Work Text:
As Ethan stepped into his office, the sight of sleeping Chiara on a couch didn’t even surprise him. It was the fifth time in the last ten days. She would throw an apologetic smile at him along with a muttered “I just need to catch a quick break” and half an hour later, he would find her fast asleep in his office.
At this point, surprise has been replaced by worrying. Ethan knew his wife and he knew that she could go weeks without rest. This behavior was strange, to say the least.
He approached the couch and knelt next to it, gently brushing the hair off her forehead. Placing a soft kiss on it instead, he whispered: “Chiara, are you okay?”
She opened her eyes slowly at first, obviously confused about the whole situation. Realizing what was happening – again – she sat up rapidly, trying to come up with a good excuse.
“I am sorry, Ethan, I must have fallen asleep. I just wanted to sit down for a while and-“
“It’s okay,” Ethan cut her off and took a seat next to her, hugging her waist. “I’m just a little worried about your constant tiredness.”
Sighing, Chiara rubbed her eyes and leaned into his chest, shaking her head slowly.
“I am fine. It’s just… ever since we’ve gotten back from the Europe, the work has been crazy. Two weeks and I feel like I need another vacation.”
Visiting Europe has become their habit through the years. It started with a trip to Tuscany on Chiara’s third year of residency, continuing with a quick trip to France after getting engaged, honeymoon in Greece and finally this year, when they decided to spend their first wedding anniversary on a three-weeks long roadtrip through Scandinavia, finished with four days in The Basque Country, so that Chiara could pursue her dream of visiting Guernica, the village on Picasso’s painting.
Chiara was right about the work being absolutely crazy ever since they’ve gotten back and throwing a glance at the paperwork on his desk, Ethan was very well aware of the exhaustion they both felt. Still, he managed to get through his days without needing a nap.
“Let me draw your blood so that I can run some tests. Maybe it’s just iron deficiency, but I want to be sure,” Ethan murmured into her hair, kissing the top of her head. “And go home to sleep.”
She turned to him, brows furrowed as she shook her head again.
“Absolutely not. I am fine, just a little weary. Just make me a cup of coffee and I’ll be fresh.”
Ethan stood up to make her the coffee, however he had no intention of letting her stay in work. He would bet that she was just ‘resting her eyes’ while he was turned to the coffee machine. As a doctor, there was one particular idea about what her exhaustion was about. Noticing such symptoms with anybody else, he would be absolutely sure. But this was Chiara he was thinking about and so he didn’t allow his mind wander into the direction it was tempted to.
“I am serious, Rookie. You are no use here, hardly keeping your eyes open. Drink the coffee, let me take your blood and go home to rest. I’ll come as soon as I can.”
She rolled her eyes and took the cup from his hands. Just as she was about to sip the coffee, she scrunched her nose in an utter disgust and looked up at him.
“Did you change the brand? This smells… ugh, I am not as demanding as you when it comes to coffee and even I can tell that this smells worse than the cafeteria coffee.”
Ethan bit his lip to hide the jitteriness overwhelming him at those words.
It was the same coffee brand they’ve been ordering for more than three years.
It was all adding up.
He shrugged as casually as he could and said: “Yeah, I tried a new roastery and it’s disappointing. Lets get you out of here, shall we?”
Chiara wanted to fight him, to stubbornly stay and prove him that she was more than capable of working, but she had to admit that she’s probably never felt as exhausted. And the vision of their king-sized bed was way too tempting.
Relucantly, she nodded and followed Ethan into an empty patient room to get her blood taken.
˜
To say that Ethan was nervous would be an understatement. He could’ve gone home a long time ago and instead he found himself pacing back and forth in his office, waiting for a nurse to page him that Chiara’s results were ready.
Still, when his pager went off, he all but jumped on the spot.
Seven minutes later, Ethan thanked the nurse and clutched the results in his hand, fighting the urge to read them right then and there, not quite believing his own self to be able to not to break down is the results confirmed the diagnosis he suspected.
