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Warnings: awkwardness, pregnancy, Poe is upset about the sex of the baby, poor communication
Words: 2.6k
Rating: T
Summary: After the war, a Republic reporter reaches out to interview you and your husband as part of her ‘Childrearing after Resistance’ piece on rebels starting families.
What marrying for love does to a mf
One of these days I’m just going to write 20k of Poe talking transcript style I want (in) his head so bad
AO3 Link
“Is it– is it on? Is it working?”
Poe fiddled with the tiny mic on his shirt flap.
It was as lowkey as you had hoped. Just the reporter, her cameraperson, and an assistant. No makeup, no training, just a conversation.
The interview was divided into three segments. Both your individual one on one interviews, and then the joint interview, your answers to be cut together later.
Poe went first. He was in a great mood.
It was early afternoon, natural light sweeping in from the bay windows to the back yard, a back yard lined with tall, billowing jungle trees.
The breeze made the light ripple through the back kitchen and dining room.
“How many kids do you want?”
“That’s the first question?” Poe asked to confirm.
“As many as she wants.” He nodded confidently from where he sat on his living room couch, arm over the armrest. The seating area around them was round and warm, handmade furniture and textiles, local wood, cloth woven in every color of the rainbow.
“As many as he wants.” You shrugged, unknowingly in the same spot Poe had been a half hour ago, one leg up to spread your lap comfortably.
“I was an only child, and I hated it. I just want my home filled with joy. I don’t wanna say there’s a limit to how many I’ll have. Whatever feels right. Have one, have another, keep going. I love kids.” Poe chuckled, genuinely warm at the thought of a baby in arms, toddlers underfoot, children in the yard and teens picking up their studies and interests, needing the speeder. He wanted all of it.
“Haven’t been around too many. I wanna prosper, y’know?” He continued. “I try to excel at everything I do. I need to have things to do with myself. This is my next mission, in a way. I try not to think of it that way, but it’s how I see life. You gotta be doing things to have done things. You need a plan. Or to wing it. Gotta pick one and go!”
“Poe and I waited so long for this. I mean, we can’t keep off of each other. I think we’re going to end up with a ton just because we’re not against it. We want it together.” A smile pulled at your mouth.
“I… it’s like, we work so well together. Our kids are going to be real stubborn.” You were trying not to smile too big, thinking about Poe, working with him, what your babies will be like is distracting, you want to go on about how headstrong and exuberant he is.
“Someone tells me they think I can’t do something, that it’s half baked, I’ve gotta do it, now. I’ll find out for myself. I always go for it.” You said.
“Thoughts on gender? What do you think your having right now?” The next question is answered very quickly.
“Definitely a girl. And I’m not just saying that because she thinks it’s a girl, I genuinely think it’s a girl.”
“Poe thinks it’s a girl.” You rubbed your bump. “I told him my mom craved sour stuff when she was pregnant with me and a couple months in– well a couple months after we found out, so three months along– I asked for lemon ice, and he just got convinced. He won’t be disappointed, but…”
“I would be content if they were all girls.” Poe said, a chuckle in his tone. “I know most people want it to be like the Force, or something, they want balance, I think that’s not a comparison. I don’t care. All girls.”
“We’re gonna raise them the same. Same skills, same opportunities, same respect, safety, education.” You nodded. “Doesn’t matter.”
“I think society is women. Men live in it, but if you actually look at what builds and binds and creates; it’s women. And that’s as much of a responsibility as it is a privilege, to raise. Sexism is still a thing even if we continue to pretend it isn’t and no girl should be raised with that. It should feel like the slap to the face it is the second someone tries to reduce her to her gender, her femininity, any of that. It’s strength. It’s real strength and it’s something, y’know, men just don’t have. They should, I think they can, that it’s possible, but they don’t.”
“It doesn’t make a difference.” You shrugged.
The interviewer hummed.
“Did you plan for this before the war was over?”
“Yeah, you know, this was kind of always the plan? It was always a goal. Meeting my wife just made it possible.”
“Oh, gosh no.” You shook your head, twisting his mother’s wedding band around your finger. “I couldn’t have even thought about it until it was over. He talked about it so much, I think it– it got him through some times. But I wasn’t ready to make it happen until that day. It was one of the things that made it so special. I mean, I probably would have gone on with it eventually anyway, but it was celebration; we’re gonna have that baby now!”
“It was never hypothetical. Both my heroes were mothers. They both turned out very differently. There’s no world, win, lose, where I don’t have a kid. I’d do it all myself if I could. I feel a responsibility to.”
“This is like– we did it. I’m not trying to say it’s like a reward, it’s an honor, it’s something we can have, now.” You laughed a little. “That’s what winning gave us: life.”
“Are you planning to raise them here?”
“Yeah. I grew up here. I love the greenery, we’re gonna be outside a lot. My dad lives just across the way, my mom passed when I was a kid, so, y’know– I still want them to have a grandparent nearby. Her parents aren’t uh… well they were never big fans of her joining the Resistance.” Poe frowned. The idea of the grandparents of his child never meeting them really got to his heart.
“Yep, right here, this house.” You said, patting the couch next to you.
Yavin was gorgeous. You wouldn’t want them to be anywhere else.
Poe pulled his earphones out and sat beside you, immediately putting his arm around your waist.
“Having fun so far?” He asked.
“Easier than I thought.”
“Yeah? Same here. I thought they’d be more existential or we’d be getting into the war, service, but it’s all basic stuff.”
Stuff anybody knew. Obvious stuff. You were an open couple, always had been.
He sat up straight when she gestured they were rolling, pulling his hands to himself.
The interviewer adjusted her notes, looked nervous for just a split second before it disappeared behind abject professionalism.
She asked the first question.
Your husband’s eyes met your just as briefly.
“Are these the same questions we already answered?” Poe asked.
“Yes. You’re going to answer them jointly now.”
You were suddenly very hot and disoriented, already blanking on your answers. You had felt completely free and comfortable thus far, now it felt like a test.
“How many kids do you want to have?”
“Two?” You answered, hand on your belly.
“Like, two.” Poe cleared his throat, hands folded over his lap.
“Two.” You nodded. That was respectable.
You took his hand to stop him picking at his nails.
“What do you think you’re having right now?”
You took as deep a breath you could.
“It’s a boy.” You said.
“It’s a boy??” Poe shifted up in his seat, he furrowed his brow at the interviewer before turning, you could feel his eyes going over your expression.
“The student messed up, they thought I already knew, they were so embarrassed I couldn’t even be upset.”
“What the hell. We– it wasn’t—” Poe wiped his eyes and inhaled. A boy. You weren’t pulling his leg.
“Are you okay?” You said while adjusting your mic.
“Of course. Of course it is.”
It had been a girl. He was certain of it.
The interviewer looked between you both.
“Can we—”
“Yes! Continue,” Poe all but snapped, leaning up in his seat, pulling himself back into it. He couldn’t place how he was angry. Why was he angry? There was nothing to be upset about.
You were having a baby boy and that was wonderful news.
“Did you plan for this before the war was over?”
“No,” Poe said, anticipating your answer.
“Yes.” You said, anticipating his.
You made a face and Poe scratched above his ear.
This had always been the plan. Since you met, started dating, got married.
