reach under the couch from here... maybe she could reach it from a different angle?
Or better yet... maybe she could go under the couch herself?
"Ooooh!" She made an excited sound, having solved the problem.
She got down on her belly and started trying to army-crawl under the couch, making determined grunting sounds—"Uh! Uh! Uh!"
Her head fit under. Her shoulders... mostly fit under.
"Uh oh," Kelley said, noticing what was happening. "The baby's going under the couch."
"She's WHAT?" Christen looked over from her conversation with Rose.
Y/N was now halfway under the couch, her entire upper body disappeared, just her diaper-clad bottom and legs sticking out, wiggling as she tried to pull herself further under.
"Uh! Uh! Uh!" Her determined sounds were muffled now, coming from under the couch.
"Y/N! You can't go under there!" Christen grabbed Y/N's legs and started pulling her back out.
"MMMMMMPH! NAAAAH!" Y/N's protesting sounds were muffled by the couch. She was trying to hold on to something under there, making angry sounds—"MMMMMM! MAH!"
She emerged covered in dust bunnies, one stuck to her hair, another on her cheek. And she was crying.
"WAAAAAAAH! MAH! MAH!" She pointed at the couch, making heartbroken sobbing sounds. "WAAAAH!"
"The bracelet is gone, baby."
"MAH! MAH! WAAAAAAAH!"
"We can't go under couches. That's not safe."
"WAAAAAAAH!" Y/N's face was bright red, tears and snot mixing with the dust from under the couch. She looked absolutely miserable.
And she'd tried to eat one of the dust bunnies. Christen could see the telltale wet spot on it.
"Did you eat dust?" Christen asked, trying to check Y/N's mouth.
Y/N clamped her mouth shut, making "Mmm-mmm!" sounds and turning her head away.
"Y/N Heath-Press, open your mouth."
"Mmm-mmm!"
"Now."
Y/N reluctantly opened her mouth. There were visible dust particles on her tongue.
"Oh my god, she ate dust from under a hotel couch," Christen said faintly.
"I'll get the bracelet," Sonnett volunteered, lying down to reach under the couch.
Y/N's crying intensified when she saw someone else getting her bracelet. "NOOOOOO! MAH! MAH!"
Sonnett emerged victorious, holding the now-dusty, drool-covered bracelet.
She held it out to Y/N.
Y/N grabbed it with both hands, pulled it close to her chest protectively, and made a possessive "MINE!" sound—still came out as "MAH!"—while glaring at everyone like they might try to take it.
Then she tried to put it back in her mouth.
"Oh no you don't," Christen said, intercepting. "That bracelet has been on the floor and under the couch. It needs to be cleaned."
"NAAAAAAAH!" Y/N clutched the bracelet tighter.
"We'll clean it and give it right back."
"NAAAAH! MAH!" Y/N was holding the bracelet in a death grip, making continuous protesting sounds.
It took Alex herself coming over and gently convincing Y/N to let go of the bracelet so it could be "washed to make it shinier."
Y/N reluctantly released it, making sad "Uhhhhh" sounds and watching with watery eyes as Alex took it to the bathroom to clean it.
While Alex was gone, Y/N sat in Christen's lap making pitiful whimpering sounds and looking toward the bathroom door, making questioning "Mmmmm?" sounds every few seconds.
"It's coming back," Christen assured her.
"Mmmmmm?" Y/N pointed at the bathroom door.
"Yes, Alex is bringing it back."
"Mmmmm?"
"Soon."
Y/N seemed unconvinced. She made sad "Uhhhh" sounds and her bottom lip quivered.
Then she spotted something else.
Kelley's phone, sitting on the arm of the couch.
Her eyes lit up. Sadness forgotten.
"Oooooh! PHO!"
She lunged for it with surprising speed, her little arms stretching out, making urgent "Eh! Eh! EH!" sounds.
"Nope!" Kelley grabbed her phone just in time. "Nice try, tiny human."
"PHOOOOO!" Y/N's face scrunched up in outrage. "PHO! PHO!"
"You can't have it."
"PHOOOOO!" Y/N started crying again, reaching for the phone with both hands, making desperate grabbing motions.
"What if—" Kelley looked around for a substitute. Her eyes landed on the TV remote. "What about this?"
She held out the remote to Y/N.
Y/N stopped crying. Looked at the remote. Made a considering "Hmmmm?" sound.
It was electronic. It had buttons. It wasn't a phone, but it was acceptable.
She grabbed it with both hands and immediately tried to bite it, making eager "Nom nom!" sounds.
"The hotel remote," Tobin said. "She's eating the hotel remote that's probably been touched by thousands of people."
"At least she's quiet," Kelley said.
Y/N was indeed quiet, completely focused on her new treasure. She was systematically gumming each button, making satisfied "Mmm... nom... mmm..." sounds as she worked her way across the remote.
Drool was running down it, pooling on the buttons, making the plastic glisten.
"That's disgusting," Mal observed, watching Y/N create a small puddle of drool on the remote.
"You get used to it," Christen said tiredly.
Alex returned with the clean bracelet. Y/N's eyes went huge.
"MAH!" She dropped the remote immediately—it hit the floor with a clatter—and reached for the bracelet with both hands, making urgent sounds—"Eh! Eh! MAH! MAH!"
Alex handed it to her. Y/N grabbed it, examined it to make sure it was the right one, made an approving "Mmmmm!" sound, and immediately put it in her mouth.
"Nom nom nom!" Back to enthusiastic gumming, making happy sounds.
She was content for approximately four more minutes.
Then she got bored with the bracelet again.
She looked around the room, assessing new opportunities, making thoughtful "Hmmmmm" sounds while still absently gumming the bracelet.
Her gaze landed on Lindsey, who was eating popcorn.
Real popcorn.
Not baby puffs.
Y/N's eyes went wide. She made an interested "Ooooooh!" sound.
The bracelet dropped from her mouth, forgotten.
She started crawling toward Lindsey with intense focus, making her hunting sounds—"Uh-uh-uh-uh-uh!"
Y/N reached Lindsey's couch and pulled herself up, making grunting "Uh! Uh!" sounds with the effort.
Then she lunged for Lindsey's bowl of popcorn.
Her little hand darted out with surprising speed, grabbed a fistful of popcorn, and brought it toward her mouth.
"NO!" Three voices yelled at once.
But Y/N was fast. She shoved the popcorn in her mouth before anyone could stop her.
Her eyes went wide.
This was new. This was different. This was... crunchy?
"Nom?" she said around the popcorn, making curious chewing sounds.
Then her face changed. The pieces were too big. They weren't dissolving like her puffs did.
She made an uncertain "Mmmmm?" sound, still chewing but looking confused.
"Spit it out, baby," Christen said, rushing over with her hand out. "Spit."
Y/N looked at her mom. Looked at the popcorn bits in her mouth. Made a decision.
She spit the soggy, half-chewed popcorn into Christen's hand, making a "Bleh!" sound.
Then she immediately reached for more popcorn, making eager "Eh! Eh!" sounds.
"Absolutely not," Christen said, moving the bowl out of reach.
"AAAAAAAH!" Y/N's protest was immediate and loud. "POP! POP! AAAAAAAH!"
"You can't eat popcorn! You just spit it out! You didn't even like it!"
"POP! POP!" Y/N was reaching with both hands now, leaning so far that Christen had to hold her to keep her from tumbling forward.
"How about we go get some yogurt?" Tobin suggested, trying to redirect. "Nice, safe yogurt?"
"NOOOOOO! POP!"
"Yogurt is delicious!"
"POP! POP! POP!" Y/N was shrieking now, her face bright red, completely fixated on the forbidden popcorn.
The entire room was staring at them. The movie was still playing, but no one was watching it anymore.
"Maybe we should take her out," Christen said quietly to Tobin, her face flushed with embarrassment.
"Yeah, good idea."
They started to stand, gathering their things with one hand while Tobin held a still-screaming Y/N with the other.
"POP! POP! WAAAAAAAH!"
But as they headed toward the door, Y/N spotted something that made her forget all about the popcorn.
The projector.
Sitting on a table in the middle of the room.
Glowing.
Making a soft humming sound.
With a very interesting-looking lens.
Her crying stopped mid-wail. Her mouth dropped open.
"Oooooooooooh!" She made an awed sound, reaching toward it with both hands. "OOOOOH! OOOOOH!"
"Oh no," Tobin said. "Not the projector."
"OOOOOH! DAH! DAH!" Y/N was pointing at it with her whole arm, bouncing in Tobin's arms excitedly.
"We're leaving," Christen said firmly. "Before she tries to eat the projector."
"NOOOOOO! OOOOOH! DAH! DAH!" Y/N started squirming, trying to escape toward the projector, making desperate sounds.
They made it out of the conference room with Y/N still reaching back toward the projector, making heartbroken "Ooooooh! Ooooooh!" sounds and straining against Tobin's hold.
The door closed behind them.
The sounds of the movie resumed, muffled through the door.
Y/N made one last sad "Ooooooooh!" sound, a tear rolling down her cheek.
Then she spotted the potted plant in the hallway.
"Oooooh!" Sadness forgotten, eyes bright with new interest. "PWANT!"
It didn't sound like "plant"—more like "PWAAA!"
She started squirming toward it, making urgent "Eh! Eh! EH!" sounds.
"Absolutely not," Christen said. "We're going back to the room."
"PWAAA! PWAAA!"
"You're not eating a decorative plant."
"PWAAAAAA!"
They headed back to their room with Y/N crying about the plant, then the fire extinguisher she spotted ("OOOOOH!"), then a room service cart ("CAAAAA!"), then someone's shoes left outside their door ("SHOOOOOO!").
Everything was a tragedy when she couldn't put it in her mouth.
"How many more days of camp?" Tobin asked as they finally got back to their room.
"Five."
"Cool. Cool cool cool. We can do this."
Y/N, now in the room, had already spotted the mini fridge and was crawling toward it at top speed, making excited "OOOOOH! OOOOOH!" sounds.
"Or we might not survive," Christen said, jogging after her daughter. "That's also a possibility."
"FWIDGE! FWIDGE!" Y/N had reached it and was trying to open it, pulling on the handle and making frustrated grunting sounds when it didn't budge.
It was going to be a very long week.
*******
The team had a recovery session scheduled at the hotel pool—light swimming, stretching in the water, and general relaxation.
Tobin and Christen had debated bringing Y/N.
"She loves water," Tobin said. "Remember bath time? She gets so excited."
"Bath time is controlled," Christen countered. "Bath time doesn't have dozens of people and pool equipment and—"
"She'll be fine! We'll keep her in the baby pool area. What could go wrong?"
Christen looked at her wife with an expression that clearly said 'do you really want me to answer that?'
But they brought Y/N anyway.
Getting her ready for the pool was an adventure in itself. Y/N was wearing her little swim diaper and a UV protection swimsuit with ruffles. She looked absolutely adorable.
She also kept trying to eat the swimsuit.
"Nom nom nom," she said, pulling the fabric toward her mouth and gumming the shoulder strap enthusiastically.
"Baby, that's what you're wearing. You can't eat your own clothes."
"Nom!" Y/N disagreed, still chewing on the strap, making satisfied "Mmmmm!" sounds.
"You're going to have drool all over yourself before we even get to the pool."
Y/N didn't care. She continued gumming her swimsuit, creating a wet spot on the shoulder.
They made their way down to the pool area. The moment they pushed through the doors and Y/N caught sight of all that water, her eyes went huge.
"OOOOOOOOOH!" She made an awed sound, her mouth dropping open. "WAH-WAH!"
Her version of "water" sounded more like "WAH-WAH!" but her excitement was clear.
She started squirming in Tobin's arms, making urgent "Dah! Dah! DAH!" sounds and reaching toward the pool with both hands.
"Hold on, we're getting there."
"DAH! DAH! WAH-WAH!" Y/N was practically vibrating with excitement, bouncing in Tobin's arms and making continuous eager sounds—"Eh! Eh! Eh!"
They set up in a shaded area near the smaller, shallower section of the pool. Tobin held Y/N while Christen arranged their towels and supplies.
Y/N was transfixed by the water. Her head was swiveling, trying to take it all in, making continuous "Ooooh! Aaaah! Oooooh!" sounds.
Then she spotted Alex doing laps in the main pool.
And more specifically, she spotted the kickboard Alex was using.
Bright blue. Floating. Moving through the water.
Perfect for eating.
"OOOOOOOH!" Y/N pointed at it with her whole arm. "BOOOOO!"
"That's Alex's kickboard," Tobin said.
"BOO! BOO!" Y/N started bouncing excitedly, making insistent sounds. "BOO! BOO! DAH!"
"We're going in the baby pool. Look, nice shallow water for you!"
But Y/N wasn't interested in the baby pool anymore. She'd seen the kickboard and nothing else would do.
Tobin carefully walked down the pool steps into the shallow area, holding Y/N securely.
The moment Y/N's toes touched the water, she made a surprised "OH!" sound.
Then her face lit up with pure joy.
"WAH-WAH! WAH-WAH!" She started kicking her legs enthusiastically, splashing water everywhere, making delighted squealing sounds—"Eeeee! Eeeee!"
"Someone likes the pool," Christen said, smiling as she waded in to join them.
Y/N was splashing with both feet now, making continuous happy sounds—"WAH-WAH-BAH-DAH-WAH!" Each splash made her giggle—actual baby giggles that sounded like "Heh-heh-heh!"
Then she noticed the water itself.
How it moved when she kicked. How it felt on her skin. How it made interesting ripples.
And most importantly, how she could reach it with her hands.
She leaned forward in Tobin's arms, reached down, and scooped up a handful of water.
Then she tried to eat it.
"Nom!" She brought her cupped hands toward her mouth, but the water had already leaked out through her fingers.
She looked at her empty hands, confused. Made a "Uh?" sound.
Where did it go?
She tried again. Scooped water, brought it toward her mouth. It leaked out again.
"Uh?" More confused now. She looked at her hands like they'd betrayed her.
Third try. This time she moved faster, scooping and immediately shoving her hands in her mouth.
She got maybe three drops of water and a lot of chlorine.
"Mmmmm?" She made an uncertain sound, her face scrunching up. This tasted weird.
But it was water and it was new, so she tried again.
"Baby, you can't eat the pool water," Christen said, gently redirecting Y/N's hands.
"WAH-WAH!" Y/N protested, immediately scooping more water and trying to drink it, making slurping sounds.
"That's not for drinking!"
"Nom nom nom!" Y/N had managed to get her whole fist in her mouth, sucking the chlorinated water off her hand, making determined sounds.
"Y/N, no! That has chemicals!"
"MMMMM!" Y/N pulled her hand out of her mouth, immediately dunked it back in the pool, and tried to eat more water, making eager "Nom nom!" sounds.
"This is going to be harder than I thought," Tobin said.
It took three minutes of constant redirection before Y/N got distracted from trying to drink the pool.
What distracted her was Kelley doing a cannonball into the deep end.
