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“I want to have a baby.”
Claire, behind the wheel, choked. “What?” she managed through a mouthful of cheeseburger, a bit of ketchup smeared on her cheek.
Kaia leaned over and wiped it off with a napkin. “I just…thought it might be nice.”
“‘Might be nice’ is what you say about a kitten, Kai, not a baby .” Claire frowned, fixing her gaze on the interstate ahead. She hit the power button on the radio, shutting off the third straight hour of Zeppelin. If I wanted to marry Dean Winchester, Kaia had said wryly. I would have.
In the backseat, Skywalker barked nervously, off-put by the sudden tension in the car. The huge golden retriever was technically Claire’s dog, but Kaia was his favorite a hundred times over and all three of them knew it. “Hush,” Claire told him, shooting him a look in the rearview mirror. “The grownups are talking.” Sky whined, but was otherwise silent.
Claire squeezed the bridge of her nose, a telltale sign a headache was coming on. “Where is this coming from, Kaia? If it’s about missing Jack, after this hunt we can stop by the bunker for a few days-”
“It’s not about Jack,” Kaia said softly. “Well…maybe a little bit. But I don’t just want to see Jack, not anymore. I want a kid, our own kid. Just think about it, just for a second. A little kid running around the cabin, playing with Sky and harassing the cats-”
Claire jerked the wheel and pulled off onto the nearest exit at the last minute, practically skidding into the shoulder. Kaia yelped, grabbing at the handle on the top of the door. “What the hell, Claire?”
She looked over, ready to start shouting, and then she noticed that Claire was shaking. She reached out, placed a gentle hand on her shoulder. “Hey, honey.” She rubbed her shoulder gently. “Honey, put the car in park.”
Quivering, Claire obeyed. As soon as she did, Kaia unbuckled her seatbelt and crawled over to Claire’s side of the front seat. She sat down at her side and eased an arm around her shoulders; leaned her head into the crook of her neck. After a second, the stiffness oozed out of her and Claire leaned into her, turning to hide her face in Kaia’s hair.
“I’m sorry,” Kaia said softly. “If you don’t want-”
“No.” Claire shook her head rapidly; her voice cracked jaggedly and something inside Kaia curdled at the palpable pain. “No, it’s not that I don’t want it. It’s that I do. ”
“You do?” Kaia stiffened slightly with surprise.
“Yeah.” Claire managed a shaky nod. “If everything was normal, Kaia, I-” Her hand found Kaia’s and grasped it tight, tight, so tight it hurt a little. She didn’t pull away. “But it’s not. And we’re hunters. And there’d be no keeping our kid out of this horseshit! You think I could let my kid - my baby - anywhere near a vamp or a shifter or any of the ugly fuckers, and live with myself?”
She looked up; her eyes were swollen red and wide with panic. “And if anything happened to us - you were in the system too, you remember it! Group homes, foster care, living out of a trash bag, Kaia -” She sobbed, and her breath hitched in her chest. Kaia pulled her closer, and Claire fell into her, burrowing into her arms and hiding her face in her chest. She was still shivering. Kaia pulled her tighter and dropped a kiss on the top of her head; she’d carried Claire through enough of her moments by now.
Guilt dropped like a stone in her stomach. Claire was right, completely. The only reason Kaia had wanted a baby was because she wanted one. She’d let herself get carried away in white picket-fence delusions of a normal house and a normal family and a normal life, one where Claire worked a job that didn’t bring her home bloody and Kaia didn’t spend her evenings poring over lore books and stitching up cuts. But that wasn’t reality. She and Claire lived thankless, dangerous, bloody lives. The cabin in North Dakota they lived in between hunts was isolated and packed with weapons. And they couldn’t even get through a night without one of them waking up screaming. Sometimes Kaia wished Jack had never walked into her rehab center in the first place and all this shit had passed her right by, and she’d been old enough to have something of a choice in the matter. This was no life to force a kid into with no choice at all.
Claire wiped at her eyes; she looked embarrassed. She wouldn’t meet Kaia’s eyes. “I - I’m sorry. I shut you down-”
“You should have,” Kaia said firmly. “You’re right. It’s not - it wouldn’t be fair. Not to them.”
Claire sat up stiffly, still dabbing at her eyes with her sleeves. “Kaia…if you don’t want-”
“Don’t say something dumb,” Kaia said warningly.
