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02:08 AM - Charging: 49%
— There is the softest of blunt thuds, a scatter of giggles from down the hallway, and for one bleary moment, blue eyes crack open with reluctance at the audacity that something— or rather, four someones— that was probably inevitable has drawn him from slumber.
Damn, the man is tired, too tired, and for all his gears and his wirings, he can hardly manage to lift his head two inches off the head rest. A full day spent exhausting his energy supply has left him in a lethargic state, having simply flopped back into the custom, built-for-two charge pod when bedtime rolled around to indulge in some last moment cuddles with the lover that is pressed against his side. Sharp eyes skirt down to the head lolled gently along his shoulder, verdant depths of wonderment and wisdom closed to the world to stay adrift in that static spring of dreams and not dreams.
Zero has never personally taken it upon himself to dive into the privacy of X’s sleep routines due to the dread of the tables ever being turned so that the sharp trigger of questions target him instead, he knows he would break and utter the term nightmare, proving it all the more real. After this little journey they have taken together (or, well, more that he agreed to because that is what lovers of years and years do, yes?), the daunting bastion filled with corpses of robots just like himself should stay swept up in the dust motes of his fear-chilled memories.
A minute passes, then another, systems warming over to provide at least partial use of observatory processes. He waits, silent, still as marble and as alert as a guard dog, but finding that the prolonged quietness at least permits him to gaze down at the round cheeks and full lips of the most precious treasure he could ever have in his arms.
With a small edge of regret, Zero is finding more that with his old age, his combat cognizance is transforming into a sentience more, for a word, sappy. Instead of relaying war routines and weapon schematics incessantly, he lauds words of poetry that can be found in the printed word of ancient tomes written by poets and authors long dead, their passages lining the shelves of their modest bedroom, all keepsakes of X’s that are just another extension of the blue bot’s enigmatic curiosity.
There, then, a bap, and it’s another little noise, an innocent sound to the untrained ear, but Zero sighs all the same, realizing that X is not disturbed, still lost in charging stasis with the sweetest of smiles on his lips. Were this a moment strung along in the lantern strings of their many nights, he would kiss those lips, coax X awake with a press of his tongue while his hands roam down that waist to hug those hips closer.
However, this is not one of those nights, and the blue Hunter snoozes on.
Damn him.
Yes, he could pout, let that sour twinge of a half-assed rechard twist the sentiment he holds in his the his core for his partner, but rather, Zero leans to trace a faint kiss along X’s temple once a simple diagnostics scan procures the results: X’s charge levels are only at a gear-rattling twenty-eight percent.
“You laid here all night listening for them again, didn’t you, bluejay?” He curses, lips brushing close to artificial skin in a kind hearted gesture of reverence that only swells in the blue tide pools of his affections, “you damn worrywart.”
Rightly, Zero notions for slow precision of his limbs while calculating the movements to keep X from being jostled and woken up to be in even worse shape than he is. From the other, there is only the slight crack of a grunt in snoozing protest, and while he regrets that his arms and shoulders are no longer pillows for the sleeping bot, he can no longer gather a lackluster excuse to stay in bed. With that weighed heavy on the broad of his back, he steps forward to the barely ajar door that opens towards the corridor with reluctance that attempts to drag his ankles back.
From the hallway, there is a little hallway light which X insists must stay on for the developing eye sensors that proves as source of the midnight noises that bleeds yellow into his own eyes after he presses the door wide open, an archaic feature of their human-style, three bedroom house that just became all theirs a few months before. For tenants of their caliber, built of titanium and wire rather than born of flesh and cartilage, the amenities had been dutifully updated, but there is still a continual itch for decor more on the bland and metallic rather than the matte eggshell white walls and the few plants interspersed on newly assembled tables.
For all the decades that he has been active, for all the years that Zero has known X more intimately than wedded bliss, taking that reluctant step into the hallway without his Blue Bomber at his right side is as frightening as any war would be. Hell, war would be preferable compared to this operation, would be preferable even with the vicious spikes and pesky security drones, but another giggle from the end of the hall tightens his joints, his fingers twitching for the hilt of his blade that sits just a transport away in the armory of Hunters’ Base.
Before him is a proverbial guillotine as he feels like a dead man walking, shouldering a soldier’s prayer because, well, he is going to need it, for at the end of that hall awaits an executioner of four.