The resulting splash was enormous.
Y/N's eyes went huge. Her mouth dropped open.
"OOOOOOOOOH!" She made an awed sound, watching the water splash and settle. "OOOOOH! OOOOOH!"
Kelley surfaced, laughing and shaking water from her hair.
Y/N started bouncing in Tobin's arms, pointing at Kelley and making excited "EEEEEE!" squealing sounds.
"You like the splash?"
"EEEE! EEEEE!" Y/N bounced harder, making the water splash around them.
"Want to splash too?"
Y/N's response was to immediately start smacking the water with both hands, making huge splashes and shrieking with delight—"EEEE! WAH-WAH! EEEE!"
Water went everywhere. On Tobin. On Christen. On herself. She didn't care. This was the best thing ever.
"SPLASH! SPLASH!" It sounded more like "SPAAA! SPAAA!" but she was clearly labeling her activity.
She smacked the water harder, making bigger splashes, laughing her little baby laugh—"Heh-heh-heh!"—between splashes.
Then she noticed something floating nearby.
A foam pool noodle.
Bright yellow.
Floating lazily past them.
Unattended.
Perfect.
Her splashing stopped immediately. She went very still, tracking the noodle with her eyes like a predator.
"Uh oh," Tobin said, recognizing that look. "She's spotted prey."
"OOOOOOOH!" Y/N reached toward the noodle with both hands, making urgent "Eh! Eh! EH! EH!" sounds.
The noodle floated closer.
Y/N's reaching became more desperate—"EH! EH! EH!"—her little fingers opening and closing frantically.
"You want the noodle?" Tobin maneuvered them closer.
The moment Y/N could reach it, she grabbed it with both hands and immediately tried to bite it.
"NOM!" Her mouth opened wide, trying to fit the foam noodle between her gums.
The noodle was too big. This didn't stop her. She adjusted her angle and tried again, making determined "Nom! Nom! Nom!" sounds with each attempt.
"She's trying to eat the pool noodle," Rose observed, swimming by.
"She tries to eat everything," Christen said. "Yesterday she tried to eat a dust bunny. This morning she tried to eat the hotel door. The pool noodle is actually relatively clean by comparison."
Y/N had found a technique that worked. Since she couldn't fit her mouth around the noodle, she'd started gumming along the side of it, making happy "Mmmmm! Nom nom nom!" sounds as she worked her way along the foam.
Drool was mixing with pool water, running down the bright yellow foam.
She was creating a wet streak along the entire length of the noodle, methodically gumming each section, making satisfied sounds—"Mmm... nom... mmm..."
"At least she's contained?" Tobin offered.
Y/N gummed her noodle contentedly for about five minutes, making happy babbling sounds around the foam—"Nom-ba-da-nom-wah-wah."
Then Sonnett swam by with a beach ball.
Y/N's head snapped up. Her eyes locked onto the beach ball.
The noodle was forgotten immediately. It drifted away as Y/N released it, her entire focus now on the beach ball.
"OOOOOH! BAH! BAH!" She started bouncing excitedly, reaching toward the ball with both hands.
"You want the ball?" Sonnett asked, swimming closer.
"BAH! BAH! BAH!" Y/N was practically levitating out of Tobin's arms, making desperate sounds—"Eh! Eh! EH! EH!"
Sonnett gently tossed the beach ball toward them. It landed in the water with a soft splash.
Y/N lunged for it with both hands, grabbing it and immediately trying to bite it.
"NOM!" She opened her mouth as wide as she could, pressing her face against the ball and attempting to gum it.
The ball was even bigger than the soccer ball she'd tried to eat during training. This made her more determined.
She worked her way around the ball, trying to find a spot her mouth could grip, making frustrated "Mmmmm! Mmmmm!" sounds when she couldn't get a good angle.
"She's very persistent," Sonnett said, watching Y/N's determined efforts.
"That's one word for it," Christen said. "Obsessive is another."
Y/N had discovered that if she pressed her open mouth against the ball hard enough, she could sort of gum it, even if she couldn't actually bite it.
"Nom nom nom!" She was working her way around the ball's surface, leaving small wet spots where her mouth had been, making satisfied sounds with each "bite."
Then the ball slipped out of her grasp.
It floated away across the pool, bobbing gently on the water.
Y/N watched it go. Made a confused "Uh?" sound.
Then her face crumpled.
"BAAAAAAAH!" she wailed, reaching toward the retreating ball with both hands. "BAH! BAH! WAAAAAAAH!"
"It's right there, we can get it—"
"BAAAAAAAH! MY BAH!" She was sobbing now, making heartbroken sounds and straining toward the ball.
Sonnett swam after the ball and brought it back, but by the time she returned, Y/N had found something new to fixate on.
Mal's goggles.
Mal had taken them off and set them on the edge of the pool, about three feet away from where Tobin was standing with Y/N.
Y/N spotted them immediately.
Her crying stopped mid-sob. "Oh!"
"OOOOOH!" She pointed at the goggles with her whole arm. "GOGGAH!"
Her attempt at "goggles" sounded more like a garbled "GAH-GAH!" but she was very excited about them.
"Those are Mal's—"
"GAH-GAH! GAH-GAH! DAH! DAH!" Y/N started squirming, trying to escape Tobin's arms to get to the goggles.
"We can't reach those from here."
"DAH! DAH!" Y/N was pointing insistently now, bouncing and making urgent sounds.
"You know what? Fine." Tobin waded over to the edge of the pool.
The moment they were close enough, Y/N lunged for the goggles with both hands, grabbing them and immediately trying to bite the strap.
"Nom nom nom!" She gummed the silicone strap enthusiastically, making happy sounds.
"My goggles!" Mal said, swimming over. "She's eating my goggles!"
"She's not eating them, she's just... tasting them," Tobin said weakly.
"There's drool all over them!"
Indeed, Y/N had created a significant drool situation. The goggle strap was now glistening with baby drool, and Y/N was working her way along it methodically, gumming each section, making satisfied "Mmmmm!" sounds.
"We'll clean them," Christen promised. "Or buy you new ones."
"She's going to eat every piece of pool equipment, isn't she?" Alex asked, swimming over to watch.
"Probably," Tobin agreed.
Y/N, hearing voices, looked up from her goggle-gumming. She still had the strap in her mouth, making her look like she had a very weird pacifier.
She smiled around it—a big, drooly smile—and made a happy "Mmmmm!" sound.
Then she noticed Alex was close.
And Alex was wearing a swim cap.
Bright blue. Tight to her head. Shiny.
Y/N's eyes went huge.
The goggles dropped from her mouth with a small splash.
"OOOOOOOOOH!" She made an awed sound, reaching toward Alex's head with both hands. "CAP! CAP!"
"Oh no," Alex said, recognizing the look. "Not the swim cap."
"CAP! CAP!" Y/N was leaning so far toward Alex that Tobin had to tighten her grip to keep Y/N from tumbling into the water.
"You can't have my—"
But Y/N had already reached Alex's head. Her little hands grabbed the edge of the swim cap and she tried to pull it off, making determined grunting sounds—"Uh! Uh! UH!"
"Hey! Stop!" Alex tried to duck away, but Y/N had a surprisingly strong grip.
The swim cap stretched.
Y/N pulled harder, making louder grunting sounds—"UH! UH!"
"Y/N, let go!" Christen tried to pry Y/N's fingers off the cap.
"CAP! MY CAP!" Y/N pulled with all her might.
The swim cap snapped off Alex's head with a wet THWAP sound.
Y/N went backward in Tobin's arms, still clutching the cap, making a surprised "OH!" sound.
Then she immediately tried to eat it.
"NOM!" She shoved the bunched-up swim cap toward her mouth, making eager sounds.
"That was on Alex's head!" Christen grabbed the cap before Y/N could get it in her mouth. "It's covered in hair and sweat and—"
"MY CAP! MY CAP!" Y/N's face scrunched up in outrage. She reached for the cap with both hands, making angry sounds—"AAAAH! AAAAH! MY CAP!"
"It's not your cap, baby. It's Alex's cap."
"MY CAP!" Y/N was shrieking now, her face bright red, tears starting to form. "WAAAAH! MY CAP!"
"Here," Alex said, her hair now plastered to her head from being under the cap. "She can have it. I have others."
"Alex, you don't have to—"
"Please, just give it to her. I can't handle the crying. I thought Charlie was a loud crier as a baby but this kid's on a whole different level,"
Christen reluctantly handed the swim cap to Y/N.
Y/N's crying stopped instantly. She grabbed the cap with both hands, examined it to make sure it was the right one, made an approving "Mmmmm!" sound, and immediately shoved it in her mouth.
"Nom nom nom!" She gummed the silicone material enthusiastically, drool running down it, making ecstatic sounds—"Mmmmm! Mmmmm!"
"She's eating my swim cap," Alex said, watching in fascinated horror as Y/N worked the material around in her mouth, "Your baby is a different breed of baby..."
"At least she's happy?" Tobin offered.
Y/N was very happy. She was gumming away, making continuous satisfied sounds—"Nom-mmm-nom-ba-da-nom."
For about three minutes.
Then she spotted Kelley getting out of the pool.
And more specifically, she spotted Kelley's water shoes.
Bright pink. Mesh material. With interesting holes.
The swim cap dropped from Y/N's mouth, forgotten, floating away on the water.
"OOOOOOOH!" Her eyes locked onto the shoes. "SHOOOOO!"
"No," Christen said immediately, recognizing where this was going. "Absolutely not."
"SHOO! SHOO!" Y/N pointed at Kelley's feet with her whole arm, bouncing excitedly.
"Those are shoes! They've been in pool water and on the deck and in the locker room!"
"SHOOOOO!" Y/N started squirming, trying to escape toward the shoes, making desperate sounds—"Eh! Eh! EH! EH!"
Kelley, sitting on a pool chair and completely unaware of being targeted, was checking her phone.
Y/N was making increasingly urgent sounds—"SHOO! SHOO! DAH! DAH!"—straining toward Kelley with her whole body.
"We should probably leave," Tobin said. "Before she tries to eat someone's footwear."
"Good idea."
They started making their way toward the pool steps, but Y/N had other plans.
She'd noticed that if she threw her weight forward hard enough and squirmed in just the right way, she could break free from Tobin's grip.
She'd been practicing this technique all week.
She chose this moment to perfect it.
With a mighty squirm and a loud "UH!" sound of effort, she twisted in Tobin's arms, pushed off with her feet against Tobin's stomach, and launched herself forward.
Right into the water.
She went under with a small splash, making a surprised "Oh!" sound that came out as bubbles.
Both Tobin and Christen dove for her simultaneously, creating a much bigger splash.
Tobin got her first, pulling Y/N up out of the water.
Y/N surfaced, water streaming down her face, her eyes huge with shock.
For a moment, there was complete silence.
Everyone in the pool area froze, waiting to see how Y/N would react.
Y/N blinked water out of her eyes. Made a small "Uh?" sound.
Then her face split into the biggest smile.
"AGAIN! AGAIN!" It sounded more like "AH-GAH! AH-GAH!" but the intent was clear.
She started bouncing in Tobin's arms, making excited squealing sounds—"EEEEE! WAH-WAH! AH-GAH!"
"She liked it," Christen said, relief flooding her voice. "Oh thank god, she liked it."
"WAH-WAH! AH-GAH!" Y/N was trying to throw herself forward again, making the same pushing motion with her feet.
"Oh no, we're not doing that again," Tobin said, holding her more securely.
"AH-GAH! AH-GAH! PEASE!" Her version of "please" sounded like "PEASE!" and was accompanied by an excited bounce.
"Maybe just a little dip?" Christen suggested. "Controlled this time?"
They carefully lowered Y/N into the water up to her shoulders, holding her securely the whole time.
Y/N's face lit up with pure joy.
"WAH-WAH!" She started kicking her legs, splashing water everywhere, laughing her baby laugh—"Heh-heh-heh!"
Then she noticed the water was right there at mouth level.
Perfect for drinking.
She leaned forward and tried to drink the pool water, making slurping sounds.
"No no no!" Christen tilted Y/N back before she could get much.
Y/N had already gotten a mouthful. Her face scrunched up.
"Bleh!" She spit it out, making disgusted sounds. "BLEH! BAH!"
Then she immediately tried to drink more, apparently not learning from the experience.
"Why?" Tobin asked. "Why do you keep trying to drink it when you don't like it?"
Y/N's response was to make another slurping attempt, her face immediately scrunching up again when she tasted the chlorine.
"Bleh!" Spit it out. Then tried again. "Nom?"
"We should get her out," Christen said. "Before she drinks half the pool."
They headed toward the steps, Y/N making protesting "NOOOO! WAH-WAH!" sounds the entire way.
As they climbed out, Y/N spotted one more thing she needed to try to eat.
The pool ladder.
Metal. Wet. With interesting textured grips.
"OOOOOH!" She lunged for it as they passed, grabbing a rung with both hands and trying to bite it before anyone could stop her.
"NOM!" She got her mouth on the metal, making enthusiastic gumming sounds.
"Y/N! Do you know how many people touch that?!" Christen pulled her away from the ladder.
Y/N's mouth came off the ladder with a wet sound. She'd left a small drool spot on the metal.
"LADDAH! MY LADDAH!" She reached back for it, making heartbroken sounds. "WAAAAH! LADDAH!"
"The pool ladder is not for eating!"
"LAAAAAAAAAAH!" Y/N was in full meltdown mode now, shrieking and crying, reaching back toward the pool area as they carried her away.
Every team member watched them go, Y/N's cries echoing through the pool area.
"LADDAH! WAH-WAH! SHOO! CAP! LADDAAAAAAAH!"
She was listing every item she'd been denied the chance to fully eat, making each one sound like a tragedy of epic proportions.
Back in the changing room, wrapped in a towel and still making sad hiccupping sounds—"hic-hic-laddah-hic"—Y/N spotted one more thing.
The hand dryer on the wall.
Chrome. Shiny. Making an interesting humming sound when someone used it.
Her eyes lit up one more time.
"Oooooh?"
"Don't even think about it," Christen said.
"Oooooh!" More insistent now, reaching toward it.
"We're leaving."
"OOOOOOOH! DWYER! DWYER!" Her attempt at "dryer" sounded more like "DWY-YER!" and came with desperate reaching motions.
They left the changing room with Y/N still calling out for things she wanted to eat—"Dwyer! Laddah! Shoo! Cap!"
"Pool time was a mistake," Tobin said.
"Everything is a mistake," Christen replied. "We're just living in a constant state of preventing her from eating inappropriate objects."
Y/N, now in her stroller, had found the stroller's safety strap and was gumming it contentedly, making satisfied "Nom nom nom" sounds, pool adventure forgotten.
"At least the strap is clean," Tobin said.
"Is it though?"
They both looked at the strap, now covered in drool and showing small indentations from enthusiastic gumming.
"It's clean enough," Tobin decided.