“-to hunt anymore, to try for a normal life, a normal family, I won’t-” She swallowed hard. “I’ll let you go. Help you with new papers, even-”
Kaia sighed. “That was something dumb. One of the dumbest things you’ve ever said, actually.”
She leaned in and kissed Claire fiercely, wove a hand into her soft blonde hair and just took her in. She tasted like salt. There was hard muscle under the hand still on Claire’s shoulder; lithe, wiry, athletic, a hunter’s body. Claire brought her hands up against Kaia’s chest, gently furling them around small fistfuls of her shirt. The dichotomy of it always struck her, watching Claire break and get broken and throw hard punches and kill, and then handle Kaia like she was made of glass. For all her strength, Claire still chose to be gentle, and there was something beautiful in how she smoothed out her rough edges so Kaia wouldn’t get cut.
She finally pulled away, just a few inches, her nose still brushing Claire’s. “This is my life,” she whispered into the tiny space between them. “And this is my family. I don’t want to go anywhere you’re not.”
Claire leaned in and kissed her again. Softer, sweeter, a little wet with tears still.
“So,” Kaia said, when she broke away again. “Just us. No kids.”
Claire jerked her thumb towards the backseat, a mock-hurt look on her face. “How could you say that in front of our son? You’re hurting his feelings, Kaia.”
Sky barked in agreement. Kaia rolled her eyes and shoved Claire’s shoulder gently, sliding back over to her seat. “Shut up and drive. Vamps won’t cut their own heads off.”
“Be nice if they did,” Claire mumbled, putting the car back in drive.
They were home for once when the phone rang. Not their cellphones, either; the landline they’d had installed when they’d bought the place. More and more often these days people were wanting to speak to the FBI directors who’d sent agents out to their confusing cases, and Claire had taken to playing fed whenever an injury kept her home. She started to haul herself up from where she’d been sprawled out on their living room floor before the crackling fireplace, nursing a flask of whiskey and journaling in her leather-bound notebook, but Kaia beat her to it. “ You’re supposed to stay off your feet - I’ll get it.”
The whiskey must have been boosting her mood, because Claire nodded easily and returned to her scribbling. Kaia rounded the corner and picked up the phone. “You’ve reached the office of the Federal Bureau of Investig-”
“Cut the act, Kaia, it’s me.”
“Jody? ” Kaia laughed softly, dropping the professional, crisp tone she used for the fed office line. “Hi! How are you?”
“I’ve been better,” Jody admitted; her voice was uncharacteristically grim. “God, I’m getting too old for all of this. You guys are home?”
“Yeah.” Kaia leaned against the cabin wall, letting her eyes close and just listening to Jody’s voice. It’d been too long since either of them called. “Claire wrecked her ankle working a shifter in Duluth last week.”
“How long?”
“Um…” Kaia brought a hand to her temple; the very thought of how long Claire was supposed to stay off her feet made her head pound preemptively. “Three pins in it say a couple of months at least, but she’s already going stir-crazy. I might not be able to talk her off the ledge if something easy comes up. Why?”
There was a sudden sound on the other end; with a start, Kaia realized that it was a baby crying. “Jody?!”
“Donna and I tag-teamed some kidnappings in Kenosha,” Jody said tiredly. “Turned out it was a Grigori.”
Kaia stiffened and retreated a few paces from the warm glow of the living room. “They’re extinct.”
“Well, they are now,” Jody muttered. “At least, I hope. The damn things are like cockroaches. Anyway, we got the kids home; the bastard hadn’t gotten around to feeding on most of them yet. But the baby…looks like the parents caught him in the middle of Raising Arizona. It was a bloodbath. He wiped out the family. Kid’s got nowhere to go, and…Kaia, I hate to ask, but Claire’s got experience with angels.”
“Jody.” Kaia swallowed hard. “What are you saying?”
“Can you take her?” Jody sighed heavily; the baby was still bawling. “It doesn’t have to be permanent, not if you don’t want it to be. I’ll keep looking, I’m sure I can find another foster parent eventually…but until then?”
Kaia sighed. “I’ll have to talk to Claire. She…she might say no. We talked about this, we agreed we wouldn’t-”
“I know. And trust me, I wouldn’t ask if I wasn’t desperate.”