Would it have been if you didn’t win?
He pulled his hand from yours.
“Okay. Last question. Are you planning to raise your children here?”
“Poe was born here. It’s really important to him his family’s here.”
“I mean– I’d be fine moving closer to– to your parents.” He said. “I mean if you wanted.”
“My parents?” You were too stunned to say anything more.
He couldn’t be serious.
You just looked at each other.
“And that’s everything. Thank you for your time.”
“We’re having a boy?” Poe asked as soon as the door shut.
“Yeah.”
It was getting on in the day. Almost evening.
It was sperm that determined the second X or a Y chromosome. So it was him, really. He made the baby a boy.
“I know you wanted a girl—” you started and Poe couldn’t even let you.
“No, no, oh my goodness… no, it– it doesn’t make a difference. I’m being ridiculous. I’m just happy you’re pregnant.” He meant it, even if he felt about it.
There was nothing wrong with it, no one had done anything wrong.
Boys were alright, he was a boy. His love for his kids would never, ever be conditional.
“I’ll love a boy just as much.” He promised. Sincerely. He would. “I just have to get used to it.”
“We need to talk more.” You said.
“We do.”
You thought you talked a lot.
Food, bills, pensions, utilities, correspondence. Maybe you just exchanged information. You hadn’t really sat down together for more than a couple minutes since your wedding, now you think about it. Where had all that time gone? Where had you both gone?
“You want to be closer to my parents?” You could barely get the words out.
Closer was a reach. Know at all was closer.
“I– I just don’t want… him, to grow up without them. I think we should at least try. If you could call them—”
“Poe—”
“Imagine it was our kid. This kid. We didn’t understand why he was doing what he was doing but he had a baby of his own and we never even knew about it. I mean, wouldn’t you rethink the things you said? Believed?”
You wanted to say yes to him. You did.
“You don’t know them.” You said.
“I want to.”
You let out a harsh, round sigh, an ache creeping though you, stretching your back against the weight of your sixth month bump, bracing your hands on your lumbar.
You cursed as Poe gripped your shoulder and massaged down your back, reliving the tense muscles with his palm one at a time. He kept it up till you were loose and sore.
He put his arm around under your armpit and across to your other shoulder, rubbing your bicep, and the other around your waist, hugging you gently from behind.
“Will you please think about it?”
“I will think about it.” You said, then more quietly, both hands over your son. “Are we really only having two?”
“Kriff no. I want as many as you want.”
“Four?” You said, cautiously.
“Six, eight—” he moved his head from side to side.
“Ten.”
“Ten.” He breathed a laugh, then nodded. “I can make that happen.”
“You wanna see how we feel after? After this one comes, after a few?” You asked.
“We’d need at least one more bedroom.” He’s thinking logistically, strategically. Trying to, anyway. He was stuck on that baby, that little boy, now. What he’d be like when he was out. “We’d need some multiples unless we keep the gap under two years. That’s not exactly within our control.”
“We’d do two as close as we can, then have a gap, than two more.”
You had thought about this. Planned it out in your head. He isn’t sure how to say he wished he’d been in your head.
“Still. Being pregnant for– seven, seven and a half years…”
“Yeah.” You mused. “Honestly it sounds great to get whatever I want whenever I want from you for that long.”
He chuckled low. “Absolutely.”
Your smile faded into the quiet.
“Poe I can’t wait until this baby’s here, and I can hold him. I wanna hold them so bad.”
“How do you think I feel?” He could only hold him through you. He wouldn’t say he was jealous, but, it didn’t feel fair he couldn’t carry them at least half the time. Some days he wanted to so badly it made him sick.
“I wanna hold him in my arms and sing to him. Take his hand and just let him hold my fingers.”
You felt a foot or a hand press to the lower right of your navel. Tiny, firm.
“I’m sorry I acted like that. We didn’t know. I shouldn’t have been so sure.”
“You got excited.”
“I did.”
“Are we like that article about post war families, how they had so many kids because they felt they owe it to rebuild, to be happy?” You stroke up his sleeve, under it, over his arm.
“I want kids because I want the rest of my life filled. I had so little family. I’m having all the kids my parents and grandparents couldn’t. If that’s what that is, I don’t care who wrote what about it.” He said. “It is what it is.”
“I want enough kids this house isn’t so quiet. I wanna fill the couch. I wanna cuddle with all my limbs and spend hours getting one photo for holiday cards.”
He held you tighter.
“Yes,” He said with his whole chest. “I want that so bad.” He pressed his face hard into the side of your neck, eyes watering.
“Wow. This interview got in my head.” He cleared his throat.
“Think it didn’t get into mine?”
“Humiliating.” He stated.
“I think we need to do it more.”
“Huh?”
“I think we need to have like– an interview night, with each other. Once a week?”
“Write down questions and–”
“Answer them. Just us. No cameras.”
“Same time? Next week?”
“I know I want the maximum amount of time to recover.”
“Yeah.”
He moved his hand down, over the swell of your stomach.
“We’re gonna figure this out, and I swear to you, no matter what we’re not getting any sleep for the entire foreseeable future.” He said. “We will fill this house.”
“At least one girl.”
“Please,” he stressed. “If we have any more we gotta have at least one girl.”
“Are we gonna be really indecisive parents?” You asked in almost a whisper. “Like go ask your dad, well what did mom say, I dunno let’s ask her, but last time dad said—”
“Shit. I think so.”
“Agree on one thing?” You shifted your weight back into him, cradling the back of his neck with your hand.
“What’s that?”
“Marrying was our best idea.”
“My idea.” He said flatly.
“You ass–!” You stand up fully and turn around.
“Marrying me was your best i—”
You kiss him so deep, hands in his hair, backing him till he has to brace against the wall, he can’t do anything but shut up.
It's one of the last few things we can have as a society that's free. You can engage, for free. People give you things (art, stories, etc), for free.
Don't buy into the consummerism just because it's everywhere else.
You don't have to consume everything you interact with. You don't have to use things, just because they exist.
You're allowed (still, for now), to have things that are enjoyable for free.
Do you realise how insane the world is? We don't have many places where we can just be, for free anymore, but ao3 is. Did you notice we don't have ads in ao3? We don't have pop ups? Where ELSE do we not have that?
Where else can you just go and not have to wait for a commercial to be over or for ads to be on the sidelines?
I don't think the younger people understand, but the whole of internet used to be like this. YouTubers would do Youtube for free, just because. You couldn't monetise your internet presence before.
Ao3 is like a little preserved corner of the internet where the old internet used to be, and it's being attacked by people who do not understand that free things are allowed to exist without judgment.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
“but shrouded black figures are scary!” not when ur muslim. its the funniest fucking thing. this is labeled on pinterest under shit like “classic horror” “scary phone wallpaper”
but that LITERALLY just looks like a niqabi or someone in a jilbab. Like Look at this pic of me (from a self photoshoot, now w/o the dramatic lighting and dark background)
or this pic of me
or this pic of me
like its so funny i can’t be scared of shrouded figures it just looks like me.
