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It’s two lines that turn their life around, literally .
“Are you even sure you did it correctly...” he inquires, holding Mona’s hand up to prevent it from shaking.
“What—like there’s a wrong way to pee in a stick?” she retorts, hey eyes glued to the pregnancy test.
“You peed on this? That’s gross!” he yanks his hand from hers, reaching for the sink to wash his hands. She rolls her eyes, “You’ve done worse things… don’t get me started on the things you ask for in the bedroom.”
He brushes his hands against his hair and turns away from her. If he wasn’t careful, he might just have a panic attack, but he keeps it inside, and turns back around. He peers at the pregnancy test from her shoulder, his head propped up against it and his arms wrapped around her waist. They’re crammed in this tiny bathroom in their one-bedroom apartment, the space feeling tighter with the coming presence of another person in the room.
The two lines were clear, and could not be mistaken.
“So you really are pregnant, huh.” he sighs, “Does that mean we can’t have sex anymore?”
She manages to stifle a laugh, “You fucking pervert!”
He doesn’t know how to take care of a child. Yes, Tartaglia is a baby hidden under the body of a 6-foot-something man , but an actual child… the concept is lost on Scaramouche. Ever since seeing the two lines of fate (or doom), he couldn’t help but avert his gaze into Mona’s stomach whenever he sees her. He wonders about how it works: how could a child grow in her stomach when she can barely keep in a few shots of vodka? Even more importantly— how will she give birth? She squirms when my d—
“Does it hurt?” he asks Mona, who is idly sipping tea by the counter.
“What does?”
“Your stomach. Does it hurt right now?”
She looks at her stomach before giving an answer, “No it doesn’t. Why?”
He doesn’t know why.
In their first visit to the doctor, he gets asked to stay outside while Mona gets asked some personal health questions. In the Obstetrician wing of the hospital, he sits there slouched to this phone, cramming as much knowledge about babies as he could into his brain. His Google searches:
How to take care of baby
What can you feed baby
Wife pregnant what to do
Helping pregnant wife
How do pregnant people give birth
Are weird pregnancy cravings real
What can babies eat
He almost laughs at himself upon the state that he’s in. It’s just a tiny human, he assures himself almost half-heartedly, you’ve dealt with tiny humans before . But this one was different, it was their tiny human, and albeit his misgivings and cracks in his vessel he wants to try and not break it, though he fears that the first time he holds the child, it will fall to the ground and crack, like the porcelain vase he gave her on one of their many anniversaries, like him when he fell into a spiral to which is own parents led him to.
There is no time to think about such things, he realizes, when he is called into the room.
Mona looks at him when he admits to the things he doesn’t understand, and the things he has never had the chance to know. He feels shameful almost, his eyes averting her gaze. He knows that look, when her eyes shift and it just peers into your soul, screaming I understand . It stirs up a conflicting feeling within him, seeking to be understood and not at the same time. It feels pathetic almost, that she has to worry about one baby and another, in the form of the man who's partially responsible for the growth of another baby in the first place.
“It’s okay, you know…” she trails off, her voice soft.
“It’s not, I’m sorry,” he puts his head against her shoulder, his walls crumbling apart, this; his only source of stability. She takes her hands and rubs his back, easing up the tension welling inside him. “I feel pathetic.”
She kisses his head, her hands soft against his back, palms pressed against it firmly as she tries to ease him.
“Well it’s pretty hilarious that you searched about weird pregnancy cravings…” she laughs at her own joke. He manages to let out a small one, a tiny ha that resonated in the entire living room.
They fall silent after that, Mona focused on her efforts to calm him down. He doesn’t end up telling her everything, he doesn’t even end up telling her that it wasn’t funny at all. He finds it laughable that in his entire life, a body of knowledge so vast, he has no idea how to ease himself into familial relationships. His mind transported back to when they first began, and until to when they started living together. Nothing came good when it was his turn to call the shots, hell, nothing ever came good from the way he tried loving her in the beginning. Rough and overwhelming, like diving headfirst into an 8-feet pool without any prior preparation. He just jumps and ropes her into it, not because he wanted to, but because it’s all he’s ever known.