Y/N hummed in agreement—"Mmmmm-nom-nom-mmm"—and continued her afternoon snack of safety strap, completely content.
For now.
******
The week had somehow passed without Y/N eating anything that required emergency medical intervention, which Tobin and Christen considered a massive victory.
Now it was matchday. USA vs. Canada. A sold-out friendly at the stadium.
And someone on the USSF staff had thought it would be "adorable" and "great for publicity" if Y/N was carried out as a child mascot during the player walkout.
"It'll be fine," the media coordinator had said. "She'll be in someone's arms the whole time. What could go wrong?"
Christen and Tobin had shared a look that communicated an entire novel's worth of concerns.
But they'd agreed.
Now, in the tunnel before kickoff, Y/N was dressed in a tiny USWNT jersey with "BABY PREATH" on the back and the number 0. She looked absolutely precious.
She was also trying to eat the jersey.
"Nom nom nom," she said, pulling the collar toward her mouth and gumming the fabric enthusiastically, making satisfied sounds.
"Baby, that's your special game jersey," Christen said, pulling it out of Y/N's mouth. "Don't eat it before we even get on the field."
"Nom!" Y/N grabbed it again, determined.
The tunnel was packed with players from both teams, referees, actual child mascots, and stadium staff. Y/N's head was on a swivel, taking everything in, making continuous "Ooooh! Aaaah! Oooooh!" sounds at all the new sights.
Then she spotted something that made her entire face light up.
The soccer balls.
Multiple soccer balls, lined up on a rack, waiting to be brought out for warmups.
Her eyes went huge. Her mouth dropped open.
"BAAAAAAAH!" She shrieked with excitement, pointing at them with her whole arm. "BAH! BAH! BAH!"
"You tried to eat a soccer ball three days ago," Tobin reminded her. "You couldn't fit your mouth around it then, and you can't now."
"BAH! BAH! BAH!" Y/N was bouncing in Christen's arms, making increasingly urgent sounds, reaching toward the balls with both hands.
"We're not getting you a ball."
"BAAAAAAAH!" Y/N's face started to scrunch up, the pre-cry face forming.
"Oh no," Alex said, standing nearby. "Not the cry face. Not right before we walk out."
"BAH! BAH! PEASE!" Y/N added her version of "please," which came with an extra desperate bounce.
A Canadian player walked by, dribbling one of the balls to warm up her feet.
Y/N's eyes tracked the movement like a hawk.
"Bah," she whispered in awe, watching the ball move. "Bah bah bah..."
Then she made her move.
With a mighty squirm and push—the technique she'd been perfecting all week—she launched herself out of Christen's arms toward the Canadian player.
But Y/N had managed to grab the ball with one hand as she was caught, and now she was holding onto it with a death grip, trying to pull it toward her mouth.
"NOM! NOM!" She was making determined grunting sounds, her little fingers digging into the ball.
"I'm sorry!" Christen said to the startled Canadian player. "Sorry! She's... very enthusiastic about soccer balls."
"BAH! MY BAH!" Y/N was still gripping it, trying to bring it to her mouth, making frustrated sounds when Christen's hold prevented it.
The Canadian player, clearly trying not to laugh, gently extracted her ball from Y/N's grasp.
Y/N watched it go with betrayed eyes.
Her bottom lip started to quiver.
"Bah," she whispered sadly, a single tear rolling down her cheek. "My bah."
"You don't need a ball, baby. You're going to walk out with the team! That's exciting!"
Y/N made a skeptical "Hmph" sound and turned her face away dramatically, making sad sniffling sounds.
Then she noticed what Kelley was holding.
The captain's armband.
Bright white with the rainbow captain's armband design.
Fabric. Soft. With interesting textures.
Perfect for eating.
Her sadness evaporated instantly.
"OOOOOOOH!" Her eyes went huge. She pointed at Kelley's arm. "OOOOOH! DAT!"
"This is my armband," Kelley said, noticing Y/N's interest. "For being captain."
"DAT! DAT!" Y/N started reaching for it, making urgent "Eh! Eh! EH!" sounds.
"You can't have—"
But Y/N had already grabbed the edge of the armband with surprising speed, pulling it toward her mouth.
"NOM!" She got it between her gums and started chewing enthusiastically, making happy "Mmmmm!" sounds.
She was gumming Kelley's armband.
While it was still on Kelley's arm.
"She's eating my captain's armband," Kelley said, watching Y/N work the fabric around in her mouth with focused determination. "During a game walkout."
"At least she's quiet?" Tobin offered.
"Mmmmm! Nom nom nom!" Y/N confirmed, still chewing away, drool starting to darken the fabric.
The whistle blew—time to walk out.
"We need to go," the media coordinator said. "Kelley, you're carrying her, right?"
"I'm literally attached to her by my armband right now, so I guess so."
Kelley picked up Y/N, who kept her mouth firmly attached to the armband, making continuous gumming sounds—"nom-nom-nom-mmm-nom."
"You're lucky you're cute, kid," Kelley sighed.
The tunnel doors opened.
The roar of the crowd was deafening.
Y/N's eyes went huge. Her mouth came off the armband with a wet sound.
"OOOOOOOOOH!" She made an awed sound, looking out at the massive stadium full of people.
Then she immediately went back to eating the armband.
"Nom nom nom!" The crowd noise was interesting, but the armband was right there.
They walked out onto the field, players waving to the crowd, the announcer calling out names.
Y/N continued methodically gumming Kelley's armband, completely unbothered by the thousands of people watching, making satisfied sounds—"Mmmmm-nom-nom-mmm."
Cameras were definitely catching this.
"This is going on Instagram, isn't it?" Christen muttered to Tobin as they walked behind Kelley.
"One hundred percent. 'USWNT's youngest player tries to eat captain's armband during international friendly.'"
"The comments are going to be amazing."
They reached their positions on the field for the national anthem.
Y/N, still in Kelley's arms, had finished with the armband (it now had a large wet spot and visible tooth indentations) and was looking around for new opportunities.
She spotted Rose's ponytail, swinging gently in the breeze.
"Oooooh!" Interest acquired.
She reached out with both hands and grabbed the ponytail before anyone could stop her, immediately trying to bring it to her mouth.
"NOM!" She got a mouthful of hair and started gumming it enthusiastically.
"Your daughter is eating my hair," Rose said without turning around, somehow knowing exactly what was happening.
"Y/N, no! Hair is not food!" Christen tried to extract the ponytail from Y/N's mouth.
Y/N held on tight, making protesting "Mmmmm! Mmmmm!" sounds and refusing to let go.
The national anthem started.
Y/N was still trying to eat Rose's hair, making continuous gumming sounds that were definitely being picked up by the broadcast microphones.
"Nom-nom-nom-mmm-nom-nom..."
Christen finally managed to free Rose's hair. It came out of Y/N's mouth covered in drool, several strands sticking together in a wet clump.
"Sorry," Christen mouthed to Rose.
Y/N, denied the hair, immediately found a new target.
Kelley's jersey number.
The big "5" on the back.
She could reach it since Kelley was holding her.
She grabbed the fabric and tried to pull it toward her mouth, making determined "Uh! Uh!" grunting sounds.
"Stop trying to eat my jersey during the national anthem," Kelley whispered.
"NOM!" Y/N got a corner of the jersey in her mouth and started gumming it, making happy sounds.
The anthem ended.
Time for the team photo.
Y/N was passed to Christen for the photo, but she'd already spotted something new.
The FIFA badge on Alex's jersey.
Shiny. Embroidered. Different texture from the rest of the jersey.
She wanted to taste it.
"OOOOOH!" She lunged toward Alex, reaching with both hands.
"Not right now, baby," Christen said, holding her back.
The camera flashed.
In the official team photo, Y/N is mid-lunge, arms outstretched toward Alex, mouth open, clearly trying to eat something, with a look of intense determination on her face.
It would become the most-liked USWNT photo on Instagram within six hours.
After the photo, it was time for Y/N to go back to the sideline with Christen and Tobin while the game started.
But Y/N had other ideas.
She'd spotted the corner flag.
Bright yellow. On a flexible pole. Fluttering in the breeze.
She needed to taste it immediately.
"FLAG! FLAG!" It sounded more like "FWAG! FWAG!" but her intent was clear.
She started squirming, trying to escape toward the corner flag, making increasingly desperate sounds—"FWAG! FWAG! FWAG!"
"We're leaving the field now," Christen said firmly, carrying Y/N toward the sideline.
"NOOOOOO! FWAG!" Y/N was straining backward, reaching toward the flag with both hands, making heartbroken sounds. "MY FWAG! WAAAAH!"
They passed the Canada bench.
Y/N spotted a Canadian player's water bottle sitting on the bench.
Crying forgotten.
New target acquired.
"OOOOOH! BAAAH!" Her version of "bottle" sounded like an extended "BAAAAH!"
She lunged for it with both arms, making urgent grabbing motions.
The Canadian coaching staff watched in amazement as this tiny child tried to launch herself out of her mother's arms toward their water bottle, making desperate "BAAAH! BAAAH! BAAAH!" sounds.
"She's very... enthusiastic," one of the Canadian coaches said diplomatically.
"She tries to eat everything," Tobin explained. "Everything. We caught her trying to eat a door hinge yesterday."
"BAAAAAAH!" Y/N was still reaching for the water bottle, making increasingly frantic sounds.
They finally made it to the family section in the stands.
Y/N immediately calmed down.
Not because she'd given up on eating inappropriate objects.
But because she'd found something new.
The foam finger a fan in front of them was holding.
Big. Bright blue. Foam material that looked very chewable.
"Oooooh," she breathed, her eyes going wide. "Oooooh!"
She started reaching for it, making interested "Mmmmm?" sounds.
"No," Christen said preemptively. "Absolutely not. That belongs to someone else."
"Ooooooh!" Y/N was leaning forward in her seat, straining toward the foam finger, making eager sounds—"Eh! Eh! Eh!"
The game started.
Y/N paid zero attention to the actual soccer.
She was completely fixated on the foam finger, making continuous longing sounds—"Oooooh... mmmmm... oooooh..."
Every time the person holding it moved, Y/N tracked it with her eyes, her head moving like she was watching a tennis match.
"Oooooh... oooooh... oooooh..."
USA scored.
The crowd erupted.
Y/N didn't even blink. Her eyes were still locked on the foam finger.
"Baby, did you see? Aunt Alex scored!"
"Oooooh," Y/N said, still staring at the foam finger. "Mmmmm."
By halftime, Y/N had tried to eat:
Her jersey (successfully gummed the collar)Christen's phone (intercepted before contact)Tobin's lanyard (got three good seconds of chewing before removal)The armrest of the stadium seat (left drool marks)A popcorn kernel she found on the ground (removed from mouth mid-chew)The strap of Tobin's bag (ongoing, currently in mouth)
She was currently working on the bag strap, making contented "nom-nom-nom" sounds while the teams came out for the second half.
"She's not even watching the game," Tobin observed.
"She doesn't care about the game. She cares about which objects she hasn't tasted yet."
Y/N, hearing her mother's voice, looked up from her strap-chewing.
She smiled—a big, drooly smile with the bag strap still in her mouth.
"Nom!" she announced proudly, showing off her accomplishment.
Then she went back to chewing, making satisfied sounds.
The game ended. USA won 2-0.
The team came over to the family section to celebrate, still riding the high of the win.
Y/N spotted Kelley approaching and immediately started bouncing, making excited "KEH-KEH!" sounds. (Her version of "Kelley.")
Kelley picked her up, lifting her high.
Y/N immediately grabbed Kelley's medal—the one she'd just been awarded for player of the match.
"NOM!" She tried to bite it, making eager sounds.
"That's a medal! It's metal! You can't eat metal!"
"NOM NOM NOM!" Y/N was trying to fit the entire medal in her mouth, making determined sounds.
The broadcast cameras caught it all.
Y/N, in her tiny jersey, trying to eat Kelley's player of the match medal, making enthusiastic gumming sounds while Kelley tried to pull it away.
"This is going to be everywhere, isn't it?" Christen said to Tobin.
"Yep. 'USWNT's Baby Preath Tries to Eat Everything at International Friendly.'"
"At least she's consistent."
They watched as Y/N successfully got the medal in her mouth and started gumming it, making triumphant "MMMMM!" sounds while Kelley stood there looking resigned to her fate.
Rose was taking a selfie with Y/N in the background, still chewing the medal.
Alex was laughing so hard she was crying.
The Canadian team was watching with expressions of confused amusement.
And Y/N was having the time of her life, systematically taste-testing everyone's medals, jerseys, and anything else within reach.
"BAH-DAH-NOM-NOM-KEH-KEH!" she babbled happily around Kelley's medal, drool running down the ribbon.
"I love her," Kelley said, "but she's eaten approximately forty percent of my belongings this week."
Y/N pulled the medal out of her mouth long enough to beam at everyone, make a happy "YAAAAAY!" sound, and wave both hands in celebration.
Then the medal went right back in her mouth.
"Nom nom nom!"
The crowd was chanting. Fireworks were going off. The team was celebrating their win.
And Y/N was in the middle of it all, systematically tasting everything she could reach, making happy babbling sounds, completely content in her mission to eat the world one object at a time.
******
Three hours later, back at the hotel, finally in pajamas, Y/N was fighting sleep once again.
She was lying in her travel crib, eyes drooping, making tired "Mmmmm" sounds.
But she kept reaching up toward her mouth, making questioning "Nom?" sounds, like she was checking if there was anything left to eat.
"There's nothing left to eat, baby girl," Christen said softly. "You've eaten enough things today."
"Nom?" Y/N asked again, her little hand moving toward her mouth.
She found her thumb and stuck it in her mouth, making a satisfied "Mmmmm" sound.
Finally. Something she was allowed to eat.
Her eyes drifted closed.
"Nom... nom... nom..." she mumbled sleepily around her thumb, her chewing getting slower and slower.
Within minutes, she was asleep, still making tiny "nom" sounds occasionally, her jaw working slightly even in sleep.
"She's dreaming about eating again," Tobin whispered.
"Of course she is," Christen said, watching their daughter sleep. "It's her favorite hobby."
They stood there for a moment, watching Y/N sleep peacefully, her little chest rising and falling, tiny snores mixing with occasional sleep-eating sounds.
Tomorrow they'd go home.
Where Y/N would undoubtedly find new things to try to eat.
Door knobs. Magazines. The dog's toys. Furniture corners. Leaves from the backyard. Anything and everything.
But for now, she was peaceful. Content. Safe.
And absolutely perfect.
Even if she did try to eat literally everything in existence.
"Worth it?" Tobin asked quietly.
Christen looked at their sleeping daughter, remembering the week. The chaos. The constant vigilance. The drool. The near-misses. The actual misses where Y/N had successfully eaten inappropriate things.
She thought about Y/N's delighted squeals at the pool. Her proud "Nom!" announcements. Her determination to taste-test the entire world. Her happy babbling around mouthfuls of things she shouldn't be eating.
