Chapter Text
Any day Caitlyn was home before the sun came down was a good one. Friday afternoons were her favorite days, when the week’s worth of grueling work was finally put away for another day. Saturday tribunals were occasionally invoked but one had not been arranged and Caitlyn took her weekend home with her early.
The home that greeted her in turn was one far to still and quiet for her comfort. The grand space was always off-putting, she reminded herself each evening. The ground floor was mainly for entertaining, something the new branch of Kirammans didn’t partake in often. Even the warm and cozy dining room they took meals in had been redistributed to the main level. It was up there she could expect to find reassuring signs of life. Though, on a day like that, with the sun gleaming so warm and high in the sky still, she expected to find her family in the garden.
She did not.
A lilting, chipper voice spoke in a broken monologue from behind the lounge door. If for some reason the tone of the voice was lost on Caitlyn, which it never was, the choppy breaks and passionately sounded-out words would cued her toward the voice's identity.
She nudged the door open a crack, content to watch her entire world unfold before her.
Her father sat reclined on the sofa, an arm held around the small, hunched shoulders of his granddaughter, a book nearly twice as large as her torso spread between their laps.
Her tiny, delicate finger traced the line of text, freezing whenever she reached an unknown word. She reached one and fumbled for a minute before correctly pronouncing saucer without needing Tobias to say it for her first.
If Caitlyn could melt into the walls of her home to keep constant eyes on her loved ones, she would. Not knowing wasn’t enough. She needed to be with them with every molecule every minute of the day. Now more than ever.
How thoughtful her whole world had gathered up to meet her as one; her Father, once so quiet and heartbroken he felt like a puzzle piece bent out of shape in his own home, her daughter, such an unexpected and all-encompassing dream she’d never thought possible, and her…
A piece of her world was missing, breaking Friday night tradition. Tradition had crumbled in the rapidly unfolding chaos of the past few weeks. It was welcome chaos, but took a great deal of adjusting nonetheless.
Caitlyn brushed the door open a sliver more, but as it parted to reveal to her an empty room, it creaked and two heads whipt to look at her.
Her father smiled at her softly as he did every time she walked into a room. She understood now how reflexive that gesture was. Her daughter held a tradition of her own and squealed a joyous greeting, clambering up on the sofa and gripping the back of the seat before going over it. She hit Caitlyn’s kneecaps a moment later, staggering her legs, but Caitlyn knew it was coming and plucked her off her limbs to hoist her onto her hip.
Caitlyn was forever grateful she was still small enough to do that with ease. She had missed so much of her daughter’s life before she entered it. She’d cling to every moment she got with her now.
“Hello, sprout,” she murmured into her ear and squeezed her tightly.
She giggled a precious and crippling flick of laughter and peeled out of the hold.
“Måe!” she squealed her own greeting. Caitlyn planted a kiss on the side of her head at that name, a holdover from her mother tongue, ironically enough. Soft, unbrushed blue-black hair parted for her lips and she found the curve of her ear, earning another giggle from her daughter.
“How was school?”
Caitlyn did not return her to the ground. Instead, she rounded the sofa and sat beside her father, at last resting her tired feet. Propped in her lap, her daughter bounced, on top of Caitlyn’s semi-full bladder. She’d been so eager to reunite with her family that she’d neglected the finer details. Lips pursed, she shifted her weight and listened to the enthusiastic retelling of another day of Primary school.
“I see that you’ve gotten some reading hours in with Pa,” Caitlyn interjected when the retelling became babbling. She smiled at the initially unceremonious name bestowed upon Tobias, another Ionian holdover.
Her daughter bounced again, a bit harder, and Caitlyn squeezed her legs shut in a hurry and thanked her lucky stars a six-year-old wasn’t that heavy.
“I learned four new words!” Her daughter exclaimed, holding out four fingers to count them out, except she hesitated and looked to Tobias for backup, “what were they?”
Tobias held up his own hand and recited them, “Skate, blade, familiar, and blue.”
Caitlyn frowned, but only for the show of it. “Blue?” She asked incredulously. "If that’s a new word then what do you call this?” She tugged the hem of the dirtied blue playsuit she’d already worn out to the garden.
