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Mounting cries break him from the shallow slumber he’d managed to fall into, between now and when he’d last felt Anya move from the bed to nurse their daughter.
He feels Anya stir beside him, making a tired noise of complaint. Dmitry groggily pats her hip before she can move. “You sleep, I have her,” he sighs, presses a kiss into his wife’s hair before pushing himself up.
Aches and pains echo through his body, new hurts that come with working on the docks, coupled with old injuries from St. Petersburg that had not been treated right nor healed properly. Both of those, and that he has just turned thirty, an age he didn’t think he’d live to see.
Belle’s cries are not quite at an ear-splitting pitch when Dmitry peers over the cradle at the bottom of their bed, marvels at her tiny limbs flailing. Seeing him, her little pink face scrunches unhappily, and he almost laughs.
“I know, I’m sorry,” he whispers, gently lifts her and leaves the bedroom before her wails wake Anya all the way. “But Mama is tired, you’ll have to settle for me instead.”
It’s still disconcerting how small she is, barely the length of his arm. With clumsy fingers, he tightens the woollen blanket Lily had knitted around her tiny body, murmurs softly as he paces the small kitchen and sitting room until her cries have subsided into hiccups.
“Better?” Dmitry yawns, bemusedly letting Belle beat his hand with her tiny, ineffectual fists. “Restless little thing, aren’t you?” Wouldn’t be ours if she wasn’t.
Her whole hand barely fits around his finger, and the rush of emotion he suddenly feels makes him sinks into the old armchair Anya had bought from the flea market.
Staring at her like this, a rare moment of quiet peace, there is no one feeling he can set on. Love, fear, joy. It still hasn’t quite hit him that he has a daughter - as if he did not watch Anya become increasingly uncomfortable carrying her as the months wore on, hadn’t felt her movements beneath his hand pressed against his wife’s expanding belly, hadn’t wept when Flora had set her in his trembling arms for the very first time.
Dmitry brushes a thumb over her cheek, smiles when she attempts to suckle on it. She’s tired, but being quiet about it for once, staring up at her father as if expecting something. He wonders what it is she sees, if he and Anya are anything more than caregiving blobs to demand affection from. He chuckles at the thought.
Dmitry has been a lot of things in his life; orphan, street rat, criminal, conman. He never thought husband and father would make the list.
Anya says it’s too early to see any defining feature yet, but Dmitry disagrees; her eyes are unmistakably blue, lighter than Anya’s but he imagines they’ll darken, and the feathery tufts of hair on her head are as dark as his.
“I hope you have her spirit,” he tells Belle quietly, kisses her tiny hand. “She wouldn’t have survived without it.” He pauses, then grins. “And my wits.” Belle just stares at him blankly, clenching her fingers in his nightshirt.
She didn’t even have a name, until a week ago, and even then it wasn’t wholly intentional. They couldn’t decide, didn’t want to give her a name with tragedy and loss attached, so had instead talked to her through terms of endearment - Dmitry especially, newly fluent in French and knowing she would eventually be, too. Ma belle, mon chèrie. Belle just stuck.
“Belle Dmitryevna Sudayeva,” he’d said out loud when it came to writing out her birth certificate, and immediately pulled a face. “Oh, God, no, that sounds terrible.”
With Belle fussing in her arms, Anya had smiled, tired. “No worse a mouthful than Anastasia Nikolaevna Romanova, I’m sure.”
Anya had filled out her birth certificate, in the slanted handwriting Dmitry believes they will find across his heart someday, she’d written their daughters name; Belle Marie Sudayev. No need for the Slavic form, either, really - Belle is as French as her name.
Dmitry supposes it’s better than Cherry.
There is a part of him that hopes she never finds out what they did to get here. Hopes she never finds out what her mother survived, what happened to her grandparents and aunts and uncle, hopes their names will be nothing more than a history lesson. He hopes he never has to tell her the things he did to survive, the sort of man he would have become had they never left.
But he knows, if she’s even a fraction like either of them, she’ll find it all out anyway.
Anya breathes a sigh of relief, finding Dmitry asleep in the battered armchair, Belle in the curve of his arm. Anya extracts her gently, drops a kiss on Dmitry’s slack face to wake him up.
“You stayed up all night with her?” She asks as he blinks awake, gets a bearing of his surroundings. “What were you doing, telling her of all yours and Vlad’s greatest cons?”
Dmitry pffts, cups a hand over Belle’s head where she’s nestling into Anya’s chest. “No, she knows all those,” he jibes along, moves to kiss Anya’s mouth.
There’s a look on his face Anya knows all too well, now. He’s holding something back. “Dima.”
He meets her gaze then, hand still on their daughters head. He clears his throat. “How much - how much will we tell her, when she starts asking?”
Anya stills. They’d discussed this once before, hurried and fearful. She still didn’t have an answer. “What she needs to hear.”
“Anya -“
“I don’t mean -“ her voice breaks, and she looks down at the little girl in her arms, small and fragile and the most precious thing she’s ever held. “I mean, she’s hardly likely to go looking for stories about Imperial families, is she? But I imagine she’ll accept her parents being Russian orphans who escaped.” Anya looks up at her husbands worried brown eyes, smiles weakly. “Perhaps she’ll find it romantic.”
Dmitry cocks an eyebrow. “I’m going to remind you of this in a few years when she bursts through our door with files on both of us.”
It startles a laugh out of Anya; she misses the fond look on his face. “Dmitry, you’re thinking too far ahead.” She stands, shifts Belle into the crook of her neck. “Lets get through the morning first, yes?”
It lingers in the back of her mind, though, as she’s bathing Belle, tapping her nose to make her giggle and letting her suck on her fingers, big blue eyes staring up at Anya.
“What am I going to tell you of my family, hm?” Anya asks softly, tucking towels around Belle. The little girl gurgles, grasps a lock of her mother’s hair. Anya kisses her forehead, inhaling sharply. “What are you going to do to us, ma belle?”
Watching Dmitry struggle his way through another French book, Belle fidgeting in the crook of his arm - Anya decides it doesn’t matter. Not yet.