"Worth it," Christen confirmed, smiling.
Y/N made a small sound in her sleep—"nom"—and her mouth moved like she was chewing something.
They'd survived camp with an eight-month-old who thought everything was food.
Barely.
But they'd survived.
And the internet had dozens of videos and photos of Y/N's taste-testing adventures to prove it.
The most popular was already titled: "USWNT Baby Preath and Her Quest to Eat Everything: A Thread."
It had over a million views.
Every single comment was some variation of "Same, tiny baby. Same."
Y/N shifted in her sleep, her thumb falling out of her mouth.
Immediately, still asleep, her hand searched for something else.
She found the edge of her blanket, pulled it to her mouth, and started gumming it, making sleepy "nom... nom..." sounds without waking up.
Christen and Tobin looked at each other.
"We're going to need to baby-proof the entire house again when we get home, aren't we?" Tobin said.
"The entire house, the yard, possibly the whole neighborhood."
Y/N continued contentedly gumming her blanket in her sleep, making satisfied little sounds, dreaming of all the things she'd tasted and all the things she had yet to taste.
Tomorrow would bring new adventures.
New objects to investigate.
New things to try to eat.
But for now, she slept.
And her parents watched her, exhausted but full of love, already preparing themselves for whatever Y/N would try to eat next.
Because with Y/N Heath-Press, there would always be a next.
Post-credits scene: Three days later, a photo went viral on Twitter. Y/N, sitting in her high chair at home, had somehow gotten hold of Tobin's car keys and was enthusiastically gumming them while making happy "Nom nom nom!" sounds.
The caption read: "She's home and back to her regularly scheduled programming of trying to eat everything. Send help. #BabyGotTaste #LiterallyEverything" It got 2.3 million likes.
Baby Y/N believes that everything should be taste-tested.
Tobin and Christen arrived at USWNT camp in Seattle with their eight-month-old daughter, seventeen bags of baby supplies, and a sense of impending doom.
Y/N, blissfully unaware of her parents' concerns, was currently in her car seat attempting to eat the strap.
"Nom nom nom," she babbled around the fabric, drool running down her chin in a steady stream.
"Baby, that's not food," Christen said, gently pulling the strap out of Y/N's mouth.
Y/N's response was to immediately grab a fistful of Christen's hair and try to eat that instead, making interested "Mmmmm?" sounds as she brought it toward her mouth.
"Nom!"
"Also not food."
"Everything is food to her," Tobin observed, unbuckling Y/N from the car seat. The baby immediately started squirming, making urgent "Eh! Eh!" sounds. "I caught her trying to eat her own foot this morning."
"Her foot?"
"She was very focused on it. Really committed to the task. Made these little grunting sounds like she was accomplishing something important."
They made their way into the hotel lobby, where several teammates were already gathered. Y/N's head was swiveling around, taking in all the new sights, making soft "Ooooh" and "Aaaah" sounds at everything she saw.
"BABY!" Kelley's voice rang out across the space. She jogged over, arms outstretched. "Gimme gimme gimme!"
Tobin handed Y/N over. The moment Y/N was in Kelley's arms, she made a happy squealing sound—"Eeeee!"—then grabbed Kelley's nose with both hands and tried to bite it.
"Ow! Okay, sharp gums," Kelley said, redirecting Y/N's mouth away from her face. "Someone's teething."
"Someone's always teething," Christen said tiredly. "And when she's teething, everything becomes a chew toy."
As if to prove the point, Y/N had already moved on from Kelley's nose and was now leaning down to gnaw on Kelley's shoulder, making enthusiastic "Nom nom nom" sounds.
"She's eating my shirt," Kelley observed.
"She's eating everything," Tobin said. "Yesterday she tried to eat the TV remote, my phone, a throw pillow, and what we're pretty sure was a dust bunny she found under the couch."
"Did you let her eat the dust bunny?"
"We didn't let her, but she's surprisingly fast. By the time we got there, she'd already gotten it in her mouth and was making these satisfied 'mmmmm' sounds like it was delicious."
Alex wandered over, looking down at her phone. "Hey guys, did you see the—OH MY GOD, IS SHE EATING KELLEY?"
Everyone looked. Y/N had Kelley's entire shoulder in her mouth, making enthusiastic "nom nom nom" sounds, drool creating a rapidly expanding wet spot on the fabric.
"Don't worry, babe. She's not eating me, she's just... gumming me?" Kelley tried to pull her shoulder away, but Y/N had a surprisingly strong grip and made protesting "Aaaah! Aaaah!" sounds when Kelley moved. "A little help here?"
Christen extracted Y/N from Kelley's shoulder. Kelley's shirt now had a large wet spot with what appeared to be the imprint of baby gums.
"Sorry about that," Christen said.
"It's fine. It'll dry. Probably." Kelley looked at her shirt with dismay. "This was expensive."
Y/N, now in Christen's arms, had already found a new target: the hotel key card sticking out of Christen's pocket. She'd spotted it and her whole face lit up with interest—"Oooooh!"
Her little hand darted out with surprising speed, grabbed the key card, and immediately tried to put it in her mouth, making eager "Ah! Ah!" sounds.
"No!" Christen said, catching Y/N's hand just in time. "Not the key card!"
"Aaaah!" Y/N protested, reaching for it with both hands now, her fingers opening and closing in desperate grabby motions.
"Nope, not food."
"AAAAH!" Louder this time, her face starting to scrunch up, bottom lip beginning to quiver.
"Oh no, not the pre-cry face," Tobin said quickly, pulling out a teething toy from the diaper bag. "Here, baby girl. Look! Your favorite chewy toy!"
Y/N looked at the teething toy. Looked at the key card. Back to the toy. Her face scrunched up even more.
Then she burst into tears.
"WAAAAH! WAAAAH!" She reached toward the key card with both hands, making desperate "Eh! Eh! Eh!" sounds between sobs.
"She doesn't even know what 'it' is," Alex pointed out over the wailing.
"Doesn't matter. It's not the toy, so she wants it," Tobin explained, trying to soothe Y/N by bouncing her, but the baby was having none of it.
Rose and Mal had appeared, drawn by the sound of crying.
"Is that Y/N?" Rose asked.
"No, it's a completely different baby," Kelley deadpanned. "Yes, it's Y/N."
"What's wrong?"
"She wants to eat the room key," Christen said, bouncing Y/N gently. "Shh, baby girl. You can't eat plastic. It's not good for you."
"WAAAAAAH!" Y/N's cries intensified, her face turning red, tears streaming down her cheeks. She kept making reaching motions toward the pocket where the key card had been.
"What if we give her something else to chew on?" Mal suggested.
"We tried. She rejected it."
"What about food? Actual food?"
Christen's eyes lit up. "That's... actually a good idea. When did she last eat?"
"In the car, about an hour ago. But she's always hungry."
They found a quiet corner of the lobby and Christen pulled out some baby puffs. The moment Y/N saw the container, she stopped crying mid-wail.
Her eyes went wide. Her mouth dropped open. She made an excited gasping sound—"Ah!"—and started bouncing in Christen's arms.
"Oooooh!" she breathed, reaching for the container with both hands, making urgent "Eh! Eh! Eh!" sounds.
Christen put a few puffs on a napkin in her lap where Y/N could reach them. Y/N immediately grabbed one with her whole fist, shoved it in her mouth, and made happy "Mmmmm!" sounds while gumming it enthusiastically. Drool mixed with dissolved puff created an unappetizing paste around her mouth.
She grabbed another puff before she'd even finished the first one, making eager "Nom nom" sounds.
"Crisis averted," Rose said.
"For now," Tobin added. "Give it five minutes."
She was optimistic. It took three minutes.
Y/N finished the puffs, looked around for more, making questioning "Mmmm?" sounds. When none materialized, she made a decision. She would find her own snacks.
She'd been sitting in Christen's lap. But Christen had made the fatal mistake of relaxing her grip while talking to Alex.
Y/N seized the opportunity.
She pushed off Christen's lap with surprising force, dropped to the floor on her hands and knees with a small "Oof!" sound, and immediately started crawling.
Fast.
Making determined little grunting sounds—"Uh! Uh! Uh!"—with each movement of her hands and knees.
"Oh no," Christen said. "Y/N, come back!"
But Y/N was on a mission. She'd spotted something across the lobby floor.
Something small.
Something brown.
Something she'd never seen before.
Something that DEFINITELY needed to go in her mouth immediately to determine if it was food.
She crawled toward it with single-minded determination, her little hands slapping against the tile floor, making her signature grunting sounds with each movement.
"What is she going after?" Alex asked, standing up to see.
They all watched as Y/N reached her target, sat up with a little "Ah!" sound of triumph, and grabbed... something off the floor.
She examined it for a split second, turning it over in her little hand.
Then it went straight into her mouth.
"Nom!" she declared, and started gumming whatever it was enthusiastically.
"NO!" All five adults yelled at once, rushing toward her.
Tobin got there first, scooping Y/N up and trying to fish whatever it was out of her mouth. Y/N made protesting "Mmmmm! Mmmmm!" sounds and tried to turn her head away.
"What is it? What did she eat?"
"I don't know! She's chewing! Baby, open up! Open!" Tobin tried to gently pry Y/N's mouth open.
Y/N clamped her mouth shut tight, making defiant "Mmm-mmm!" sounds while continuing to gum whatever she'd found, her jaw working methodically.
"Y/N Press-Heath, open your mouth right now!" Christen used her stern mom voice.
Y/N's eyes went wide at the tone. She looked at her mom, made a small "Oh" sound of surprise.
Then she swallowed.
Her little throat worked, and whatever it was went down.
She opened her mouth to show it was empty and made a proud "Aaah!" sound.
"Oh my god, she swallowed it," Kelley said.
"What was it?!" Christen was panicking now, immediately checking Y/N's mouth to make sure nothing else was in there.
"I don't know! It was small and... brown maybe?"
They all stared at Y/N, who looked incredibly pleased with herself, bouncing slightly in Tobin's arms and babbling happily—"Ba-ba-ga-da!"
"Nom!" she announced proudly, then made smacking sounds with her lips like she was savoring the taste.
"Should we take her to a hospital?" Rose asked.
"Let me check the floor," Mal said, jogging to where Y/N had found her mystery snack.
She crouched down, examining the carpet carefully.
"I found more of them!" she called out. "They're... oh. They're just cheerios. Someone spilled cheerios."
Everyone exhaled in relief.
"She ate a floor cheerio," Tobin said.
"A floor cheerio from a hotel lobby," Christen corrected. "Do you know how many people have walked across this floor? How many germs?"
"Nom!" Y/N said again, looking very proud. She started looking around, twisting in Tobin's arms, clearly searching for more floor cheerios.
"We're going to need to watch her every second, aren't we?" Alex asked.
"Every single second," Christen confirmed, taking Y/N from Tobin. "Come here, you little vacuum cleaner."
Y/N immediately grabbed Christen's necklace and tried to put it in her mouth, making interested "Ooooh?" sounds.
"This is going to be a long week," Kelley muttered.
She had no idea.
******
Getting settled into their hotel room with an eight-month-old who tried to eat everything was... challenging.
Tobin and Christen had barely set their bags down when Y/N started squirming to be put down, making insistent "Dah! Dah!" sounds and pushing against Christen's chest.
"Okay, okay, down you go." Christen set her on the floor.
The moment Y/N's hands and knees touched the carpet, she was off, crawling around investigating every corner of the room, making curious little sounds—"Ooh... ah... mmm..."—as she discovered new things.
She found the TV remote first.
It was on the nightstand. She pulled herself up to standing—a new skill she was very proud of—using the nightstand for support. Her little legs wobbled but held. She made a triumphant "Ah!" sound.
Then she grabbed the remote with both hands and immediately tried to bite it, making eager "Nom nom" sounds.
"No no no!" Christen rescued the remote from Y/N's mouth. "Not for eating!"
"AAAAH!" Y/N protested, reaching for it with both hands, opening and closing her fists in grabby motions. "Aaaah! Eh! Eh!"
"Here, how about—" Christen tried to hand her a teething ring.
Y/N looked at the teething ring like it had personally offended her. Her face scrunched up in disgust, and she made a dismissive "Pbbbth!" sound. Then she knocked it out of Christen's hand with a swipe of her arm and it rolled under the bed.
Then she spotted something even better.
The phone charger.
Plugged into the wall.
With a very chewable-looking cord.
"Oooooh!" Y/N's whole face lit up. She dropped to her hands and knees and started crawling toward it with alarming speed, making excited "Ah-ah-ah-ah!" sounds with each movement.
"TOBIN! Electrical cord at three o'clock!"
Tobin dove, unplugging the charger just as Y/N reached it. Y/N grabbed the end of the cord with both hands and tried to bite it, making determined "Nom!" sounds.
"Nice try, baby girl," Tobin said, pulling it away from her mouth. "But we're not eating electricity today."
Y/N stared at the cord being taken away. Her mouth opened in shock. Then her face scrunched up and she made an angry "Naaaah!" sound. It was one of her favorite new vocalizations—expressing extreme displeasure at being told no.
"Yes, nah. No eating cords."
Y/N's bottom lip started to quiver. Her eyes began to water. Small whimpering sounds escaped—"Uh... uh... uh..."
"Don't do it," Tobin warned. "Don't you dare do the sad face."
The lip quivered more. Y/N made a heartbreaking "Uhhhhh" sound, drawing it out for maximum effect.
"I mean it. I'm immune."
One tear rolled down Y/N's cheek. She made a soft, pitiful "Mmmmm" sound and reached for the cord again with trembling hands.
"That's not going to—oh, come here." Tobin picked her up, and Y/N immediately grabbed a fistful of Tobin's shirt and tried to eat it, making eager "Nom nom nom" sounds, her crying forgotten.
"Really? My shirt?"
Y/N pulled the fabric toward her mouth with both hands. "Nom nom."
"That's not even tasty. It's cotton. And it's sweaty from traveling."
Y/N didn't care. She was committed to eating the shirt. She got a corner of it in her mouth and started gumming it enthusiastically, making satisfied "Mmmmm" sounds.
Christen was busy baby-proofing the room—covering outlets, moving anything dangerous to high surfaces, checking for small objects on the floor.
She got down on her hands and knees, viewing the room from Y/N's perspective.
She found three pennies (dangerous choking hazard, confiscated), a paper clip (also dangerous, confiscated), what looked like a piece of a broken plastic bag tag (very dangerous, confiscated), and a small wad of paper (gross, confiscated).
"This room is a death trap," she announced, standing up with her handful of contraband.
"Most rooms are, when you have an eight-month-old who thinks everything is food."
Christen continued her sweep. She checked under the bed, finding Y/N's rejected teething ring and a truly alarming amount of dust bunnies. She quickly vacuumed them up with her hand—if Y/N found one, it would definitely go straight in her mouth.
She checked behind the nightstands and found one bobby pin, which she immediately pocketed.
