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Seeing as Mac's head was buried in the toilet, Will volunteered to go pick up Charlotte from her friend Hannah’s birthday party.
“It's called morning sickness,” Mac moaned as Will gathered the hair off her neck and placed a cool, wet cloth there. “It's supposed to happen in the morning.” She rocked back on her heels and Will helped her to her feet, steadying her when she swayed slightly.
“Take it easy,” he murmured, helping her to the bed and pulling back the covers so she could climb underneath.
Mac's second pregnancy wasn't exactly planned—although it wasn't exactly not planned either.
A little after Charlotte turned two, they decided to start trying (“We're pretty good at this,” Will pointed out, and Mac, exhausted but incandescently happy, was forced to agree. They were good at it), but month after month, when it failed to happen, both were disappointed.
“If it happens, it happens,” Will declared, reclaiming his title as Director of Morale. He couldn't stand to see Mac that devastated, time and again. “If it doesn't happen, I'm still the luckiest son of a bitch in the world. I've got you. I've got Charlie. I've got more than I ever thought I'd have.”
So they weren't actively trying, and for the first few weeks, Mac chalked up her bone-aching tiredness to being the mother of a newly turned five-year-old. It was after she threw herself from the bed, falling in front of the toilet, several mornings in a row, that it occurred to her it could be anything more than that.
And this pregnancy had wiped her out. Just completely wiped her out. Exhaustion, headaches, crippling nausea that knocked her off her feet. She had been hoping to pick up Charlotte from the birthday party, spend the rest of the day just the three of them, maybe go and get hot chocolate at Charlie's favorite place (it was her favorite if only because the young man behind the counter always gave her a wink and extra marshmallows. Mac thought it was adorable, her daughter's starry eyed gaze up at the cute barista, but Will was far less amused. His irritation only added to Mac's entertainment).
Instead Mac knew that the day was a lost cause. She would be lucky if she was able to move from the bed to the couch.
“You sleep,” Will instructed. “I'm going to go get Charlotte, and maybe we'll go to the park or something. Keep her out of your hair and let her expend some energy.”
While they planned to have the conversation soon, they had not yet told Charlotte that she was going to be a big sister. Charlie knew something was amiss. She was too observant of a kid to not notice that some mornings her mother didn't join at breakfast, and that there were more frequently occurring occasions where Mac was still in bed when she got home from kindergarten.
Charlotte, having inherited her mother's empathy and her father's penchant for drawing the worst conclusion, was becoming increasingly worried about her mother, her little eyebrows sloping together in concern when Will mentioned that Mommy wasn't feeling too good.
The jig was going to be up sooner rather than later.
Especially since the moment Will suggested taking Charlotte to the park, a clap of thunder shook their building, and Mac gave her husband the tiniest of smiles.
“I think you're going to have rethink your park plan,” she said, and Will let out a sigh.
“You don't worry about it,” he said. “Just rest.” Mac made a noise in agreement and buried her head under the covers. Will slipped out of their bedroom and grabbed his coat and umbrella to go pick up his daughter.
His first clue that it was going to be a long afternoon was when Charlotte came bolting out of the party, running at him so quickly that she nearly knocked him off balance when she threw herself at him.
"Daaadddddyyyy!" She cried in excitement.
"Hi, sweetheart, did you have a good time at Hannah's party?" It was a good thing he had a grip on her, as Charlie flung herself backwards to hang upside down from his arms.
"Yep!" Will pulled her back up and she gave him a wide grin. "We had cake!"
Oh yeah. It was going to be a long afternoon.
While Will and Mac were the first to admit that they certainly weren’t perfect parents, they did at least try to keep Charlotte from overindulging in sugar (well, except for the bowl of Lucky Charms that she shared with her father every morning. And the mug of hot chocolate she and her mother had every afternoon when she came to Mac’s office after work. Well, and other than the candy that the staff snuck Charlotte on a near daily basis that they thought her parents didn’t know about. But other than that…), so when Will discovered that Charlotte had had a giant piece of chocolate cake with chocolate icing, on top of the pile of candy that had been in the pinata that Hannah’s parents had not stopped any of the children from eating, and the pixie sticks that Charlotte told Will were “really yummy, Daddy,” he knew that it was going to be a difficult afternoon.
Charlotte was going to be bouncing off the walls. She was going to go hard, and then she was going to crash.
And he was going to have to do his best to corral her, and keep her away from MacKenzie, who he was sure was still curled up in bed and in no shape to deal with a sugared-up Charlotte.
He barely managed to get her to sit still long enough to strap her into her car seat, her tiny feet kicking at the back of the passenger seat.
“Where’s Momma?” Charlotte chirped. “She said she was going to pick me up.” Every word was punctuated by a kick.
“She’s not feeling well, pumpkin, she’s at home,” Will explained.
“But we were going to get hot chocolate.” Kick. Kick. Kick.
“We can make hot chocolate when we get home, maybe we can make one for Mommy,” Will suggested.
“With marshmallows?” Charlotte shrieked, her voice hitting a decibel level that Will had not thought possible.
Oh sure, Will thought. Because what you need is more sugar.
“We’ll see,” Will hedged.
“Please? Please? Please, Daddy? Pleeeeeaaaasssssseeee?”
Will was over the moon about MacKenzie’s second pregnancy. He was overjoyed at the thought of another baby, but there were moments when he wondered just what in the fuck he and Mac were thinking, and in the car, Charlie’s feet drumming against the seat, her voice chirping, “please, Daddy, please” over and over again, was most definitely one of those moments.
