Chapter Text
The sun was barely up, but Nile was indisputably and frustratingly awake. She finally tired of staring at the ceiling and eased out of bed; Abi and Ro slept on. They had been born into interstellar travel, but despite spending over half her life in space, Nile still struggled with the transition between artificial and terrestrial day cycles. Figuring she might as well go for a run if she was going to be up anyway, she tossed on some athletic gear and slipped out of the guest bedroom.
There was a soft voice, barely audible, coming from the living area; she was not the first one up. The low hum resolved into words as she approached. “No, you can’t be done already… what if we… yes, there we go, much better…”
Nicky was on the couch, the baby looking almost comically small as he cradled them against his bare chest. Tiny balled fists bumped against the side of the bottle, and Nicky monitored the feeding with all the focus Nile had seen him bring to his sniper work. His attention never wavered, but she could feel his awareness of her as she crossed the room to his side, even as he started crooning a love song that had been popular fifty years before.
She sat down and watched, moving closer and closer as he sang until she was plastered to his side, her chin hooked over his shoulder. When the song wound down, she murmured, “So, how’s the munchkin?”
He smiled beatifically and lowered the bottle. “The munchkin is doing very well. The munchkin has a healthy appetite and is not shy about it. Isn’t that right, darling? No, I see that you are not done; of course you may have some more,” and he angled the bottle up again.
“’Not shy’ is the polite way of saying ‘up all night,’ yeah?”
“Not all night.”
“You know there’s those automatic feeders now, what are they called, ‘Night Nannies’?” Nicky gave an exaggerated shudder. “Ok, it’s a stupid name, but they work.”
He shook his head; he had still not turned his face away from his newborn. “Joe and I agreed, it makes no sense to have a child and then not do the work of caring for them.”
Nile grinned. “Bet that makes you real popular in the parenting groups. But we’re here too, remember, and it’s not so we can sit around and watch you run yourselves ragged.”
“Thank you, Nile. But we have gotten by on far less sleep than this.” He sighed. “Although I must admit, it’s a very different experience in a mortal body. Still, I would not want to miss this.”
“Is there anything else I can do? Make breakfast?”
“I believe Booker and Abinash prepared a number of meals yesterday.”
“I could take Pixie for a run?”
“We wanted you here for your company, not for your labor. And last I saw, Pixie was sleeping on Joe’s feet. But you could stand outside the door and say the word ‘walk’, and unless she is very deeply asleep that should get her attention.”
“Sounds like a plan. Gotta get my Auntie Nile time where I can, since someone is hogging the baby.” She kissed his cheek, leaned over to kiss the baby’s head, and got off the couch. “Speaking of the baby – any progress on a name?” There was no response. “Nicky…”
“The right name will come at the right time,” he replied serenely. “We will tell you when it does.”
Nile stretched and rolled over, following the afternoon sun as it moved across the back garden. Modern ship lights supposedly had all the same properties as sunlight, but it never felt the same to her. Other suns never felt right either, for that matter. She was still an Earth girl at heart, and she had no intention of letting a perfect Mediterranean spring day go to waste. No matter how chaotic it was for everyone else.
The morning run had done very little to keep Pixie calm; the combination of visitors, a new baby, and Nicky and Joe’s disrupted sleep schedule had clearly been too much for her and she was agitated and fussy. Abinash and Akhosa were playing fetch with her, trying to distract her and bleed off some energy. Rosa had her own nervous energy, and was constantly in and out of the house, offering snacks and drinks (for the humans and the dog.)
Joe had suggested that Nicky take an afternoon nap, and Nicky had agreed… until he saw Booker arrange the baby in a wrap on Joe’s back so that Joe could go out and work in the garden. All talk of napping had ceased, and instead he hovered next to Joe to oversee the situation with the same relentless sniper focus Nile had noticed early that morning.
“Joe. Joe let me fix the wrap, I don’t think it’s positioned right.”