I mean I think a part of the ‘scary background’ bit is the thing where the individual in question is staring directly at the viewer from a foggy pond in a dense forest. And also the literal burning halo
sounds like a normal Friday night. if a sister wants to go on a walk in the evening who am i to stop her. if she has a burning halo that’s the will of god.
the reason that wounds that break the skin hurt is because its always supposed to be dark inside your body and when your blood sees sunlight for the first time it gets scared. and that causes the pain. or maybe it doesnt
#‘el pastel promedio tiene tres leches’ es en realidad un error estadístico. El pastel promedio tiene 0 leches. Leches Georg#quien vive en una cueva y absorbe 10.000 leches al día#es un valor atípico qeu no debería haberse contado (via @deathbycoldopen)
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It's Juneteenth yall. And I'm not letting this day go unmarked.
Black people fight for everybody. We stand in solidarity with women, lgbt people, poor people all over the world of every skin color and background. Every religion and nationality.
Today, stand with us. Be with us. Tell a black person you love them. Hug a black person (with consent). Ask that hot black girl out today. Make a black person smile. Black lives matter to everybody and you matter to us.
Stand with us on Juneteenth like we stand with you all year round, and I hope a happy Pride month continues for all of us
Worlds Apart - goldfish merman!Steven Grant x pirate!Layla El-Faouly | Chapter Five
Warnings: almost drowning, monster violence, fade to black sex, system fighting
Words: 5.1k
Rating: T
Summary: Steven plunges headfirst into more trouble, monsters and secrets, as many explanations as questions, guilt, disenchantment, and one first he isn’t sure is really his.
I don’t think anyone but me and a few Oscar Isaac fan tumblr users know what a goldfish kiss is. It’s an open mouthed kiss with more of a seal where the tongue is out and the lips are very locked. It’s just how he kisses. I imagine it’s pretty par for the course for fish cause they don’t want to get water in their mouths but intense for a human not expecting it and only having kissed raised Jewish Marc who let’s be honest never swapped spit with her
Additionally, about how his missing fin is missing toes in his human form, the majority of the tail would be extended from the tail BONE and enveloping the legs in a bent fashion, completely unlike Layla, just in case that was not clear
AO3 Link
Layla had one hand over her nose and mouth, the other flailing, trying to get some movement upwards, but she was sinking, down, fast.
Steven crashed in above her, and got an arm around her chest, trying to swim her to surface, but her weight was dead and his swim was weak and their progress was negligible against her quickly depleting oxygen.
“Layla, just hold on, hold on, I’ve got you.”
She couldn’t hear him, focused on trying to keep the air in, the water out, and kick against the both of them sinking, her ears filled anyway, sinuses packed.
Steven started to stop their descent, enough to keep them suspended, but startled as another torpedo hit their ship, finally breaking it in two.
He adjusted his grip, down around her waist, unrelenting.
Layla’s hand fell from her face, head slumping forward. Bubbles trailed from her mouth and nose.
“Layla! No, no no no!” He touched her face, pulling her tight to his chest. He didn’t know any spells, didn’t have any air left in his lungs for her.
The halves of the boat above shadowed them, now fully flooded, they barreled past them to the seafloor as Steven beat his tail against the pull, still far from Egypt but deep in denial.
Layla felt a dull itch in both her calves, like her shoes were much too tight, the fabric of her pants caught against them. Her head throbbed, her lungs burned. The sting traveled down her feet and became a sear, unbearable.
And she gasped deeply, drawing water, eyes flying open, coughing and kicking scraping first one boot off, than the other with her heel, twisting, gripping the front of Steven’s shirt, arms bent. She coughed and coughed, vision slowly returning.
“You’re a mer!” Steven shrieked, and Layla cringed against the sound, ringing clear in her ears. “
She looked down to where both her feet had become flat, long, transparent red flipper like fins, connecting up to bright scarlet red scales along the length of her unfamiliar anatomy.
“Why does your legs stay?” Steven questioned. “That doesn’t seem fair at all. Who am I kidding I don’t care, you’re alive!” There was a break in his voice. “You can breathe?” He held her in both hands.
“I’m… breathing,” Layla coughed, shakily sucking water through her windpipe and having a sensation as if she were about to start choking. Unpleasant, strange, her nose and throat itched like hell, but she was breathing. It took more force than air to get in and out. It felt surreal.
“How am I breathing?” She cried, both alarmed and assuaged, all but shaking Steven.
“I think your father may have been a bit more than interested in merculture, Layla, I think he was an undineborn!”
Layla reached and unzipped first one cutoff, than the other. More scales, faded and scattered as they blended in and under the skin up her calf.
Hidden from her all this time.
“That’s…” she didn’t have words for it.
“Stretch your fins out, easy. Nice and slow.”
Layla did so, taking Steven’s hand. He moved, she followed.
Choppy, uneven, Steven’s swim was nothing short of stunningly elegant to Layla. The way he just glided through the water like it was his own slipstream, to her it felt like pressing, shifting force all around, trying to move through it was like wading in clear pudding, sliding and struggling with even basic form.
Steven felt a sting in his head, from the base of his neck through to his temples.
The blissful respite was short lived.
“Big mistake, taking to the water, Steven.”
Harrow.
He breathed using a large irregular bubble around his mouth, nose, and the vestiges of thin slits of gills in his throat, scarred over, only just visible behind his collar.
His eyes landed briefly on Layla, recognition coming over him. The Scarab. That El-Faouly. Her engagement to the marauder made perfect sense, now.
He didn’t dwell on it.
He drew his staff in a curve down to his side, then around his front.
The water coursing around him glowed deep purple, churning as he chanted in ancient Egyptian.
The currents twisted and folded and opened with the snapping teeth filled jaws and twisted skeletal arms of reanimated merlike monsters, where not scaled, covered in algae eaten leathery skin, pigmented a sickly gray green, dorsal fin along most of its spine.
A grindle.
Steven swam back, his heart pounding, something he’d only seen frightening illustrations of lunging right for him with claws sharp enough to drag him down and rip him to pieces.
Twists of deep blue spotted yellow-brown watersnakes slithered from similar cracks, big as dogs and times longer than any snake could possibly be.
Layla held firm.
She stuck her knife through one of the serpent’s heads, throwing it down to the dark with a cry, kicking awkwardly to swim back up, avoiding the jaws of the other.
“Okay, Marc, I need you,” she shouted. “You can have all the ‘I told you so’s you want!”
“You heard her, Steven.”
“Yeah,” Steven gasped, still backing away, unable to process.
“I’m right here, I can protect you! Protect her,”
“So can I!”
“She almost died.” Marc stressed.
“Give the body back when you’re done.” Steven tried to bargain, ducking around the wreck of her ship as the grindles swarmed for him.
“When all this is done,” Marc said.
“No, Marc—!”
“Surrender control!”
“Just do what I can’t, please.” He sobbed. “Get us out of this.”
“You got it buddy.”
“Okay. Okay, do it.”
Steven relented, relaxing his head back, and Marc took control, suit manifesting about their body in a pattern completely unfamiliar to Marc.
A three piece, minus the three, stopping at the waist to accommodate his fishtail. A dress suit.
“Steven, what—”
He had always transformed when he summoned the armor. But here he was without his pants or legs, orange tail swishing.
“Marc, look out!”
Marc only just caught the grindle making a lunge for them, choking it out with a fist.
Steven watched, but couldn’t control how his body moved. It was like he was trapped, reflections, his eyes, watching himself that wasn’t him.