The ride home felt eternal, and he tried, unsuccessfully, to get Charlotte to take it down a notch (or four, or five) before they got into the apartment.
“Remember, Mommy’s sleeping, okay?” He reminded her. “So we’re going to be quiet, right? So she can sleep?”
Fat fucking chance.
The second the door opened, Charlotte went flying through, throwing off her coat and flinging her rain boots in different directions. The treat bag from the party went skittering across the floor, toys and candy falling out, and Charlie was about to go racing down to the master bedroom when Will’s voice stopped her.
“Charlotte, what did I say about being quiet?” Charlotte turned to face Will, her hair falling out of a barrette and over her eyes, her little mouth turning downwards into a pout.
“But I wanted to tell Mommy about the party,” Charlotte’s bottom lip quivered and Will scrambled to do damage control before she let out an ear splitting wail (Charlotte had quite the set of lungs on her, and the staff knew to take cover when the bottom lip began to shake and her face screwed up. Her yells were usually loud enough to wake the dead, and they certainly were going to be loud enough to wake up MacKenzie).
“We can tell her later, baby,” Will tried, but Charlotte was too hopped up on sugar to be reasonable. They has passed reasonable a long time before. Reasonable was a distant memory to them now.
“But I want to tell her now,” Charlotte yelled, dissolving into tears and sliding bonelessly onto the floor.
Ah, shit, Will thought. (He was trying very hard not to use swear words around Charlotte, but it was fucking hard. Especially in moments like this where he was about to lose his goddamn mind.)
“Charlotte,” Will tried to use his stern voice, one that sometimes worked on his staff, but Charlotte gave him a side-eyed unimpressed look and continued with her tantrum.
“I want to see Mommy,” Charlotte screeched.
“Honey, please,” Will changed tactics.
It didn't work.
Charlie's screams echoed off the apartment walls and Will winced.
"Okay, okay, we can stop in and say hi to Mommy. Just for a minute." Charlotte's wailing ceased immediately, her head popping up as she gave Will a wide smile.
"Okay!" Shit. He'd been played so hard. At least that would brighten his wife's mood. She got a considerable amount of glee when it was confirmed that Will was the weak parenting link (like that was really ever up for debate). Charlie tore down the hall, throwing open the master bedroom doors before it occurred to Will to check first to see if Mac was in bed and not in the bathroom.
Fortunately, when Will arrived, a few steps behind, he saw Charlotte clambering onto the bed next to her mother. Mac gave him a side-eyed look eerily reminiscent of the one his daughter had given him only minutes before. He held up his hands in a helpless gesture.
"Lots of cake," he mouthed over Charlotte's head.
"How was the party, darling? Did you have some cake?" Mac asked innocently, Charlotte threw her head up and down in exaggeration.
“I made you a picture!” Charlotte jumped off the bed, landing on her feet with a thud, and racing back out of the room.
“If you can’t handle one on your own,” Mac teased. “How am I ever going to leave you with two?”
“I wasn’t the one who gave her the fucking cake,” Will muttered. “Or the candy. Or the pixie sticks.”
“Jesus Christ, pixie sticks?” Mac groaned. “That’s pure sugar. She’s going to crash.” She paused, and listened.
“What?” Will asked, noting her look of concern.
“She’s being awfully quiet,” Mac answered, throwing the covers off.
“I can go check on her. I really am capable of taking care of her,” Will argued.
“Despite the evidence to the contrary?” Mac shot back, but her words were softened by the smile she shot in his direction.
“Ha, fucking ha,” Will deadpanned. “Seriously, lay back down. You’re still looking slightly green.” Mac slid, gratefully, back under the covers and laid her pounding head down on the pillow.
She woke up a couple hours later to an ominously quiet apartment.
Thankfully, after being sick one last time, Mac was finally feeling human again. It was as if she was recovering from the world’s worst hangover, only without having had any of the fun first (although that wasn’t exactly true. What had gotten her into this situation certainly had been fun. It was just a different kind of fun).
When she emerged from the bedroom, she found Will scrubbing paint off of the wall.
“We should have known she was being too quiet,” Will said with a sigh when he spotted her.
“And where is our little Van Gogh?” Mac asked, not quite sure if she was amused or irritated by Charlie's work of art. Will pointed to where Charlotte was asleep on top of the coffee table, clutching a blanket, her tiny arm dangling off the side. Will had placed a ring of pillows on all sides of the table.
“I haven’t had a chance to move her yet,” Will answered. “I didn’t want to risk waking her until I had cleaned up a little bit.” Mac nodded, leaning down and brushing a kiss against the top of Charlotte’s head.
“You’ve had a day, haven’t you?” Mac asked him, sinking down onto the couch. She could see the damage around the apartment, and she had spent enough time with their daughter to know exactly how the last two hours of Will's life had gone. There was paint on the wall, toys scattered everywhere the eye could see, her dollhouse had been dragged from her bedroom into the living room (Mac had actually heard some muffled thuds coming from outside her door, but she had decided to ignore it. Part of her felt guilty for leaving it all in Will's more than capable hands, but the other part of her, the part that was still breathing out through her nose to stop from being sick, couldn't summon enough energy to care at the moment about what she would be walking out into when she finally got up), a piece of cheese was sticking to another wall, and Will looked worn the fuck out.
"I really think we should ban all birthday parties," Will sighed, dropping the rag and coming to sit down next to her. He picked up her hand and tangled their fingers together. Mac nodded, pretending to consider it.
"We're going to be in so over our heads in six months," Mac reminded him.
"Yeah," Will gave her a sideways grin. "I can't fucking wait."