Darkness, he realizes, is all he’s ever known.
It takes Mona a while to anchor him to earth. Break-ups, falling outs, moving out. The endless cycle of pain that falls before them until the puzzle pieces manage to come together and form a picture. Scaramouche becomes well-aware of the fact that a lot of it is his fault: how he deals with anger should not be the way he deals with love. This, he learns throughout the years.
The nights plague him like a thunderstorm. In his mind, he’s transported back to Inazuma, lost on the many alleyways in his city. His back: illuminated by the neon lights and the bustling nightlife, but he cannot make himself turn around, thus forced to look into the darkness before him. The noises are blurred in his head, focused on the static silence creeping up in his face. He was scared, yes, but he clenches his fist and buries it all deep, the first of the many times he’ll ever do the gesture in his life. He doesn’t dare to step forward, instead tries his best to look around:
“Mommy…?”
No answer . He daren’t say the word again ever since.
“You’re going to be a mommy, Miss Mona?” Klee asks joyfully in one of their playdates. She hums in response, continuing to braid her hair. Klee’s unworldly enthusiasm keeps her from staying in one place, excitement running through her veins. She stays still for a moment, before turning her head to Mona once more, “When the baby is here, you’ll let them play with Klee, right? Klee’s going to be a very good big sister, I promise.”
Scaramouche looks at them from the coffee table. He’s never realised how Mona fit so well into the maternal role, her hands delicate, her gaze soft. Her voice modulated, knowing how to talk to children so well. Albedo praises her, even, for being able to keep Klee down, as much as you can keep her down that is. It feels depressing how he has to rely on her to keep his head above water, although at the end of the day it seems like he has no other choice.
He marvels at this scene he’s watching, Klee and Mona simply laughing together and talking. Their voices are muffled, but he smiles, and in his attempt to ground himself, thinks: That is my wife. And then we’ll have a child just like her.
His train of thought breaks when Klee acknowledges his presence.
“Mister Scaramouche! Can you take a picture of us?” she asks politely, handing Albedo’s phone to him (which she pickpocketed from him just as he was leaving for work earlier today, poor Albedo) with both of her hands. He takes it, and she hurriedly skips over to Mona’s lap. Through the camera, he sees a clearer picture of them both, their smiles wide.
That is my wife.
They have sex that night, Scaramouche making a mental note to handle her gently. He takes her in his arms, holds her tight, and eases himself in slowly. It’s slow, he can almost take his time to listen to her moans and revel in it-songs to his ear. When they’re done, she lies on his chest, tracing lines on it with her fingertips.
“I feel like our baby just got grossed out by us,” he jokes. He’s actually very serious.
She laughs idly, too tired to say anything else. She hasn’t fallen asleep in his chest like this in a long time, always the type to need to shower before sleeping. But that night, she gives in, in his arms, her breaths slow and relaxed. This too, relaxes him, stroking her hair until he too gives in to the night.
And then he’s back again in Inazuma, in a different time. He can’t see anything clearly, no matter how much he rubs his eyes to clear his vision. These hands feel small against my face , he thinks.
“You’re going to have to be on your own soon…” a female voice says, tone distant. He wants to speak, but his mouth doesn’t move.
He feels a hand on his head, brushing out his hair gently.
“...no more space for another one…”
“...don’t worry, they’ll find you, you won’t be stray for long…”
He jolts back into consciousness, cold air surrounding him. Mona feels this too, instinctively rubbing her hand against his back so as to say, “ I’m here. This is reality. Welcome back,” while he navigates through his heavy breathing.
It lasts for a few minutes, until Mona sits up and faces him. “Hey,” she hums, “What happened?”
He doesn’t answer, at least not for a while. She understands, softly reaching into his face and brushing the hair away, the gesture painfully familiar to Scaramouche. But this feels different, he knows this much. It feels real, as if she could brush his fears and nightmares away through a single gesture. She cups his face with her hands when she’s done, caressing his cheeks. “It’s okay, you’re here.”