In the bathroom, she scrubbed the toilet, installed cabinet locks on anything that could be opened, and moved all toiletries to the highest shelf.
"Okay," she said finally, emerging from the bathroom. "I think we're safe."
That's when Y/N spotted the curtains.
She was still in Tobin's arms, but she'd been looking around the room. Her gaze landed on the long, flowing curtains with decorative tassels at the bottom.
Tassels that looked VERY chewable.
Her eyes went wide. Her mouth dropped open. "Oooooh!"
She started squirming in Tobin's arms, making urgent "Dah! Dah! Dah!" sounds and pointing at the curtains with her whole arm.
"What? What do you see?" Tobin followed her gaze. "Oh no. The tassels."
Y/N squirmed harder, making increasingly desperate "Eh! Eh! EH!" sounds. She twisted her whole body toward the curtains.
"You want down?"
"Dah!" Y/N nodded enthusiastically. Well, she moved her whole upper body in what might have been a nod.
"I don't think—"
But Y/N was already pushing against Tobin's chest with both hands, making demanding "Nah! Nah! DAH!" sounds.
"Okay, okay." Tobin set her down.
Y/N made a beeline for the curtains, crawling faster than Tobin had ever seen her move, making excited "Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah!" sounds with each rapid movement of her hands and knees.
She reached the curtains, grabbed a tassel with both hands, and pulled it toward her mouth.
"Nom!"
It went straight into her mouth before either parent could stop her.
"Y/N, no!" Christen rushed over. "That's been touched by hundreds of people! It's probably never been washed!"
She pulled the tassel out of Y/N's mouth. It was already wet with drool. Y/N immediately lunged for it again, making angry "Aaaah! Aaaah!" sounds and reaching with both hands.
"How about we just... tie these up?" Tobin grabbed both curtains and knotted them high, out of Y/N's reach.
Y/N stared up at the curtains, watching them being moved out of reach. She looked at Tobin, then back at the curtains, then back at Tobin.
Her face crumpled.
"AAAAAAAH!" she wailed, pointing up at the curtains. "AAAAH! AAAAH!"
"Nope, those are done. Off limits. Find something else to investigate."
Y/N sat on the floor and cried for a solid minute, making heartbroken "Waaaah! Waaaah!" sounds while pointing at the curtains and looking at her parents with betrayed eyes.
"You can't eat curtain tassels," Christen said firmly.
"WAAAAH!"
"I know it's very sad."
"WAAAAAAAH!"
Finally, Y/N's crying subsided to hiccups—"hic-hic-hic"—and then to sniffles. She wiped her nose with her hand (gross), and then tried to put that hand in her mouth (grosser).
"Oh no you don't." Christen grabbed a wet wipe and cleaned Y/N's hand before she could eat her own snot.
Y/N, adaptable as ever, looked around for something else to investigate.
Her eyes landed on the decorative pillow on the bed.
A new target acquired.
She crawled to it, making little grunting sounds—"Uh! Uh! Uh!"—grabbed it with both hands, and faceplanted into it. Then she turned her head to the side and started trying to eat the corner, making "Nom nom nom" sounds.
"At least pillows are relatively clean?" Tobin offered.
"Relatively being the key word." Christen pulled the pillow away after Y/N had been gumming it for about thirty seconds. Y/N had left a wet spot on the corner and the fabric was slightly darker where her drool had soaked in.
"Did she just drool all over the hotel pillow?"
"She drools on everything. I'm pretty sure drooling is her primary activity. That and trying to eat things that aren't food."
As if to prove the point, Y/N was now sitting on the floor with drool running down her chin in a steady stream, looking around for her next victim. She was making soft babbling sounds to herself—"Ba-ba-ga-da-ma..."
Her eyes landed on her own foot.
She looked at it like she'd never seen it before. "Ooooh?"
She grabbed it with both hands, pulling it toward her for closer inspection.
It was wiggly. It was attached to her. It fit in her mouth.
Perfect.
She pulled it toward her mouth and started gnawing on her toes, making satisfied "Mmmmm" sounds.
"She's eating her own foot," Tobin observed.
"At least we know where that's been," Christen said.
"Do we though? She crawls everywhere. That foot's been on some questionable surfaces."
Y/N, unbothered by this debate, continued happily gumming her toes, making continuous satisfied "Mmm... nom... mmm..." sounds. Drool ran down her foot and onto her leg.
There was a knock at the door.
"Come in!" Tobin called.
Alex and Kelley entered, took one look at Y/N with her entire foot in her mouth, and stopped dead.
"Is she... is that her foot?" Alex asked.
"Yep."
"In her mouth."
"Yep."
Y/N, noticing she had an audience, pulled her foot out of her mouth and held it up proudly. "Ah!" Look what I can do!
Then she put it back in her mouth and continued gumming, making "Nom nom" sounds.
"Why?" Kelley asked.
"Because she can reach it and everything goes in the mouth right now," Christen explained. "Teething. Everything is a teething toy."
"Everything?" Kelley asked, a mischievous glint in her eye.
"Everything. Don't you dare—"
But Kelley had already pulled out her phone.
Y/N's head swiveled so fast it was almost cartoon-like. Her foot dropped from her mouth with a wet sound. Her eyes locked onto Kelley's phone like a heat-seeking missile.
"Ooooooh!" She dropped to her hands and knees and started crawling toward Kelley at top speed, making excited "Ah-ah-ah-ah!" sounds that got higher pitched as she got closer.
"Kelley, put that away!" Christen said.
But it was too late. Y/N had reached Kelley, pulled herself up using Kelley's leg for support—making little grunting "Uh! Uh!" sounds with the effort—and was now reaching for the phone with both hands, opening and closing her fists in desperate grabby motions.
"Pho! Pho!" It sounded more like "Pho! Pho!" but the intent was clear. She wanted the phone and she wanted it NOW.
"You can't have my phone, tiny human. It costs more than—ow! Did you just bite me?"
Y/N had grabbed Kelley's hand in both of hers and was now trying to gum her fingers, making enthusiastic "Nom nom nom" sounds. Drool was already coating Kelley's fingers.
"She's teething on me again!" Kelley tried to pull her hand away, but Y/N had a surprisingly strong grip and made loud protesting "Naaaah! Naaaah!" sounds when Kelley moved.
"Just give her something else to chew on," Alex suggested.
"Like what?"
"I don't know, a toy?"
"She's rejected every toy we've offered," Tobin said.
"What about food?"
"She just ate."
"So give her more food."
"We can't just feed her constantly to keep her from eating other things."
"Why not?"
Everyone considered this.
"That's... actually not a bad idea," Christen said slowly.
Five minutes later, Y/N was in her portable high chair with a plate of soft foods in front of her.
She looked at the food. Looked at her parents. Back at the food.
Then she grabbed a piece of banana and squished it between her fingers, making interested "Mmmmm?" sounds as she examined the texture.
"No, baby, you eat it. Like this." Christen demonstrated by pretending to eat.
Y/N watched her carefully. Then she brought the squished banana to her mouth and started gumming it, making happy "Mmm! Mmm!" sounds. Drool mixed with banana mush and created a truly horrifying combination that ran down her chin.
"Welcome to babies," Tobin said. "Everything is disgusting all the time. There are fluids you didn't know existed."
Y/N finished gumming her banana piece—most of it ended up on her face rather than in her mouth—and immediately reached for the next thing on her tray: a piece of avocado.
She grabbed it with her whole fist.
Squished it.
Made a delighted "Ooooh!" sound at how squishy it was.
Smeared it on her face, babbling "Ba-ba-ba!" the whole time.
Then tried to eat it, making eager "Nom nom" sounds.
Half of it went in her mouth. Half of it went... everywhere else. In her hair. On her eyebrow. Somehow inside her ear.
"How did she get avocado in her ear?" Alex asked, amazed.
"I don't know and I don't want to know," Christen said, already grabbing wet wipes.
Y/N, now covered in banana-avocado mush and drool, looked incredibly pleased with herself. She clapped her hands together—"Yay!"—sending food flying in all directions.
A piece of avocado landed on Kelley's shoe.
Kelley looked down at her shoe. "Your daughter just flung pre-chewed avocado at me."
"She's very generous. She likes to share," Tobin said.
"I don't want pre-chewed avocado on my shoe!"
"Then you shouldn't have stood so close to the feeding zone. First rule of babies: maintain a three-foot radius during meals."
Y/N was still clapping, making happy "Ah! Ah! Ah!" sounds with each clap, completely unconcerned that she was covered head to toe in food mush.
After the meal—and the subsequent twenty-minute cleanup that involved multiple wet wipes, a full outfit change for Y/N, spot-cleaning the carpet where she'd somehow flung sweet potato, and washing everyone's hands—they decided to head down to dinner with the team.
"This will be fine," Christen said, packing the diaper bag with enough supplies to stock a small daycare. "It's just dinner. We'll feed her in the high chair, she'll eat her food, everything will be fine."
Tobin looked at her. "Do you actually believe that?"
"No. But I'm choosing optimism."
"Bold choice."
"I'm also packing three backup outfits, six bibs, and every wet wipe we own."
"Less bold. More realistic."
They made their way to the private dining room where the team was gathering. A high chair had been set up for Y/N at Tobin and Christen's table.
Y/N was placed in the high chair with some of her own food—soft pasta pieces, small chunks of cooked vegetables, and some cheese cut into tiny cubes.
For the first five minutes, everything was perfect. She ate her food, making happy "Mmm! Mmm!" sounds with each bite. She babbled to herself—"Ba-da-ga-ma-la!"—between mouthfuls. She waved at other players who came by to say hi, making "Hi!" sounds that came out as "Hah!"
Then she finished her food.
And got bored.
A bored Y/N was a dangerous Y/N.
She looked around, assessing her options, making thoughtful "Hmmmm" sounds.
The high chair tray had food residue on it. She licked the tray, making "Mmmm" sounds. Her mothers didn't notice—they were talking to Alex about the upcoming training schedule.
There was a buckle holding her in the chair. She grabbed it and tried to eat the buckle, making interested "Nom?" sounds as she gummed the plastic. It tasted weird. But everything tasted weird, so she kept trying.
Then she spotted something even better.
On the table next to her high chair, Christen had set down her water bottle.
Plastic. Clear. With water sloshing around inside making interesting sounds when the bottle moved.
Perfect.
Y/N reached out—her arms were getting longer every day—grabbed the water bottle, and immediately tried to bite the cap, making eager "Nom nom!" sounds.
"Y/N, no!" Christen caught her just in time, pulling the bottle away. "That's Mommy's water!"
"AAAAH!" Y/N protested, reaching for it with both hands, making desperate grabbing motions. "Aaaah! Aaaah! Eh! Eh! EH!"
"You have your own sippy cup!"
Christen tried to hand Y/N her sippy cup—a colorful one with handles that was supposedly perfect for eight-month-olds.
Y/N looked at it with utter disdain. She made a dismissive "Pbbbth!" sound and knocked it off the high chair tray with a swipe of her arm.
It hit the floor with a clatter, the sound echoing through the dining room.
Every head in the room turned.
"Sorry!" Christen called out, her face flushing. "Just the baby throwing things! Everything's fine!"
She retrieved the sippy cup, which had rolled under Rose's chair.
When she turned back, Y/N had found a new target.
The napkin on Tobin's lap.
Y/N's little hand had somehow reached over—she was really stretching, making little straining "Nnnngh!" sounds—and grabbed it.
It was now halfway into her mouth, and Y/N was gumming it enthusiastically, making satisfied "Mmm! Nom nom!" sounds.
"How did you—" Tobin pulled the napkin away. It was covered in drool and had a small tear where Y/N had been gumming it with surprising intensity. "This is why we can't have nice things."
Y/N's face immediately crumpled at having the napkin taken away. "Uhhhhh!"
"Paper!" Y/N made a sound that might have been trying to say "paper" but came out as "Papa!" She pointed at the napkin with her whole arm. "Papa! Papa!"
"Not for eating."
"Papa!" More insistent, bouncing in the high chair and reaching with both hands.
"No."
Y/N's face scrunched up. The pre-cry face was forming, her bottom lip pushing out dramatically.
"Don't you dare," Tobin warned.
Too late. Y/N let out an ear-piercing shriek.
"PAAAAA-PAAAAAAA!" Her whole face turned red with the effort of the scream. "AAAAAAAH! PAPA!"
The entire dining room went silent. Conversations stopped mid-sentence. Forks paused halfway to mouths.
"We're so sorry!" Christen said to the room at large, her face bright red. "She's teething and everything is going in her mouth and she thinks napkins are food and—"
Y/N shrieked again, this time reaching for a spoon on the table, making desperate "Eh! Eh! EH! EH!" sounds.
"Baby girl, please," Tobin tried, using her gentle voice. "Inside voices."
"OOOOOOOH!" Y/N had spotted the spoon and was making urgent sounds that got progressively louder—"Ooh! OOH! OOOOH!"
"You don't even know what a spoon is!"
"OOOOOOOH! AH! AH!" Y/N was bouncing in her high chair now, making it rock slightly, her arms outstretched toward the spoon.
Hayes appeared at their table, looking concerned. "Is everything okay?"
"Define okay," Christen said, taking Y/N out of the high chair. The baby immediately started squirming and reaching back toward the table, making frustrated "Aaaah! Aaaah!" sounds. "She wants to eat everything and when we won't let her, she screams."
"Ah." Hayes looked at Y/N, who had paused her fussing to stare at her with wide eyes. She made a curious "Ooooh?" sound, tilting her head. "Can I try something?"
"Please."
Hayes leaned down to Y/N's level. "Y/N, if you stop crying, I'll give you this." She held up a breadstick from her plate.
Y/N's eyes went wide. Her mouth dropped open. She made an awed "Aaaaaah!" sound.
She reached for the breadstick with both hands, making eager "Eh! Eh!" sounds, opening and closing her fists rapidly.
Hayes handed it to her. Y/N grabbed it like it was made of gold, brought it immediately to her mouth, and started gumming it enthusiastically.
"Mmmmm! Nom nom nom!" She made happy sounds with each gum, drool already starting to coat the breadstick.
"You're a baby whisperer," Tobin said, amazed.
"I have a son," Hayes said. "I know the universal truth: babies will do anything for breadsticks."
She walked away, leaving a now-content Y/N happily destroying a breadstick while cradled in Christen's arms.
"That was amazing," Alex said from the next table. "She just... solved the problem."
"With bread," Rose added. "She solved a screaming baby with bread."
Y/N continued working on her breadstick for the next ten minutes. By "working on," she was mostly just gumming it, making continuous "Nom nom nom" sounds, drooling on it copiously, and occasionally taking actual bites that she'd then let dissolve in her mouth while making satisfied "Mmmmm" sounds.
The breadstick was now a soggy, drooly mess that looked more like paper-mâché than food.
She loved it.
She was making happy babbling sounds around it—"Ba-ba-nom-nom-ga-da!"
