Chapter Text
Catelyn had barely been able to toe her shoes off when she sensed something... odd about the scene in front of her.
It was not uncommon for her to find Ned up with his textbooks and internship materials late into the night as she got home from work. Usually, her boyfriend would give her a simple greeting as she shuffled from the door straight to the shower, at times too invested in his work to look up. Later, if Cat were awake enough, they would share a pint of midnight ice cream and go to bed. It was their nightly ritual to get Ned away from his work for a time and for both of them to relax and spend a few hours together.
This night, however, Ned sat in his usual nest of papers and books on the couch, surrounded by the ordinary (and quite embarrassing) cluttered mess of their tiny apartment, with the ice cream already out. He never ate their midnight pint of ice cream without Catelyn. Never. To the man’s credit, there were two spoons stuck into the carton, but still!
As well, Ned hadn’t looked up when she came in, nor acknowledged her presence with a sound. He simply sat, absently prying into the frozen food with a fazed-out expression on his face.
‘He must be dead tired or beyond stressed out,’ Catelyn mused to herself, dropping her grimy apron over her shoes and padding up beside the couch quietly. She placed a hand gently on her boyfriend’s shoulder from over the arm of the chair. The innocent action caused Ned to jump with a startled shout, his spoonful of ice cream catapulting as his hand spasmed backward. The next second, Cat had a glob of dessert in her face as it flew free of the spoon.
Ned whipped his head back and moved his hand to his chest, exhaling deeply and exclaiming, “Fucking hell, Cat!”
“Good evening to you too, dear.” She replied, wiping the food into her palm and giving Ned a peck on the cheek, “I see you saved some rocky road for me?”
As Catelyn scanned the mess of their floor for a spare towel and cleaned herself of the projectile dessert, her boyfriend smiled guiltily, “Yeah, also made you some tea. It’s over here on the coffee table.”
‘Odd,’ Catelyn thought, ‘He doesn’t usually make tea.’ Out loud, she noted, “Well, that’s a surprise! I’ll take it as your apology for the ice cream,” and dropped the towel back to the ground to be dealt with later.
Ned grimaced, carding a hand through his already frazzled hair, “I didn’t see you.”
“I can tell. Is law theory that interesting?” She asked jokingly, grinning at him as she picked her way around the small room to fall ungracefully onto the clear end of their couch. If his responding laugh sounded a tad manic, it wasn’t anything she hadn’t heard before a test day.
“Riveting. You can just take the rest.” He gestured with his spoon to the remaining half-pint of ice cream, now placed delicately atop a textbook between them. Without a word to waste, Catelyn picked up the second spoon and dug in. She hummed in content as she relaxed into the lumpy cushion behind her, willing to put aside her desire for a shower and her curiosity at Ned’s strange behavior for the moment.
A stretch of silence settled between them, Ned fluttering through his papers and Catelyn savoring her food. She was distracted for a moment when she thought she heard a sound from their bedroom, but as she turned her head to the sound, her boyfriend coughed and spoke up, “I’m guessing you had to stay overtime at work?”
Cat sighed, pushing some flyaway red hairs from her face as she turned back to her partner, “A coworker didn’t show up to replace me, so Mr. Manager made me wait on her tables until she turned up. As it turns out, she had a family emergency or something, so I ended up taking all of her tables.” After another large spoonful of ice cream, she added, “At least I have a day off tomorrow, I can clean this goddamn apartment and rela-“
A definite rustling sound from the bedroom interrupted Catelyn mid-speech. Ned visibly tensed, carding a hand through his hair and even more thoroughly messing it up.
“Ned?”
“Hm?”
Catelyn watched her boyfriend pretend to read a passage from his textbook and try to look nonchalant. As the silence stretched, his foot began to bounce.
“Did something just shuffle in the other room?”
He looked up, but not quite at her, eyes darting between the general vicinity of her head and the open bedroom door. “Possibly?” His voice cracked.
