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He hasn’t gotten much better at sleeping.
There were periods of exhaustion when the children were babies that made sleeping, at least when he had the time to sleep, more conducive, but now that Charlie is four and Teddy and Josie are in their own room and for the most part sleeping through the night (although Charlie has nightmares, often, or pretends to so that he’ll give her milk and animal crackers before tucking her back into bed and he realizes he should be better at telling Charlie no but twenty minutes at the kitchen island one night a week isn’t going to stunt her growth and he’d rather his daughter feel like she can come to him with her fears) he has no reason to be exhausted.
Besides, being a father means he wakes up at every stupid little noise thinking that he needs to reach for the baseball bat in the hall closet, but that’s more related to his own father than anything else.
For years, he couldn’t sleep past five without jolting awake, thinking someone was going to rip him out of bed. And for years, every noise on the other side of the wall and shadow under the door was Dad, and now every noise that wakes him up has him reaching for Mac on the other side of the bed, getting up to check on the kids on the other side of the large study separating their bedrooms.
It’s nicer, in a way, than being kept awake by his ruminations on self-loathing.
And it’s not like he smokes anymore, and what’s the point of brooding if he can’t chain smoke his feelings away to Van Morrison?
So it’s two in the morning, and he’s in the study, reading decade-old wire reports that Mac and Jim filed from Fallujah for an upcoming broadcast on the fifteenth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq when he hears his oldest daughter’s bedroom door open and her tiny voice call out, “Daddy?”
Blonde curls falling out of her braid and her pajamas askew, she appears in the doorway.
“What are you doing up, sweetheart?”
Her eyes are half-closed and sleepy, but even in the dim light he can see that they’re glazed over.
“I don’t feel good.”
She pads over to where he’s sitting at the desk with his laptop, her footed pajamas silent against the floor, and he quiets the instinct to tell her to stop dragging her blanket behind her. Pulling her up into his lap, he sees her forehead is dotted with sweat.
“What’s wrong?”
Charlie’s arms wrap around his neck and pushes her face into his shoulder. “I don’t feel good.”
Her much smaller body sags against him, and he has to hold her up to press the back of his hand against her forehead. “You have a fever.”
“Yeah. Fever,” she peeps. “I’m too hot.”
Kissing the top of her head, Will wraps his arms around her and stands up. “Okay, let’s go wake up Momma.”
“Momma knows what to do,” she says, going completely limp.
Mac has always been the pragmatic one of the two of them when it comes to parenting, except during the brief irrational hours of transition labor. As such, things tend to work out better when Mac is around so he’s not paranoid that he’s somehow misreading the label on the children’s Tylenol and giving their four-year-old an overdose of acetaminophen and sending her into acute liver failure.
“Momma always knows what to do,” Will murmurs, stooping to reach the doorknob so he can open the door to their bedroom. “That’s right.”
Mac wakes up as soon as the light from the study hits her side of the bed, rolling over and blinking her eyes open towards where he’s standing with Charlie in the doorway.
“Honey?” she murmurs, leaning up onto her elbows.
“The baby has a fever,” he says, walking to Mac’s side of the bed.
Charlie kicks at his thigh. “Not a baby.”
Frowning but distinctly amused despite what she’s trying to say with her face, Mac reaches up to take their daughter, pulling her tightly against her chest. “Come ‘ere, baby.”
Of course, their four-year-old doesn’t complain when Momma calls her that, and Mac grins, or would, if she wasn’t pushing Charlie’s blonde bangs off her forehead, pressing her lips there next.
“Oh, you’ll let Mommy call you baby, but not me—” he protests, holding up his hands when he gets glared at two of the three the women in his life; it’s quite the image. “Okay — fine, fine.”
Sighing, Charlie squirms down until her head is under Mac’s chin, and in turn, Mac lifts the tail of Charlie’s braid off the back of her neck to check her temperature there, as well, at which point he heads into their bathroom to grab the thermometer and wet a cold washcloth, and by the time he’s standing back at the edge of the bed Mac has Charlie out from under the covers and is stripping her out of her footed pajamas.