Then she dropped it.
It fell from her hands and landed on the floor with a wet splat.
Y/N looked at her now-empty hands. Looked down at the floor where she could see the breadstick. Back at her hands. She made a confused "Uh?" sound.
Her bottom lip started to quiver. Her eyes began to water.
"Oh no," Christen said. "Not again."
"BREEEEEAD!" Y/N wailed, pointing down at the floor with her whole arm. "BREE! BREE! BREEEE!"
"It's on the floor, baby. We can't eat food from the floor."
"BREEEEE!" Y/N was crying in earnest now, real tears streaming down her face, making heartbroken sobbing sounds—"Waaaah! Hic-hic-waaah!"
"I'll get her another one," Tobin said, starting to stand.
But Y/N had other ideas.
She started squirming in Christen's arms, twisting her whole body and reaching down toward the floor, making desperate "Eh! Eh! Eh! EH!" sounds that got louder with each failed attempt to reach the breadstick.
She was trying to dive out of Christen's arms toward the floor.
"Y/N, stop!" Christen grabbed her more firmly. "You're going to fall!"
"BREE! BREE!" Y/N was writhing now, making continuous crying sounds—"Waaaah! Bree! Waaaah!"
"I'll get you new bread!"
"DAH BREE!" Y/N pointed insistently at the floor. "DAH! DAH!"
"That one is on the FLOOR!"
"MY BREE!" Y/N's face was bright red from crying, snot running from her nose, drool and tears mixing on her chin.
This back-and-forth continued for a solid minute, with Y/N getting increasingly upset—her cries escalating from "Waaah!" to "WAAAAAAH!" to full-body sobbing with hiccups—and Christen getting increasingly frazzled.
Finally, Kelley couldn't take it anymore.
She walked over, picked up the fallen breadstick from the floor, and handed it to Y/N.
"KELLEY, NO!" Christen yelled. "That's been on the floor!"
"Five-second rule?" Kelley tried weakly.
"It's been more than five seconds! It's been like thirty seconds!"
But Y/N had already grabbed the floor-breadstick with both hands and shoved it in her mouth, making immediate happy "Mmmmm!" sounds. Her crying stopped instantly, replaced with contented gumming sounds—"Nom nom nom."
"She's eating floor food," Alex said, watching in horrified fascination. "In a public dining room. At a professional team camp."
"She ate a floor cheerio in the hotel lobby earlier," Tobin said. "This is par for the course. Yesterday she found something under the couch at home and we still don't know what it was."
Y/N, blissfully unconcerned about germs or hygiene or her mother's rising blood pressure, continued happily gumming her floor-breadstick, making satisfied "Mmm... mmm... mmm..." sounds between chews.
She was the happiest baby in the world.
Her mothers were dying inside.
"I need wine," Christen said.
"We don't get wine at camp," Rose reminded her.
"Then I need something. Anything. This child is going to be the death of me."
Y/N, hearing her mother's voice, looked up from her breadstick and smiled—a huge, drooly, breadstick-filled smile, food mush visible in her mouth.
Then she held out the soggy breadstick toward Christen. "Mama?" It sounded like "Mama?" She was offering to share, making "Mmmm?" sounds like she was asking if Christen wanted some.
And despite everything—the floor food, the constant drool, the attempts to eat inappropriate objects, the screaming—Christen's heart melted.
"No thank you, baby girl. That's all yours."
Y/N seemed to accept this answer. She made an "Okay!" sound—well, it was more like "Kay!"—and went back to her breadstick, gumming it while babbling happily—"Nom-nom-ba-da-ga-nom!"
"She's talking to her food now," Kelley observed.
"She talks to everything," Tobin said. "This morning she had a full conversation with a dust bunny before trying to eat it."
"What was the conversation about?"
"I don't know, I don't speak baby. But she seemed very engaged. Lots of 'ba-ba-ba' and pointing."
Y/N finished her breadstick—or rather, she'd gummed it into submission until there was nothing left but a small nub that she couldn't hold anymore. It fell from her fingers.
She looked at her empty hands. Made a sad "Awww" sound.
Then she saw Rose's plate at the next table. Rose had breadsticks.
Y/N's eyes lit up. She made an excited "Ooooh!" sound and started reaching toward Rose's table, making eager "Eh! Eh! Eh!" sounds.
"Oh no," Rose said, seeing Y/N's intent. "These are my breadsticks."
"OOOOH! EH! EH!" Y/N was leaning so far out of Christen's arms that Christen had to hold her tighter to keep her from tumbling out.
"Baby, those aren't yours."
"EH! EH! EH!" Y/N's reaching became more desperate, her little hands opening and closing frantically.
Rose looked at Y/N's determined face—red from recent crying, covered in drool and breadstick residue, but with eyes full of hope and desire.
"I can't say no to that face," Rose said, handing over a breadstick.
"Rose!" Christen protested. "She just had one!"
"I know, but look at her! She's so happy!"
Indeed, Y/N had grabbed the new breadstick and was already gumming it, making ecstatic "Mmmmm! Mmmmm!" sounds, her whole body wiggling with joy.
"We're teaching her that screaming gets her what she wants," Christen said.
"We're teaching her persistence," Tobin corrected. "That's a valuable life skill."
"She's EIGHT MONTHS OLD!"
"Never too early to start developing a strong work ethic."
Y/N, oblivious to this debate, was having the time of her life with her second breadstick, babbling happily to it—"Ba-ba-nom-nom-ga-bree!"
The rest of dinner passed with Y/N contentedly gumming her breadstick while the adults ate their meals. By the end, Y/N was covered in breadstick residue, drool, and what might have been some sweet potato that had somehow launched itself from a nearby plate.
She was also fighting sleep.
Her eyes were drooping. Her gumming was getting slower. She'd made that little "Mmmmm" sound that meant she was getting tired.
But she was still trying to eat the breadstick.
"Someone's sleepy," Tobin observed.
Y/N's response was to try to open her eyes wider and gum her breadstick more enthusiastically, making defiant "Nom! Nom!" sounds. She wasn't tired. She was FINE.
Her eyes closed.
She startled awake with a little "Ah!" sound.
Started gumming again.
Eyes closed.
Startled awake. "Mmm!"
More gumming.
"She's fighting it so hard," Alex said, watching the battle between baby and sleep.
"She doesn't want to miss anything," Christen said. "She's got serious FOMO."
Y/N's eyes closed again. This time they stayed closed. The breadstick fell from her hands.
She was asleep, still in Christen's arms, drool running down her chin, covered in food, looking like the most peaceful angel who had ever existed.
"Out like a light," Kelley whispered.
"The breadstick finally defeated her," Rose added.
"We should get her cleaned up and to bed," Christen said softly, standing carefully so as not to wake Y/N.
They made their way back to the room, Y/N sleeping deeply the entire way, making soft sleep sounds—tiny sighs and coos.
"You know," Tobin said as they were cleaning Y/N up and getting her into pajamas (Y/N stayed asleep through the entire process, which was a miracle), "as exhausting as the eating-everything phase is..."
"Yeah?"
"It's also kind of amazing. She's just exploring her world. Everything is new and interesting and worth investigating. Even if investigating means trying to eat it."
"That's a very poetic way of saying our daughter treats the world like a buffet."
"Exactly."
They put Y/N down in her travel crib. She immediately rolled onto her side, stuck her thumb in her mouth, and made a satisfied "Mmmmm" sound without waking up.
"She's even eating in her sleep," Christen observed.
"That's dedication."
They stood there for a moment, watching their daughter sleep, listening to her soft breathing.
Tomorrow would bring new challenges. New things for Y/N to try to eat. New messes to clean up. New moments of panic when she grabbed something she shouldn't.
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Raspberry Season ((Leah Williamson/Alessia Russo X Baby! Reader)
Leah teaches Y/N a new skill.
The discovery happened entirely by accident, as most of Y/N's greatest achievements did.
Leah had been lying on the living room floor with her for what felt like hours—tummy time officially abandoned in favor of simply existing together in the afternoon light, which was Y/N's preferred approach to most structured activities. She was propped up on her forearms, watching her daughter with the kind of focused attention she usually reserved for match footage, cataloguing every small expression that crossed that round, serious face.
Y/N had been studying her mama's mouth with great scientific interest, as she often did. She was at the age where faces were endlessly fascinating puzzles, and Leah's was her favorite one to solve. She'd reach up and grab at her nose, her chin, her lips with those little starfish hands, always with the same furrowed expression of deep concentration, as if she were actively filing information away for later use.
So Leah, because she was a footballer with a lot of time on her hands and absolutely no shame about being ridiculous for an audience of one, blew a raspberry against Y/N's cheek.
Y/N went completely still.
Not frightened—she didn't startle the way she sometimes did with sudden sounds. This was different. This was the stillness of someone encountering something entirely new and needing a moment to process it properly before responding.
Leah did it again, and Y/N's eyes went very wide, and then—
She giggled. Properly giggled, the full-body kind that made her shoulders scrunch up toward her ears and her little feet kick frantically against the mat, like she was trying to run somewhere even though she had nowhere to be except exactly here, exactly in this moment.
"Oh, you like that?" Leah grinned, doing it again just to hear the sound. "Yeah? That's funny, is it?"
It was very funny, apparently. It was the funniest thing that had ever happened in the history of the world. Y/N was absolutely beside herself.
Leah spent the next ten minutes blowing raspberries onto various parts of her daughter's face and neck and round little tummy, recording each new location's comedic rating on a mental spreadsheet. Cheek: very funny. Forehead: moderately funny, elicited a surprised expression followed by delayed laughter, approximately a three-second gap. Tummy: absolutely hysterical, maximum giggling, possible hiccup risk, do not attempt directly after feeding.
She was in the middle of this highly scientific research when Alessia appeared in the doorway in her training kit, home from an afternoon session, and stood watching them with an expression she usually tried to hide but hadn't quite managed to yet—soft and warm and slightly undone, the expression she only ever wore when she thought no one important was looking.
"What are you doing?"
"Research," Leah said seriously, without looking up.
"She's going to be sick if you keep doing that."
"She hasn't been sick yet."
"Leah."
"She loves it."
Alessia came and dropped cross-legged onto the floor beside them, leaning over to press a kiss to the top of Y/N's head. The baby immediately grabbed a fistful of dark hair and yanked with the cheerful determination that was her standard greeting for Mummy. Alessia winced. "Did you have a good afternoon, tesoro?"
Y/N released the hair and reached for her face instead, patting her cheek with an open palm in what Leah had come to think of as her version of a hug—the gesture she gave when she was particularly pleased to see someone.
"See?" Leah said. "Perfect afternoon."
Alessia looked down at her daughter, then up at her wife, then down at the mat scattered with several soft toys that had clearly been abandoned in favor of staring at Leah's face. "You've been lying on this floor for two hours."
"An hour and forty minutes."
"That's not better."
"My back hurts a bit," Leah admitted.
"I know. You're going to tell me about it at eleven o'clock tonight."
"Probably." Leah rolled onto her back anyway, pulling Y/N up to sit on her stomach, supporting her with both hands around her middle. Y/N wobbled, very pleased with the elevated view this gave her, and grabbed at Leah's fingers. "Worth it though."
Alessia leaned her chin on her hand and watched them both, and didn't say anything for a moment. Then: "She really does love you."
"She loves you too."
"I know. But she—the way she looks at you." Alessia tilted her head slightly. "Like you hung the moon and she's already planning how to get up there and grab it."
Leah looked up at Y/N's face—the serious brow, the focused eyes, the small mouth that kept making experimental shapes—and felt the thing she always felt, the thing that still caught her off guard sometimes even seven months in. Too large for her chest. Too specific for words.
"Yeah," she said quietly. "Well. Feeling's mutual."
The following week, Leah noticed Y/N watching her mouth again during a bottle feed, with that particular focused look she got when she was processing something new—when she was filing it away, building her understanding of how the world worked and what was possible in it.
"What are you thinking about?" Leah asked her, which was something she did constantly, narrating and questioning and talking to Y/N through every part of every day, because someone had told her once that the talking was important for language development and also because she simply could not help it. Y/N was interesting. She wanted to know what was happening in there.
Y/N stared at her.
"Are you thinking about the thing from last week? The sound?"
Y/N stared at her.
Leah blew a small, quiet raspberry, just to jog her memory.
Y/N's face broke into the enormous gummy smile that still made Leah feel like her chest was too small to contain everything it needed to contain, and then she went very still again. Watching. Studying. Her little lips pressed together. Her brow furrowed with the specific effort of trying to make her face do something she'd seen someone else's face do—the same focus she gave to trying to grab things that were slightly out of reach, or track something moving too fast across the room.
Her lips pressed together again.
And she blew the world's smallest, most determined raspberry.
It was barely a sound. More of a damp suggestion of a sound. An impression of a raspberry, a raspberry in spirit if not yet fully in execution. But it was undeniably intentional, and Y/N looked immediately to Leah's face to assess the result.
Leah's reaction was not measured or proportionate.
"ALESSIA."
There was a pause from the kitchen. Then the sound of something being set down very carefully, the way you set things down when you were preparing for news that could go either way. "What? What happened?"
"Come here. You need to come here right now."
A slightly longer pause. Footsteps. Alessia appeared in the doorway of the nursery holding a dish towel and looking at Leah with the cautious expression of someone who had learned that you need to come here right now could mean anything from the baby has done something incredible to I cannot figure out how to get the poppers on this vest and I need a second opinion.
"What's wrong?"
"Nothing's wrong—she did it. She did a raspberry."
Silence.
"Leah, I thought something was—"
"Something happened—" Leah turned back to Y/N with an enormous smile, bringing her closer, bouncing her gently. "Do it again. Come on. Show Mummy what you just did."
Y/N looked between them both with the regal calm of someone who would perform on her own schedule and not before.
"She might not do it on demand," Alessia said reasonably, coming to sit on the edge of the chair beside them. "She only just—"
Y/N blew another raspberry.
Louder this time. More confident. Wetter. The kind of raspberry that knew what it was and was not apologizing for it.
Alessia's whole face changed. "Oh," she said softly.
"Right?"
"She actually—she learned it from watching you."
"She learned it from watching me." Leah said it with the satisfaction of someone whose theory had been proven correct. "She watched me do it and she worked out how to do it herself. She just figured it out."
"She is seven months old."
"Cleverly seven months old."
"That's not—that's not a modifier you can apply—"
Y/N, pleased with the response her experiment had generated, did it again unprompted. Then again. Each one marginally more confident than the last, and by the fifth one she had properly graduated from damp suggestion to genuine raspberry—a proper, proud, committed sound that made her whole face scrunch up with the effort and the satisfaction of it, her eyes crinkling at the corners.
"She looks like you when you score," Alessia observed, watching her with her chin resting on her hand.
Leah considered this very seriously for a moment. "That's the best thing you've ever said to me."
"I've said many excellent things to you."
"This is the best one."