Catelyn couldn’t see a thing in the dark room as she turned her gaze to it, but there was another rustling sound, accompanied now by a flat knock, like something hitting cardboard or some type of plastic. “Ned?”
“Cat?”
She stood awkwardly, shuffling in the wiggle room between couch and coffee table, “I am going to look into the bedroom. Is there anything you want to tell me before I do so?”
Face red and hands wringing around his papers furiously, Ned darted his eyes towards her. It looked as if he were about to say something, but he just gulped and sputtered out, “Don’t- don’t turn the lights on in there. I just got him to sleep.”
“Him?”
“Him…”
“You… stay right. Where. You. Are.”
Ned nodded fervently as Catelyn picked her way to the doorway of their bedroom (not a particularly long journey, all things considered). She squinted into the unlit room once she reached the door, respecting her boyfriend’s wishes to keep the room dark. The incandescent lamps behind her illuminated the space enough that she could spy the bulky shapes of their dresser and bed, the latter of which sat immaculately made and unoccupied, save for a small, cardboard moving box placed near its center.
As she stood in the doorway, another knock-sound came from the box. As quietly as possible, she edged into the room on socked tip-toes, sitting gently on the edge of the bed and trying to see as clearly as possible into the container. Slowly, the details focused in the dark: hand, hand, head, bundled up body… With a lurch in her gut, Catelyn realized what she was looking at. She tip-toed back out of the room. As she stood, the shifting mattress moved the bin, making… him… squirm and murmur before settling back down.
“Ned?”
“…Cat?”
“What’s a baby doing in our bed?”
He gave her a tight smile, “Sleeping, hopefully.”
“Eddard…” She warned.
Ned sighed heavily, “Do you remember Wylla?”
“Wylla from Trivia Night?”
“A week before we started dating? Yeah.”
A long silence ensued. Catelyn stood against the doorframe, Ned sat in their cluttered living room, both looking at each other with hopeless expressions, the former not sure if she should feel angry, sympathetic, or just tired.
“A shower.” She stated, turning away towards their bathroom.
“What?” Ned asked dumbfounded.
“I need one. A long shower. Then I will try to process everything.” She grabbed another ground-towel and yanked out her falling hair tie, “Oh, and Ned?”
“Yeah?”
“Have this room picked up by the time I get out.”
To Ned’s credit, he could pick up a room quickly; when Catelyn stepped out of the shower, wrapped in her towel, and scrubbed clean of her workplace grime, the place looked passably clean. The towels and clothing sat piled in their much-neglected hamper, and Ned’s textbooks and papers were stacked neatly on the coffee table, old dishes assumedly in the kitchen sink. Ned was notably absent from the room, but Cat heard some bustling around the bedroom, so she made an educated guess.
He had turned on their dim floor lamp and sat perched on the bed so that his body cast a shadow over the box as best as possible, as not to disturb the tiny form within. When his girlfriend walked in, Ned asked how her shower was without looking from the boy.
She deigned not to answer, following with her own question as she pulled some pajamas from her dresser, “Do you know he’s yours?”
He sighed heavily, “I mean, I can’t know for certain, but the timing adds up. Plus, this-“ he held up a torn edge of paper, “was taped to the box.”
With one arm stuck through her pajama tee, she read the four words Sharpied onto the note:
Ned,
the condom broke.
-W
“The condom. Broke.”
“Apparently so.”
“That’s all she had to say.”
Ned shrugged, “Can’t say I blame her.”
“And ‘W’ is definitely…”
“Wylla, yeah. Again, that was-“
“A week before our first date, I know.” Fully pajamaed, Catelyn stood uselessly in front of her boyfriend and his… son, looking from the former’s beyond-stressed expression to the latter’s peacefully sleeping form, blissfully unaware of anything happening around him. “Fucking hell, Ned, I want to be angry at you. Like, I really want to be angry at you.”
"You can, by all means!" Ned assured, holding up the arm not supporting his body in surrender.