Mona understands little of Scaramouche’s background, his insistence to forget his past, strong. She doesn’t press on the matter, because she, too, understood the feeling of tucking away parts of yourself you find repulsive. It’s an open secret between them, these uncharted lands that occasionally slip up in forms of nightmares and idle mumbling. He puts his hand above hers, absorbing this reality. She’s here, I’m here.
She plants a kiss on the tip of his nose, her lips tender. Maybe it upsets her that she’s unable to chase away these demons that continuously haunt him, but pasts hidden away, as painful as they are, can only be comforted through a grounding reality. She knows it’s not her fight, it’s not her mission to fix his regrets and his misgivings, and so she settles: she guides him home when his nightmares lead him too far from her.
He slowly relaxes in her hold, pressing his forehead against hers. “You should be asleep,” he starts. “There’s a baby inside you.” But in many ways, he too feels like an infant in her arms. Maybe he hasn’t grown at all, maybe the reason why Inazuma haunts him in his dreams is because in more ways than one, he is still that boy.
“I cannot help you if you don’t tell me.”
“It’s nothing,” he exhales. She doesn’t believe him, but knows him well enough to not be any more persistent than she already was. She trusts, perhaps, that he would eventually come around to telling her.
She manages to coax him to lie down with her, her hand lying atop his chest. Singing a familiar melody, lulling him to sleep.
“Look, I don’t know what you’re asking of me,” Tartaglia starts, sinking into an armchair. “It’s simple, you just carry them when they cry and feed them when they keep on crying.” he adds, putting a cigarette in between his lips. He gestures the carton towards Scaramouche, to which he shrugs him ‘no’.
“A changed man, I see.” he teases, lighting his cigarette before taking a small puff.
“You’re comically useless.” Scaramouche says, leaning his head against his hand that’s propped up on the arm rest. “One would think you’d offer better advice than whatever bullshit you just said out loud. And shouldn’t you be not smoking inside your own house?”
Tartaglia blows the smoke in his direction, earning a wince in Scaramouche’s face. He laughs, “C’mon! I was just joking. Truth be told, I don’t know how to help you either. A child’s different from a sibling, you know?”
He raises an eyebrow. Different? “It’s both small people. What’s the difference?”
Tartaglia laughs again, “Hahaha! You’re so entertaining today!” Scaramouche’s free hand clenching into a fist. Tartaglia relaxes his face, before turning serious. “Buddy, I think there’s a big difference between something you made and something that’s just being given to you. I wouldn’t know that, I haven’t gotten anyone pregnant yet. But you’ll see what I mean when it comes to fruition.”
Scaramouche ponders upon that for a while.
“Mister Scaramouche, come, come! Look, I made you and Miss Mona into Dodocos!” Klee says sing-songily, tugging at his arm and bringing him to the table which her sketchbook was. Mona had to attend to some work matters, and so he’s left alone in their shared weekend babysitting duty. He tried getting out of it, even roping Tartaglia in the scheme, but even the ginger-haired crackhead wouldn’t cooperate. Hang out with Klee , he said. It’ll be fun!
She excitedly flips through the pages until she lands on the one she was pertaining to earlier, tugging at him again to call his attention. He looks, and there it was: Dodoco versions of him and Mona, her with her twin tails and him in his, as Tartaglia puts it, “Lovechild between bowl cut and mullet”. Klee looks at him, eyes wide, expecting a response.
“It looks so cute, Klee,” he comments, a satisfied grin forming in her face. “I know, right! And then, I can put your baby in the middle...hmm…what do you think, Mister Scaramouche?”
He doesn’t know what to think of it. For so long it has only been him and Mona, and how it’s going to be him and Mona and someone else. It feels foreign to him, still unable to grasp the idea. In his mind, as long as it hasn’t come out yet, he can pretend it doesn’t exist (Mona’s growing baby bump screaming at his face).
“That would be nice,” a giggle coming out of her in response as she scampers around the living room to look for her crayons.
She asks him to braid her hair later that day, before he leaves.
“But ah, I don’t know how… what if I get your hair tangled up and we can’t fix it?”