“Oh this is weird. I hate it.” He whispered.
“In your nose out your mouth you’ll get used to it.”
“Is this how it’s felt for you this whole time?”
“It’s easier if you don’t fight it!” Marc crushed a grindle’s skull into a sunken crate, splitting both.
“Are you going to push me down if I stop?”
“No. Focus. You’ll be right here. Like a cleaner fish. Just quit—!” Marc grunted, hitting one of the monsters as it tried to bite into their tail, like lead against their body, dragging. “Pulling my punches!”
“I am?” Steven had only thought it. He hadn’t felt a thing.
“I can’t fight in this it looks ridiculous.” He said as he took care of the last one, looking himself over.
“Well then give the body back.”
“Not a chance.” He looked up to where Layla was being accosted by more watersnakes, and figured he’d have to make do with the tail.
“He deceives you, Layla.” Harrow taunted the woman in front of him, arms spread, treading too close for Marc’s liking.
He bounded upward and pulled a long crescent cutlass from his back, slicing through the serpent’s neck with one clean sweep, untangling her.
“Why don’t you try shutting up?” Marc punched him right in the chest.
Harrow sputtered, eyes wide.
“You,” he hissed.
“Me.”
“Marauder.”
“You wanna go what, round six?” Marc gripped his sword in front of him.
“Seven, easily.” The captain chuckled.
“Who’s keeping track? Bring it on.”
Harrow directed a jet of water right into his face, and then a pair of grindles.
“That’s cheating–!” Marc grunted.
“Like you’ve lived a fair day in your life, landwalker!” Harrow shouted over their snarls.
“Maybe you’ve warmed it up now I can take over. Marc, give me the body.” Steven said.
“It doesn’t work like that.”
“You keep saying how it doesn’t work. When are you gonna tell me how it does work?”
“Maybe when we aren’t under attack–!”
Marc wrestled with the monsters until Layla struck one hard, redirecting it’s attention to her where she used her knife straight across its throat.
“I want you to know that I’ve got your back, Steven. I’m not your enemy here.” Marc broke another’s neck and then dropped it when it continued to grab at them.
“You think I don’t know that? I know. You say it all you want, but your actions are louder than your words, like Layla’s.”
He glanced to where she was bracing against another grindle a bit below them.
“You’ve been getting real nice and tight with her on this trip, huh?” Marc said. “You in love with her?”
“Yeah alright.” Steven dismissed.
“You keep it in your slit and your hands to yourself, you understand me?”
“Mmn-hmn sure, Mr. In Charge, Captain Neverhere, I’ll for sure think of that next time I’m snoggin’ her!”
“You kiss her and you can forget about having a body to come back to!”
Marc looked up to where Harrow was, distracted in the direction Layla threw the map, he would kill them before he let them get away, even without it.
He folded forward into a dive. This was a losing battle.
“Layla,” Marc said, taking her arm. “I need you to hold on to me as tight as you can.”
He wrapped his jacket around her shoulders. She buried both arms around his chest.
“Looking for a lift down here, big guy!” Marc called up to where the god stood peering down at them, woefully disappointed in the turn of events.
“As you ask, Spector, so I protect.”
“Don’t even,” Harrow growled, catching them in an artificial countercurrent.
His heart pounded. Marc incensed him, but the map, he needed it far more. If they were retreating, they must have had a way there, a copy, perhaps, though Harrow knows no way they could have made one.
Something is off, but he may yet have a chance with Steven, he sees reckless compassion in him, and so he lets go, and is tossed back in a burst of propulsion and bubbles as they disappear into the sea.
Layla, Marc, and Steven dragged themselves waterlogged and soggen up onto the Egyptian beach, somewhere near Alexandria.
Layla’s ears were popped, she felt something alive squirming in her hair, fresh scratches and cuts joining the scars littering her exposed arms, and to top it off, acid in the back of her mouth.
“Thank you for trying to save me.” Layla sighed, chest heavy as she finished coughing up water and tried to get reused to air.
“Huh?”
“You jumped in after me.” She was talking to Steven.
“Oh. Well, I failed.” Steven replied. “If you couldn’t breathe underwater you’d be dead right now, so.”
“Yes, but,” she panted. “You didn’t even hesitate.”
“Just instinct I guess…” Steven cleared his throat, eyes going unfocused.
“And do I get a thanks? I just swam us a some two thousand and a half miles through the frickin’ sea.” Marc huffed, fruitlessly wringing his shirt.
“Thank you?” Layla said.
“You’re welcome.” Marc started to get up, then looked down at his tail and grumbled.
“Marc,” Layla said. “Since you’re here, I want some answers.”
“Right.” His shoulders pressed forward. “About what?”
“You’re half mermaid.” She said.
“That’s right.”
“Is that why you went back? Why you never told me?”
Marc’s throat caught. Safety. So much of his life just trying to find it. It was why, but there was more than that, killing him.
“There was… too much going on with what happened and my parents and the wedding, I couldn’t marry you while you didn’t even know who– I really was. And I hate this, I hate what I am and where I came from and I had no idea how to tell you about any of it. I never told anyone.”
“You should have.”
“I should have.” He muttered.
He watched as the scales slowly dissolved to bare tanned brown skin, spotty from the salt, not looking at her.
“Your mom was the mermaid.”
Marc breathed. “Yeah.”
“Was it back then, that this,” she brushed his foot and Marc tucked it under the other.
“Yes.” He said bluntly.
He swallowed. “You got some… fins, of your own, you know.”
“Hardly. I had no idea.” She flicked her ankle, droplets splattering from her fin.
“No you’re right.”
Layla leaned in a little closer, leaning on her thighs.
“I’m sorry.” She whispered. “I… y’know I feel like I’ve barely known you.”
“Nope. Nope, not doing this now.” Marc pressed his eyes shut, shook his head once, and with that he was gone.
Layla pushed aside her anger and breathed, spitting the last of the salt water out.
Steven gave an impossibly long sigh, flopping into the sand and pushing his legs back into the water, his tail reappearing with the tide after a few moments.
“I’m sorry about your boat.” He said, suddenly sounding very guilty.
“That thing? Oh. I’ve needed an upgrade for ages. Don’t worry about it.”
He leaned on his arm to look up at her.
“I… I think something is starting to make sense for me now.” Layla said. “My father wasn’t just a merculture archaeologist, he was a mermaid, Steven, like you, he was half land and sea, a… what’d you call it?”
He stuck his elbow in the crunchy taupe sand. “Undineborn!” Steven exclaimed. “A landwalker. Oh, that’s beautiful. I mean, love transcending worlds brought you about. It brought both of us about.”
He stroked a hand down her shoulder.
“I would have loved to meet him, Layla. He sounds brilliant. Just like you.”
Layla smiled, feeling her chest warm.
She cringed, clutching her head. An anchovy. It was an anchovy in her hair. She tossed it back into the water.
“Oh, blubber,” Steven whispered, sitting up.
“What?” Layla said.
“Gus is dead. He killed my fish.”
“Steven, I’m sorry—”
All the grief he’d stuffed down to make it out of there alive filled him now, rising in his gut, there had been death, he’d seen it with his own eyes, he hadn’t been counting but even one was too many.
