2021-09-17 - Baby I Love Your Way

Last night Eleanor Roen went to bed in her cute spicy lingerie, with her handsome husband, and the nagging worry about their cabin possibly being blown over by the gale bombarding Gray Harbor being pushed aside by the desire to be with August. She went to sleep thoroughly exhausted and happy.

Now, morning light filters in, and it seems like the sun has found its way back to their little bit of the woods. Her eyes only slit open, because she's still tired as if she didn't really sleep as well as she thought she did, and the headache makes her close them again quickly. She flings an arm over her eyes and grunts, the other hand reaching to grope for the shoulder of her husband beside her.

She feels achy, and off, but she's chalked it up to poor sleep at the moment.

August is perfectly happy to not think about the myriad of bad things which could happen as the worst of the storm descends upon them. Fortunately they were spared much flooding in its first pass; none of the outside animals had to come in. Now he's bracing for impact, prepared to be woken up by a work emergency call or who knows what. Eleanor is in cute spicy lingerie, so clearly she has the same idea: let's think about anything except the weather. Well, no complaints from him, that's for sure.

So when morning rolls around he makes a low sound in response to being grabbed by the shoulder. It's...not as tender as he expected it, considering semi-recent injuries. He yawns, slips his arms around Eleanor, slits an eye open, shuts it. "Sunny out," he mumbles against her hair. "Guess we should go inspect the damage."

Latte mews, hops up onto the bed. She's here to demand her breakfast. She begins walking over the two, sniffing curiously at Eleanor. ...very curiously.

"Do we have to get up?" Ellie mumbles back, as she settles into his embrace. "My head hurts," she explains, and then frowns as she isn't fitting against him in the manner she's grown accustomed to. There's interference or a lack of proper lining up of their bodies or something. Nothing to freak out over, just not expected. "Do you feel, off at all?" she asks, snuggling in to tuck her head under his chin.

"Fuck off, Latte," she mutters at the cat. Which is not how she normally responds to the feline. But her mood also feels off.

Latte keeps sniffing until Eleanor grumbles at her, then mews (an apology, maybe?) and settles on August's hip instead. August mmms, runs a hand down Eleanor's back. "Yeah, eventually." He kisses her forehead, lets out a long, slow breath. After a second or two, he says, "I don't...think so." He sounds as he feels: unsure. Something is different, but it's not something he can pinpoint, not something he can easily identify. Like his shoulder feeling oddly okay, it doesn't seem to bear mentioning.

Of course, a huge storm of Glimmer-esque nature did just plow over them all, so maybe he needs to be more concerned. And he will be, after coffee.

"I can get us some coffee going, glance out the window at the worst of the damage. Sleep in some more, okay?"

"Mmmmm...ok. Bring me an aspirin with the coffee?" she requests, as she hunkers down under the blanket again, only the top of her head visible. The blanket is lifted briefly to scritch the cat in apology before her hand retreats again. "If it's bad, wake me up, k?" she asks sleepily.

August gives Eleanor a brief squeeze. "Will do." He slides out of bed and into his slippers, frowns and pulls on a robe. It's cooler in the cabin than he'd expect for June, even after a storm. Well, maybe by noon it'll be warmer.

Latte accepts the scritches with a purr, hops down to follow August downstairs. The pigs rush up past the two of them, eager to mill around the foot of the bed at Eleanor. "Be nice, you two, she's tired."

Bathroom first to wash his face and brush his teeth. He shuffles into the kitchen, starts coffee prep, stops to feed cat (who gets on the counter and gives him a Look), resumes coffee prep. Stops again and peers at the fridge. There's a...sonagram on it, held in place by a little fox magnet. He blinks, slowly, pulls it down. "Huh," he says under his breath.

The coffee's ready in short order, filling the cabin's interior with the welcome smell. He heads back upstairs with two mugs, some aspirin, and the mystery image in blurry, grainy gray and black. As he approaches the bed, setting the mug and aspirin down on Eleanor's side table, he says, "Hey, whose is this?" and holds up the picture. "I don't remember when we got it. Luke didn't become a baby daddy all of a sudden, did he?" August feels like he'd remember that, primarily because Eleanor would lose her goddamned mind.