“Get one of my t-shirts,” she says, and Charlie pouts up at him as Mac pulls the elastic out from her hair to re-do her braid. And then Mac herself pouts. “She was feeling fine when I put her to bed earlier. Weren’t you honey?” Charlie, now sitting cross-legged in Mac’s lap in her Tinkerbell undies, nods. “Here, you’ll feel better with your hair off your neck.”
Instead of another braid, Charlie’s hair winds up in a tight bun on top of her head, and when Mac finishes both of their hands wind up patting down the fly-aways and he smiles when Mac grabs one of Charlie’s hands, brings it to her mouth, and kisses her chubby fingers.
A grin splits his daughter’s face, as miserable as she feels.
“Time to take your temperature, hon,” Will says, sitting down on the bed.
Humming, Mac’s arms wind up around Charlie’s waist, pulling her down to rest her head against her breasts and effectively pin down their very wary child. It takes three tries — “You have to keep your mouth closed until it beeps, Charlotte” — and a bit of coaxing — “Just do this and then we can give you some medicine, we’ll let you sleep in our bed tonight” — for her to let the damn thing stay in her mouth to give an accurate reading, and ten minutes later they’re squinting down at the 101.4 on the tiny digital screen, and mentally revisiting the preschool’s policy on fevers and illness and revising their schedules for the day.
She’ll go in earlier than usual, move all pertinent meetings to the morning, and clear her afternoon schedule except for anything she can do from home, and he’ll make it in for the two o’clock rundown meeting and come home right after broadcast.
(They’ll make it work; they always have, even if it means he only gets to put the kids to bed on the weekends and the meal they all sit down together for is breakfast, not dinner. In some ways, Mac being President of ACN has made it easier to keep their son and daughters from being raised by a nanny.
Although rarely being home for bath time means he’s sorely lacking in the ability to make the girls' hair look presentable. He is the one who dresses them, though, for better or for worse.)
After the negotiations to get Charlie to let them take her temperature, they decide on a different tactic for getting her to take the recommended two teaspoons of Tylenol. Less coercion, this time. At least a first.
(Charlie doesn’t care if it’s cherry flavored or bubblegum flavored or grape flavored, if it’s medicine she’ll demand the moon in exchange for taking it and most of the time he winds up convinced he should find a way to give it to her, which is another reason he woke up Mac for this.
Mac runs the best cable news network in the country and he somehow manages to pull off a nightly broadcast watched by over two million people and manage a staff of over a hundred but maybe that’s the reason the universe has decided to bless them with a child who does a solid impression of someone being tortured anytime they try to give her medication.)
“Oh, you don’t feel well, do you baby?” Mac coos, rocking Charlie in her lap.
Closing her eyes, she shakes her head. “Nuh-uh.”
“Too sick to go to school?” he asks, taking the cold washcloth and pressing to Charlie’s forehead.
She nods, settling against Mac. “Uh-huh.”
“Too sick to sleep in your own bed?”
“Yeah.”
This is the point where he starts to genuinely feel bad, because after thirty seconds of being somewhat horizontal she’s falling asleep, and even in the dim light he can see the faint flush across her cheeks and chest and the words Just leave her be are very much on the tip of his tongue.
Mac leans down to kiss the top of her head, brushing her hands down Charlie’s arms and legs, and he remembers that he was supposed to get her a t-shirt to substitute for the thick fleece pajamas she was put to bed in. “I don’t know, Daddy, I think our baby needs some medicine so she doesn’t feel so sick. I hate it when she’s this sick.”
Squirming, Charlie becomes very much awake again. “I don’t need—”
“I think you do. If you don’t take it, you won’t feel any better, and then we’ll have to take you to the doctor and she’ll give you more medicine to take,” Mac explains, in a tone of voice that is gentle but stern, and not entirely unlike the tone of voice she also takes when he drags his feet on employee evaluations, except that conversation usually ends with a I can only defend your laziness to Pruitt for so long before he accuses me of being unduly influenced by a certain blonde lout and if I’m going down, I’m bringing you with me.