“Don’t worry! We can cut it off! Won’t Klee look good with short short hair?”
He realizes there’s no escaping this crimson menace. And so, he props her in between his legs, his phone propped up on his knee as he follows a YouTube tutorial of how to braid hair. The tutorial says it’s similar to rope, albeit more delicate. I got this , he reassures himself.
Upon catching a handful of her hair, he freezes. It’s so delicate, much more fragile than Mona’s hair when he brushes it in their idle moments. And then he realizes: her head is so small, much smaller than Mona’s head that he just casually holds from time to time. And then her figure: she was so tiny, so much energy condensed into this small human being. All this hits him slowly, and then all at once. This is what a child looks like, and this is what he will have soon. And then he gets hit again by another train of thought:
This is what he looked like when he was thrown into the pits in Inazuma.
Mona doesn’t question why she had to pick him up from Klee’s place that night, tears in his eyes, quiet. She only holds his hand in the drive home.
As the months close in on them, they begin to scour the shops for baby-related items. On her third trimester, still not knowing the gender of the baby. It’ll be a surprise , Mona says, and somehow he feels comfort in not knowing. Scouring the shops for appropriate cribs, bassinets, stuffed animals, and clothes, he lets Mona do all of the decision-making.
“I’m just here to pay, wife. Just like old times,” he manages to joke. She hums in agreement, focused on picking out the best items. Very rarely she indulges in expensive things, but as Scaramouche examines the receipts they have gathered at the end of the day, he begins to think that Mona has been reserved all this time only to splurge on all of these baby items.
(She manages to make everything star-themed. Who is the baby here again?)
He helps her put away their purchases at the end of the day, feeling particularly proud of the way he can neatly fold up baby clothing. When he finds the little galaxy-print pyjamas, he pauses, and holds it up.
“This is so small.” he says, as a matter-of-fact.
“Of course it is.”
“And how big are they in your stomach now?”
She makes a gesture with her hands, “About this big.”
“Holy shit.”
Silence. He returns to packing up the rest of the clothes, putting them in neat little drawers as she folds the paper bags away.
“Mona,”
“Hmm?”
“How did you feel.. you know, when you found out?”
“That I was pregnant?”
“Yeah.”
She pauses for a moment, thinking about her answer. “I don’t know. I think I was scared at first. I mean, I still am now—there’s still a lot of things that could go wrong—but I’m grateful too. My mother told me a child is a blessing from the stars.”
“It is?”
“Yeah,” she says, “I mean, children don’t ask to be born, right? But when they are, we have to take care of them and treasure them. It sort of becomes our responsibility to protect them until they’re ready to stand on their own.”
If he loses grip of reality for a second, he might just return to his Inazuman nightmares right then and there.
“I could only hope we could love them with as much love we give each other, if not more,” she adds, before going back to what she was doing.
“I’m actually pretty scared, you know…” he trails off, hoping she wouldn’t catch what he just said.
She moves closer to him, hugging him from behind. “I know.”
He turns around to face her, kissing her forehead before pulling her in for an embrace. He squeezes her arms, as he does when he has to tell her that he’s trying, when he has to assure her that he’s going to keep it together. A message that translates on its own in Mona’s head without any words, this method of correspondence coming into them naturally ever since they started dating. They stay silent for a while. He tries to imagine the blob in his wife’s stomach: how it could potentially become another Klee, explosive and cheerful. Or something the opposite, quiet and reserved. He tries to imagine the face, the complexion, the voice.
It’s our responsibility to protect them until they’re ready… I could only hope we could love them with as much love we give each other…
He feels something shift in Mona’s stomach.
“Fuck,” she says, pulling out of the embrace, hands on her stomach.
“What, what’s going on? Do we need to go to the hospital?”
“Holy shit, fuck, Scara—“ she sits down. If he wasn’t already burdened with worry then, he’s definitely worried now. He rushes to her, kneeling to level with her.
“Are you okay?” he asks gently, his hands on her face.
“I think the baby just kicked,” she says, grabbing his hands and placing them on top of her bump.
They are both silent for a moment, interrupted when he feels the muscle shift.