Feet naked from his bolstering armor yield at the door, but when he finally presses his palm against it, he notes again his lack of protection. It still unnerves him, this upgrade of his entire being to be able to be nearly helpless, but it is another strange aspect of being in love with X, so awfully in love, who is so insistent on comfort of body and mind, especially for a war android hellbent on keeping his ever-encompassing power.
A creak of the door, an inevitable summoning of the dismal fate ahead, and soon, three set of eyes aglow cut to him.
So much for developing eyes.
"Hi, papa," comes the first abrupt voice, youthful and jubilant in spite of the gruff edges; ah, there he is, Zero’s own person favorite, his trooper with energy and attitude to boot that pads into the hall light to greet a parental unit with a megawatt grin. The saccharine sight aids in a loosening of the Hunter’s joints, gives him a reprieve of the temporary even though he knows he will just lock up all over again.
At least Zero can appreciate that these kids are intelligent enough to accept they have been caught, especially as X’s own split image toddles in next with her eyes bright with the always-present elusion of mischief and prowess. The tiny body should not exude such an ambiance of sneaky confidence, and even now at this hour, the new father of four wonders where in X’s and his DNA Leviathan obtained such a bombastic mood. In the Hunter’s own opinion, naming their only girl Leviathan was a beginning to a gruesome end as she is every bit the couple’s little piranha with a bite that would gladly eat away at any poor thing in her path.
“Mermaid,” X’s voice chides in the lofty cross spaces of his memory boards, “our little mermaid.”
God, though, her grin would terrify a great white shark.
"Papa," Leviathan begins with a lilt that drips with the acidity of childish sadism, “It’s so silly! Harpy just wanted to fly!"
“But!" Fefnir balks with a flail of his hands, jaw dropped at the astonishment of the audacity of his proclamation, "he won't fly down! He stuck!”
Zero takes a quick assessment of the bunk beds and high dresser, noting a pair of blue eyes that watch him owlishly from their perch, a hover car’s headlights flashing bright through the bedroom windows as before it swerves down the road back towards the city.
Someone please scrap him and melt his parts for out of the quadruplets, Harpuia is the absolute worst, a rebel against Zero with a taste for pushing the boundaries. For all that he can surmise, the hesitation of trust does not bloom fervent and unfurling from anger or hatred, but rather misunderstanding that leaves the sleeping android down the hall exasperated from the antics that are pulled to dive his utmost attention.
Were it not witching hour, and were it not for patrols and training sessions with new rookies at the ass crack of dawn, Zero might ponder fondly on the basis of schematics of the eldest child, an aviary thematic of appearance and skill set, a full circle of the blond bot’s use of ‘bluejay’ whenever he finds himself with his lover in the secrecy of their bedroom. For those sheepish glances and soft chuckles he receives, Zero’s tone is always warm with that fluttering emotion all he has ever guessed was contentment.
Now, though, he gruffly attempts, as any rational parent would though his genuine ace in the hole still lays in their custom charge pod in their bedroom, to bid his child to see common sense. "Come down?"
A blink, then two, then a skeptical squint with a jagged response; “no.”
Damn this kid. No, damn X. Already Zero feels completely submerged in feelings as his CPU struggles to compute the audacity of this kid as not many people, human or reploid, tell Zero ‘no.’ X is the only one that has the authority, just as he is the only one that has the authorization to command, just the same as he smiled on that ill fated day when he brought up the DNA experiment.
Unlike everyone else, X, with all his hopes and dreams interwoven in those late night patrols where they would sneak about hand in hand through the alleys of their city, had smiled so tenderly, so resolutely when he asked Zero to come to his office that moment to offer them this chance.
A family, X had whispered as though the entire existence of this theorized project was as fragile as the thin ice creeping along the Base’s high-rise view, a real family.
Zero admits he is a soft-hearted man when those verdant eyes, so full of summer ambitions and of futures to come, sweeten at the edges, but his core is solid in the affirmation that maybe having rebellious, childlike coding was an utter mistake.
A desperate flipping through his files, a miserable sweep of tactics to thwart an enemy target, and Zero is at an impasse. Struggling, he thinks, processors flaring uneasily and— what is that archaic weapon of choice of housewives and janitors of old? The little... sweepy thing that he sees in the old vintage reels of films and sitcoms X privately indulges in for his so-called ’research’ on human history? Surely that would come in handy, a long ranged device that would be thin enough to fit in the crevice of the dresser and the ceiling to knock Harpuia down; then the kid would really fly.
No, doubtful that means to an end, while appeasing to the hunter for usage of such superior tactics, would definitely not be stamped with a seal of approval from his lover, X would definitely not approve of his superior tactics. Another plan it must be then.