This adventure was far more terror and blood than he’d ever signed up for.
“I never learned to talk to him. I never told him I loved him. Oh if I had just given Marc control he might still be alive.” He let out staggered sobs into his hand, big tears pooling at the vertexes of his eyes and dropping down his cheeks.
“What’s wrong with me, why do I have to be like this, can’t do bloody anything… I just wish I was home, I want to be back home, at home with my fish!” Much more real than any story.
“Steven, I’m sure he knew. I saw you talk to him. I’ve never seen anyone care so deeply for something so small. You were gentle.”
“You must think it’s silly.” He blew out his nose.
“No,”
“You thought it was silly. But… we had each other and I took care of him. I mean I tried. I really did try.”
“You did. Hey,”
Steven breathed in and turned to her.
“It’s going to be okay.” She said. “We’re alive. We made it. You left him with me, back there. I’m sorry I didn’t keep him safe.”
“No, it’s not…” he shook his head. “All this was Harrow.” He said. “He’s demented. He needs help. We need to stop him.”
“We will. We’re on the same page about that. Unlike Marc, I’m sticking with you.”
She was.
Steven looked at her, completely found in her eyes.
Hers flicked to his lips and then back to his. She leaned away, realizing how close she was. To doing it. That would be wildly inappropriate right now, she needed to get it together.
Not that she didn’t want to, quite the opposite, but this was confusing. He was euphoric, vulnerable, in tears, angry, grieving.
She didn’t want for it to feel like Marc. Or maybe she did, maybe she hoped it would, because that would be easier to explain to herself.
Steven had never felt doom impend on him so quickly, been so sure he would lose so much. But she was still here, still alive. She was from the sea like him, a secret she didn’t even know of until it consumed her.
And she rolled with it. Every second, every look, every fight. She stood up for him, with him.
Breathing with her made him feel more whole, even after so much.
“Layla, I’m… I’m so happy you’re like me. I mean I feel like maybe that’s why I– why we’ve—”
“Yes. I know.”
Steven didn’t know how to ask if he was reading right, if this was right. “You know, then, how long I’ve– I’ve wanted to do this?”
He put both hands on either side of her jaw, brushing away a bit of sand stuck there.
“How long?”
“My whole life.” He whispered.
He gently parted her lips with his own, closing his eyes, tilting his head and enveloping her mouth in a goldfish kiss.
Layla kissed him back, feeling him moan lightly from his chest, moving their mouths together languidly, pressing his tongue into hers when he found it.
She was shocked, unsure where to put her hands, her head, anything, she moved with him and put her hands on his shoulders and hoped that was right.
In that moment, it felt right.
Salty and fishlike and right.
Steven quickly broke the kiss and pulled away, turning his whole body over, caudal fin hitting her calf, hands tight over his lap.
Layla brushed her hanging open mouth with her hand, pupils blown, heart pounding.
Not like Marc. Not like Marc at all.
“Sorry! I’m sorry. Gods that’s so weird. I-I-I’m feeling a lot of things at once. Like a lot.”
Layla, thinking for a brief moment she’d done something wrong, realized what was happening and quickly averted her eyes across the shore.
“It’s alright.” She said, hoping she sounded reassuring. This had been a weird, hard day for everyone.
Steven took long, deep breaths, trying to slow his heart rate.
He switched, just briefly, barely feeling it. His arm jammed into his side and a stinging pain surfaced there, in what would be his lower thigh of his tail, a loud, disapproving insult he would never repeat in his head.
Steven grabbed and pulled at it.
A fishhook.
It gave, taking a couple scales and a trail of blood with it.
Steven mouthed a ‘what the fish?’ tossing the thing out into the rocks.
At least it took care of his problem.
Perfect. This was exactly what he wanted. Embarrassed, exposed, abrupt. He didn’t know if he would even call that his first kiss, let alone if it was worth it. No. He had kissed her. The literal girl of his dreams. And no peck either. Fully and properly. Even if it wasn’t as long as he’d have liked, it had felt good. Really good.
“Good?” Layla asked.
“Yeah.” Steven said, turning back, fondness returning to his eyes as he looked at her. “Terribly sorry.”
“It’s alright. Really.”
Steven hummed. He appreciated it.
“You know I was asking to test you earlier.” She said. “Back when we met and you were– naked.”
“You were?” That memory was very vivid. How sure he’d been that Layla would hurt him, and how mistaken he’d been. It was everything else that had.
“Yeah.” She wet her lips and committed.
“Marc and I haven’t had sex before.” She said, and getting it out lightened her.
“You haven’t?” Steven inquired, unperturbed by the subject. He wanted a distraction. He already called Marc’s bluff.
“No. I’ve, well, I’ve never had sex. Which...” she blew out a breath. “Makes things sort of weird, because he has.”
“Oh my God, how?”
“Well he’s had girlfriends—”
“No I meant how have you never had sex with anyone? You are so gorgeous.”
She smiled briefly and just shrugged, trying not to let on how hot that made her.
“Why, are you a virgin?”
“Uh, no! I mean, I’ve courted, I didn’t– we didn’t ever… well, okay, I’ve never gotten to the actual sex part. It– it’s hard to explain, it’s not– there’s like sex for reproduction, which no mer’s really interested in doing with me, which I’m fine with–! But there’s also sex for recreation, which… no mer’s really interested in having with me either. But it’s fine, it’s not like what you do, or what humans do, rather, it’s fine, we don’t, we mers, I don’t—”
“Would you like to?” Layla interrupted gently.
Steven looked to her big crinkled amber brown eyes and freckled cheeks and folded instantly.
“Yes.” He said resolutely. “Yes I so would.”
“Now?”
“Yeah, now.” He nodded. “Here?”
“Here.”
Layla leaned forward and pulled off her shirt, tugging the wet fabric over her head.
He flushed. Oh Great Basin. Right here.
“But er, what do you– what about—”
“I track, it’s a safe day,” she said, sliding the knot of her bandana out and using it to put her damp stripped hair all the way up.
“It’s what?”
“Can’t get pregnant.”
“Oh, like mermaids can only get pregnant or impregnate during mating season…”
“Yeah. Something like that.”
“There’s uh… recreational sex is usually at the times of year when– well actually it depends on the—”
Layla finished with her hair, grabbed Steven with both hands and kissed him, making a yelp stop in his throat and turn to a deep, drawn out moan, his bottom lip between her teeth.
“Type.” Steven finished his sentence as she drew back. “Traditionally mers of opposite sex are expected to make babies.”
“Right.” Layla said.
“Not always! It’s just because there’s so few of us, these days. Strengthening your bond as mates was also permitted. And I mean… mers rendezvous and elope with whoever they like, they do. Big ocean. Are your mating cycles monthly?” He whispered, breathless, her fingers fiddling with the buttons of his shirt, smile growing.
“They are.”
“Sounds exhausting. I can’t imagine lekking or… or mating, that often. R-repeatedly. I mean I think I could. Do it. Maybe. Probably.”
“Mmn.” Layla brought their lips back together and pressed till he was flat against the sand.
Embodying a god of chaos, trying to, Harrow found himself in situations he didn’t have answers to. Or only with ones he didn’t like.
Embrace it, he told himself. There was no sense to nature, no grand order. His own existence was proof enough of that. Riddled with disorder and lawlessness. Born into it.