She groaned, rubbing a hand down her face, "No, Ned, I don't think I ca- Oh, sorry," the baby scrunched his face up as she raised her voice. In a hushed tone, she repeated, "I don't think I can! You didn't cheat on me, you didn't knowingly leave Wylla with a baby, and I'm assuming from "the condom" that you acted responsibly. I am assuming that you didn't know about him?"
"No, of course I didn't!" Ned hissed back, "The neighbor knocked an hour or so before you got home, telling me to ''bring the kid into my apartment or dump it somewhere else'' because his crying was ''waking up the whole damn floor.'' I'd thought it was coming from the apartment over before I opened the door. Cat, you should know I wouldn't have just left Wylla if I knew there was a baby involved! She hadn't contacted me since the day after Trivia Night."
Catelyn nodded with a heavy sigh, sitting down on the other side of the box from Ned. Wylla was a friend of one of their mutual friends, and she had joined Ned and Cat’s usual group of drinking buddies one night upon the friend’s request.
She had felt jealous when the other woman had left the bar with Ned (after a crushing trivial defeat and a fair dose of booze) but hadn’t gathered the courage to ask him out until a week later. With no lack of irony, Catelyn remembered how adamantly Ned had assured her that his and Wylla’s night together was just a one-time situation.
As she was about to let that train of thought turn sour, Catelyn looked again at the baby. He had woken up during their conversation and was gazing up at the two adults in front of him blankly. His eyes were the same gray as Ned’s, and Catelyn could tell in the dim light that the little shock of hair on his head was his father’s dark brown as well.
“Has he been out of the box yet?” Catelyn asked, flicking her gaze up to Ned, who was similarly observing the tiny child.
He nodded, “I held him a bit to get him to stop crying after I answered the door, but once he was asleep again, I put him back. Didn’t want him to move around and suffocate or something.”
She hummed, watching the little boy look between the two adults above him with a distant gaze. He yawned, his little face scrunching up and his hand flexing near his chin. Catelyn’s mouth twitched a bit upwards, and she tentatively leaned in closer to the baby. His gaze seemed to focus on her as she did so, and he reached up for her, his face splitting into a gummy smile.
“He is a cute little thing, isn’t he? I can definitely see you in him.” Tentatively, she reached into the box with both hands, looking up to Ned quickly and asking, “May I?”
Ned let out an incredulous laugh, “You don’t have to ask me, Cat.”
Nodding, she carefully picked the baby up, holding his head steady as she brought him to her chest. He was lighter than she thought he’d be and immediately clung to her shirt once he was settled against her. She could practically feel Ned’s nervous fidgeting as he watched her handle his son, and she felt both taken aback and touched by how quickly he had grown attached to the boy.
Ignoring her tense boyfriend, for the time being, Catelyn focused on the baby. He seemed to be doing the same with her. He gazed up at Catelyn with his big, earnestly innocent eyes as if he automatically trusted her with his blip of a life. And, she supposed, he did. The boy could be no more than a month old at the latest; his entire world would have revolved solely around his mother until just a few hours ago.
She felt her heart flutter a bit in her chest and something twist in her gut when she thought about this little child, who only knew how to eat, cry, and love, being left behind by the one axis his life had previously oriented itself about. He had lost a mother; would he be able to keep his father?
Catelyn looked up at Ned, “What are you going to do with him?”
Ned took a deep breath, looking miserable about the words coming out of his mouth, “I’m keeping him with me. I won’t be upset if you want to move out, or if you don’t want to date a man with a baby I understa-“
“No!” Catelyn found herself interjecting, catching Ned (and herself) by surprise. His mouth snapped shut. She continued, pressing the baby to her as he snuggled into the crook of her neck, “You’ll need help, and he will need a mother if his biological one isn’t in the picture. I respect that Wylla didn’t want to raise a child, but I’m not going to give up on my relationship with you because of her. I-“ she took a breath, “I’ll be his mom. If you're okay with it, that is.”