Breathing heavily as he reached his office, he sat down on the couch – the very same Chiara was sleeping on just hours ago – and with trembling hands opened the file to see the results.
His eyes widened and just then, his vision turned blurry. New lump formed in his throat and his heart kept beating as if his dear life depended on the rate it was beating. His hands trembled so hard now that the file fell on the floor.
He was right.
Ethan could feel the tears damping his cheeks and falling on the fabric of his navy blue pants and he realized that he couldn’t care less about crying while at work.
Throwing his head back, he stared at the ceiling, letting the tears fall down freely, his heartbeat slowly calming back to normal.
He knew he needed to go home and share the results with Chiara. He just didn’t know how he should do such a thing.
˜
Chiara’s peaceful five-hours long nap has been interrupted by the sound of keys clinking in the door.
Stirring lazily in a blanket, she sat up and smiled softly as Ethan walked into the living room.
“You look exhausted. Hard day?” she asked, patting the seat next to her. “Come here.”
Ethan slumped down on the couch next to her and kissed her cheek instead of answering, his mind a battlefield of ideas on how to tell Chiara. As a doctor, he knew that he needed to be honest and straightforward. As a husband, he didn’t feel comfortable throwing such a bomb into her face as if she was simply a patient.
Noticing how lost in his head Ethan was, Chiara grew concerned.
“Did something happen, Ethan?”
He blurted his next words out before he gave any of his battling ideas a chance to win.
“I’ve got your test results.”
“Am I dying?” Chiara laughed, putting her hand on his bouncing knee to calm him down. After Ethan refused to look back at her, she sensed that something was indeed wrong. “Oh, I am dying, aren’t I?”
Chuckling, Ethan finally turned to look at her and kisser her temple. “You are not dying.”
“But?” Chiara raised her eyebrow while Ethan took the hand on his knee into his own, stroking Chiara’s knuckles softly with his thumb.
Taking a deep breath, he stuttered: “I… we… you are pregnant, Chiara.”
Chiara’s face grew paler than he’s ever seen it and there were big drops of cold sweat on her forehead. Ethan squeezed her hand to stop it from shaking, but with no success.
At last, Chiara let out a choked whisper.
“What kind of sick joke is this?”
For a second, Ethan almost felt offended by her accusation, as if she didn’t know him, as if she didn’t know that he would never joke about such a thing. Then, however, he recalled his own reaction when he found out just an hour and half before and could understand the Chiara’s one.
Instead of another word, Ethan reached down to grab his bag from the floor and pulled Chiara’s file out. Handing it to her, he made sure to point his finger at the row that indicated the elevated level of hCG in her blood.
Her eyes widened as she recognized what he was showing her and she gasped audibly, looking up at Ethan and down on her own file, back and forth until she found her lost voice.
“But… how? That’s impossible.”
“Nobody has ever said that it was impossible, only that your chances were extremely low, close to none.”
Chiara started to reminisce the last days, trying to connect the dots now that she knew the result.
The extreme fatigue, waves of nausea here and there, those could easily be read as literally anything else. She missed her period, but her cycle has never been regular, so she hardly considered it anyhow important, especially knowing that travelling has always made things even more irregular for her.
“Did you know?” she whispered as she turned to Ethan, who was staring at her intensively.
“I didn’t know. I became suspicious few days back, when you wouldn’t let me go anywhere near your chest,” he grinned. “Together with the exhaustion, the possibility of pregnancy found its way into my mind, but I didn’t even want to think about it, knowing how very unlikely it was. It was your disgust with the coffee today that made me almost sure that you were, in fact, pregnant.”
Chiara stared at the results again, not quite absorbing what they were saying. For almost six years, she believed she could never be pregnant.
“You need to see your gynecologist tomorrow, of course,” Ethan cut the silence again. “But as Dr. Ramsey, I can say for sure that you are pregnant.”
He scooped her into his arms so that she would sit on his lap and hugged her shocked form tightly. Chiara’s lips were still slightly parted and she was blinking just a little bit faster than usually as his words – and their new reality – sank in.
When it finally did, she wasn’t able to contain the emotions any longer.
