Work Text:
There were several things that came with being married to Lance Hernández-McClain—or Kogane now, as he had been since just after the end of the war. Kisses exchanged in the kitchen over dinner were some of the best things about marriage, Keith thought, as well as the sight of two razors and toothbrushes instead of one in the bathroom cupboard, the endless warmth of having someone always next to him in the double Garrison dormitory where they lived...
Everything about Lance was his favorite thing, really. It was Lance, after all. Lance, for whom he had pined so wrenchingly during their first year in space, whose memory kept him alive on the back of that space whale after he and his mother escaped from Ranveig’s base, whose hand kept him grounded and breathing those first few awful weeks after Shiro went missing, whose voice was both comfort and haven after Adam died and a source of utter joy after he came back.
Keith loved him with everything he was, or would ever be.
But unfortunately—or fortunately, since Keith hadn’t quite figured out which it was yet—being married to Lance came with enough chaos to drive Keith up the walls sometimes; Lance’s most recent escapade had resulted in them bringing home a child, after all, and true to form he hadn’t even thought to consult his husband before bundling a fluffy Galra baby through the door. But Keith fell in love with Kazha at first sight, and the Coalition spokesmen who dared insinuate that they were too young and inexperienced for parenthood quickly realized that Lance and Keith Kogane did absolutely nothing halfway.
Today, however, what Lance was saying made no sense at all. Not that this was particularly out of the ordinary; half of his ideas flew over Keith’s head on the best of days, and laundry days (like this one) were usually Keith’s worst.
“We need to have a party for Adam and Shiro,” Lance announced. “Today, if everyone can manage it.”
“Why?” asked Keith, folding one of Kazha’s blankets before sorting a handful of socks. “They never know what to do during parties. It’s embarrassing. Shiro just stayed in the kitchen and ate the whole time on Sylvio’s last birthday because he didn’t know anyone there.”
Lance lifted an eyebrow. “So did you, samurai. But don’t you remember what the date is?”
“September...fourteenth?” Keith tried. “It’s not their anniversary, or either of their birthdays.”
“I meant the month, love.”
“Sep..tember?”
“Right,” smiled Lance. Keith blinked, dazed by the sudden appearance of snow-white teeth and dimples—
“So, what’s only two months away?”
“November?” he shrugged. Who cared about months, anyway? The little dent over Lance’s lip was criminally cute, and nothing to do with his (perfectly alive and healthy) brother and brother-in-law could get him to look away from it.
“And who’s arriving in November, sweetheart?”
“The bab—oh!” Keith jumped out of his chair. “You want to throw them a baby shower?”
“Well, not exactly a baby shower,” Lance admitted. “Adam would probably kill us both if he actually had to, like, interact for two whole hours. I thought we could just take them out to a bar or something to unwind, since they’ve both been doing overtime with their teaching shifts.”
“Why?” wondered Keith, frowning. “They don’t need the money. Or wait, do they? Did they refuse the grant package the Garrison offered them?”
“I honestly have no clue. But the Garrison’s understaffed anyway because of all the off-planet missions, so it’s not like they had a choice.”
“And they’re not allowed to leave town since Adam has to stay near medical...honestly, why is he even still working? He only got out of the hospital two weeks ago,” Keith sighed. “But you’re right, they could use a night off.”
“Should I see if everyone’s on for tonight, then?”
“They should be,” said Keith, pulling up the group schedule on his phone. “Adam and Shiro finish at five, and Coran and Allura should be able to make it here by six. What about Kazha, though?”
“Pidge’s mom said she could watch him.”
“...He won’t be able to fool her into giving him cake for dinner, at least.”
“I still can’t believe Shiro fell for that. How is he going to be a dad, again?”
* * *
“Adam, sweetheart?”
“In here, Takashi,” called Adam, looking away from his laptop screen and smiling as his husband opened the door to his office. “Ready to go home, love?”
“More than,” Takashi groaned. “I hate teaching the senior classes sometimes. It’s so much easier to make mistakes with the coursework.”