Joe planted cucumber seeds in front of a trellis with the speed and confidence of centuries of experience, not at all slowed by the baby. “The wrap is fine, Nicky. Remember how often we practiced it?”
“Don’t worry,” Booker assured him. “I’ve been practicing too. I checked everything out, it’s safe, I promise.”
Nicky gave no indication of having heard. “We have to be careful about sun damage, Joe, you didn’t even give them a hat…”
“You were with me when we bought the sunscreen, Nicky. They are slathered in it from head to toe, and no I did not forget their ears.” He stopped arranging mulch to reach back over his shoulder and delicately trace one of said ears with the tip of a grubby finger. The baby, half asleep, squirmed under his touch and smacked their lips.
Still standing awkwardly in the middle of the family tableau, Booker tried again. “I can get you a hat if you want, but the sunblock they make these days is -”
Simultaneously, and louder, Nicky shouted, “Joe!” Nicky’s shoulders had gone stiff. “What are you doing? You can’t just rub dirt all over their face, they’re not even a week old, their immune system isn’t –”
Even from a few meters away Nile could see the deep breath Joe took. As amusing as it had been (though also unnerving, to see an anxious Nicky), it was probably time for some distraction. Unlike Pixie, Nicky could not be induced to simply run after a ball. But there were other options.
“I was thinking,” she said loudly, “Andy and Quinn are both really good names. Unisex too.” She could see the conflict in Nicky: on the one hand, a friend and guest was trying to engage with him, but on the other hand Joe was clearly about to permanently damage their baby. Ultimately, the desire to gently correct and educate won out, as she’d known it would. Nicky turned and walked toward her (although not without a few backward glances.)
“Those are wonderful names,” he agreed, “but we’re not going to name the baby after anyone we know. Especially because, while they are good names, they are not common modern names. It’s hard enough pretending to be men in our thirties as it is...”
Nile caught Joe giving her a grateful smile and relaxed back into the grass, hands pillowing her head as sunlight and Nicky’s words washed over her.
The rain the next day was unseasonal and seemed to come out of nowhere, and anyway Nile was decades out of practice in interpreting weather. So she was later getting home with Pixie than she’d planned, and had to dry off both the dog and herself before she could join the rest of them in the living room.
She peered through the entryway while she waited for Abi to bring towels. Joe was lying on the sofa with the baby on his chest and his head against Rosa; it looked like the two of them were remarking on the precise number and nature of the baby’s body parts (“…eight, nine, ten, you have ten tiny toes!”) Booker and Akhosa were having a quiet discussion in an armchair, and how the two bulkiest members of the team had managed to squeeze themselves into a single chair was a physics problem requiring more degrees than Nile had yet earned to be able to solve. Nicky, curled up in another chair, was fiddling with the sound system but kept getting distracted by the inventory being conducted on the couch.
Nile watched as he was drawn into a fingernail count (astonishingly, there were ten), leaving them all to listen to a biography of Kiran Mehta, whose birthday it was. (Dr. Mehta had been the environmental engineer responsible for the carbon scrubbing technology that made ecological restoration possible and set the stage for the repopulation of Earth. Her birthday was still a minor holiday. Nile thought about what it meant, as she blotted the rain from her hair, that she could touch the same water that had existed in her first life. This water had been circulating even during Andy’s first life. They’d almost lost it entirely. Maybe she should start actively observing the holiday again.)
By the time she and Abinash walked in with a (begrudgingly) dry Pixie, Nicky’s focus had shifted and he seemed to be engrossed in the broadcast. He pulled up some information on his wrist unit and called for Joe’s attention. “Did you know that the name Kiran comes from the Sanskrit word meaning a ray of light?”
Still engrossed in his current occupation (holding the baby’s hand and touching their fingers to random spots while Ro narrated “that’s your eye! And now you’re touching your chin!”), Joe muttered distractedly, “I thought that was a Celtic name?”