“Oh fuck,” is all he manages to get out. It’s real. It’s very real and it’s inside her. It’s real, they made that and it’s real.
He looks at her, tears streaming down her face as she smiles at him.
It’s real.
Months pass by quickly, his nightmares failing to catch a chance to haunt him as he inevitably stays up all night to attend to his wife. He’s burdened with worry, sleeping lightly now as her movements at night wake him up. What if she needs something? What if she falls into labour and he wouldn’t be awake? What if some accident happens and he can’t respond quickly? He ends up falling asleep at work, Tartaglia laughing at him as he enters the office with under eye circles darker than the day before, a cup of coffee in hand.
“ScaRacoon, you can sleep in the conference room if you’d like,” he manages to churn out through his laughter.
All the anxiety welling up inside him reaches its peak as he waits outside the delivery room, pacing in circles for the past hour. He wasn’t allowed in, and he was almost grateful . His mind is empty and full at the same time, switching back and forth in between the lives he has lived. He peers into the incubation room, looking at the array of babies there. They all look the same , he mumbles in his mind. How can someone form such an intimate connection with a blob such as that? He couldn’t differentiate who was who among the array of babies. Even in Mona’s ultrasound photographs, he couldn’t even make out where the human was. What if I don’t recognise my own baby when it comes out, and we pick up the wrong one on our way home? And Mona will hate me forever because I’m so incompetent and I’ll lose everythi—
“Sir, your wife has delivered a healthy baby girl. You can come see her now.”
He freezes from where he was standing.
It takes everything in him to not stumble on his way to her bedside. She was sweaty and worn out, but the red in her cheeks were so beautiful, her attention all on the baby nestled beside her. This sight beholds him: my wife and my child.
My wife. My child.
Noticing his presence in the room, she smiles, motioning her head so as to tell him to come closer. He grabs a stool from the corner of the room, and sits beside her, putting his hands on her, stroking her head.
“How did it go?”
“Horrible,” she says, motioning him to come closer. “They couldn’t put the anesthesia correctly , I don’t want to do this again.”
He stifles a laugh, “I can sue these people, just say the word.“
They share a giggle. He focuses his attention on the baby beside her, and his heart falls to the floor. She was nothing like the babies he saw in the incubation room earlier, this much to him was clear. She has his hair, her rosy, plump cheeks. He reaches his hand to this child, hesitating before fully reaching out to her. Mona eases him into it, and before he knew it the baby is in his arms.
He feels overwhelmed, Tartaglia’s words resounding in his brain, “A child is different from a sibling”. He remembers when he held Klee, oh, how dainty, how delicate children are.
She’s fragile in his arms, eyes closed, sleeping resoundly. “She barely cried,” Mona hums. “They thought she was dead. I simply thought she got your strength.”
He doesn’t say anything, hyper-fixated on rocking the baby slowly. Mona watches them, her husband and child . A family she has for herself, a family that can start anew.
“She’s beautiful,” he whispers, nestling the baby back into her arms.
“She is, isn’t she?” she says, cooing the sleeping baby. He lets them stay like this for a while, drowning in this joy he feels welling up inside him, drowning out the fear he’s harboured for so long.
His wife and his child.
For a brief moment, his mind takes him back to Inazuma once more, but he dashes back to reality before he can even be further thrown into his personal abyss. His trauma, fresh in his mind still—he remembers all this too well: the neglect, the abandonment, the listlessness that ate him up as he struggled to walk the earth in his own, tiny shoes until someone picked him up. A pain he is most familiar with, a violent life he is most acquainted by. This is all fresh in his mind as he looks at Mona cradling their child , and so he swears to himself that he would build them a home so strong, keep them safe from any storm that may fall. Darkness envelopes him throughout his life, chaining him to a certainty of unhappiness. At the end of all things, it’s him who stops himself from drowning in the pleasures in his life. But the sight before him is marvelous: being transported into outer space to be within the embrace of the stars. In a rare moment of acceptance and openness, he reaches out to the lights before him, its warmth finally allowed in his soul.
He lets himself relish in the chance of a happy family.