“That’s why I’ve stuck to the same syllabus these last ten years,” Adam chided him. “I haven’t changed it since before Keith came along.”
“Oh, speaking of Keith, he’s invited us out for dinner tonight. Do you feel well enough to go?”
“I guess so. I’m not as tired as I was last week, so it should be fine.” The last week had been particularly hellish, Adam thought, what with the baby deciding it was time for eggs and barbecue to join the list of things he couldn’t eat and giving him six bouts of morning sickness worse than the ones he had suffered four or five months ago. Everyone from Takashi’s grandmother to his own aunt and then Colleen and Sanda had told him the nausea got better after the twelfth week, but Sonia (all of thirteen inches long, so far) seemed to have other ideas.
“Are you sure? I can tell him to reschedule.” said Takashi, squeezing his hands. “Juliana only just cleared you to go back to work. You need your rest.”
“I’ve been going a bit stir-crazy cooped up in here, actually. And it’s not like we’ll be doing anything strenuous, right? We’ll just be sitting and eating. Where does Keith want to go?”
“Remember that bar downtown where we celebrated mine and Mishaal’s first off-planet mission? The Jumping Spoon, I think it was called.”
“You mean where you proposed, forgot about it, and then didn’t remember for the next two years?” said Adam dryly. “It’s only a ten-minute drive from the base, so I don’t see why not.”
“Okay.” His husband scratched his chin and winced at the stubble he found there, clearly wishing he had found time to shave before leaving the house that morning—his prosthetic arm had learned to do routine tasks like shaving and brushing his teeth on its own, meaning that he could simultaneously do things like comb his hair or help Adam with his earrings, but both of them had slept past the alarm and woken up with only ten minutes left to get ready. “Let’s go home and nap until we have to leave, then.”
Adam laughed. “Now that sounds like a plan, mere jaan. Lead on.”
They did go home and sleep after that, since neither of them got much rest at night lately. Shiro was constantly afraid that something would go wrong with Adam’s quintessence implants, and woke himself up every three hours just to make sure that he was still soundly asleep and breathing—which usually woke Adam up in turn, since he said that Shiro’s worry was contagious.
“Go back to sleep, ‘Kashi,” he grumbled, turning his back to his husband after the fourth time he opened his eyes to find a pulse meter stuck to his finger and a brushed-titanium hand pressed against his chest. “I’m fine, soniye’s fine, and we both need to sleep. Lie down.”
But for some reason Shiro was always more trusting of daylight, so he and Adam napped without interruption until nearly seven o’clock, when they woke to the trilling of Adam’s datapad and about forty missed texts from the group chat.
“Whazzgoinon?” mumbled Shiro, tightening his grasp on Adam’s waist and shaking his head as the datapad flashed again. “Is it Matt again? Tell him to buzz off.”
“No, it’s just Lance,” Adam laughed, showing him the screen. “Keith’s wearing brown shoes with black slacks, and he’s trying to get him to change them.”
“The slacks or the shoes?”
“Maybe both,” frowned Adam. “I’m not sure. Do we need to dress up, or—”
Shiro snorted at him. “ Koiishi. You never turn down an occasion to dress up, and you know it.”
“That was before I started sharing my brain and body with a baby who never stops thinking , love.”
“What does she think about?” he wondered, pulling Adam closer and yanking the covers back over their shoulders. “I keep forgetting she taps into your head when she’s awake.”
“My memories, mostly,” smiled his husband, wriggling out of bed and hauling Shiro up behind him. “She likes our school days best, and everything Keith got up to before you left. I haven’t caught much coming from her except feelings. She gets bored a lot, though, and I can tell because she keeps playing a few scenes back again and again to search for stuff she could’ve missed.”
The datapad chimed again, and without speaking further they went off to get ready for the evening. Adam took the shower first, leaving Shiro to lay out his clothes on the bed and spend ten minutes choosing between two green dress shirts and his purple one.
“Wear the purple shirt,” Adam called at last, sticking his head around the shower door and releasing a plume of steam into the bedroom. “You look heavenly in it, sweetheart.”