"Okay," Zero suffuses with a heated exhale, feeling his CPU start to spark into a heating phase while he over processes tens of strategies to take his opponent, his own son, down in the most literal sense, “what can I do to make you come down?”
Levi snorts at his shin, her little nose curled up as she glances all the way up his tall stature to roll her eyes, “papa, that’s silly! He wouldn’t even come down for me!”
Harpuia pouts at such glorification at his own expense, sitting down with a heavy flop onto the corner of his perch as he targets Zero precisely. “I want mama.”
Oh, of course he does. “First off, kid, mama is asleep, and second, we don’t call mama ‘mama’ to his face.”
“But— but mama is mama!” Fefnir snarks with a sputter as his little foot stomps against the beige carpet of the nursery, “we have a papa and a mama!”
If it were even reasonable within his schematics to acquire a headache, Zero is certain that now would be the time for one to arise with from the depths of this nightmare hell. They have had this talk more times than he cares to count as this argument is only to be blamed upon the crazy social constructs humans have derived over the millennia. Admittedly, Zero could give less of a care what the kids call him, and hell, ‘that bastard’ or ‘that son of a bitch’ would work just fine, but he is chained at the hip to a leader of example, and for some reason their human overlords, in spite of all their progress, still ask why four toddler-sized reploids call X their ‘mama.’
In all this commotion, it rings in a peculiar alarm of observance within his cerebral confines that he has only been dealing with three children. Do they not have four? One, two, three… where in the hell is the fourth?
“Levi, Fefnir,” he starts with an agitation that pinpricks at his tone, all due to the exhaustion onsetting from a lack of decent charge, “where is your brother?”
There is a shared glance of eyes before Fefnir— bless him— bluntly asks, “have you gone blind, papa?”
“No— no, your other brother, Phantom,” Zero finally clicks the two, almost tensing further when the two chorus out an ‘ohh’ in wondering revelation.
With the quadruplets, the variances in personality, skills, and features are an endless plethora of discoveries that increase on the daily. It is no surprise how individual they are with each taking on little pieces of their parents’ code to call their own: Levi with her aptitude for water and sass (from X even though he refuses to admit it), Fefnir with his playful and fiery energy, Harpuia with his subservience to no one (except X), and then Phantom with his independence.
While the little ball of stealth is loved and doted on— by both parents in their own special ways— as equally as his siblings, the fourth and youngest tends to go off on his own, hiding in darker corners and spaces where life is just better, Zero approximates with careless assumption.
“Papa, he’s hiding! He’s sneaky!” Levi giggles, wrapping her little arms around his shin, and oh, now if that doesn’t make his core a little palpable, he isn’t sure what would, with her bluer than blues batting up at him.
The color might be all his, but the roundness, that playful naivety, that’s all X, and Zero cannot help but fall for his little girl’s smile even with the little jerk that huffs from his ‘nest’ above them.
“Well, we’ll have to get him out before we all go back to bed,” he barely chides though it lacks his usual sufficiency of authority, “after we get the wannabe hawk down?”
Fefnir gives a musing hum, even so much as tapping on his tiny chin as though he were assessing all the outcomes, all the hundreds of scenarios like some great general off to war. He then shrugs, flapping his arms with a squawk. “He can jump! Woooosh!”
Probable, and Zero would ultimately concur that Fefnir’s offer would be better than finding that archaic instrument he now remembers was once labeled a ‘broom,’ but a sniff and a kick jerks his gaze up to Harpuia who looks downright offended.
“Want mama!” The little want-to-be bird recoils, crossing his arms to snivel up into the neck of his sleep shirt, “only mama catch me!”
Oh, that— that would make sense why the eldest of his four offspring would be uncertain to come down prior. A knack of being blunt and thorough might have scarred this kid since the Hunter takes ‘wanting to fly’ too seriously…
X still blames him for the trauma of playing catch with their own kids has inflicted.
“What if mama isn’t always there?” Zero pauses after his inquiry, seeking out to litigate the pressure that seizes up his core, a little nonchalant question creaking out that little nightmare of X somehow not being there, “what if it is just me sometimes? When mama is working or doing things away from us?”
Harpuia is almost an affronted kind of terrified, little round cheek reddening in a sure sign of overheating imminent, “mama… mama will always be there.”
“Mama’s not here right now! He sleeping” Fefnir hops on his toes, grinning as he always does when he is in the tactical position of taking his father’s side, “and papa is cool! He might catch you!”