First sob escaped her mouth, followed by another and so much more, accompanied by huge tears falling from her eyes.
Ethan gently pulled her head closer so that she was resting it against his chest and peppered her hair with soft kisses. Even though his share of tears has already been shed in a privacy of his office, feeling Chiara’s shaking body as she cried all those happy, surprised tears, he couldn’t help but cry along quietly with her.
“I am going to ruin your shirt,” Chiara mumbled against his white Oxford, noticing how her mascara stained it.
Ethan let out a quick laugh, his voice thick with emotions as he replied: “I couldn’t care less.”
After what could have been minutes or hours, they breaths steadied, however their positions haven’t changed at all.
They were both quiet for a long time and one could say that they were lost in their own thoughts when really, they were both lost in the very same thought.
Parents. They would become parents.
They talked about adoption on a regular basis at this point, both open to the idea that two or three years from now, they would go for it, that they would become parents to a kid that was left alone.
But those were talks about future. Hypothetical.
This was real. In less than a year, they would be parents to their very own newborn.
“Are you happy?” Chiara whispered, looking up at him with a gentle smile on her lips.
Ethan kissed her forehead before responding.
“I can’t imagine being happier.”
Biting her lower lip, Chiara asked again: “Are you also a little bit…scared? Because I am.”
Laughing loudly at the adorable confession, Ethan nodded: “God, I am terrified. Being a father, that brings so many possibilities to screw it up.”
Chiara cupped his cheeks and pulled him down for a kiss, their first real, deep kiss that day and as his tender lips moved over hers, she knew that there would be no better father for her child than Ethan Ramsey.
˜
One of the perks of being in her sixth month of pregnancy was the fact that her belly could easily serve as a tiny tea table. Right now, a large bowl of popcorn was sitting on her rounded torso as she was sitting on Bryce’s couch.
“The poor kid,” Bryce muttered as he noticed.
It was another Bryce & Chiara movies Wednesday, a habit that started even before Chiara and Ethan got together and carried on through the years.
With her third trimester slowly approaching, Chiara has been even more insistent on attending those, knowing that once she would give birth, they wouldn’t be able to watch a whole movie in one sitting.
“How is Ramsey? I haven’t seen him in the hospital this week,” Bryce asked as he put a glass of water in front of Chiara and played with a remote control to find the movie on Netflix.
“He’s busy with paperwork, so he mostly stays in his office these days,” Chiara explained. “Other than that, he has read two books about child’s development this week, so I guess everything’s as usual.”
Bryce laughed loudly and just before he pushed the ‘play’ button, he turned to Chiara: “Do you remember when you told me about not being able to have kids all those years ago?”
Chiara nodded, that day somehow still fresh in her mind.
“I told you back then, that you only had to find someone whose sperms will be stubborn enough to beat your own stubborn immune system, remember? Well, I was damn right,” he grinned smugly, earning a popcorn thrown into his head from Chiara.
On the other side of Boston, Ethan and Naveen just finished their meals and moved into the living room, glasses of scotch in their hands.
A comfortable silence accompanied them, their talks about work already finished.
Taking a few gulps of his drink, Ethan leaned into a couch with a soft smile on his lips.
“It’s going to be a girl,” he let out finally, his soft smile soon turning into a wide, happy one.
They only found out yesterday. Ever since beginning of the pregnancy, they couldn’t decide whether they wanted to know the gender of the baby or not. After long discussions – and Sienna’s suggestion that they should do a blood tests that would reveal the gender, give the results to her without looking at them so that she could organize a baby gender reveal party – they came to the agreement that they would only find out if the ultrasound would show it. And yesterday, in Chiara’s 25th week of pregnancy, the doctor informed them that their ‘princess’ is growing beautifully.
Neither Chiara nor Ethan wanted any kind of baby party organized – much to Sienna’s disappointment. This pregnancy – most likely the only one they would ever get to experience – has been such precious, sacred thing to them that they tried to keep everything as private as possible. They found joy in their bubble of emotions only two people who never believed would be this lucky could feel.