“How heavenly?” teased Shiro, holding it up to his chest and winking so flirtatiously that Adam choked on a giggle. “Not nearly enough to hold a candle to you, surely.”
“Good enough to eat, ‘Kashi. Now hurry up and shower, and let me get dressed.”
Shiro did as he was told, shutting himself in the bathroom and leaving Adam to his own devices outside. When he wrapped himself in a towel and came out again he found his husband standing in front of the mirror, dressed in a pair of slim-fitted grey pants and a half-tucked white blouse with translucent sleeves that hung off his arms in matching double arcs—slashed from wrist to elbow and then from elbow to shoulder, highlighting his warm copper skin so beautifully that Shiro stood frozen in the doorway for a moment before taking a step towards him.
“Push these through for me, would you?” he asked, holding out his hands and sighing as Shiro kissed the heart of each rough palm before fastening the cream silk cufflinks. “Thanks, janu. ”
“Where did...where did that shirt come from?” Shiro said aloud, mouth going dry as Adam turned to face the mirror again and clasped a gold pendant around his throat. He had changed his earrings, too—the little gold studs his parents had given him long ago were lying in a bowl on the nightstand, and now a set of sparkling diamonds were dangling from his earlobes instead. “I haven’t seen it before.”
“Lance and Hunk gave it to me for my birthday, remember?”
“I would definitely have remembered that .”
“I thought it was too nice to wear, so I just hung it up and forgot about it,” shrugged Adam. “I’m not surprised you didn’t remember, I’ve never even tried it on before. Do you like it?”
Shiro bit his lip. “Very much,” he confessed, cheeks flushing as Adam leaned up to kiss him. “You look stunning.”
“Put on your clothes, and you’ll be just as breathtaking, mere jaan. We’re going to be late if we don’t hurry.”
“Don’t forget your jacket!” Shiro shouted, throwing open the closet doors as Adam clattered off to the living room. “It’s almost October and those sleeves are way too thin—you’ll catch a cold if you don’t.”
“ Haan, haan, ” sang Adam. “There, I’ve got my coat and my shoes, and you’re driving. I doubt you’ll be in a fit state to drive on the way back, so it’s your turn now.”
“Give me the keys?” Shiro tucked them into his pocket and cast a critical glance over his reflection, smoothing down the fabric around his shoulder socket before shrugging on his own coat and meeting Adam outside. “Text the squad, love, and tell them we’re on the way.”
* * *
The Jumping Spoon was, as Takashi had said, only a ten minutes’ drive from the Garrison’s main campus—just on the eastern fringe of downtown Maricopa, and crowded at all hours by virtue of being one of only three bars in the city that admitted patrons under twenty-one. Adam was part of that collective himself the last time he visited; Takashi and Mishaal Rizavi were celebrating the success of their first mission to the Kuiper belt in the spring of ‘34, and Takashi had gotten so thoroughly drunk that he cried when Adam refused to kiss him on the mouth on the dance floor and then proposed to him before calling Keith an angry little turtle and falling asleep with his head on Adam’s loafers. He remembered none of it by the next morning, and Adam had threatened Keith into silence with the promise that he could say goodbye to sushi bento boxes if he said so much as a word—but for some reason Adam still treasured that proposal as his first, and his heart began to beat just a little faster at the thought of returning to the place that made it happen.
“Adam!” hooted Lance, jumping up and down on a curb stop right outside the door as Takashi pulled the jeep into the parking lot. “Finally. I thought you guys would never get here.”
“Where’s Pidge?” Takashi asked, rolling down the window. “She and Matt and Mishaal ought to have been here by now.”
“Mishaal couldn’t make it. They’re sending her to the Venusian base next week, so she wanted to get some rest in before then.”
“Oh, right.” Adam rubbed his chin. “I forgot about that. But where’s Matt?”
“He and Pidge went inside already.” said Keith, wincing. “Pidge wanted to slip past the bouncers without the minor badge before you two got here.”