He sloughed the water from his hair in one big wet sheet, smattering it to the deck, flicking his fingers.
He really hated that woman. Even more, now, knowing where she came from.
The tear mirrored four ways, along the fold. The entire center missing. The landmarks confirmed his suspicions, but it wasn’t enough. The script was illegible.
Embrace it. He looked around at what little crew he had remaining. Tools.
“The plan remains the same.” He announced. “We follow this as far as it takes us, and then we search. We will find the traitors and the tomb soon enough.”
He trusted fate, inevitability.
He folded the torn, wet map back into it’s intricate case, picking his staff back up.
Steven and Layla laid side by side on the beach, gentle waves lapping at their finned calves and tail respectively.
“Okay,” Steven said slowly. “So I know we’re mates,” he brushed his fingers over the bottom of his ribcage, still feeling warmth spread like it was sunny inside of him.
“But also, that things work pretty different for you… so like are we– mated, now?”
“Yeah, sure. If that’s what you call it.”
“No, it’s…” Steven sighed. “It’s more serious than that. Mated means you don’t just… you only have one partner, and it’s– it’s for life.”
He thought about how he really had and was stealing from Marc. But he had left her. If he had that right. He wanted her to be safe, but he wouldn’t invest anything more. Steven would.
“Are you… do you really want me to be that?”
Layla turned her head, gazing over his dark wet curls. “Yes, Steven.”
Steven looked up to the gray clouds drifting in. It couldn’t be that easy.
He took a deep breath. “What about Marc?”
He hadn’t thought about him once the clothes were all off. It was just her and him, waves and sand. His body.
Layla groaned. “I knew you were going to say that.” She sat up, sand caked, damp curls whipping as she shook her head and Steven felt the temporarily alleviated anxiety about everything return tenfold.
She had looked so relaxed. He hadn’t meant to ruin it.
Human relationships were already so much more complicated than mer ones, and that was before the fact he was two people in the same body, that he’d met her when she was expecting the other. But he just didn’t want to be thinking one thing, while Layla thought something else, and a third thing entirely was true.
He couldn’t deal with that. He couldn’t let this, the first time he’d even been with anyone, come apart completely because he was too scared to say anything. Yes, maybe it had been a really big mistake, possibly even the biggest of his life, but he loved Layla and he wasn’t sure he was ever going to get a chance like this again if he hadn’t taken it. If he would even live to. She had asked. She wasn’t married. That wasn’t shell fish, it took vertebrae.
It hadn’t felt wrong. It had felt like the most right thing in this, since meeting her, holding onto her through the streets, embarking out on the sea, using the stars to navigate.
“We’ll have to talk about it at some point. Whenever he feels like being here. I don’t know if you should be in that conversation. Especially now.”
“Right.” Steven nodded, eyes down.
“I want to be with you.” Layla assured.
Steven tried to smile but it felt forced.
“Layla, I love you, but I can’t leave the ocean behind. It’s my home, it’s where I’m from, it’s part of everything I am.”
“I wouldn’t ever ask you to do that, Steven.”
“I know, but you, you’re the first person to say I looked nice, or that you want me around, or even like me, and I just– it’s weird. Isn’t that weird? I love you, but I shouldn’t. What if this is just sort of– all sort of childish?”
Layla’s lip pulled into a conflicted frown.
“On my part,” Steven corrected himself quickly. “This feels sort of fast, for my first relationship, my first real friend. It’s not, you’re not—”
“No, you’re right. It’s childish of me too.” Layla nodded, then groaned. What was she thinking? There wasn’t any future with Steven. Just as much as he couldn’t leave his home she couldn’t leave hers. And there was so much he didn’t get.
“When this is over, I think I should just let what’s best for everyone happen, you should return to the sea, and I should move on with my life.” She said.
Steven sunk. So she didn’t mean it. Or for life didn’t mean together to her. Mates was just friends.
She leaned back on her arms. “It’s what Marc wanted, it’s what’s best for you.”
“Hang on now,” Steven said, sitting up fully. “Why do you think you know what’s best for me?”
“I didn’t mean it like, like—” Steven cut her off.
“We only met a week ago. I am not your fiancé. I’m not Marc. Why do you think you know what I want or how I should live my life? Why do you think Marc should decide for me?”
“I don’t think Marc should decide for you.”
“But– my decisions are only important if it’s something you want? What if I do want to stay. Leave home. Live up here. Even if I die.”
“We all have to live with our decisions, Steven, for God’s sake, I just slept with you!”
“I didn’t ask you to! This-this-this mess, it wasn’t mine. I never would have decided to leave you,”
Steven paused. He brushed his drying hair back with his fingers, staring at the glistening of his scales.
“But I also probably wouldn’t have ever met you if Marc hadn’t. Left you.”
“Exactly.” Layla sighed, and it was quiet for a moment, gulls crying from down the beach, pecking for food, the water crashing.
“Layla, I want to find a way to be together.” Steven said. “I want to be with you. I want to be mated to you. That’s what I want.”
“Marc and I are done.” She shook her head.
Steven breathed in shakily. He didn’t know how she could say that after they had been like that together. Marc was him, whether he liked it or not.
“I thought you understood, you– you want to cut me out of this– but I’m not Marc! I am not Marc and I can’t be Marc! He has to go away for me to be me!”
“That’s why this can’t work!” Layla rubbed her neck. “I don’t just want you.”
Steven swallowed, trying to submerge his upset in a neutral face. He knew. He had known. She was engaged to him. They had been together years. But not Steven. Steven was just this tiny piece of that, by comparison. It hurt. Layla was a new and only to him and a whole life to Marc.
“It isn’t possible.” She said. “Marc already ruined that. He hasn’t even properly apologized for leaving me. I know he isn’t you, believe me, I can tell– but he’s a part of you and I just… that can’t work, Steven. I can’t look at you and not see him.”
Steven felt his chest clench so painfully. Of bloody course.
A fairytale, all of it. In his head.
“We’ll be together till we find the heart and stop Harrow, okay?” Layla said, pulling her legs up out of the water. “That I can promise you.”
“But after that…” Steven trailed off, close to tears.
“After that we’ll say goodbye.”
“Yeah. Yeah. Okay.” Why had he trusted she could understand him, what he felt, wanted, what he was? He barely understood that himself. He sniffed, breathed deep and let it out shakily.
And when Layla leaned in to kiss him, he kissed her, hard, with every bit of himself, because he didn’t know how many more times he was going to get to.
Warnings: depression, self deprecation, trauma, self esteem issues, repression, crying, anxiety, baby distress, angst, Marc is a bad host (DID)
Words: 3k
Rating: T
Summary: You and Marc head home a day early from vacation and get caught at night in the snow, exacerbating the fight that led to the calling short of your one year anniversary.
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This is a continuation of an AU that first appeared in this work!
AU where Marc never left Chicago. He’s twenty-three here and things played out very differently after he left home
AO3 Link
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January 11th, 2011, 4:26am, Chicago, Illinois
“Hey, hon?”
“Mmn?” You blink, glancing over at Marc.
“You alright?”
“Actually. Can you take over, I’m getting spotty over here.”
Your car was crawling along the snow covered highway. Everything just looked gray. It had for hours.