“A girl!” Naveen clasped his hands together and beamed even brighter than Ethan. “A granddaughter!”
Ethan nodded, the warmth in his chest expanding even more at Naveen’s words.
“Have you decided on a name yet?” he asked, his curious nature not letting him keep the question to himself.
Shaking his head this time, Ethan said: “Since the beginning, we’ve known that if it was a boy, he would be named Dorian after Chiara’s father. There have been some ideas about girls name, but nothing seemed right so far.”
The first idea they both had was Dolores. It came naturally to Ethan, knowing that she named her son after him and that his friend’s name deserved to be celebrated. Still, he didn’t want to be reminded of the tragedy every time he would talk to his daughter. Chiara has been very supportive about the name Dolores, knowing better than anyone what it felt like to want to name her child after someone important to her. But she never insisted. She could tell that simply thinking about Dolores Hudson made Ethan’s heart ache and she would never push the name on him.
“You seem lost in your thoughts,” Naveen commented. “Are you worried that your daughter will inherit your insufferable stubbornness?”
Ethan laughed at that, raising an eyebrow at his mentor and his friend.
“As if you didn’t know Chiara. The kid is going to be insufferably stubborn no matter who she takes after.”
The truth was, he did wish their daughter would take after Chiara. The idea of raising his own little self terrified him more than he would ever admit and on the other hand, the idea of having someone else as bright as Chiara in his life made his heart happy.
“Well, no matter who she takes after, it’s safe to say that she will be a strong girl,” Naveen smiled, raising his glass. “Beating all those odds and finding her way into your life, she is already a bigger rebel than any of us. She will be a warrior and a mighty one, I am telling you.”
˜
When Chiara returned home, she found Ethan deep in a research on his laptop.
He registered her presence only when she sat down next to him, taking a glance on the screen only to find yet another study about children.
“Hey,” he kissed her cheek and closed the laptop. “Did you have a good time?”
She laid down, putting her head into his lap. “The movie was terrible. I could feel my braincells leave my body. Other than that, yeah, it’s been great. Bryce is so excited about being an uncle to the ‘little queenie’. He said, to quote him, that he will make sure she sees him as an example of how gentlemen should treat their ladies, so that when she is dating she doesn’t settle for anything less than what she deserves.”
“That’s really… nice of him. Thoughtful,” Ethan nodded; however, his furrowed brows didn’t quite match the words. “I don’t think we need to talk about dating just yet, though.”
Of course he will be that kind of a father, Chiara thought, laughing.
“What were you reading about?” she decided to change the topic.
“Oh, I’ve been looking up baby carriers online and so I decided to read some articles and studies about them.”
“Baby carriers, huh? I never took you for someone who would want that.”
Ethan shrugged, fighting the temptation to read her all those articles. Instead, he went with simply pointing some interesting information.
“It helps to build a healthy attachment between a child and their parent. You know, you are carrying her in your body for nine months, you have a possibility of breastfeeding, you two are naturally connected. As a father, I would like to… increase my chances of bonding with my child properly,” he swallowed harder that he wanted, hoping that Chiara didn’t notice just how nervous about this whole attachment thing he’s become.
He was so excited to meet their daughter, to hold her in his arms, it sometimes surprised even him.
But there was another part of him. The one that constantly doubted his ability to be a good father. For such a long time he didn’t believe that he could ever find himself in the role of a parent and he got used to the idea, no matter how painful. He used to remind himself that it would be for the best if he never had them, that as a man unworthy of his mother’s love, he wouldn’t know how to be the parent his children deserved.
Everything has changed with Chiara in his life and now he was about to become a father. And he was scared that it would be the one task he would fail. He tried his best to be prepared – reading books and studies and articles, watching videos on how to bath a newborn and taking notes about how many layers of clothing was suitable for various temperatures. He made arrangements with Naveen and his team so that everyone knew that he would be stepping down as a head of diagnostics once the baby is born, with Aurora becoming the director of the team.
For more than fifteen years, he’s been building his career and he’s been proud of what he achieved. But there was no feeling connected with his career that would make him as proud as the idea of being a decent father.