“Did neither of you think about stopping her? ” demanded Takashi, turning around to glare at Hunk and Coran. “She’s only eighteen, she won’t be of age to drink for another three—”
“Three years, yeah,” Lance supplied. “But since we were lost in the rift for three years, my ID says I’m twenty-three and hers says she’s twenty-one, so, uh...at least the bouncers would have let her in anyway?”
“But still— ”
“I told the bartender to cut her off at four drinks,” Hunk stage-whispered, leaning over Lance’s shoulder as Adam and Shiro got out of the car and came to join them. “He owes me a favor from school, so he said he would.”
“How strong are Earthen spirits compared to Nunvill?” wondered Allura, detaching herself from Hunk’s side and stealing Shiro’s jacket before he had time to pull it back. “I haven’t tried any except for the champagne at yours and Adam’s wedding.”
“I actually don’t know,” Shiro frowned. “I’ve never known a human apart from myself who could stomach enough Nunvill to figure out how strong it was, to be honest. And Coran drank two bottles of rose by himself at our reception and didn’t seem drunk at all, so you probably won’t get affected the same way one of us would.”
“ Damn, ” she swore. “It’s been thirty decaphoebs since I last had the chance to get drunk. I’m going to steal Coran’s bangle flask as soon as we get in.”
“What does he even keep in there?”
“Juniberry nunvill,” Coran piped. “It’s much tastier than the plain kind. Would you care to try some?”
“No, I would not,” Shiro groaned, pinching the bridge of his nose and remembering the time he tried to force just a cupful of nunvill down to be polite at one of the Voltron shows and woke up the next morning with the father of all hangovers pounding at his skull. “If Alteans can get drunk on nunvill, it’s probably for the best that we can’t stand the taste. One flute had me skipping training for three days, remember?”
“Enough standing around!” came a voice from behind them, followed by Pidge’s fluffy golden head sticking out of the bar’s double doors. “Are you guys coming inside or not?”
“Coming,” called Adam, tucking his arm around Shiro’s and grabbing Keith with the other. “Hurry up, it’s freezing out here.”
“No alcohol for him,” Pidge announced as they walked in, pointing straight at Adam and gleefully ignoring his huff of exasperation as he marched past with his nose in the air. “He can’t drink. For medical reasons.”
“I don’t draw X’s on anyone’s hands unless they’re under twenty-one,” the bouncer told her; from the looks of it, Pidge had been driving him out of his wits all evening. “Forgive me, miss, but that guy definitely doesn’t look like a minor. I couldn’t stop him from drinking even if he had third-stage liver disease.”
Pidge leaned over and snatched the marker from his fingers. “But still. It’s a bar, and he can’t drink.”
“Hey! I don’t drink in general, the baby’s got nothing to do with it,” Adam protested, extracting the marker from Pidge’s small fist and passing it back to the bouncer. “Uh, sorry about that, by the way, sir. Here.”
“Thanks. And congratulations?” the bouncer offered, confused. “Wait, aren’t you that kid whose boyfriend started crying on the dance floor when you wouldn’t kiss him back at the ‘34 holiday bash? Because I’m pretty sure—”
Adam threw back his head and laughed. “Yeah, I am. We’re married now, by the way.”
“...Is he with you?” The bouncer looked very much as if he regretted all the life decisions that had led him up to this point, Shiro thought. “Shirogane, right? The Kerberos pilot?”
“Yes, right here,” sighed Shiro, turning around to stare at his brother and brother-in-law squabbling over something in the entryway. “Keith, Lance, get a move on. We’re holding up the line, and I don’t want to miss our slot for the seafood sampling.”
“He’s such a dad ,” Lance stage-whispered as he squeezed past Keith and Adam. “Take notes, mi amor. You’re going to have to perfect that voice for when Kazha learns how to crawl.”
“But you already have,” objected Keith. “It wasn’t me who got Nadia to stop playing in the road while your brother wasn’t around to keep an eye on her. Why do I need to be the bad cop? I won’t even be good at it.”