The green of Harpuia’s pajama appear sage as he scoffs. To this aviation reploid, it is as if the suggestion of a solution to his predicament is worse than just sitting up there stuck. Little hands rub at his eyes, and Zero assesses that the kids are all running lower on charge despite the youthful energy.
He can use it to his favor, have the quadruplets simply run out of their battery and initiate shut down, and would until Harpuia shrills out in a hitch pitched screech, “papa just throws me! Mama catches!”
God, if there is any deity out there that stands as Providence for reploids, is messing with this old Hunter’s patience.
To add salt to the wound, Leviathan hums, pressing her cheek along Zero’s shin with a light whisk of a yawn, at her sibling’s distrust for her personal upright bed. “Papa, m’sleepy…”
With a groan, Zero draws a hand up to rub the bridge of his nose, a human quirk that he has picked up over the years that conveys when his stress levels are reaching maximum. This would be so easy, too easy, were it his rookies or Mavericks, just a brandishing of his saber or his authority, and this mission would be completed. He could be asleep with X cuddled right up to him, but no.
He has to prove himself, X or not, to keep his composure, to snatch out a first victory with his children or else he might as well ask to be retired mercifully.
“I am assuming that this defense pertains to eighty-six hours ago when we all were located at the designated family park— you stated that your priorities were to fly, and human fathers were propelling their offspring into the air to catch them, thus simulating temporary flight. I caught you then, didn’t I?”
Since having children, X has ever been inching closer and closer to a second retirement, pushing himself into a position where he is more diplomat than Hunter, more politician than warrior. It has been a strange breath of fresh air, the world quieter since the last war, and the ambiance that X carries is that of patience and wisdom that people respect. With that noted, Zero has been fussed into taking days off, a concept wholly foreign to him as, being an android, his directives were clear with no requirement to take even an hour off from his duties.
However, for the sake of family bonding, X has rustled their budding unit into a myriad of excursions with the one Harpuia intending to utilize for reminder of Zero’s fatherly failures having been a so-called ‘picnic.’
The situation was redundantly simple: the aviation-based child had wanted to climb the trunk of a firm oak to jump off a low-hanging branch in the hopes of flying. At the time, Zero simply thought that lifting his eldest child into the air to catch him would suffice. Apparently, parental desire to appease offspring is far beyond his reach, but he did try.
The Hunter’s college try at hands-on parenting, of course, had the consequences of getting quite acquainted with the stiff couch that night. It was no recharge pod, but an external cord and some shifting around proved he was capable of waking up the morning after, ready to slaughter with his combatant operations at ninety-percent charge.
Perhaps the couch is in his future this night, too, if X—.
Wait.
A light sparks in Zero’s head, a bingo ring that flickers out miles in a void of useless options as a beacon for the one infinite variable that will always bring the patchwork members of this family together. The light bathes him in blue, endless blue, a once lonely color that now breathes ineffable love through the dusty crevices of old motherboards and archaic gears to make him feel at home in his own unnatural skin.
“Let’s go see mama,” Zero offers to his son, watching those green optics contract at the proposition that would ultimately help all of them to get back to a reasonable charge session, “but we have to be really quiet and go to sleep when we’re there, yes?”
Fefnir and Leviathan do their strange little share of glances before grinning, giving their father’s legs a good squeeze with a chorus of chirping hope, “slumber party?”
Not… exactly what he was thinking, but, hell, if it gets him back to bed faster, Zero would tell them there was a swimming pool or new toys or, damn, he cannot take the time to download the possible knick knacks children rearing required as he has wasted a good ten percent of precious energy over this.
A stretch of little legs draping across the ledge of the dresser tells him that there is a change of ambiance. Sharp blues meet round greens, and Harpuia’s cheeks are tender with what can only be trust as he reaches out, small fingers outstretched.
“Slumber party, papa?”
A trickle something emotional wisps amongst all the blues in his sentience, drowning all his striking crimson until he is waterlogged with thrumming plum. In the morning in the dewy sunlight, he will have to confess to his lover that, yes, after all these decades, it is quite apparent a bloated circumstance to their union.
Zero really is getting soft-hearted.
So, he steps closer to his eldest while two little bots giggle in a tune that is precious, their limbs all wrapped around his legs tight as to not jostle them about too terribly much. Even with the extra weight on his shins, Zero raises his arms high while the tiny grunts of a reploid child that reminds him of a baby bird interweaves with the jubilee of his siblings before Harpuia abruptly drops off the ledge with bravery Zero honestly respects.