Alessia shook her head, but she was smiling in the way that meant she thought Leah was slightly ridiculous and also entirely right.
They spent the rest of that evening on the sofa, a fairly standard Tuesday, with Y/N propped between them taking full advantage of having two dedicated audiences simultaneously. She had begun to understand, with increasing clarity, that the raspberry produced a specific and reliable reaction in the adults around her. The reaction was laughter and noise and bright eyes and people leaning toward her and making similar sounds back, which was—by any measure—a very good reaction. Better than most things she had tried so far.
She kept doing it. Just to confirm the hypothesis. Just to make sure the effect was consistent.
It was extremely consistent.
"We've created a monster," Alessia said, around nine o'clock, when Y/N had produced her fortieth-odd raspberry of the evening, still with the same air of fresh satisfaction each time.
"We've created a genius," Leah corrected.
"Same thing, sometimes."
Leah looked at her over the top of Y/N's head. "That's very wise."
"I have my moments."
Y/N blew a raspberry at the television, which was showing a nature documentary neither of them were really watching. Then she looked at her mothers to make sure they'd seen. They had.
"Yes," Leah told her seriously. "Very good. The elephant deserved that."
England camp was the following Monday.
Leah had found a rhythm to camps now, a logistical choreography she'd worked out over several months of trial and error and one memorable incident involving a bag of nappy bags and a security scanner at a service station that she'd elected not to think about anymore. The car was always packed the night before. The changing bag had its own packing list on her phone. She'd learned which of Y/N's toys survived the journey intact and which ones needed to be confiscated before they disappeared down the side of the car seat and couldn't be retrieved until the return journey, by which point everyone had forgotten about them and they turned up like tiny time capsules.
She'd also learned, through hard experience, to accept help when it was offered. The team staff had quietly reorganized themselves around Y/N's presence at camp. There was a travel cot in Leah's room that materialized somehow, every camp, without anyone making a fuss about it. There was a small routine around feeding times that everyone simply worked around, with the same matter-of-fact acceptance they gave to everything else. It had stopped feeling unusual. Y/N at England camp was just—part of it. Part of how things were.
The drive up was fine. Y/N slept for most of it in her rear-facing seat, one hand curled near her face and the other gripping the ear of a stuffed lion with the focused intensity of someone engaged in meaningful work. Leah kept glancing in the rearview mirror. She always did, on drives. She'd tried to stop, had pointed out to herself several times that it wasn't helpful, but her eyes went there anyway.
They arrived in the late afternoon. The car park was already half-full when she pulled in—she could see Lucy's car, and Georgia's, and Keira's distinctive key fob hanging from the main entrance door handle because she always forgot it wasn't her house and couldn't just leave her keys in the lock.
Leah got out, stretched her back, and went around to extract Y/N from the car seat. Y/N woke up during the extraction, as she always did—the moment of movement and cool air enough to bring her back from wherever she'd been. She blinked at Leah with sleepy, confused eyes, then at the car park, then back at Leah.
"I know," Leah told her, settling her on her hip and reaching back into the car for the changing bag. "Different ceiling. It's alright. You know this place."
Y/N studied the car park for another moment, then apparently decided it was acceptable and put her head on Leah's shoulder. Small concession. Big trust.
"Come on then," Leah said, pressing a kiss to her hair. "Let's go find your aunties."
The reaction to Y/N's arrival at camp was, as it had been at every previous camp, disproportionate in the best possible way.
She was spotted in the corridor before Leah had even reached her room. Lotte was coming the other way with her training bag over one shoulder and stopped dead in the middle of the hallway.
"She's here." She said it with a particular kind of intensity, like she was reporting something significant to command. "She's actually here."
"Hello, Lotte."
"Hi, yes, hi Leah—" Lotte was already putting her bag down, hands out toward Y/N in the universal gesture that meant can I have her. "Hi, you."
Y/N looked at her. Then she did something she had started doing in the past few weeks—a specific assessment, a taking stock of someone's face to determine whether it was a face she knew and trusted. Lotte passed. Lotte always passed. Y/N leaned forward from Leah's arms with the confidence of someone who knew they would be caught.
"She just—she just leaned toward me," Lotte said, accepting her with enormous care, the way they all handled her. "She chose me."
"She chooses everyone," Leah said, picking her bag back up.
"She chose me first."
"You were in the corridor."
"In my direction."
Leah left her to it and went to put her bag in her room, which took approximately four minutes, and when she came back Lotte was in the team room with Y/N on her knee showing her something on her phone—probably a video of something completely unserious, which was Lotte's standard offering—and Georgia was already on the sofa next to them, and the TV was on but nobody was watching it because the television had become significantly less interesting the moment Y/N arrived.
Further down the sofa, Chloe Kelly had her legs tucked up beneath her and was watching Y/N with the slightly reverent expression she wore around babies, like she couldn't quite believe they were real. Next to her, Alex Greenwood had her arms folded and was pretending to watch the TV while very clearly watching Y/N instead.
"She's bigger," Georgia said, looking up when Leah appeared in the doorway. "She's definitely bigger than last camp."
"She's doing that, yes. Growing."
"She looks like she's got opinions now."
"She's always had opinions. She's started being able to express them."
Georgia considered this. "What kind of opinions?"
"Mostly about what she wants to put in her mouth. Very strong opinions. Very consistent follow-through."
"Sounds familiar," Alex said, without looking away from the TV, which everyone in the room understood to be a comment about Georgia.
Georgia didn't dignify this with a response. Y/N, as if sensing she was being discussed, looked up from Lotte's phone and found Leah in the doorway. The smile she produced was immediate and enormous and slightly unfair, the full-face kind that showed her gums and made her eyes go small.
"Yeah," Leah said softly. "Hello, you."
Dinner that evening was the usual comfortable chaos of camp meals—everyone at long tables in the hotel's function room, food appearing in the middle and being passed around, conversations overlapping each other, the particular energy of a group of people who knew each other extremely well and were genuinely pleased to be back in the same room. Y/N sat in a travel high chair between Leah and Keira, which had become her standard position. She had her own small dish of purée that she engaged with at her own pace and on her own terms, which meant most of it went in and some of it went on the tray and a little bit went sideways in a direction that nobody fully understood.
"How's she sleeping?" Keira asked, accepting a bread roll from Georgia without looking.
"Better," Leah said. "We had a rough patch last month but she's mostly settled now. Goes down around seven, up once around three, back down until six or so."
"That doesn't sound bad."
"It's not bad. It's fine. I feel fine."
Keira looked at her.
"I feel relatively fine," Leah amended. "I feel functional."
"That's more like it."
"The three AM wake-up is—" Leah paused, considering how to describe it. "It's actually quite nice, sometimes. Just us, really quiet. She's not fully awake, just needs a bit of settling. There's something about it."
Keira nodded, and didn't push it, because she understood things without having to be told about them—one of her most useful qualities.
Y/N had finished her opinion of the purée and was now examining the tray of her high chair with great interest, pressing her palm flat against it and lifting it to see if it left a mark. It did. She did it again. She found this deeply compelling.
"She's doing science," Lauren James observed from across the table. She had arrived late, slid into her seat with the loose energy she brought everywhere, and had been watching Y/N with great interest since she sat down.
"She's always doing science," Leah said. "Everything is an experiment."
"What are the current major research areas?"
"Cause and effect, mainly. Sound and response. Gravity—she's very interested in gravity, specifically in confirming that things she drops continue to fall down even if she drops them repeatedly from the same height."
"Has she confirmed it?"
"She's working on it. Very rigorous methodology. Requires a lot of replication."
Lauren looked at Y/N with something like admiration. "Thorough."
"Very."
Y/N, who had at this point developed a fairly reliable sense of when a performance was expected of her, looked at Lauren for a moment—taking stock, assessing the face—and then, with the sudden decision of someone who has been saving something good, she blew a raspberry directly at her.
Lauren blinked.
"Oh," said Leah. "Right. I should mention—she's learned a new thing."
"I noticed."
"She's been doing it all week. She watched me do it and worked out how to do it herself."
Lauren was staring at Y/N with an expression of pure delight. She had a very expressive face at the best of times, and right now it was doing something extraordinary—cycling through surprise and joy and the particular disbelief of someone who has just witnessed something that exceeds expectations. "She just—she looked right at me and—"
"She picks her moments. She's got good timing."
Y/N, aware of the attention and finding it satisfactory, did it again. And then again, in quick succession, watching Lauren's face with the focus of someone confirming results.
Lauren turned to Keira. "Did you see that?"
"I saw it," Keira said, already smiling. "She's been saving it."
"She saved it for me."
"You were making a funny face," Leah pointed out.
"I make great faces." Lauren leaned forward, bringing herself to Y/N's level, and made one of her faces—the full commitment, the exaggerated expression, eyebrows and everything. Y/N studied it with great seriousness. Then: raspberry.
Lauren's reaction was the kind of laughter that makes no sound for a moment, just shaking, bent double over the table. Keira put her fork down because she couldn't use it while laughing, which was probably for the best. Georgia, who'd only caught the end of the exchange, looked between them in confusion.
"What happened? What did I miss?"
"She can do raspberries," Keira managed.
"She can—what? No."
"Do it again," Lauren told Y/N, still wheezing slightly.
Y/N looked at her. Then at Georgia. She appeared to weigh up her audience.
Then she delivered one of the best raspberries she'd produced yet—confident, committed, spectacular in its execution—directly at Georgia's face.
The table descended into the kind of laughter that disturbed the tables on either side and attracted looks from the hotel staff, which nobody particularly cared about because Y/N had a new skill and it was objectively the best skill anyone at this table had ever developed.
Further down the table, Chloe looked up from her conversation with Jess Carter. "What's going on down there?"
"Y/N can do raspberries," Georgia called back, still recovering.
Chloe was out of her seat and crouching down beside the high chair within approximately three seconds.
Y/N regarded her. Then, with great dignity, delivered one directly to her nose.
Chloe sat back down. "I love her," she announced to the table. "I just want everyone to know."
She performed three more times before dinner was finished.
Lucy turned up midway through dessert, late from a call with her family, and was immediately informed of the development by approximately six people simultaneously.
"She can do what?"
"Raspberries," Georgia said. "Just—out of nowhere. She just—"
"Show me."
Y/N, who had by this point developed a fairly reliable sense of when a performance was expected of her, looked at Lucy for a moment—taking stock, assessing the face—and then, in her own time, produced one.
Lucy's face went through approximately four different expressions in the space of two seconds. Surprise, delight, something almost emotional, and then the enormous laugh that was very recognizably Lucy and which made everyone nearby smile whether they wanted to or not.
"She's incredible," Lucy said, sitting down heavily in the nearest chair, still laughing. "She's actually incredible. Leah, she's—"
"I know."
"She learned this from you?"
"She watched me do it and figured it out herself."
Lucy pointed at Leah. "That's because she's yours." She pointed at Y/N. "You are absolutely, unmistakably your mother's daughter."
Y/N received this information with what appeared to be complete satisfaction.
The team meeting that evening was an introductory session—first camp meeting of the new preparation cycle, mostly organizational, Sarina going through the schedule for the week and the shape of what they were working toward. Players settled into the familiar arrangement of chairs in the hotel's conference room. Y/N was in Leah's lap at the back, which was standard now, unremarked upon. Sarina had, approximately three camps ago, stopped acknowledging Y/N's presence as anything notable and had simply incorporated her into the landscape of the room, which was the highest possible compliment.
Y/N was, initially, well-behaved.
She had her teething ring. She had the corner of Leah's sleeve, which she was examining with great focus. Sarina was talking about the defensive structure they'd be working on this week, and Y/N seemed mildly interested in the cadence of her voice, which had a quality the baby had responded to positively from very early on.
Keira was in front of them. She turned around briefly to check on Y/N at one point, made eye contact, and offered a small, quiet wave. Y/N received this with dignity and extended her teething ring toward Keira's face, which was about as warm a greeting as she gave anyone.
Sarina was moving on to the attacking transitions. Y/N had finished with the teething ring and was now watching the projected slides on the screen at the front of the room with what appeared to be genuine interest, her head tilted slightly, tracking Sarina's pointer as it moved across the diagram.
Leah thought: she's being so good, actually. She's really settling into these meetings.
It was around this point that Y/N blew her first raspberry of the meeting.
It wasn't particularly loud. A conversational raspberry. The kind you might produce when offered a suggestion you found mildly disagreeable. It landed in a momentary pause in Sarina's presentation, and a few heads turned, and there were suppressed sounds from various points around the room, but it passed. Leah pressed her lips together. "Sorry," she murmured to the room. "Carry on."
Sarina carried on.
Two minutes later, Y/N produced a second raspberry. This one was louder. Keira's shoulders immediately began to move. Lauren, two seats to the left, had her fist against her mouth. Leah looked at Y/N with what she intended as a please, not right now expression, and Y/N looked back at her with an expression that indicated she had her own scheduling priorities.
Leah bounced her gently. This usually worked as a distraction. Y/N accepted the bouncing but did not appear to consider it a satisfactory substitute for the thing she was actually interested in doing.
The third raspberry was, objectively, the best one yet.
It arrived during a moment when the room had been fairly quiet—Sarina pausing to advance the slide, just a second's silence—and it was full and round and remarkably confident, the raspberry of someone who had been practicing for a week and knew their craft. It filled the room in a way that the previous two had not, and the response was immediate and uncontainable.
Georgia made the seal noise. She tried not to but she did, and once Georgia made the seal noise it was effectively over for everyone in a five-seat radius. Lauren's professionalism collapsed entirely. Keira turned around in her chair with watering eyes, caught Leah's expression, and that finished her too. Lotte, in the third row, had gone bright red with the effort of containing it. Even Alex Greenwood, who maintained composure better than almost anyone in the squad, had her hand over her face and her shoulders shaking in a way that gave her away completely.
Even Lucy, who was by any measure one of the most composed people in the room, had disappeared behind her notepad.
Leah had her forehead against Y/N's hair. She was not laughing. She was very professionally not laughing. Her shoulders might have been doing something slightly inconsistent with not laughing, but she was committed to the position.
Sarina stood at the front of the room and waited.
She was very good at waiting.
She had a very particular quality of stillness that she deployed in these situations—not impatient, not stern, just present and unhurried, like she had all the time in the world and was simply allowing the room to come back to her.
The laughter settled. Players wiped their eyes. Someone coughed. The room reassembled itself into something approximately resembling professional attention.
"I think," Sarina said, her voice entirely level, her expression carefully calibrated somewhere between patient and fond, "that she has a comment on our defensive shape."
The room went again. Not as badly as before—they were trying, they were making genuine efforts—but Georgia was gone, and Lauren was gone, and Lotte was bright red, and Chloe had her face pressed into Jess Carter's shoulder beside her.
"She thinks we should press higher," Keira offered, once she could speak.
"Clearly," said Sarina, with the faintest elevation of one corner of her mouth. "Perhaps she'd like to finish the session."