“According to these studies, the position they are in while in a carrier helps the newborns with their colics and also there are children that don’t like being in a stroller and the carrier helps them to fall asleep.”
Chiara nodded, noticing absolutely clearly how nervous and overwhelmed Ethan was. She also knew why, even though he would never share his concerns with her.
“I kind of believe that. When I was born, I was the perfect baby. You know, the kid that everyone envied when my parents talked about me. I slept most of the day and then the whole night, I never cried, I smiled at everyone. My parents would joke that sometimes they forgot they had me. And Liam was very similar from what I can remember – and what my mother told me. He was such a cutie and even if he couldn’t fall asleep or calm down, a little bit of bouncing in a stroller and he would be fine,” she laughed softly as she was reaching the end – and the point – of her monologue. “My parents were so proud. They always said that they could only create the good sleepers that never cry. Probably encouraged by the belief, they decided to have a third child and God, Alicia was such a difficult baby. She would always cry and never sleep. The only thing that calmed her down enough to sleep was when someone carried her in their arms and walked around the house – so that’s what my parents did. All the time. Sometimes, when they’ve gotten too tired or needed to do something, they would put her into my arms – let me remind you that I was seven – and I would be in charge of walking around the house. I bet they would appreciate the baby carrier back then.”
Ethan chuckled softly while stroking Chiara’s wild hair and after a while decided to tell her the real reason he even browsed the internet this evening.
“I might have found a name.”
After Naveen left, something he’s said resonated with Ethan.
‘She will be a warrior and a mighty one.’
Ethan never cared about meanings of names, he didn’t even know the meaning of his own name until this evening. And yet, despite his best principles, he decided to search girls names that meant warrior or ‘strong, mighty’.
And he found it.
Mighty in battle.
It clicked.
“What name do you have in mind?” Chiara asked.
“Matilda.”
Chiara didn’t even try to suppress her surprise, expecting anything but Matilda. What surprised her even more, she loved it on the first hearing. It indeed was the one.
“I have also thought about the name a little bit,” she admitted. “I found one that I would love to be a second name for her.”
Nodding, Ethan encouraged her to spill it.
“Nekane.”
“Nekane? I have never heard of it.”
“It would be surprising if you did,” Chiara smirked. “It’s the Basque form for Dolores. And you know, since now we know for sure that our daughter has been conceived in Spain, I think it would be rather fitting. It would still carry the honor of Dolores, just in a different form.”
Matilda Nekane Ramsey.
They both loved the sound of that.
It sounded like their daughter.
After sharing another silent moment full of love, peace and understanding, Chiara decided to go to bed and Ethan promised to follow her as soon as he’d finish the study.
When Ethan stepped into their bedroom, Chiara was already asleep, lying on her right side. Climbing to the bed, he laid down on his left side so that he could face her. Suddenly, not knowing how the idea has gotten into him, he was shifting down slightly until he reached her round stomach.
Moving the fabric of her cotton shirt higher, he put his hand over her belly and did something he had never done before.
“Hello, Matilda,” he whispered nervously. “This is Ethan speaking. Your father. Or your dad, as you will probably call me. We have never really talked before but the annoying knocking you hear sometimes, that’s me stroking your mom’s bump.”
He paused for a while, composing his thoughts.
“I am sincerely scared about how this whole father thing is going to work for me, but I promise you as I am trying and I will by trying for the rest of my life. I have done a lot of bad things in my life, Matilda and I can’t take them back. They are part of who I am. But looking at your mother and thinking about you makes me realize that both of you are part of who I am too. And I don’t know in which point of my life the universe decided that I have shared enough kindness to earn your presence but I must have done something right to deserve you in my life, right?”
Kissing the skin of Chiara’s stomach, he added: “I just really hope you inherit your mother’s patience and kindness so that you will forgive me every time I fuck things up.”
Biting his lip, he grinned to himself before saying one last thing to his Matilda.
“Please don’t tell your mom I said ‘fuck’, she would be furious.”