“We’re not going to make it back tonight, are we?”
Marc leaned forward against his belt, peering through the windshield wipers making furious Sisyphean progress against the onslaught of fluffy white clumps covering your car.
“Mmm. Uh-uh. I am exhausted, can you take over or not?”
“I… do I have to?”
Rebekah cries once from the backseat and you pull off the highway and unbuckle.
“I would really like it if you could, please. I’m tired.”
“Yeah, okay.”
Marc gets out and trudges around. You climb over into the passenger seat.
He shuts the door and puts his hands on the wheel, takes them off, puts them back again.
“It’s still in park.” You point.
He looks at it.
The whole car sits, heat off, lights on.
He puts it in reverse.
“Marc do you not know how to drive?”
“No. I just need a second.” He stares down at the pedals.
“You don’t know how to drive.” You knock your head back against the headrest.
So much made so much more sense. How everything’s been arranged to avoid this.
“I don’t know how to drive.” He admits, resting his hands at three and nine. “He usually does that stuff.”
“Okay, get him.”
Marc’s brow knits tighter.
“Or not. Talk to him, then.”
“I’m not gonna talk to him.”
“We don’t have any place to stop tonight.”
You look out through the dark trees. Your reservation was left with a night back there, the one you were having here instead.
“I’m not talking to him.”
“Marc you already ruined this vacation will you stop acting like a damn child!”
Your baby cries again, louder, and you unzip your coat, maneuvering around to free her from her blankets and seat and get her into your lap, rubbing her back. She seems to have noticed the lack of heat, and seems much more content buried against you under your coat, up on your chest. After a minute or two of cuddling, she settles.
“Can Steven—”
“Don’t bring Steven into this!” He snaps.
“Can Steven drive, Marc! Jesus, can he drive?”
“No, he says he can’t.”
You scrub your forehead.
“Marc.”
“Yeah.”
“Can you see we’re a little stuck here?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you going to say anything else?”
“What should I say?”
“You should get him.”
“Other than that.” He says. “I’m not doing that.”
“You should know how to drive, Marc!”
Marc flinches, his grip tightening.
“What?” You say, bouncing your knee.
“I’m afraid… afraid every time you get that voice, I upset you, that you’re going to break up with me.”
“Oh, good God…” you take a deep breath.
“Say it. Call me pathetic. I know how it sounds. I don’t care. It’s what’s real as far as I know and that is all I know. I didn’t choose this, okay?”
“I know Marc. I know.”
“I should have myself together. I should be better. You deserve that. I keep thinking that.”
“You know what I think?” You huff and your breath trails from your mouth in the dim light.
“I think I don’t deserve someone so patient, careful, selfless, and gentle. Who puts his whole heart into everything he does no matter how hard it is. Who stepped up to this. You take such good care of her. You know that? That’s not a guy I’m leaving.” Your working against the aggression, fighting your own frustration.
“You never think you want to?” He sniffs. “You think about– breaking up?”
“Rarely. And I mean rarely.”
During stuff like this.
“But you do.”
“Do you?” You ask.
“Of course. It’s just… it’s not something I would ever do to you. Things would have to be bad. Really bad.”
“You see.”
“Are things not really bad for you?”
Bekah is rooting through your shirts, trying to get to your breast, tapping her finger on it, and you don’t have an answer for him that he won’t refute, so you work on untucking and loosening your clothes.
Marc pulls down and stares at his reflection in the sunshield and shakes his head, flipping it up.
“What is it like an hour or more into town? Are we just staying here?” You say.
“Looks like it.”
“Fine. I didn’t wanna be home yet anyway.”
You finally pull up your inner shirt, get your nursing bra open, and latch your daughter on. She hasn’t breastfed since you picked her up.
Marc watches, detached.
That kid in your arms was the reason you were married at all, this, all this, was him trying to do right.
As scared as he was to have this kid and marry you he was terrified of it all ending.
You being somewhere else, being someone else, raising a kid he didn’t know.
He just wanted this baby. More than anything, he wanted that kid to have both her parents.
His family.
You yawn. “Talk to him, Marc. Please. I know you can.”
He doesn’t answer.
That family sleeps on the side of the road the rest of that morning, till dull sun raises over heavy pines and fills white, a snowglobe left in the window, settled, the stretch of highway untouched, empty except for your secondhand black Honda Odyssey.
Marc’s already woken up when you start to.
“Hey, baby,” he whispers, kissing your temple and the baby at your chilled breast.
“Did you talk?” You rub your eyes.
“Yeah. We talked. I’m sorry I ruined our anniversary. Let’s just go.”
“If you talked can’t he drive?”
“He said no. Let’s just go. Please.”
You sit up, fixing your clothes and passing off the baby so you can clamber around to the backseat and he can get into yours, so you can climb up into the driver’s.
Marc shushes his daughter softly as she adjusts around the switch up, getting her a quick fresh diaper from the bag in the backseat and buttoned back up, sitting up in his lap.
You turn the ignition and it stalls. You curse under your breath and try again. It stalls again.
“That doesn’t sound good.”
“No shit, really?”
“What?”
You sigh. “Buckle her in. Help me clear the snow.”
“Is that gonna help—”
“You need to learn how to drive, Marc!” You slam your palms against the wheel, shouting in frustration.
“You need to— learn how to talk with each other, you can’t do this!”
Marc opens his mouth then closes it again, nodding.
“What is going on with you?”
“I’m… I’m waiting for you to figure out what a big mistake this was.” Bekah looks up at him with big penny brown eyes. Marc can tell she can tell he’s upset. The way she looks at him.
She’s so big already. Sixteen months old, pulling herself up and starting to throw things.
“What. All this?” You say.
“All this.” He says.
You stare ahead. Your nose is running, more than a little.
“Do you want this to work out?” You ask slowly.
Marc breathes, feeling his throat and chest get tighter.
“Yes.”
“Don’t lie.”
“I’m not.”
“No, don’t lie to my face.”
“I—”
“Don’t sabotage yourself so you can prove to me I shouldn’t have married you. I wanted to!” You try to keep your voice down. “I wanted to marry you!”
“You haven’t been seeing it!? You’ll just work later or get a babysitter to stay up with my bullshit and it’s terrible. I’m terrible for you!”
You want to scream.
“You even consider, Marc, does it go through your head when I tell you I do these things because I want to, I mean that I want to?!”
He doesn’t look at you, and even knowing his thing with eye contact you wish he would tell you he’s listening, that you don’t have to search him for it.
“It’s work, and I wish it was easier, sure, but I signed up for this. You did too. Not just to help me, not just for the baby, but to let me, help you.”
It goes quiet. Really quiet. Bekah sneezes. Once. Twice. Third time she exclaims like it surprised her. She’s tired.
“They’ll be through to clear the roads within a day.” Marc says, wiping her face.
“What’s going on with you and him?” You ask.
“We don’t need him.”
“We do need him! He is the one who can drive, who knows where everything is, pays the bills, writes the grocery lists, knows how to fix the damn car, unless you figure out how to do those things on your own, we need him!”
“You should just marry him then!”
You put the car back in park.
It’s silent, the only sounds your baby fussing, annoyed at all the shouting.