And in an instant, there is now a weight in the crook of his arm and a pair of owlish eyes that carry the buds of wisdom and care staring up at him.
“See mama now?”
Yes, they can go.
The corridor doesn’t seem as sufferable and haunted now, doesn’t creep and groan with the monsters of a past that wreaks with putrid fumes of garish nightmares and empty futures. There is no strange elder that cackles in a lonely room, no blank eyes that stare at up him with faded despondency. No, he tells himself, it is a plain hallway in a new house where they all can grow together, learn together, tangling their roots into the soil of the foundation of promises. There is nothing but a promise at the end there where the bedroom door is, an oath found in a charge pod that will just have to accommodate the five— no, was it not six?
Oh, damn it; “did any of you tell me where your brother is?”
“Papa,” Fefnir chides, an obvious eye roll rounding out his tough lilt, “you’re blind.”
The poor shadow child will just have to be found after Zero puts these three hellions down, and fortune smiles in swollen grace upon him as he hears the little yawns breaking the silence of their trip down to where X sleeps. No scans are required to tell that the children he currently has count of are low on their charge, so the end result will benefit them all before morning’s lilac dawn.
With a shush, and the faintest of giggles from Leviathan, the Hunter cranes his head in and lo, there X is, curled up and passed out cold just as he was left. The air that compounded in his internal vents exits in slow relief, and it isn’t but a few more moments before Zero is shuffling the three kids over.
It’s then in the bleary light that leaks in through the closed blinds that Zero notices a dark ball of a child curled up in the crook of X’s arm only to realize, well, Phantom didn’t really so much as hide as just go ahead and make himself comfortable during the whole debacle. The sight flourishes a softness in Zero’s chest as he stares at the two sleeping bots, their cores low, soothing hums that are sirens’ songs to his ears.
“Papa,” Leviathan whispers, her big blues drooping ever so slight to half-mast as she shuffles up into the pod, little hands pressing into the thick of the cushion, “Phantom’s here. See?”
Zero sighs, laying Harpuia down closest to X while Fefnir makes his own way up, pushing his father’s hands away each time they come under his arms to help him. Right before Fefnir joins the others, Leviathan flops onto her side, kindly patting at Phantom’s curved back as he snuffles and wiggles ever closer to X’s shoulder.
The crimson Hunter stops at the side of the bed, feeling like some identity of war-woven capes and weathered hilts of swords all fade away into something that is still, a calmness in the eye of a storm that leaves him lost yet so found. If this is the memory he can keep forever, let him stay there, as motionless as a statue carved with battle-worn hands to ever pay his respects.
“Yeah, I see that, Levi,” Zero presses out through slack lips, “you ready to sleep finally?”
In reply, Leviathan only sighs a sweet and high ‘yes, papa,’ and can someone other than X melt him down to his very bearings? The answer appears to be obvious.
Harpuia has sat on his knees, stalled in his quest for cuddles with the ‘mother’ unit of the family now that he has been confronted with a brother that has taken the prospective spot along X’s arm. Leviathan and Fefnir pay no mind to the schematics, finding their comfortable positions that will be between their parents once Zero finally crawls in to lay on his side so that he can hesitate before shutting down himself.
There is barely a second before Fefnir is entirely out, shutting down as the dim blue light of the charge pod flickers to assess the additional energy intake and output before whirring mutedly and creating the charge flow they will all need. Harpuia, though, is still stock still, frozen in place while green eyes that of a once wise owl assess a plan of attack.
Zero waits, ready to have to talk the eldest down for the second time this early morn, but truly curious in seeing how the eldest will act. It isn’t long before the only child still awake glances over to him, the pupils swimming in the depths of verdant contracting with methodical assessment.
The cotton wrinkle of baggy pajamas rustle along the cushion, Harpuia carefully crawling over to the other elder with a reluctance that stems not from defeat, but of shyness. It is a waiting game, a trickle of time that cringes at a reasonable train wreck to come, but there is something that has cracked in the bastion of tension the young avian bot has protruded out.
It means they can finally learn to know one another.
Harpuia says not one word, not one peep slipping from his mouth as the round of his cheek smushes on top of the crook of Zero’s arm with hardly a care for the angled tilt of his neck. Their eyes catch again, a tick of a moment passing ever so sluggish with the holding of breath that necessitates nothing. Then, a merciful, trusting smile, and the little one shuts down, arms and legs folded up like a baby bird settled down in its nest for the night.