After a beat, the most relieved look Catelyn had ever seen on her boyfriend crossed his face, and he let out a breath, “I could definitely use the help,” he agreed with a smile.
[A Few Weeks Later]
‘Wow. Speak of horrible timing,’ Catelyn thought to herself, staring at her reflection in the bathroom mirror. Her hair was mussed, Ned’s old tee hung loosely over her hunched shoulders, and her expression betrayed just how flabbergasted she felt. From outside the small room, she could hear some clanging from the kitchen and happy baby noises: telltale signs that her boys were up and ready for the morning. She wished they would still be asleep- give her a good half-hour just to comprehend her life. ‘At least I have the day off.’
“Cat? You good in there?” Came Ned’s concerned voice from the kitchen (the rooms were within talking distance of each other, connected by the tiny living room as they were), “Breakfast is ready!”
“Yeah, I’ll be out in a moment!” She called back, unsure if she sounded convincingly nonchalant. She splashed her face with some water, wiped it dry, slapped it a bit (just to make sure she was really awake), and took a deep breath. "You got this, Catelyn," she muttered to herself, trashing the stick with the glaringly pink plus-sign and exiting the bathroom.
Ned stood in front of the stove, not yet changed out of his pajamas into the suit he wore for his internship, flipping a pancake off of their pan onto one of their two matching plates, his other arm supporting little Jonathan. The baby had his tiny hands fisted tightly in his dad’s shirt and his cheek rested heavily against his shoulder. He stared raptly up as Ned explained something or another to his son in a solemn voice.
Catelyn glanced ruefully at the mug of coffee meant for her sitting, innocently, at the table as she snuck up behind her boyfriend. Jonathan noticed her from over the shoulder, making a little “bah!” sound and grabbing towards her with a tiny hand.
“Good morning to you, too,” She said to the baby, poking his little nose and getting a gummy smile in return. She leaned against Ned’s back, soaking in his warmth and trying to calm the spike of nerves in her gut, “Smells good,” She hummed.
“The breakfast or my neck?” Ned chuckled.
Catelyn smirked, letting Jonathan grab a chubby fistful of her hair and wave it around, “Wouldn’t you like to know.”
He laughed again, turning off the stove, “Help me with these plates, please.”
Cat shook her head, “It’s my off day, ‘m not carrying around any plates. I will hold Jon, though.” She parted from her boyfriend’s back, taking the baby into her own arms after carefully detangling her hair from his grasp. It was a futile effort; once he was re-situated in the crook of her elbow, his hand was once again around a red lock.
She smiled down at the child, “Has Daddy fed you yet?”
In response, Jon put her hair in his mouth with a gurgle. Ned answered for him, “Yes, and changed him.” She turned to face the table, where her boyfriend had set the plates down beside each coffee mug. She placed Jon in the baby swing they had set up by the table before sitting at her own spot, with another rueful look at her coffee. She picked up her fork, more than ready to eat her delicious-looking breakfast, but found herself too antsy to stomach it.
Ned must have noticed her nervousness. “Everything okay, Cat?” He asked after swallowing a bite of his pancakes, “You feel sick?”
Catelyn shook her head, pouring syrup over her food to avoid looking at him. She suddenly had an idea how her partner must have felt the night they met Jon, “No, I’m not sick.” She cut a big triangle out of her pancake stack, eating the (admittedly delicious) food.
She swallowed thickly, “But, I might be… a little… pregnant.”
A fork hit a plate with a lot of force, and Catelyn looked up to find Ned staring at her in disbelief, “You’re joking.”
She smiled sheepishly and shook her head, “Test is in the trash by the toilet if you need me to prove it.”
...
A long stretch of silence.
Ned began to laugh, rubbing a hand over his face and looking down at Jon, who had dozed off in his swing, “Well, damn!” He looked back at a similarly stress-laughing Catelyn, “Which of our parents do we call first?”
