Chapter Text
A crackle of static. A high-pitched whining.
A cold foot on his calf.
“Mmph,” Clover mumbled. Dug his face further into the pillow.
“Cloves, babe,” the voice sounded weathered, hoarse with sleep.
Clover groaned. A short and emphatic hmph. Didn’t lift his head.
The whining was now mounting into a cry.
The pressure on his calf was now a pair of cold feet.
Hmph.
“Clover,” Qrow said, this time with a stronger presence, so that Clover could hear in his voice that he was staring blankly at the ceiling, contemplating whacking him with a pillow. “Your child.”
With a sigh that sounded more childish than he was willing to admit, Clover pushed himself up onto one arm and swung a leg out from under the covers. Cold air hit his bare skin like an arctic blast out on the tundra of Solitas. Ugh. “How come when he’s crying, he’s my child?”
Qrow mumbled something that sounded an awful lot like my child would never be so needy but since marriage was about picking your battles, Clover couldn’t have said for certain and let it slide. He yanked on a pair of sweatpants thrown haphazardly on top of a dresser – because everything had been a bit haphazard recently – and pocketed the baby monitor. He padded down the hallway in socked feet.
The shattered moon cast long shadows on the floorboards and a chill crept up his spine. Even Patch got cold at this time of year, he’d found. The nursery was warmer than the hallway though. They had been doing work to their little fixer-upper house since they’d moved in – little DIY projects that played into Clover’s can-do attitude and Qrow’s newfound desire to nest – but that had all taken a backseat in the last six months. Finishing the nursery before Jay arrived had become top priority. And after he’d been born, Clover couldn’t even remember the last time he’d slept for four consecutive hours, let alone felt the desire to knock a dresser together.
The crying in the cradle quietened, though, as soon as Clover opened the door. Went from a full-blown wail to a more settled grizzle. “Yeah, you just woke up alone and you were scared, huh?” he said, half through a yawn, as he bent down over the wooden bars and plucked the bundle of blankets up into his arms. “That’s scary, hmm?” he murmured, bouncing the grizzling bundle in his arms.
Jay was a little pink in the face from his efforts, and he’d nearly kicked off the multicolour blanket that Auntie Blake had knitted for him. Despite Qrow’s grumpy and sleep deprived protestations, the thick and unruly thatch of black hair on his head and sleepy glimpses of deep red eyes were dead giveaways as to Jay’s parentage. But so were the footie pyjamas covered in tiny green clovers.
Clover hummed sleepily and made for the kitchen, dragging the blanket back over his son’s tiny form to protect him from the winter chill in the rest of the house. He was grateful that the tears had subsided. They had soon learned that when Jay really worked himself up into a state, he was pretty impossible to quieten.
“Strong lungs,” Qrow had remarked one morning after a sleepless night. He’d been staring into a steaming mug of coffee like he might find the meaning of life hidden at the bottom. Or maybe he had just been too tired to shift his gaze. “In the tribe-“ he broke off to yawn, “we would’ve kept him.”
Most days, reminders that his husband was raised by bandits and had trained so that he could murder huntsmen hit with all the tenderness of an anvil. “That’s nice,” Clover had said simply, and took a hearty gulp of his own coffee.
Now, Jay was drinking down a bottle of formula with gusto. Unlike Qrow, who had played a hand in raising two children before, Clover hadn’t mastered the art of getting Jay to take the bottle slowly. He normally ended up having to shhh and pat and bounce and pray his shoulder didn’t end up covered in sick. Once the bottle had finished, he hummed tunelessly and held his son against his chest, patting gently. Jay let out a little whine and then burped and Clover chuckled to himself. “There there, little bird,” he murmured. It was hard to be mad that it was three in the morning when your own little kid nuzzled into your neck like that. A tiny, pudgy hand gripped the neck of his pyjama shirt.
Back in the nursery, Clover lay Jay down in his cot, and the little boy’s eyelids were already getting heavy again. He tucked him in, and then just stood there for a second, smiling, looking.
They’d been through hell and come back alive. Nearly lost each other. Won a war. Stopped the end of the world.
The sheer terror of being completely responsible for the life of something so tiny and defenceless dwarfed everything else in comparison.
But so did the love. When he and Qrow had nothing else, they had love.
Always the love.