“Not blue the color,” she corrected, “blue like sad. Like ‘I’m blue.”
Caitlyn poked again, “Who’s blue? You’re blue?”
Her daughter moaned in protest, “No! Mr. Wimble was blue because all his birds left for Winter.”
Caitlyn scanned the large titular text of the now abandoned book on the cushion beside her. “Ah, Mr. Whimbles Winter, that’s one of my favorites when I was your age and just learning to read. Did Pa tell you that?”
Tobias shook his head. “It’s true. I must have read it ten times over to you to get you off to sleep at night.”
Caitlyn had no memory of being such a difficult child, but she did remember the story of a lonely old man who lived in the woods and cared for the birds of the forest.
“Don’t take after me in that regard, sprout,” Caitlyn instructed.
“Regard?” Her daughter’s bottom lip tucked under her teeth in her confusion, the way Caitlyn’s had a thousand times before. She hadn’t noticed the quirk passed from Måe to daughter yet.
“Oh, that’s a big boring nothing of a word, isn’t it?”
She got a put-out nod in response.
“It just means to think or talk about something.” She wrinkled her nose, “Don't worry about remembering that one just yet.”
Her daughter was put at ease and shimmied off Caitlyn’s lap to retrieve something off the floor by the unlit fireplace. Caitlyn knew what she’d grabbed before she stepped into the light.
“Can we play?” She asked, holding up the little figures, “before dinner?” Like any Kiramman, she knew tradition and expected it to be followed.
Caitlyn hummed, “Aren’t we missing someone to play pirates?” She waited but her daughter gave no indication of understanding, or perhaps no willingness to divulge the answer. “Where’s Mommy?”
Her daughter wobbled on tiptoes as she walked the outline of the carpet rug on the floor, “Doing big, boring nothing of a paperwork,” she explained, not quite parroting the slang Caitlyn used correctly. “She’s in your room.”
Caitlyn swapped quick and subtle looks with Tobias. He confirmed her immediate suspicions.
“Well I should go change out of my work clothes, and you should go clean up for supper. I’ll check on Mommy. Then, maybe, if we’re lucky she’ll let us go on a walk to Killigans while she finishes that paperwork up.”
Her daughter bolted across the room shouting her approval. The night was young and the whole world could be accomplished in it.
Caitlyn roused herself from the swallowing sofa cushions and left her father on watch duty once again.
It was now more than ever Caitlyn was thankful he’d agreed to stay at the residence. He’d protested initially, insisting Caitlyn had the right to both the estate and privacy, but Caitlyn had lost so much of her family and quickly found it so small and lonely that she desired to have whatever was left of it with her. It was no surprise Vi felt the same way with such losses of her own. It hadn’t taken long at all for Tobias to take to Vi like a second daughter. He sometimes still didn’t know what to do with her—how to handle her undercity edges and her brashness, but having a granddaughter so similar sure had taught him much the past couple of years. Most of all, Caitlyn loved having him in the home for her daughter. She loved being able to watch them bond and loved to see her Father reclaim the family they’d lost. The household was so lonely for a small girl, but Tobias was a wonderful friend to her.
Up another flight of stairs was the wing of rooms both occupied, held, and unused. Solely to check all available options, she first checked inside the room closest to hers—the spacious, previously unused, and recently emptied-out spare bedroom. Vi teased Caitlyn about jumping the gun when it had all still been a vague hypothetical and then when months crawled by with negative after negative. Caitlyn defended her actions. She’d needed something to do with herself during that time or else the guilt and the anxiety and the plain old desperation would’ve eaten her alive the way it nearly did Vi. Besides, the room was not hard to clear. However, the staff needed the lie of turning it into a home gym not to turn their heads.
It sat empty when Caitlyn checked it. Not that there was anything in there to rest on, but she’d caught Vi contemplative in there once or twice before.
Again, she heard the proof of life before seeing it. The sharp whine of their two spaniels urged her into their bedroom. The silky black dogs rushed at her when she entered, yipping and whining for her attention. She pet them each once on their silky heads and ordered them to sit, making straight for the closed bathroom door they’d been pawing at a moment earlier.
With great relief, she found the last piece of her world inside. Well…two pieces, she thought with some glee.