“Let me talk to her. I’ll call you back in a few.” Kaia hesitated. “...start driving this way. I can give you at least a few days.”
“We agreed.” Claire was exhausted; her face was tight with pain from her ankle and she looked thoroughly miserable. “Kaia, we said…”
“We said we wouldn’t bring another kid into the world just to go into this life.” Kaia placed a hand on her knee, squeezing it gently. “That’s not what we’re doing. We’re saving a kid that already exists from going into the system. It’s not the same.”
“It’s not,” Claire admitted. “But still, hunting…”
“Claire.” Kaia reached for her and gently tugged down the neckline of her shirt. In the glow of the fire, the angel mark glinted silver. “Remember when you tried to stop hunting?”
“Yeah.” Claire looked away. “I do.”
“You’re the only person who can understand what this is like.” Kaia pressed her palm flat against the mark; it was warm against her skin. “Honey, you lost your family to angels, too. You killed two of the Grigori. If there’s anyone out there who can help this little girl…” She cupped her other hand on Claire’s cheek; ran her thumb over the cheekbone. “It’s you.”
For a second, Claire looked like she was about to cry. Then she blinked it back, and her face went stony. She gently closed her hand around Kaia’s wrist and pushed it away from the mark. “Just until Jody can find someone else.”
The baby was tiny, dirty, and whimpering weakly when Jody pulled up in her pick-up, a bag thrown over the arm that wasn’t cradling her. She set the bag down as soon as Kaia rushed outside, Claire limping after her on her crutches, and wrapped an arm around each of them tightly. “Hi, girls.”
Kaia didn’t mention that she was turning twenty-six in a week, and Claire was only a few months behind her. “Hi, Jody. We missed you.”
Claire peered around anxiously, trying to get up high enough to look through the windows of the truck. “Where’s Donna?”
“Oh, she wishes she could have come, but there’s such a mess to clean up in Kenosha…” Jody sighed. “Come down to Sioux Falls any time, she’s staying with me right now. She’d love to see you.”
Kaia turned to raise an eyebrow at Claire, one that she normally would have returned with an evil smirk and a giggle like a middle-school boy, but she was staring in fascination at the baby. “What’s her name?”
“Not sure.” Jody shook her head. “They told the nurse at the hospital they weren’t sure what they wanted to call her yet. She’s only a few days old.”
Kaia tentatively held out her arms, and Jody laid the baby into them. She was tiny, and she felt so fragile, but she melted into Kaia’s embrace, one tiny fist grabbing a handful of her curls as she wailed. “She’s been crying non-stop,” Jody continued. “Probably hungry, but she won’t take a bottle. Dean is forging documents for her now in case somebody comes asking questions. According to Kenosha cops, she’s still missing. I’ve got diapers, formula, a few sets of clothes, things like that in the duffel.”
“She needs a bath,” Kaia murmured, “and a nap. Come on in, Jody, I can heat up some dinner for you-”
“No, that’s all right.” Jody shook her head, taking a step back. “I gotta get back to Kenosha and help Donna with the local cops. Besides, you two have enough on your plate.” She ruffled Claire’s hair playfully, shaking her head. “What have you done to yourself this time?”
Claire rolled her eyes, but she was smiling. “You should see the other guy.”
“Six feet under, no doubt.” Jody picked up the duffel again, handing it to Kaia. “You two get inside, before you catch cold.”
“Okay. It was great to see you, Jody.” Kaia barely looked at her; the baby in her arms was still clinging to her hair, and her heart was melting into something new and different entirely. It was love, but it was a new kind of love; vicious, clawing, furious. Anything that tried to take this baby from her arms would face her full wrath, a kind of wrath she hadn’t even known she was capable of.
She ended up giving the baby a bath in the sink; she still wouldn’t stop crying. Hopping awkwardly about on one foot, Claire warmed up a bottle for her, peering anxiously over Kaia’s shoulder every chance she got. “Is she supposed to cry that much?”
“With what she’s been through, I think she’s entitled,” Kaia murmured, carefully scooping her out of the plugged-up kitchen sink. The bathwater had run brown. “Claire, grab me a towel.”