“Marc, I don’t know how this is supposed to work. I don’t think anyone does. I just know that we all need each other. You don’t have to like him. But you need to do what the books say, talk, write notes, I don’t care what! You just can’t fight like this!”
“I wasn’t—” he wasn’t trying to fight. When he told you it was because you needed to know, his system was broken, you didn’t know what was going on. But he didn’t tell you. Steven did, because he couldn’t.
“I wasn’t ready. To be– a dad, because I can’t. I can’t do this. I don’t know how to work with them. I wasn’t ready.”
“I know.” You sigh. You’re getting a sinus headache of some kind.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have married you, maybe I was just being selfish, but I— I wanted to feel like I was doing the right thing, for once.”
“Yeah. Maybe.” You grumble, rubbing between your eyes with cold fingers.
“Frick.” He sniffles, rubbing his nose with the back of his hand.
“I like you. Love you, even. I love our baby. That’s… married is what I wanted. I love you more than I love myself.”
“You know, Marc, I think that’s the biggest problem we have.”
He shifts up in his seat, fingers pressed to his upper lip. “I have something I gotta tell you.”
“What?”
“Are you chill or are you gonna freak out about it?”
“I’m chill, Marc! I’m freezing, tell me what it is!”
“I didn’t talk to him.”
You groan hard and try to keep in to your chest.
“Marc, I know—”
“No, I haven’t been talking to him, I haven’t been letting him around at all. I’ve been pushing him down on purpose and lying about it.”
You breathe a sigh.
“Marc, you’re not a native Spanish speaker. You’re high school level. I can tell.”
“You knew?”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“Because I needed you to tell me. I need you to do that work. Don’t you get that? Yes. Yes, I’m tired, and yes, this has been hard, but I have seen how good you take care of Bekah and how happy we are when things are going well. You could make it so we have more of that.”
You inhale and rub your dry nose, checking the glove compartment for some chapstick or something. Just a bunch of expired coupons, nicotine gum, an extra pair of gloves, a tiny flashlight, backup batteries and a newsboy cap.
“It’s true that I can’t just take care of everything indefinitely.” You click it shut.
“I mean look at where we are. That’s where I need you to put in the work, so we can work.” You say. “You do want to work out, right?”
“Yeah. I want that.”
“Act like it.”
He shuffles his legs to get some feeling back into his toes. It is really cold.
He takes a deep breath.
“He wants to cheat on you.” He says, feeling like he’s falling to pieces with the words, that this is it, him ruining what you put together.
“He– what?” You don’t think you heard right.
“It’s been two years, since the– since that night, how we said we were gonna break it off, that we messed up, th-then the positive pregnancy test, and he hasn’t done anything, since, he hasn’t and I know he hasn’t, I know he wouldn’t, but– but he wants to date.”
“Like…?”
He doesn’t get it, how unaffected you sound.
“Like date, like, go out.” He doesn’t want to spell it.
“Like we do?”
“Mm-hmn.”
You think for a second.
“With me?”
You don’t know if you should bring back up the flirting right now, that kiss.
He looks like he’s about to start crying.
“Are you enabling me?” He says.
“Huh?”
“Is this one of those relationships where the husband can’t do anything and the wife just– she just has to manage; everything.”
You look out across the dashboard.
“I don’t do the laundry.” You say. “I don’t clean, I don’t think I even know where thermostat is. You seriously think you don’t do anything??”
“I mean…”
“Bekah, Marc.” He holds her a little tighter, like you’ll take her back and he isn’t ready for you to yet. She’s practically asleep, curled against his stomach, holding on. It’s the biggest comfort he has right now. That she’s okay. Too tired to care.
“I’m supposed to.” He says, watching her breathing. “That’s not…”
Bekah was his daughter. One he wasn’t going to let stay an ‘accident’. He knew what not to do. What she needed. Sometimes it felt like there was nothing else. That if he was just good enough at this, nothing else mattered.
And then she wouldn’t be there, and he would wonder why the hell you even liked him, how you could put up with it.
“Marc, you’re mentally ill. I know you are, you know you are, we know that going to someone–”
His whole body locks up, for a moment breathing stuffs his head, you don’t fail to notice, but you know addressing it won’t help at all, that he just needs to hear it more so it isn’t like this every time.
“Could make things a lot, lot worse.”
He couldn’t pretend it wasn’t that bad, or that it hadn’t taken years of his life when you brought it up. Getting out of there had been so much most days he didn’t even remember Putnam Medical Facility existed, much less that it did anything to him.
He had forgotten to tell you go out of your way so you wouldn’t pass it on the way out of town. It was in the back of his head the whole trip, what they said, that he belonged there.
“So sure, I’m enabling you. Trying to enable you to participate in this in a way that hurts you and me the least.”
The least. Not none. It would never be none. No matter what he did.
“He was there. All that shit.” Marc said. He couldn’t act like he went through that, either. “We’re only here because of him.”
“Yeah.”
“Am I getting worse?” He says softly.
“You’re not getting worse, baby.” You gently touch his coat arm, rubbing into his shoulder. “You wanna talk about that now?”
“No.” He lets his eyes shut. “I just wanna go home.”
There was so much. All Marc’s life, no one really talked to him about it safely. Everything he said seemed to be used against him. How he felt, lived, tried to cope, when you met him he was in one room shut off from the house of his pain in all these compartments, a place he did and didn’t want out of. And a pregnancy burst down that door, but he still went back there. Still needed it.
“All this is conversations, Marc. We’re gonna do this five hundred thousand more times. Do you want to keep doing this, for every thing, for the rest of our lives?”
“I like talking with you.” He says gently, thinking of all those times you make him feel real, even when that reality is small, and it hurts, it’s enough for the him he knows exists to anyone else.
“I do.” He says.
“I do too.” You say. “So talk to him. Work through this. And we can work on something else tomorrow.”
The snow falls.
That was something he could do. For both of you. Even if he didn’t want to.
“This was supposed to feel good. We made it a whole year. This whole year, with everything, I mean, we were already living together but it really… it changed.”
“Did you think we weren’t going to make it?”
“I did. Until you– until my parents.”
You put your hands behind your neck and pull, stretching.
“Talk to him, Marc.”
“Okay.” He lets out.
He sets Bekah carefully back into you, against your front, zips up his coat, forces the frozen driver’s side door open, and steps out into the cold, knocking some of the snow off when he throws it shut.
You watch him straighten his back and stare down the side mirror with a deep frown on his face. He shouts a little, something about you being his wife, how nothing is ever just his, then he sighs, holds his face in his hands.
You think you might want to intervene until he pulls his head up and cracks the hood of the car. He trails around to the trunk, gets something out, comes back around. He pops the door and turns the ignition, keeping turned from you, focused. You think he jumpstarts it.
You take the time to get sleepy Bekah buckled back in her seat and comfy with a blanket canopy, and you back into the passenger side, sunlight and lack of wind helping some against the temperature.
You hear some shoveling, some Spanish, a few minutes pass, and then he gets back in the car, stomping snow off his boots and tapping it off the scraper.
“Guay de mi, siento.” He gives you a smile and straps himself in.
He shifts the gear, then pushes back in his seat, tugs his glove off, and puts his hand out to you on the center console.
You look at him, then his hand, then take it in your own, palms flat together.
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