It was no relief, though, to find her wife half-sprawled on the bathroom floor with her arms outstretched to cushion the side of her face she had turned toward the toilet bowl.
She barely acknowledged Caitlyn’s arrival, eyes too heavy and preoccupied with maintaining a frustratingly delicate balance.
Delicate as it was, Caitlyn brought in a phantom wind of triggers, and Vi twisted to heave into the bowl with a disheartening moan. From the sounds of it, nothing came up, though that had proven worse in some ways than simply ejecting that which made her sick and moving on with her day. When there was nothing left to evict and the nausea remained, Vi struggled to remain functional—hence the sanctioned bathroom floor time.
“Oh, love,” Caitlyn murmured, “this late in the day still?”
In an ironic twist of the morning sickness myth, Vi was consistently sickest in the evenings before and during dinner and when they were trying to sleep.
Caitlyn bent and ran her nails softly over Vi’s back until she cleared whatever heave of air she’d needed to release.
“Fuck,” Vi coughed into her forearm as she buried her head in it once more. “This is fucking ass.” She leaned into Caitlyn’s touch as she came down from the surge. Caitlyn kept her hand at its post.
“Think it’s passed?” She asked when Vi’s back stopped heaving.
She shook her head and settled back into her resting spot on the lid.
Caitlyn had seen Vi through worse, through more troubling and disheartening physical woes, but she hated seeing her so wholeheartedly put out by it all so soon. The nausea was constant and Vi had a near-impossible time keeping anything down which was concerning enough without the fact that it got people asking questions they weren’t ready to answer yet.
No matter the degree of suffering her wife experienced, Caitlyn didn’t like it. She wasn’t sure how she’d make it the full 10 months when that suffering would only grow and evolve. She’d put her whole back behind trying different tactics. She ordered the supplements, made the ginger tea, followed their doctor’s advice, and stuffed as much food into Vi as she could when she was given moments of respite. It was all one circumventing tradition that reminded her how useless she was for anything other than moral support.
“If nothing’s going to come up you might as well lie down,” Caitlyn decided, seeing up close how dirty she’d let their bathroom floor become. “I’ll bring you a bowl just in case.” She searched the cupboards for the bedpan Tobias swiped from his hospital floor following the loss of her eye and the subsequent vertigo and nausea that plagued her for months. It had been revitalized in the past month. It was a return to form for the old puke bowl.
Vi made no effort to move. She could make herself comfortable in the most unforgiving places, and the toilet had proved no different.
Bending down to retrieve the bedpan had constricted the waist of Caitlyn’s trousers, revealing the selfish motivation she had to get Vi off the floor.
“Why are you standing like that?” Vi regarded her with one quizzically open eye. Somewhat unintentionally, Caitlyn’s knees came together to keep her thighs flush. The gesture was genuine, but she played it up to achieve her objectives.
“If you don’t get yourself off the floor I’ll piss myself right here,” she threatened, pointing an ominous finger at her feet. “I’ll do it.”
That did it, pulling Vi onto her knees, and then slowly onto her feet. “The throne is yours,” she grumbled, sliding past Caitlyn to the sink. She flicked the handle out and held a finger under the stream of water while it warmed.
Caitlyn shucked off her stifling pants so fast you’d question her intentions, especially when she left them crumpled on the ground—a cardinal sin as far as her household rules went.
“I mentioned to Louen I might take her for ice cream after supper,” Caitlyn admitted as they existed in adjacent functions around the other—Vi washing her face and rinsing her mouth, and Caitlyn, stripping on the toilet. Domestic life had its perks. “If you need to rest tonight.”
Vi lifted her face out of the water cupped in her hands and blinked the moisture off her lashes, “At this rate, I won’t survive dinner.” She switched the water off but didn’t leave. Planted in front of the spotless mirror, her hands slipped under her top and mapped out the growth unfolding there. It wasn’t noticeable to anyone but her. She insisted there was a change but Caitlyn saw no deviation in her perfect abs. “Isn’t this supposed to be getting easier soon?”
Caitlyn reached behind her back and popped the hooks of her bra off. “Soon. Not just yet, though. Dad says a few more weeks of all this hormone craziness.”