Claire obeyed, and Kaia wrapped her up, carefully drying the tiny little thing. Jody must have grabbed whatever she could from the house; most of the clothes in the duffel were frilly little baby dresses. Kaia made a note to have Claire drive them into town tomorrow to buy something more practical and zipped her into the softest onesie she could find. “Come on, let’s get her in the living room where the fire is, and we’ll try again with the bottle.”
Claire tagged after her like a duckling. Kaia settled into the old leather armchair they’d picked up from a Goodwill for fifty dollars and cradled the baby in her arms, coaxing her to take the bottle. She wouldn’t take it; just screwed up her tiny face and wailed, her little hands balled into fists.
“Let me,” Claire said suddenly. Kaia looked up, surprised.
“She’s been with a Grigori her whole life, right? Well.” Claire snorted derisively. “Naverel said he could smell Castiel on me. Tamiel, too. Premium angel suit, right here. Maybe that’ll calm her down.”
Kaia frowned - there was a bitterness in Claire’s voice that she didn’t like - but the baby needed to eat. She slowly passed her over, pressing the bottle into Claire’s hand.
Claire’s hands were rough by nature - thick with calluses, rough from digging graves, and a long scar ran over the back of her left one from a werewolf claw. As she took the baby into her arms, though, they were exceedingly gentle, as if she were afraid of breaking her. And as soon as their skin touched, the baby settled. Her face still red from crying and the remnants of her tears glistening on her cheeks, she quieted, suckling thirstily at the bottle Claire offered her.
“How’d you know?” Kaia asked softly.
Claire tilted her head in the direction of the angel mark. “‘S been burning like fire since the second she went over the doorstep. The way it does when there’s angels around. I had a feeling.”
The baby’s tiny hand curled loosely around the lapel of Claire’s leather jacket, and in the firelight, a peculiar softness washed over her face. For just a second, she looked almost peaceful. That was a look Kaia didn’t think she’d ever seen on Claire before.
“Kaia,” Claire said softly, still gazing down at the baby. “She’s gotta stay.”
Kaia laid a hand on her shoulder. “I’ll call Jody.”
Kaia squinted at the computer screen. “Harper.”
“Like, the lesbian best friend from Wizards of Waverly Place? ”
“Was she a lesbian?”
Claire snorted. “Did you look at her?”
Kaia considered. “Yeah, okay. Emma.”
“Absolutely not.” Claire lay sprawled on her back on the couch, her broken ankle propped up on the armrest.The baby lay on her chest, sleeping peacefully. She’d learned to accept Kaia over the last few days, and would even be fed by her, but Claire was still, for the time being, her favorite.
“Rose.”
Claire frowned. “Rose Nieves. Nah.”
Kaia glanced up, one eyebrow raised. “Not Novak?”
Claire shook her head. “I use Winchester with hunters. It’s got pull, and it’s the least Sam and Dean can do after they paraded their best friend around inside my dad’s corpse. All my IDs are rock shoutouts. Legally, I’ve been missing for almost a decade, but if I did have any official paperwork, I’d put Nieves on it.” Kaia’s gaze softened and so did her heart. It must have shown on her face as well, because Claire cleared her throat gruffly, looking away. “There were a lot of problems in the Novak family before the Castiel-nuke hit. That’s not who I am, not anymore.”
Kaia wanted to get up and kiss her and shower her in all the love neither of them had known until Jody had come along. Instead she smiled up at her and said, “Alex.”
“Perfect, if my big sister Alex wouldn’t lord it over me until the day I die.”
“Peyton.”
“Too girly.”
“Jayden.”
“We’re not suburban moms named Jessica who drive minivans.”
“Cody.”
Claire paused. “Cody,” she repeated quietly. “Cody Nieves.”
On her chest, the baby stirred slightly, letting out a soft, contented sound. Kaia set the computer aside and scooted over, laying her head on Claire’s good leg. “She looks like a Cody, don’t you think?”
Claire nodded. “Not too girly. Jody will love it. She’s not going to be spelling it out for everyone for the rest of her life. I like it.”
“Then it’s settled.” Kaia snuggled in, sighing as she felt Claire’s hand go to her hair, stroking it gently. “I’ll call Dean and tell him what to write on her papers.”
“In a minute.” Claire hummed softly with content. “Stay here.”
“Not going anywhere,” Kaia promised, squeezing Claire’s hip reassuringly.