“I’ve already been bad cop with a niece and a nephew. It’s your turn.”
“But—”
“Lance, for the love of all that is holy, if you and Keith don’t get inside right now I’m revoking your godfather privileges!” Shiro snapped. “And I mean it! Hurry up!”
“... Damn, corazon, Space Dad’s still got it!”
“ Lance! ”
Half an hour later, the Kogane party—including all six Paladins, Coran, Matt, and Adam—finally ended up at the bar counter, where Keith and Lance finally stopped jumping down each other’s throats about an argument they had earlier that afternoon and turned their addition to the food. The Jumping Spoon had branched out into several different types of cuisine since the last time Adam was there; fourteen years previously, the bill of fare mainly consisted of pub food and the odd Chinese entree, but now the dining area was sectioned off around separate cooking stations, each with its own couple of chefs and (for some of the larger ones) a bartender.
The station Lance had reserved was devoted to seafood, and by the time nine o’clock rolled around they went through two sushi platters, a bottle of sake, five or six crabs, and a lobster. Adam ate more of the maki rolls than Allura and Hunk did combined, and as he turned towards the order pad yet again Pidge put her fork down and stared at him in envious fascination.
“Where do you put it all?” she demanded, pointing to his waist—which, despite his long-standing addiction to sweets and tendency to skip gym days, was still as toned and slender as it had been when he was eighteen. “Teach me your ways, please. I could barely even take seconds at the last war gala on Arus, and I’d like to not humiliate myself so thoroughly at an eating contest again.”
“If you ever have kids, Katie, you’ll figure out where I put it,” said Adam dryly. “Any child of yours would need twice as much brain fuel as my Altean hybrid clone-baby does. You wouldn’t have any problems beating the Malthusian prince in an eating contest then.”
“I still don’t get why she’s part Altean,” Hunk chimed in from Pidge’s other side. “Or why you are, come to think of it. Shiro got revived with Allura’s quintessence too, but he’s just as human as ever—if you don’t count the whole clone thing, I guess.”
“It wasn’t my quintessence doing the actual work with Adam,” Allura shrugged, mixing a shot of Coran’s juniberry nunvill with a tumbler of late-harvest Semillon. “Mechanical quintessence is different, it changes the receptive vehicle so it can do whatever it needs to. It optimized his DNA to offer the path of least resistance, and then that got passed down to the baby.”
“Is it just super strength? Or can you shapeshift too?” asked Matt, tearing himself away from his phone for the first time that evening—apparently, he had been texting what looked like a five-hundred-word essay to Mishaal under the bar counter. “Imagine what we could’ve done with that back when we were in school.”
“ Don’t imagine it,” Shiro told him. “We’re in charge of several young, impressionable minds, and they deserve teachers that can set them a good example.”
“One of those young, impressionable minds is going to be your baby’s in about twelve years. Wait and see what I’ll do then.”
“Don’t even joke about that, she can hear you,” Adam warned. “And I’m limited to soft-tissue fluidity, though it takes a lot of strength. I can do anything with...skin, and muscles, but not bone or cartilage or ligaments. Which means I can’t shift myself up to Takashi’s height, no matter how much I might want to.”
“ Do you want to? You’re the perfect height, sweetheart.”
“Well, I was taller until you were around eighteen,” he pointed out. “And I don’t exactly miss it, but it would be nice to be taller, sometimes.”
“He just wants to give Shiro forehead kisses without anything getting in the way,” giggled Lance. “But he can’t. Keith complains about that, too, but now that I’ve caught up there’s nothing he can do about it.”
“I might still grow,” Keith grumbled, eyeing Coran’s bangle flask with a speculative gleam in his eye. “Galra come of age at fifty, you know. I’m not old enough for the second growth spurt yet.”
“How tall do you think you’ll get?” Pidge piped up. “Are we talking seven-feet-plus here, or like...Shiro’s height?”
“I’m as tall as Adam is,” protested Keith. “Five-eleven isn’t short. And Kolivan says I might end up anywhere from six foot five to six-nine.”