“Weeks.” Vi fake gagged then real gagged. Caitlyn held her tongue and sucked in her stomach as cold air blew down from the vent at her exposed skin. Vi’s hands went from under her shirt to the outside hem of it and lifted it clear to her shoulders. Caitlyn wasn’t expecting full nips so soon, but she supposed she took hers out first. “They’re definitely bigger, right?”
Caitlyn laughed, nudging to get at the sink. “I don’t know, bitch, you’re always smashing them flat.” Caitlyn honestly couldn’t tell, but objectively the answer was probably yes.
Vi let go of her shirt and kissed her teeth, “Bitch? ” she sniffed. “Long day?”
Caitlyn dried her hands on a towel. “Don’t let me get started.” She watched Vi turn in the mirror and reach for something long and blue. She held the housecoat out for Caitlyn to thread her arms into. Warm, soft fabric hugged her. She hummed, pressing the folds of silky fabric to her chest. “When did you turn that on?” She meant the towel warmer in the corner behind the door Caitlyn always hung her housecoat on whenever she took it off in the morning.
Vi’s hands slid down her arms, finding an actual pocket of warmth to leech in the pockets. “Knew you were coming home sometime soon,” she answered, “It’s Friday.”
Caitlyn melted against her wife, her heart paradoxically tight and gooey in her chest. “Oh, I love you,” she whispered into that jaw. Vi only peeled away, her mouth making another unsavory shape.
“Ugh, you smell like ink.”
Caitlyn smelled her own skin and smelled nothing but her subtle fragrance. “How do you smell that?”
Vi leaned over the sink and gagged. As usual, nothing came out. “It’s a blessing and a curse,” she mumbled, propping her elbows against the smooth granite.
“Alright, soldier,” Caitlyn didn’t bother touching her again, not until she’d showered the day away, but she waved for her attention in the mirror. “Dinner?”
Head cradled in a single hand, Vi considered the question at length. “Not dinner,” she settled on and caught the next question in Caitlyn’s expression, “Yet , but I’d like to do ice cream tonight. We haven’t made the walk to Killigan’s in ages.”
“Louen will be thrilled.” Hand brushing Vi’s elbow, she urged her out of the bathroom. Reluctantly, Vi followed, grabbing the bedpan on their way out.
“I’m worried she might think I’m ignoring her,” Vi confessed as she sank onto the edge of their bed. “Telling her I’m working has been landing alright, but, I know she doesn’t understand fully. I don’t want to make her sad.”
“She isn’t blue,” Caitlyn assured, chuckling at the new phrase Louen was bound to spout on repeat. She flicked the shower on and let it warm as she got a spray bottle of cleaner out from the cupboard and sprayed down the toilet seat and the floor around it. “She’s got way too much energy to keep her mind from wandering.” She caught Vi’s look through the open door. “Of course she misses you.” She wasn’t sure if that was the most comforting route she could’ve taken. “But you’re right. It’s easier this way, and it won’t be too much longer we have to keep her in the dark.”
Vi mumbled a half-response. Looking up from her cleaning task, Caitlyn saw she’d shifted to laying flat on her back, stomach rising and falling with each rhythmic breath. Her shirt had ridden up a bit, giving Caitlyn an unblocked view of the minuscule curve right along the waistband of her shorts. It wasn’t real yet, or more so it was still deniable. Caitlyn knew that bump wasn’t real, just water and bloat but someday soon it would be—real, more noticeable, and impossible to hide or deny. Then it would be real, the happiness they were carving out for themselves piece by piece. Her heart was solidly liquid and trickling out her ribs as she finally climbed into the shower. She kept the door open and the glass unfogged throughout the quick rinse. She knew before she was fully under the water that Vi was already asleep, hardly the watchdog she normally was during Caitlyn’s showers, but seeing her was enough, seeing the open doorway and her wife at rest just beyond it was comfort enough.
Her whole world was outside that bathroom, a world that was rapidly and miraculously expanding. Change had once been a source of great contention for them. The threat had once been crippling. It occasionally still crippled but change was no longer just a threat of loss. The change Caitlyn knew was coming would only bring them more, and it had only just begun.