Eleanor sits up slowly, and she's wearing a tee and comfy sweats instead of the fancy lingerie she remembered going to bed in. She leans over to squint at the sonogram and then blinks a few times til her eyes open fully. "He better not have knocked up that Addington girl..." She winces and puts a hand to her chest which is sore and...wtf. Larger? She flings off the bed linens and stares at a bump where her normally flat belly should be. "AJ? AJ? D-Do you see this? I'm still asleep right? And I do not have a xenomorph inside me that is going to burst out of my chest cavity?" There's a note of panic in her voice.

August is mid-coffee sip when Eleanor flings off the covers. His coffee drinking gradually halts. He lowers the mug, slowly, sets it on the side table. Looks at the sonagram in his hand, turns it over.

> Bump, 12 weeks!!!

Back to the front. In the upper right corner, hard to see because these things don't print clearly even in 20-fucking-21, is: E. Roen

"Uh. I...I think...that's..."

His voice dies. He feels cold. Is this a Dream? It's the kind of garbage they'd pull. Hell, Itzhak had been pregnant with an actual alien August had needed to actually--

The pigs are getting restless, upset by Eleanor's growing anxiety. August sets the sonagram on the table, moves to sit next to Eleanor on the bed. "Okay. The pigs are here. So's Latte. Maybe it's..." A revision?

"The Revisionist?!" Eleanor finishes for him. "What the actual fuck!" She grabs for her phone and taps it on, then freezes. "August, what date does your phone say it is?" she whispers, eyes wide in the reflected light of the screen. She reaches for the sonogram and scans the date of it too, swallowing hard.

August leans across the bed to his own table, takes up his phone off the dock. He swipes at the face, unlocks, frowning the whole time. The frown gradually becomes a blank stare. "Ah, it's..." He lets out a sharp breath, shakes his head. "That can't be right. Does yours say September? September 16th?" There's a bit of a tremor in him. What if this is a Dream?

Coltraine nudges him in the leg, jolting August back to reality. He sits up, leans down to pet the pig. "Is that you, big guy?" he murmurs, and Coltraine whines. "Sure seems like it."

He straightens , slips an arm around Eleanor, eyeing the bump. "We should check with others. That should prove if it's a Dream." Because really, how many other people could be in it with them?

"Yes, September 16th. But I don't have any messages from anyone asking where I've been for three months, do you?" Eleanor asks, looking like she's hanging on by her fingernails to keep from screaming at the moment. She looks at Coltrane and scritches his chin. He looks bigger. Not much, being a teacup, but like he's grown some.

She checks her nails, gets up and heads to the bathroom to check her hair. They aren't three months untended or overgrown. "I don't think we pulled a Sleeping Beauty. I mean, we would have starved if we slept for three months, right?" she calls out to him.

August looks at his hands, checks his face in his phone. "Yeah, unless we were in some kind of hibernation. But, if you're pregnant," he licks his lips, because he's done it, he said the words 'you're pregnant', "you'd need a lot of energy." He gets a look on his face, hops off the bed and throws open the curtains.

The aspen saplings in the yard are almost twice as tall as they were, beginning to yellow with the onset of fall. There's...is that a stream? Did they make a little stream out of a furrow dug by flooding?

"I--honey you should come look at this."

Pregnant. Ellie's hands move to that bump of a belly and she swallows hard. Then she moves to stand next to August. "D-do you think it's big enough to...to sense?" With her abilities. Does she even dare do that? Would it call Them here? She blinks at the stream and the aspens. "Did we just...forget the last three months totally? We clearly...we clearly did things. The pets are all healthy and tended to. The house has no cobwebs. The bills have been paid. The coffee shop and Branch and Bole aren't calling us in panics..."

"Maybe we did. Maybe..." August glances down at the bump. "Maybe it's like the revisionist, but things actually happened. We don't remember the specifics, but they happened." He slides an arm around Eleanor, resting his hand on her hip.

Sounding like he badly wants to, he says on a sigh, "Probably shouldn't." He does run a hand over her belly, though, marveling. "I hadn't actually meant like...that night," he admits. He smiles, hopeful. "If you don't mind, I don't."