“Six- nine? ” asked Hunk, alarmed. “Won’t it make some stuff on Earth pretty hard? Like fitting into standard cars or airplane seats? You can’t fly everywhere in Red, and she won’t come unless you’re having an emergency anyway.”
At that, Keith and Lance grimaced and exchanged a pair of guilty glances over Pidge’s head. Adam raised his eyebrows at them; both he and Takashi were fairly certain that the two paladins had been hiding something for months, and considering Lance’s fondness for sharing absolutely every detail of his personal life, it was probably something the others might not want to hear.
“Uh,” stuttered Lance, gulping down a few sips of sangria and gripping Keith’s knee under the table. “About that, um—we kind of have news?”
“Wait, you didn’t tell anyone?” Allura interrupted, voice pitched so high with the nunvill she was drinking that a couple at the curry station turned around to stare at them. “But—”
“Tell us what ?” whispered Hunk. “Lance, don’t. Whatever you’re going to say, just—just don’t do it.”
“We don’t have a choice! Kazha doesn’t look even remotely human, and we can hide that he exists now but we can’t keep him cooped up in our apartment just because no one knows aliens exi—”
“Ooookay, ” Pidge said, grabbing Hunk’s arm and hauling him off his chair. “Let’s not do this here, or tonight. Nothing’s happening anytime soon, so Hunk, you can stop worrying about it, and Lance—you’re the one who invited everyone out, so you’d better not kill the mood.”
“Forget the mood, he killed my buzz,” said Matt sadly, holding his empty tumblr upside-down and pouting as a drop of sake splashed onto the floor. “I need more sake.”
“Dance floor, then?” Takashi suggested, tucking a folded bill into the tip jar and helping Adam to his feet. “Our time’s almost up, anyway.”
“Lead on!” crowed Coran, who had procured a second flask of nunvill from his sleeve and was now beginning to jump in place while holding Allura’s arm. “I’ve been itching to break out those Arusian moves we learned on our last trip there.”
“Not again , Coran.”
“Yes, again,” said the Altean, looking thoroughly offended. “ You thought they were stunning, didn’t you, Adam?”
Adam bit his tongue and tried not to smile. “Of course, Coran. Of course.”
The dance floor—as Adam discovered a few minutes later, after Hunk finally managed to drag Pidge away from the sushi bar—was in the newly-renovated club, accessible from the dining area through a pair of high double doors and manned by yet another pair of bouncers; the one who greeted them when they came in seemed to have been rotated inside, and studiously ignored the whole party as they passed him by.
“I don’t think we can ever come back here again,” whispered Shiro, leaning heavily into Adam’s side as someone ran straight into him from the left. “That bouncer’s got it out for us.”
“Well, you did try to sock him in the nose for flirting with me that one time,” Adam snorted. “Come on, ‘Kashi. Let’s get inside.”
* * *
“I regret everything,” Keith whispered, shortly before midnight. “ Why did I drink so much?”
He stared vacantly at the dance floor about ten feet away, where Adam and Shiro were slow-dancing together—though Shiro had long since lifted Adam up to stand on his shoes so that the two of them were almost eye to eye, which meant that Adam wasn’t really dancing at all.
“I shouldn’t have tried the Nunvill,” moaned Lance, slumping onto the seat beside Keith’s and downing a glass of water. “But the juniberry brew was so good, and now—hey, darling, do you want chicken nuggets? I’m getting chicken nuggets.”
“How on earth did you get from Nunvill to chicken nuggets, huh?” muttered Pidge, nursing her third glass of orange juice and sulking because Hunk had bribed the bartender to cut off her liquor supply sometime around ten o’clock. “But get me some, too.”
“I like nuggets,” Shiro said thoughtfully, tucking his head onto Adam’s shoulder. “Can I have just one, sweetheart? I’ll leave room for dinner, I promise.”
“You’ve already had dinner, husband of mine,” Adam told him, smiling helplessly as his husband steered him to a nearby couch and dragged them both down onto it. “You can have as many nuggets as you want.”
