Archive of Our Own ^beta

“Well, if the EVC doesn’t work my only other options are moxibustion or dance classes. I don’t think anybody wants to see me shaking my hips right now.”

She stops in front of the window to water a pink butterfly aglaonema Stephen keeps on the corner table, beside an angel-wing begonia she brought from her apartment when they married; her belly sticks out full and round as a melon over the waistband of her pajama pants. She has consented to going on maternity leave two weeks earlier than planned because she got herself briefly stuck while scooting around a patient’s bed in the ER, a thing that will return Stephen dividends of private amusement for a decade even if his heart had almost spasmed and stopped when he first saw that she was calling him during the middle hour of her shift. 

He does not have time to swipe the dumbass look off his face before Christine turns around. There is an interplay of irk and preening pridefulness in her eyes.

“— Hey. Shut up, okay?”

He raises his hands. “Did I say something?”

She scrunches her nose. As a master of the mystic arts with a cosmic reputation to uphold, Stephen chooses to make the same expression back at her. 

He also ransacks the Kamar-Taj library in his search for an answer to the breech-position problem, since he regards external cephalic version as a clumsy rudimentary treatment and one entirely unsuited for the wife of a Sanctum keeper. None of the spells he tries have their intended effect, unlike the ones he used for her sciatic nerve pain and the numbness in her fingers, although they do cause Christine to sneeze sparks whenever she inhales dust and sprout wildflower bouquets from her hair whenever something startles her, makes her cry — Stephen has perfected a spell that lets him produce tissues from thin air — or when the Butternut gets a bout of hiccups. He appears to be an anxious little fellow, which might explain the meditative position, and this happens rather more often than Christine would like. 

“Look at these,” Stephen says. “You’ve got some apple blossoms this time.”

“Really? Let me see.”

He is clipping another eruption of flowers off her head with his blunt-tipped beard scissors, passing them forward to Christine so she can plop them into a vase. Thus far they have identified the usual species: blue sage, white aster, sawtooth sunflower, wild bergamot and prairie wild rose, a collection it took them three times to note represents a nice cross-sampling of native perennials found in the American Midwest. Once or twice there have been clouds of purple lilac or white dogwood, but the conch-pink flowers Stephen hands to her are a first. 

“That’s nice.” She puts her nose into them. “I wonder what kind of apple tree it’s from?”

Stephen waits until his left hand steadies before he snips off another spike of blue sage. “Donna could’ve helped you there. She memorized all the different varieties for a science project back in fourth grade.” He passes his fingers through her hair to comb leaves from it. “She’d carry seeds around in her pockets and plant them everywhere. There’s probably still a scrawny apple tree growing out behind the Hy-Vee in Papillion.”

Christine brushes her curved side with the apple blossoms. “What was her inspiration?”

“She’d watched that animated ‘Johnny Appleseed’ special Disney made back in the forties. We owned the video tape.”

“I actually might know that one. It’s got the song that goes —?”

Christine starts to hum. It is a bright but simple, vigorous tune. Stephen puts aside his scissors to fluff sawtooth sunflower petals off her shoulders. 

It remains an odd thing, speaking so freely about his sister this way, but the practice has progressively made her death into a single event at the conclusion of a sequence rather than the moment that swallowed all the rest of her life and memory within it. Somehow her passing now seems to be a thing Donna has been allowed to grow beyond, around, and above, as if by a transfiguration, as if in some significant way the dark cold water and the deep narrow grave have not been able to keep even her body for themselves. 

He fetches up the foolish tune along with Christine’s accompaniment, since unlike her he can remember the words. They begin the next verse together. 

This may be enjoyable to the Butternut and his physically developed if culturally unsophisticated ears; during the night he flips himself over, so carefully it does not even wake Christine, giving the appearance of this being something he was planning to do anyway whenever he finally felt like it. Stephen guesses it is indicative of a stubborn streak after all. 

It is not exactly a surprise. They should be able to manage so long as the kid is not intent on being born with a third eye, or being like him in any way whatsoever.

Donna would also have some good ideas for baby gifts, but everyone else does their part. America has given Christine the present of a bib that reads ‘Yo Sé Que Ese No Es Un Aeroplano, Estupido’, even if Stephen has no idea where she bought it. Peter Parker — please don’t apologize, sir, I mean Stephen, it really wasn’t your fault — has given Stephen a card that says something about power and responsibility, and not fueling rude rumors concerning people shooting webs from their butts. Wong has gifted them a replica Eye of Agamotto, made from what feels like the BPA-free plastic used for teething rings, since purportedly the last keeper of the Eye had adopted a child who profoundly enjoyed chewing on it; Wong imparts this information with such a slabbed flatness of affect that Stephen will likely never know the truth. A group of novices bring Christine a bowl of dahi chura they have cooked — sweet for you, healthy for the little one — and when she starts to weep at the thoughtfulness of this gesture the youngest student begins to weep in synchrony, fearful she has upset Mistress Palmer-Strange. The Cloak is mainly ignorant of human biological functions yet accedes with only minimal vexation when Stephen locks himself into the study and practices using a six hundred year-old relic to swaddle a ten-pound sack of flour against his chest. He forgets that Christine’s wedding and engagement rings both function as skeleton keys for every door in the house until she walks in on him. 

