#cyrusthegrim

The nursery she stood in was small, but she thought it was far from cramped. It was perfect. It had a small bay window big enough for a rocking chair, which she went to. She always thought it was easiest to hold an infant while sitting. James was still cooing to himself, but the sound could barely be heard over the rain the gently pattered on the window behind her.

Anastasia still detested water and being wet, but Cyrus lived in England, where it was very wet, and Anastasia could not have bared it to see him pine for his home. So she had moved away across an ocean from her old home to settle into her new one. And she was happy her. Completely and truly. Even with this rain nonsense always going on.

James made a particularly loud noise and Anastasia’s attention turned back to him. He smiled up at her and Anastasia felt her chest fill with love for him, her own smile spreading across her face. She leaned down and kissed his forehead softly, her lips lighter than a moth’s wing. James wasn’t her baby, exactly, but she loved him all the same.

Anastasia still could remember the woman that was his “real” mother, as the mother had put it perhaps only a few weeks ago. Cyrus had searched Russia for a suitable “surrogate mother”, he called it, and eventually found the woman he thought was perfect. She had had some of Anastasia’s temperament, but much longer fangs than Anastasia could ever have. She had not had the best of lives and the world had made her harsh. But once she opened up to Cyrus and Anastasia, he realized how much he was like his love. And she looked so much like Anastasia as well, which was why he picked her in the first place, of course.

It had taken nearly a year (ten months, two weeks, four days, twelve hours fifteen minutes, and thirty two seconds, to be exact) since when James’s surrogate mother first met Anastasia and more paperwork that Cyrus thought possible, but at the end, Cyrus and Anastasia had a son to call their own. Even if Anastasia’s bank account was down by a few thousand. But that barely made a dent in the sizable number that already rested in it.

Of course, in the beginning, Anastasia did not want a child. She had many reasons to not want one, one of which was that she could not have any herself, but her love for Cyrus overcame these and so she allowed him to begin such a lengthy process. Had she known, that, in the end, the surrogate mother would have died in a way she was sure the reaper had something to do with it, she would have protested a touch more. But now, with Cyrus’s son, her son, in her arms, she found herself glad Cyrus had convinced her to have one.

"Isn’t this a sight?"

Anastasia looked up to see Cyrus standing in the doorway, his hair still a mess from freshly waking, his night clothes still on him. Looking very much the way she had left him when she had left their bed to tend to their child. “Cyrus,” she said softly, looking up at him. “I hope James did not wake you.”

"No no, not at all," Cyrus said with as smile as he walked into the room. His smile grew the more he walked into the room, his cheeks nearly aching by the time he knelt down in front of his wife to be on her, and his son’s, level. "And if this is the sight I’m greeted with, I think I’d like to be waken by it more."

James looked over to his father and Cyrus beamed down at him. “Good morning, James,” he said gently. He then smiled up at his mother. “Shall I make us breakfast?”

"Yes, I think James will be hungry soon."