Nicky kept scrolling. “Kieran, Irish name, meaning dark haired.”
Booker laughed and leaned around Akhosa to shoot Nicky a mischievous look. “A dark-haired ray of light? That definitely sounds like someone you know.”
Nicky turned off his screen and looked over at the couch, smiling softly and very nearly glowing like a ray of light himself. “Two someones.”
“Nicky!” Abi reached over and poked his leg. “That baby is as bald as an egg! You can’t name them for a hair color when they don’t even have hair yet!”
Before Nicky could respond, Nile grabbed Abi’s shirt and pulled him away. “Joe has dark hair. Nicky has dark hair. It seems like a safe bet.”
“Besides,” Nicky added as he moved to sit on the floor next to the couch, “it’s not about the hair color.” He leaned his head on Joe’s shoulder. “A ray of light, who for us has brought forth an entire world.”
Joe turned to lay a kiss on Nicky’s hair. “I have two of those myself.”
Nicky, unsurprisingly, was the first to depart from their impromptu “we finally have a name for the baby” celebration. He and Pixie withdrew to the master bedroom, followed an hour later by Booker and Akhosa retiring to the “sort of a study/partly a guest bedroom/probably Kiran’s room when they’re older.” Ro started to nod off around 2300, and Abi crashed shortly after, so it was just Nile and Joe left. And Kiran, of course, who had been napping on and off throughout. Joe was magnanimously letting Nile hold them, and as much as he tried to look relaxed she could see he was watching her like a hawk. She considered pointing out that after thousands of years, she was pretty sure she knew how to hold a baby; but since she wanted to be able to hold that baby again sometime, she just made sure she was obviously supporting Kiran’s head.
“You know, you never actually said. Kiran…what? Can you even hyphenate ‘di Genova Al-Kaysani’? Genovani? Kaysano-” She broke off and held Kiran closer when it looked like Joe was trying to snatch them back. “Hey, I’m not done!”
Joe subsided with a sigh. “We flipped a coin. Hardly anyone takes a spouse’s name when they get married anymore, and all the portmanteau names are far too… cutesy.” He gave her a look. “This lovely little person here is Kiran di Genova.”
“And the next one will be Al-Kaysani?”
“The next one?” He groaned and let his head fall back against the wall. “Let’s wait till we’ve all survived with one for a while, before we start talking about a second.” Nile raised an eyebrow, and he at least had the decency to look sheepish. “Yes, the next one will be Al-Kaysani. But if you check my search records, you will not find research on the effects of various age differences between siblings, and you will certainly not find bunk bed designs in my sketchbook.”
She couldn’t help smiling as she shook her head. “Bunk beds? It’s barely been a week, Joe.”
“But that matters now!” His voice was quiet, to not disturb anyone, but still intense, and his eyes were wide and bright. “This is – a week used to be nothing, a year used to be nothing, but now it’s real. I’ve never been more aware of every moment that passes, and it’s intoxicating. And this is our baby, Nile, Nicky’s and mine, and sometimes I’m afraid that if I let them out of my sight it’ll turn out to just be a dream.”
One tear and then another trickled down into his beard, and Nile stared at him, unsure of how to respond. He laughed a little, self-deprecatingly, and scrubbed his face with his hands. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to… I’m just…” He took a deep breath. “I’m just so happy right now. And tired. But mostly happy.”
Nile shifted Kiran’s weight so she could support them with just one arm, and wrapped the other arm around Joe. “It’s nothing you don’t deserve.” They held each other for a moment, breathing together, until Kiran began to squirm and whine.
“That’s my cue,” said Nile, handing them back to Joe. “I’m heading off to bed. Good night, Joe. Good night, Kiran ibn Yusuf ibn Ibrahim di Genova.” She kissed their head, where their dark hair would be someday.
She climbed into bed alongside Rosario and Abinash, and slept until the sun laid a ray of light across her face.