But for some reason, that only made Takashi’s eyes fill with tears. “What did you just say?” he whispered, tightening his grasp on Adam’s shoulders. “You—you can’t mean you’re—”
“What?” Adam said blankly. “I thought you wanted nuggets.”
“You’re married?” Takashi choked out, bursting into sobs. “You—you just said you had a husband!”
“I do have a husband! Takashi, you adorable fool, I’m married to—”
“You are married!” his husband wept. “I should have known I didn’t have a chance the second you walked into the room. You were smiling too much, and your eyes were too warm, and you were too nice when you as—asked me to dance with you.”
“Love, I’ve always been nice to you. I’ve worshipped the ground under your feet since the day we met, my jaanam. ”
“That doesn’t mean anything if you’re married, ” Takashi sniffled. “I know I’m bad at cooking, and I forget to comb my hair sometimes, but I’m not a—a homewrecker. ”
“I am married to you, ” Adam told him, pulling Takashi against his chest and pressing their foreheads together. “I married you in front of a crowd of two thousand people, with your family and mine and all of our friends, and Keith gave me away and made you cry like a baby, and then you put my wedding ring on for me and cried all over again. I’m yours for good, Takashi Shirogane, whether you like it or not—and we’re having a baby together, so you’d better remember before she gets here.”
Takashi’s eyes flew wide open. “We’re what? ”
“Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten the baby,” Coran frowned, from somewhere over their heads. “You’ve been talking about nothing else for the past seven months.”
“A baby? You have a baby, too?” Another flood of tears poured down Takashi’s face, and Adam put his head in his hands and groaned. “I’m even worse than I thought I was. I’m in love with a married man, and he has a baby.”
“ You’re my husband, you idiot! And the baby’s yours, too!”
Takashi had the gall to look confused, at that. “How, sunshine?”
“Here, put your hand on my chest. You feel that metal lump right there?”
“Mm-hm, I do.”
“That’s giving our Sonia quintessence so she can grow,” Adam told him. “There’s another somewhere around my liver, but there’s no point feeling for that one. She was made from you, and from me, and we’re going to meet her in just two months if everything goes okay.”
“You mean everything might not go okay?” Takashi demands, breaking out into a fresh round of sobs. “You’re saying I have the most perfect husband in the world and a little baby girl, and they might not be okay? What’s the point of living, then?”
“That one’s your fault, you know,” Allura called from the other side of the room. “You were asking for that, Adam.”
Adam put his face in his hands and moaned. It was going to be a long evening.
* * *
“And that, my Sonia, is the story of how your father got so drunk one night that he forgot he was married to me,” Shiro hears Adam saying from the sofa. “After that, I had to show him your ultrasound pictures with both of our names on them before he would cheer up, and then he dragged me onto the dance floor and proposed all over again, because we shouldn’t have a baby before we tied the knot, or something like that.”
Sonia coos up at him and reaches for the pendant around his neck, trying to bring the gold beads to her mouth as Shiro drops down on the couch beside his husband and daughter and pulls them both into his arms.
“This is slander, my love,” he says gravely. “She’s never going to respect me, at this rate.”
“Sweetheart, she’s already going to respect you,” Adam laughs. “Her father is the kindest, wisest man alive, and the reason she still has a planet to live on, too. She should know some embarrassing things about you, though, just to balance it out a little—don’t you think so?”
“Amazing,” marvels Shiro, leaning in to press a kiss to Sonia’s cheek and then to Adam’s forehead. “Half of what you just said was wrong. I’ve never seen that happen before.”
His husband gives him a no-nonsense look and then returns the kiss with a smile. “I’m never wrong about anything, darling.”
“You just said I was the kindest, wisest man alive,” Shiro points out. “How can I be, since you are?”
And then Adam blushes like a June sunrise, leaving Shiro so utterly dazzled that he almost stops breathing.
“Don’t flirt, Takashi,” Adam says helplessly. “Not like that, moonlight! You know I can’t take it.”
“Mm, too bad. I’m never stopping.”
“Takashi…”