They blink at each other. She hides a snort and a smile behind her hand. 

“I was going to try baking some bread later,” she says, “but now I think I’d feel like a monster.”

The Butternut grows into a Honeydew, and into the Swiss Chard that precedes the Pumpkin. Christine starts cutting her sandwiches in half to save them as snacks because her stomach, crowded out of place by its downstairs tenant, no longer has room to hold a square meal, and the refrigerator is under Stephen’s warning to leave her leftovers in peace or else suffer the eternal consequences. Her vision becomes blurred for close reading and he lends her a pair of emerald spectacles from the occult archives, which improve the blurriness but also enable her to see the ghost dog who has been messing up her admittedly dismal Knitting for Nincompoops efforts at a hat. She informs him in passing that it hurts a bit to walk, now, and hurts more to climb the stairs, so he rattles around with the Sanctum’s birdcage elevator to get it working again; he does, after nearly being flap-jacked five or six times, since the elevator regards itself as respectfully retired and resents this disruption. He finds her whacking around inside the new nursery because all the ousted furniture has attempted to squeeze itself back inside and, absent the ability to bend over too far or lift anything too heavy, Christine is left with the option of herding everything out by threatening it with a feather duster.

“Why’d one of your predecessors own so many of these?” Christine holds up a ceramic piggy bank; it makes a merry alms-giving jingle. “Ooh, that sounded like a whole two dollars. Wanna see if we can beat the poltergeist in the Pinball Wizard machine?”

“Sure.” Stephen holds out a hand. “Can I see that for a second, though? Just toss it here.”

She gives the piggy bank a good underhand softball pitch. 

Stephen blows it to pieces in midair, consumes the three-headed red dragon it has been keeping trapped for the last century, shrinks the spell’s blast radius down to the head of a pin, clears his throat with an eructation of fire and dispels the residual smoke with a macabre whirl of the Cloak. When the smoke clears he sees that Christine has grabbed the nursery’s wet-chemical fire extinguisher and is aiming it at him. 

She sets it down. 

“What the f — ” she claps her hands to either side of her belly like earmuffs and lowers her voice. “What the fuck, Stephen? Are you okay?”

“Yep.” Stephen pats his throat. The aftertaste is reminiscent of charred hamburger. “I was wondering when I’d get to show you guys that trick.”

“Consider us both duly impressed and don’t ever do it again.”

“I can’t make any promises.”

They do not play the pinball machine. Christine does mention a kind of cookie her paternal grandmother used to bake for her, however, snickerdoodles with a strawberry white chocolate frosting, and one she has never been able to exactly replicate after Grandma Palmer’s death. The recipe was never written down; the only reason Stephen’s seance the next night fails is because this woman proves to be the pedigreed origin point for his wife’s own defiant tendencies, as well as her name, and wizard-boy don’t you let me ever, ever get wind of you meddling around with this kind of wicked hocus pocus nonsense again.

Tell my Rissie I said hello.

While answering the front door on Halloween — the Sanctum gets several thousand trick-or-treaters, even after the year Stephen ensorcelled the ‘Just Take One’ candy bucket to suck miscreants down into it — Christine wears a black sweatshirt that makes her resemble a magic 8-ball, complete with changing predictions he puts onto its back: Don’t Count On It, Signs Point to Yes, Without a Doubt, Better Not Tell You Now.

“But how’d you get the baby in her tummy?” an exceedingly tiny girl asks. She is dressed in a bunny rabbit bodysuit complemented by a googly-eyed insect antennae headband, perhaps posed as a warning against man’s trespass into God’s domain. “Was it magic?”

“Yes,” Stephen answers, expansively. He drops several fun-sized Snickers into the girl’s pillowcase. “That’s the way all mothers and fathers do it.”

“Wow.” She smiles at Christine in glowing admiration. Christine smiles glowingly back. “How are you getting him out?”

“Same thing,” Stephen says, and shuts the door.

Christine walks into rooms and promptly forgets why she came into them so frequently that the Sanctum’s floorboards start rotating to keep her pointed in the right direction. Stephen finds her color-coding the house’s magical objects, based on possible safety hazards, and simply picks up a sticker book to join her, a chore that is interrupted when she plants a red one on his hand to designate him as a Crush Hazard; there are only a few awkward moments during their subsequent canoodling and undressing of each other, including one where Stephen unfastens his own belt because this would otherwise require her to reach all the way around him and Christine helps him undo the small, slippery buttons on her blouse, although she lets him skim it off her shoulders. Her present tilting-doll sense of balance makes most physical tasks a cumbersome inconvenience and he ties her shoes every morning. 