Y/N, as if accepting the invitation as straightforwardly as it was offered, produced one more raspberry. Measured. Considered. The kind that closed arguments and ended discussions. The room gave her a proper round of applause this time, and Y/N received it with the equanimity of someone who had expected nothing less.
Sarina looked at Y/N for a moment over the heads of her squad.
"Good input," she said. "We'll take it under advisement."
After the meeting broke up, there was the usual drift of players through the corridors—some heading back to rooms, some lingering in the team room, the particular unhurried rhythm of the first evening of camp when nobody had anywhere urgent to be yet. Leah found herself on the big sofa in the team room with Y/N still in her lap, now more alert, the evening's performance having clearly energized rather than tired her.
Hannah appeared and dropped into the armchair across from them, which was very much her chair—she had claimed it, unconsciously, over multiple camps, and everyone else had accepted the arrangement with the kind of unspoken agreement that defined how this group worked. She had her phone in her hand but wasn't looking at it.
"She was excellent in there," Hannah said, nodding at Y/N.
"She was a disruption," Leah said, but without any real conviction.
"She was an excellent disruption." Hannah leaned forward and looked at Y/N properly. She had a stillness about her that Y/N had always seemed to respond to—something in the steadiness of her expression that the baby appeared to find interesting and trustworthy in equal measure. "Come on then. Let's see it."
Y/N studied Hannah's face for a long moment, doing her assessment. Then she blew a very tidy raspberry at her.
Hannah sat back. Something softened in her expression that she probably would have denied if asked about it later. "Yeah, alright," she said quietly. "That's something."
"That's everything," Leah corrected.
"I'm not going to argue with you."
Georgia appeared behind the sofa, draping her arms over the back of it. "She needs a nickname. You can't just keep calling her Y/N."
"That's her name."
"Her camp name. Like—we all have—like Lucy is Bronze, obviously, and Keira is Walsh, and you're Leah-captain-Williamson-thank-you—"
"Nobody calls me that."
"I call you that, in my head." Georgia looked at Y/N. "She's Little Lion. We established this."
"You established this," Leah said.
"The team agreed."
"The team agreed with you because you said it with confidence."
"Same thing," Georgia said, reaching over to ruffle Y/N's hair gently. Y/N tolerated this. "Hello, Little Lion. Great work in the meeting. Really strong contribution."
Y/N grabbed Georgia's hand and brought it to her mouth to investigate with great focus.
"She's trying to eat me," Georgia said, not moving her hand.
"Don't take it personally. She tries to eat everything."
"I'll take it as a compliment."
Lauren appeared in the doorway a few minutes later, fresh from changing out of her training kit, and stopped when she saw Y/N. "She's still going?" she said, with the tone of someone who found this deeply admirable.
"She's been going for three hours," Leah said.
"Stamina." Lauren came and sat on the floor in front of the sofa, cross-legged, bringing herself to Y/N's level. "Respect." She made a face at Y/N—not the full performance, just a casual eyebrow raise. Testing the waters.
Y/N looked at her. Considered. Raspberry.
"Every time," Lauren said, shaking her head, delighted. "I cannot help it. She knows I cannot help it. She is using this information against me."
"Consciously," Leah confirmed.
"Seven months old and she's already figured out cause and effect with specific individuals." Lauren looked up at Leah. "She's going to run the country someday."
"She's going to run something," Leah agreed.
Leah's room at camp was small and familiar in the way that hotel rooms became familiar after enough stays—the specific quality of the curtains, the angle of the light from the bathroom, the way the heating unit clicked at irregular intervals at night. She'd been in enough of them that the particular combination of generic and temporary had stopped feeling strange. It just felt like camp. Like the in-between space of this particular life she lived.
She put Y/N down in the travel cot at half past seven, which was later than her usual bedtime at home but about right for camp, where the dinner schedule pushed everything back slightly. Y/N was tired—the journey, the new environment, the full evening of performance had all caught up with her—and she went down without much protest, just a few minutes of resettling, one small sound, and then the particular stillness of a sleeping baby.
Leah sat on the edge of the bed and looked at her for a minute, which she always did. The habit had started in the earliest weeks, when she'd checked constantly and anxiously, and had evolved into something else—quieter, less anxious. Just a moment of looking. Just taking stock.
Then she called Alessia.
"She was incredible today," she said, when Alessia picked up. She was already smiling before Alessia had said a word.
"Tell me everything." She could hear that Alessia was in the kitchen—the specific ambient sound of it, a tap running briefly, the settle of something being put down.
"The car journey was fine, she slept most of it. She was a bit uncertain when we arrived, but she settled as soon as she saw the team." Leah leaned back against the headboard. "Lotte found her in the corridor first and completely lost her mind. And then at dinner—she just picked her moment, didn't she. Lauren was making a face at her and she just—delivered it. Perfect timing. Lauren completely lost it."
Alessia laughed, and the sound of it came down the phone warm and close. "I wish I'd seen Lauren's face."
"It was spectacular. Chloe was out of her seat within about three seconds when she heard what was happening. She did it about four more times during dinner. Standing ovation. She knew exactly what she was doing, Ale. She'd look at someone, really look at them, and then just—perform."
"She's working the room."
"She absolutely is. She is seven months old and she is working the room."
"She gets that from you."
Leah considered this. "I don't work rooms."
"You absolutely work rooms. You just do it so naturally you don't notice."
There was a comfortable pause. Leah could hear Alessia moving, the soft sound of the kitchen light being switched off.
"And then," Leah continued, "we had the team meeting."
Another pause, longer this time. Leah could hear Alessia's smile. "What happened in the meeting?"
"She waited. She was really good for the first bit—sitting there, watching the slides, very professional. And then she just—timed it perfectly. Right in the middle of Sarina's presentation. Full commitment. Best one she'd done all day."
Alessia made a sound that was trying to be composed and failing.
"Sarina told her it was good input," Leah said. "That she'd take it under advisement."
"Sarina said that?"
"Direct quote."
"I love that woman," Alessia said. "I genuinely—she is so—I love her."
"She's special."
"How is she now? Y/N?"
Leah looked over at the travel cot, where Y/N's shape was just visible in the dimness—the rise and fall of her breathing, the small fist near her face. "Out cold. Seven thirty, no complaints. Performed for three hours straight and then absolutely crashed."
"Like her mama after a tough match."
"Apparently." Leah settled further back against the pillow. "I miss you."
"I miss you too. Both of you." A beat. "How are you, though? Not just Y/N."
"I'm good. Tired in a normal way. Happy to be back." Leah thought about the corridor with Lotte, and dinner, and the team room after the meeting—the particular comfort of that specific collection of people, the ease of it. "It's good to be here."
"It should be," Alessia said. "It's yours. You built it."
"We built it."
"You built more of it than you think."
Leah didn't argue. Outside the window, the evening had settled into quiet—just the faint sound of other rooms, distant traffic, the particular gentle emptiness of a place that would be busy again tomorrow.
"Go to sleep," Alessia said. "You've got a big week."
"I will. You too."
"Give her a kiss from me in the morning."
"She'll be awake at three," Leah said. "I'll tell her then."
"Good." A pause. "Ti voglio bene."
"You too," Leah said softly. "So much."
Y/N was, indeed, awake at three.
Not distressed—just awake, in the particular way she sometimes was, lying quietly in the travel cot and making small sounds that weren't crying but were a gentle indication that she knew the world was still out there and she'd like some acknowledgment of the fact.
Leah got up without thinking about it, the way she always did, the way her body had learned to do before her mind was entirely present. She lifted Y/N out of the cot and settled in the chair by the window with her, the room lit only by the faint glow from outside.
"Hi," she said quietly.
Y/N looked at her. Sleepy, soft, not quite here and not quite away.
"Mummy says goodnight," Leah told her. "She's at home. She misses you."
Y/N blinked.
"She'd say buonanotte if she was here. You know how she says it." Leah adjusted her slightly, settling her more comfortably against her chest. "You'll be back home in a few days."
The room was very quiet. Outside, nothing much moved. This was the part she'd tried to explain to Keira at dinner and hadn't quite managed—the particular quality of three o'clock, the way it sat apart from the rest of the day. The world reduced to just this: a chair by a window, the warm weight of her daughter, the small sounds of breathing.
Y/N, against her chest, made a sound. Very quiet. Just her lips pressing together.
And then a small, sleepy raspberry. Barely more than a breath. A three-in-the-morning raspberry, offered up to nobody in particular, because she'd discovered she could make the sound and apparently even at three o'clock she saw no reason not to.
Leah laughed, soft and quiet, trying not to wake the whole corridor.
"Even now," she whispered. "Seven months old and no concept of appropriate timing."
She pressed her lips to the top of Y/N's head and stayed there for a moment.
"You're perfect," she said against her hair. "Absolutely, completely, impossibly perfect."
Y/N blew one more tiny raspberry, possibly in agreement, and fell asleep.
The rest of the week settled into the comfortable rhythm of camp—early mornings, training sessions, meals together, the careful ordinary work of a team preparing for something. Y/N attended training in her carrier or passed between whoever asked to hold her, watching the drills with her usual focused attention, occasionally gracing someone with a performance.
She had, by the second day, identified which members of the squad gave the best reactions and begun targeting them with some precision. Lauren remained the gold standard—her response was the most dramatic and therefore the most satisfying, her face doing something new and extraordinary each time as though she genuinely hadn't seen it coming. Georgia was excellent if you caught her off-guard, which was not difficult because Georgia's guard, where Y/N was concerned, was essentially non-existent. Keira gave a quieter reaction but her eyes did something that Y/N seemed to find worth working for.
Chloe was unpredictable—sometimes laughing so hard she had to sit down, other times affecting complete composure for approximately three seconds before collapsing entirely. Y/N found this variability compelling and returned to her repeatedly, like a scientist who has identified an interesting variable and wants to understand it better.
Alex Greenwood, who presented the stiffest challenge, broke on day two. She had been maintaining a dignified composure every time Y/N looked at her—a small smile, a raised eyebrow, nothing more—until Y/N escalated to the loudest and most committed raspberry of the entire camp, delivered at close range and with significant warning up, and Alex laughed so suddenly and so completely that she spilled her coffee, which Y/N appeared to consider an acceptable outcome.
"She got me," Alex said, mopping at her sleeve with the matter-of-fact tone of someone acknowledging a fair defeat. "I want it noted that I lasted longer than anyone else."
"Noted," said Keira.
"She was very strategic about it," Lotte added, who had witnessed the whole thing. "She built up to it. She was setting you up."
"I know she was setting me up. That's what I'm saying. She's seven months old and she was setting me up."
Y/N looked at Alex with large, guileless eyes. Completely innocent. A baby who had done nothing but make a small sound.
"Unbelievable," Alex said, and reached over to very gently boop her on the nose, which Y/N accepted with the grace of someone who had won and could afford to be magnanimous.
She tried it on two members of the backroom staff who were initially startled and then charmed. She tried it on a hotel employee bringing fresh towels to the corridor, who stopped and laughed and said something in a regional accent that made Leah smile. She tried it on Jess Carter at breakfast on the second morning—Jess, who had a face that seemed to express approximately six emotions simultaneously at all times and who responded to the raspberry with such genuine, wholehearted delight that Y/N immediately promoted her into the regular rotation.
"I feel like I've passed a test," Jess said, still grinning about it ten minutes later.
"You have," Leah said. "She doesn't perform for everyone."
"She performed for literally everyone at dinner last night," Georgia pointed out.
"She chose to perform for everyone at dinner. That's different."
By the third day, it had become something the team referenced with the ease of an established shorthand—do the thing, someone would say, crouching down to Y/N's level, and Y/N would take her time, assess the situation, and perform when it suited her. Sometimes immediately. Sometimes after a pause long enough to make the requester uncertain, followed by a raspberry deployed at maximum impact when they'd almost given up.
The timing, everyone agreed, was exceptional.
"She's going to expect this level of attention forever," Lucy said on the third evening, watching Y/N in the team room surrounded by players who had all somehow ended up on the floor near her. "When she's older and she realizes people don't just applaud her for sounds she makes."
"She'll find other sounds," Leah said.
"She'll find other ways to hold a room," Lauren corrected. "Look at her. She already knows what she's doing."
Y/N was, at that moment, looking between Georgia and Chloe with the assessing expression, clearly deciding who was the better target for the raspberry she was plainly preparing. She chose Georgia—she often chose Georgia, who was reliably excellent—and delivered it with the composure of someone who had refined a skill through dedicated practice.
Georgia, who had by this point been on the receiving end of at least a dozen raspberries over the course of the week, was no more immune to it than she'd been the first time.
"Every time," she said, shaking her head. "Every single time."
"It's because you make a good face," Lauren told her.
"I can't help my face."
"No, it's a good thing. It's what she wants. You're giving her what she wants."
"I know I'm giving her what she wants! She knows I can't help it! She's using me!"
Y/N looked at Georgia with enormous eyes. Blameless. Innocent. A baby who had done nothing but make a small sound.
"She's using you," Leah confirmed, entirely without apology.
"I have absolutely no complaints," Georgia said, and tickled her chin very gently, and Y/N grabbed her finger and held on with the grip strength that never failed to surprise, and that was that.
On the last morning of camp, Leah was in the corridor with the changing bag and Y/N on her hip and her training kit half-packed when Sarina came out of the room three doors down.
They walked together toward the lift in the way they sometimes did—companionably, without agenda. Sarina looked at Y/N with the expression she'd developed over these months: measured fondness, the careful warmth of someone who took seriously the responsibility of their relationship to other people's families.
"She did well this week," Sarina said.
"She was a disruption in your meeting," Leah said.
"She offered useful feedback." Sarina pressed the button for the lift. "And the team was calmer for having her here. They were—lighter."
Leah thought about this. About dinner on the first night. About the team room at three different times of day, everyone gravitating toward that corner of the sofa. Alex's coffee. Jess Carter's face. Lauren on the floor, cross-legged, making faces and losing every time. "Yeah," she said. "She does that."
"It's a quality," Sarina said, simply, and stepped into the lift.
Y/N watched the doors close and then looked up at Leah with the expression that meant she was processing something and would get back to her later with conclusions.
"Come on," Leah told her, heading for the stairs because Y/N seemed more interested in moving than in waiting for the next lift. "Let's go home to Mummy."
Y/N reached up and grabbed a fistful of her collar, her standard position for being carried anywhere, and made a small sound—not quite a word, not quite a raspberry, something in between. Something that seemed to mean: yes. Let's.
Leah took the stairs down through the quiet morning hotel, her daughter held close, and the changing bag over her shoulder, and her chest full of something that didn't have a name beyond this. Beyond here. Beyond the particular irreplaceable specific weight of this particular person who had arrived seven months ago and rearranged everything, and who blew raspberries at the England squad and Sarina Wiegman and hotel staff with equal confidence, and who held on when she was carried and let go when it was time, and who was—by any measure, in any room, under any circumstances—exactly herself.
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