“No, I don’t wanna go to the doctor—” Charlie whines, kicking her feet.
He gets up to get the shirt from Mac’s dresser to hide his grin. “Then you’ll take your medicine for me and Momma?”
They pull the heather grey shirt (it’s not until the hem is pulled down to Charlie’s knees that he sees MARINE CORPS in faded black lettering on the front) over her head rather than to let her give them an immediate answer.
“Of course she will,” Mac answers, kissing Charlie’s head again. “She’s doesn’t feel well, after all.”
And so, with a considerable frown (that Mac’s claims resembles his own) but little complaint, their daughter swallows the recommended dose of Tylenol, grimaces, and (sounding entirely too much like Leona Lansing, if Will’s being honest) demands a glass of water. Which he figures is entirely reasonable, so he again gets up off the bed to go to their bathroom, and rinses out the cup he uses when he brushes his teeth and fills it with the coldest water that will come out of the tap. Then reroutes to the study to turn off the lights in there, then to the window on Mac’s side of the bed to turn on the nightlight.
By the time he’s easing under the covers on his side of the bed their daughter is a blonde head peeking out from under the middle of the duvet. Mac, humming softly, is on her side facing the center of the bed, her free hand dabbing the abandoned washcloth to Charlie’s face and neck and wrists.
It’s quite the image.
Charlie gulps down the water quickly and slumps back down into the divot between his and Mac’s pillows. She tosses restlessly, disturbing the mattress more than someone who barely weighs forty-five pounds has any right to before finally burrowing against his chest.
For now, at least. Their baby never manages to stay still for long, even when she’s sleeping, even when she was still in Mac’s stomach.
Cradling her head, he reaches behind him for his BlackBerry to send an email to Jim to explain the situation. Two feet away, Mac is doing the same on her own phone, probably sending a message to Millie to rearrange her schedule and warning Pruitt (or threatening him, it’s a fifty-fifty shot) of her decreased availability. The glare off the screens lights up both their faces, and Mac finishes first, tossing her phone back onto her nightstand.
“I’ll aim to get into work at eight, I'll take Teddy and Josie with me... drop him off at daycare and keep her with me in my office.” she murmurs, moving closer to them. “If I work straight through lunch I could probably get back here a little after one. It’s a pretty quiet day. A lot of paperwork I can do here, and provided no one screws anything up in primetime — although I can always just call in and make the switchboard put me in the control room.”
Will snorts. “Are you saying that only primetime screws up?”
“Well, LA rarely does anything exciting enough to cause a screw up,” Mac says with a smirk, curling her knees up until they’re resting against the front of his thighs, effectively trapping Charlie between them. “Maybe I’ll go in at seven and breathe down Tony Hart’s neck for a bit. Is she already asleep?”
Craning his head down, he sees that Charlie has curled her fingers into the knit of her blanket and her eyes have closed, her breathing evened out.
“Yup,” he says, attaching one last document to his email to Jim and sending it off. “And you should go back to sleep.”
“Hmm… what time is it?” she asks, moving in even closer, until her nose is pressed to their daughter’s freshly-washed hair.
“Half past. Almost half past two.”
Mac closes her eyes and sighs. Under the sheets, he feels her hand land on his hip. “Give her more Tylenol when she gets up, I’ll probably be gone.”
“It’s every four hours?” he asks.
“Yeah,” she answers quietly.
“Okay. Get some sleep.”
“Okay.”
Nodding, her fingers tighten where they’re resting at his side. In a few moments her face slackens like Charlotte’s, breathing evening out in time with the little girl snuggled between them — quite the image.
He’s not much more tired than he was half an hour ago, but watching his wife and daughter while they sleep is at least a step in the right direction.
Okay.