His first solution is to charm them, because in a cold wet month like November his fingers are slow and inefficient more often than not, but that solution is discarded when the sneakers hop out from beneath her and dance a gleeful hornpipe up the bedroom wall onto the ceiling. His threats to these shoes — I’ll shred you, I’ll eat you, if you make me come up there after you I’ll flatten you into the second dimension, I’ll spritz you with Febreze — do nothing but make Christine sit down on the floor in laughter, inducing a head-crop of wild phlox whose color she says reminds her of Stephen’s eyes. She sits on the bed and holds out her foot, patiently like Cinderella, however long the shoe-tying takes him, and when he finishes she usually reaches to riffle her hand through his hair or scratch his beard. Stephen happens to be kneeling between her legs one time and she guides him forward so his head is gathered warmly against her. 

“He’s been moving a lot today,” she says. “Can you feel anything?”

Stephen can hear something, certainly; it is a quiet burbling, rushy underwater sound, but he would rather die another thousand times than tell his wife her insides sound like a fish tank. The morning sunshine in the room puts aureate underscores of reddish-gold within her brown hair, which is just beginning to have a strand here and there of white as opposed to Stephen’s darker gray. They are both dressed in ordinary street clothes because she has asked him to go for a walk with her and these days this means an earnest odyssey down to Mercer Playground and back.

“Let’s see,” he says. 

The slight, playful pressure of his fingertips is greeted with a few piqued interior flutters — she laughs, maybe a bit sorely — before he lays his ear above the humming of a strawberry-sized heart.

They both spent the first six weeks of the kid’s seedling existence independently attributing Christine’s symptoms to a lengthy list of other, more plausible possibilities, foremost among which were perimenopause and the fact that such things so rarely happen to couples who are nearly in their fifties, or at least rarely happen outside the realms of folklore and scripture. Stephen had calmed himself with this notion for about five seconds before it occurred to him that he was, after all, a wizard, and that in the tradition of old Zechariah he too would try to argue logic with any divine messengers who came calling. 

Okay, he thought, as a reconsideration. Fine. Point taken. Here’s the thing, though: 

Telling Christine anything about babies would probably be like trying to tell me about brains, and if this was really happening then she would’ve simply found out for herself and told me. I will be as kind regarding her moods as she is about how loudly my joints crack whenever I stand up. I should not, must not, cannot be a father, because I’ve had a father already and I know that I do not want to become him: America is different, Peter is different, since better people than me raised those kids first. Nobody ever warned me about the hazards of getting frisky in the Mirror Dimension and so I think I’m entitled to a free pass. 

The period of their willful obtuseness ended one day when Christine was brushing her teeth at the bathroom sink, spat, gargled, kicked open the toilet seat cover with a sideways fillip of her toes and got above it just in time to undo the work of having eaten breakfast, then all the private cumulonimbus terrors that had been piling up on the horizons of Stephen’s soul for the last month changed color as if struck by the daylight when his wife — his best and last love, his friend, his helper, his heart — put her head into her hands and started crying. 

“Okay,” she said, between jerking, coughing breaths. She spat a few more times. “Ugh, jeez, that burns — okay. Okay. Whoo boy — change of plans, I guess.” She turned her face towards him. He was bowed beside her, holding back her hair. “I’m sorry. I know you — ”

“Christine.” Stephen reached to fill a glass from the sink so she could rinse her mouth. “Not everything is about me.”

And without protest she had allowed herself to be drawn into his arms, and brought down onto the bathroom floor with him, where they sat together talking until their bare feet got cold, Stephen’s back against the wall and Christine tucked into his lap.

The over-the-counter test had been mainly a formality, but as a man whose every gesture and stitch of clothing pointed towards some millennia-old prime analogate Stephen was well aware that formalities, too, have their part to play; he had asked Christine to wait, went out, and returned shortly thereafter holding the Watch in order to count the test’s requisite two minutes.

“All right,” he said. “Go ahead.”

Now there is a subtle ocean-wave roll beneath his ear, as the son whose name they have not been able to decide upon since both nothing and everything goes with Strange — well, I didn’t let you have the laminectomy technique, Christine has said, but this is almost as good — reaches out as far as he is able within his secure, though shrinking, primordial world. Stephen keeps his ear laid in place while Christine strokes her fingers, comb-wise, through his hair, until she turns his face up to kiss him several times. She speaks with her mouth pressed to the corner of his so that he can feel it when she smiles.

“I love you, Stephen.” She nuzzles her nose against his cheek a little. “But I’m guessing you’ve figured that out by now, huh?”

“Oh, yeah.” Crying is going to make him look stupid; he is probably going to do it anyway. Somewhere in another life, another self he might have been is waking from a good dream. “I’ve had my suspicions.”

…