Eleanor leans against him. Suddenly feeling so tired makes complete sense. She covers his hand on her belly with her own. "Of course I don't mind! I don't think either of us thought it'd happen right then." She chuckles a little bit and holds up the sonogram again, scanning the data on it. "So that'd put us at the end of 12 weeks. Well, hot damn, I memory-skipped morning sickness." She frowns though. "We missed a lot of important things with just this. How many did we miss in the rest of our lives the last three months?"

She tilts her head back to look at him with concern. "Did we fix your abilities? Did the shops get damaged? Did we lose anyone in the storm?"

"I guess that's one way to do it," August muses. He sobers as she does, goes still at the notion of working with plants being restored to him. Maybe? He's almost afraid to check. No, he is afraid to check.

So instead of touching on that, he lifts his phone and begins flipping through texts and emails. "Well...I'm not seeing any condolences. A lot about 'repairs' for the shop'." He grimaces. "Can't wait to see what that amounts to. Nothing too bad on my end, looks like." He rubs at his eyes, rests his head on Eleanor's. "I guess we just have to...go out there and find out."

Ellie goes to grab her own phone and she begins going through her messages, bringing it back over to him. She makes a strangled sort of sound before she shows it to him. "We found it, AJ."

There on the screen is a photo of the mirror frame she'd described to him a thousand times. And the photo appears to have been taken in the basement of her Spruce Street house. The message it's attached to, a more recent one, indicates they have a shard of the glass stuck in the frame, so a strong Shaper should be able to restore it.

August looks up at that sound she makes, hair standing on the back of his neck. The sight of the mirror in Spruce Street's basement isn't actually an improvment, either.

He leans in to look at the picture. Still on her phone, but then, it's mundane enough: a mirror with an empty frame. "Yeah. If," he looks from her phone to her, "you still want to do that." He sets a hand on her neck. "You don't have to, okay? It's alright if you'd rather..." He's deliberately not looking at the bump. "If you want to wait."

"No, no we need to take care of this. I won't feel...right until it's taken care of, August. It's been weighing on me for so long now. I don't want our baby to grow feeling my pain over Addie. I need to resolve this, to save my friend, to know I'm that kind of person. But I won't do it alone." She clings to his wrist where his hand is on her neck, eyes teary. "We're having a baby. We're going to be parents." Her smile is beatific. Then it falls. "Oh shit, who did we already tell? Anyone? Everyone?"

August covers Eleanor's hand with his. There's no denying it: he's nervous about the prospect of Eleanor dealing with That Thing, particularly while pregnant. But it's her choice to make, so he nods, kisses her on the forehead. "Not alone. Guess it'll be a family project."

He laughs a little, clears his throat against how it's threatening to tighten. "Ah, yeah, I guess so." Oh God, he's fucking terrified.

...oh. Right. He did tell his parents and sisters, right? If not he's a dead man. He checks his phone. "I'm not...sure."

"Most people don't tell folks til 12 weeks right? So we might get to do that. We need to move really fast though. Get "World's Greatest" tees for Grandparents and Aunts and Uncles and Nieces..." Eleanor checks her social media feeds and emails more closely. "Looks like we haven't told anyone yet. No congratulations in the messages."

She squints. "We did start setting up a baby registry gift thing though. Because of course my OCD self would do that."

August relaxes a hair. Of course, he'd known about his sisters' pregnancies much earlier, but that was just how Hanne and Zelda were. They and his parents would understand a desire to wait, given the givens.

"Under a secret email, I bet," he murmurs against Eleanor's hair, unable to help a smile. This can't be a Dream. It better not be.

Outside the geese start honking, demanding to be let out of the shed. What's taking so looooong!

August sighs. Well, if it is a Dream, he's going to enjoy it until it's bad. "Okay. Maybe we should scan that picture in and starting DMing it. Check on everyone else, see if they also...forgot anything." 'Forgot'. "And I'll get the animals sorted, see what's different outside." He leans in to kiss Eleanor's neck, turns to head back downstairs into the bathroom. The pigs, now sensing less anxiety from them, trot along with him, excited. Latte, meanwhile, comes back upstairs to sit on the bed, maybe assuming Eleanor's getting right back in it.

Eleanor leans into the kiss, eyes fluttering shut. It better not be a dream or a Dream. Her hands fold over her belly and she watches him head downstairs. Then she crawls back into bed with the cat because she is exhausted despite her brain thinking she just slept three months away.