The man composed of wires and motherboards is left alone to stare at his family with a slow-eating hollowness, left to wander in his grievous thoughts of how the traumas of wars and the miracles of resurrections have correlated in perfect pinpoints of fate that would have him lay there with a lover and four children. For all the good that it would be to another, it is a barren reward to him now in the darkness, now that his mind can focus on the shadows that lurk inside of him, the beasts that scrape tar and ash with screaming static resounding of never good enough over and over and over—.
“Phantom told me, you know.”
Zero’s eyes widen, his ears picking up now the lightest of core whirs as one green eye half-opens, X barely awake to abide his partner with a wise, solemn gaze. It must have left him paralyzed, speechless with a slack jaw and lost gaze as X just gives his most secretive smile while extending his elbow so their hands might meet between the spaces their children take up.
That smile, filled to the brim with the hope and the goodness that Zero comprehends he lacks, comprises sunshine itself into a curve of lips that would never, ever fade like a death of a star if the crimson Hunter has one ounce of an opinion on the matter. That smile is love, it is a ballad of strings where the bows glisten on strings in a pacifying hymn that will forever glow forth and chase away all those monsters that crawl about in his lover’s being.
Like a moth to lamplight, Zero is gone, fingers interweaving with X’s as he stares near fearful and asks “and?”
“And?” X chuckles tiredly, the sound slurred as he must be resorting to transferring his dismal energy supply to the greater functions so the two of then can even have this twilight excursion of soft words and touches. Perhaps if somehow there was more to them than just the bolts and circuits they are formed from, X might would be a saint, an ethereal apotheosis imbued with the stardust of eons to come while Zero hopes to brush his fingertips along the tail end of a cosmic trail, a rainbow of shimmering dust as some proof that X existed.
Love is a hard range of measurement for the blond to comprehend, but this golden smolder that aches in his core must surely be it.
“He said you were trying to help Harpuia down. Poor Phantom, he was so worried about the both of you, asked me to go on and help matters,” X titters with a trail of a yawn skittering along the ends of his words, and Zero almost feels affronted that his partner was aware the whole time, yet did not come to his side for once— but that was against the grain of the whole reason he left X to sleep in the first place, wasn’t it?
“But,” X continues, his thumb drawing lazy circles on the back of Zero’s hand, catching along the ridge of each knuckle as he mumbles, “I told him to trust you just as I do, and he went right to sleep after that.”
The moth wings of worries fly along dim slits of orange light that bleeds into their bedroom, flitting away into a nightly excursion to happenstance upon another family that might have their fears bared along the dips of their throats, too.
A clearing of his throat, as though he would have something caught there in his throat, and Zero folds his hand over X’s with a tight purse of his lips and a nod towards their children, “you really trust me with these hellions?”
There it is, a flicker of amusement in those green eyes, those eyes that reflect the rejuvenation of springtime, of wisdom that now also lies in the child drooling into the crook of his elbow that belies something deeply kept within X’s core that he thought it were possible that the universe would already chime the answer.
“Same as I trust you with myself. Now, sleep.”
And with that is all X reveals, a little hidden smile meant for Zero and only ever Zero slowly brightening his features before his eyes close again to be swept into the currents of a core shutting down, of a tidal ebb and flow that drifts him back into slumber.
Tomorrow, Zero wonders in the quiet of the bedroom, it a wondrous thought, something unpredictable though he can surmise with darkening vision what will happen, hardly too farfetched to think that the children will awaken with a start, crowing for breakfast even though reploids such as them hardly need the nourishment of a meal. Oh, but X, bless him, will rise with the tugging of little hands along his arms to pad to their kitchen, mixing blueberry pancake batter as he laughs at the little one voicing their peculiar questions concerning chickens and eggs, and Zero will simply sit at the table, amazed how he can still fall over more in love.
Once, X and him sat and were content with doing nothing, happiness found in the silence of their togetherness. After years of being a unit, of being lovers unbidden to part, they would hardly need to speak, letting their gazes and their touches convey all they would ever need to. Yet, now, even as the veil of sleep bids his eyes to rest with her buzzing lullaby, he is grateful that the comforts of their once silence is now fallen into amicable dissidence, the chirps of their children a chorus of sweet voices that would uplift him into a feeling of rightness with his life.
And, so, he sleeps, same as his family, until the sun breaks into a slow, fretless dawn to peek into the windows and bathe them all in the gloriousness of new light.