Chapter Text
Yes, it was nearly Solstice, and yes, she was late, but Jenny hadn’t expected to return to an empty house. “Guys?” she called out quietly, nudging the heavy wood door closed. The entire ground floor was dark as midnight.
This was jump-out-at-you dark.
Scanning the hulking shadows of the living room, Jenny set down her suitcase and laptop bag. She wrapped her fingers around the cross in her blazer pocket and forced herself to breathe evenly. No reason to panic yet. As her eyes adjusted, she could make out a dim glow from the direction of the kitchen. “Rupert?”
Up three steps to the elevated landing with its diamond-mullioned windows above a wood radiator cover-turned bench seat. A wind-up timer next to a pillow. On Jenny’s left, a staircase led up to the second floor. And just ahead, three steps down, was the kitchen.
Plates and silverware on the kitchen island, casserole dishes half-full with food gone cold. One plate upside-down on the floor, utensils scattered, drinks splattered. A stool overturned. Clear signs of a struggle, but no bodies. Jenny’s foot landed on something… meaty. The remains of what looked like the bottom half of a creature stuck to the bottom of her shoe.
Suddenly queasy, she closed her eyes and took a deep breath through her mouth. Didn’t want to think of what had led to this. Dreaded what might be waiting on the second floor. Everything in her wanted to turn around and run back out the door, get help. But Rupert would be counting on her.
Sometimes being the grown-up sucked.
She crept upstairs, the amber nightlight at the top anemic and useless. Five heavy wood doors on this floor, two of them open. The master bedroom on her immediate left, bed still unmade from when its occupant left in an obvious rush – blankets flung hastily aside, the pillow down next to the footboard.
She skipped over the closed bathroom door, a jack-and-jill that connected the master to a second bedroom, door also closed. The entrance to the attic stairs on her right, securely locked. Thank God.
The original master bedroom was opposite the other and contained a private bath and a door out to a small rooftop porch. A line of art glass windows took up the middle third of the wall, framed with the same thick oak trim that extended through the rest of the home’s Craftsman architecture. The room blazed bright even on cloudy days; in the evenings, mismatched lamps cast halos over the desks and sofa. Rupert spent part of every evening ensconced in his favorite chair with a cup of tea at hand, a book in his lap, and public radio murmuring in the background.
She didn’t realize how desperately she’d hoped to find Rupert in that room until she didn’t. Further confirmation that, in the hours since she’d called him from the airport, something had gone terribly, terribly wrong.
That something was on the other side of the closed bedroom door. Jenny pressed her ear to it and heard what sounded like a snarl.
Bracing a palm against the wood, she slowly turned the crystal knob and then incrementally pushed the door open until there was just enough space to ease her head into the room.
Jungle-level humidity filled her lungs. Ocean waves roared under a constellation of twirling golden stars above.
And on the floor: Rupert. Glasses askew, sweater stained, hair matted to his forehead. He clutched a bottle of blue liquid in one hand, an open book in the other. The snarling noise was coming from him.
It was snoring. But not the gentle baritone rumble that vibrated against her back in the middle of the night. This was the high-pitched, clogged wheezing of a man with a massive upper respiratory infection. Jenny reached a palm to his forehead and didn’t even have to make contact to know he had a fever.
“Touch of a cold my ass, Rupert,” she whispered at him.
“Hi, Mama,” came a tiny whisper in return.
Shit. Jenny’s cringe smoothly shifted into a wide smile for the dark-haired little girl sitting up in bed, clutching a stuffed pink piggy. “Hi, baby!” she whispered back, picking her way over scattered toys and stuffed animals and Rupert’s body to sit on the edge of Ellie’s bed.
“Are you in my dream?”
“Nope, I’m really here.” Jenny planted a long kiss on her daughter’s forehead and smoothed the hair out of her face, fingers repeatedly catching in tangles that would require at least half a bottle of conditioner and lots of fussing to remove. The girl squirmed free and threw herself at her mom, painfully crushing Jenny’s boobs and squeezing her midsection so tightly that she was surprised not to barf all over the spider man blanket. She took a moment to breathe and savor the feeling of little arms wrapped around her. It never failed to surprise her anew, each time. We made this. “How come you’re in bed already?”
“Bea pitched a fit,” Ellie said gravely.
“She did? How come?”
“’Cause Daddy made dinosaur nuggets and mushy peas for dinner, but that’s what you make for dinner, and you makes circle peas for me, or baby carrots and ranch, but Daddy said we had no baby carrots or ranch and we simply had to eat the peas and Bea got mad and threw my plate and my juice.”
Jenny fought to keep her serious expression in place. “Wow. That sounds like a true fit.” It certainly matched the scene downstairs in the kitchen. And if the mess was still there, and Rupert was here…
“Daddy didn’t believe me,” she whispered. “He was mad.”
“Hmm. I bet. Especially since it looks like he’s not feeling too well. Looks like he got your cold.”
“He yelled. It scared Bea.” Each revelation offered as an invitation for Jenny to do something.
“Sounds like Daddy got really frustrated,” Jenny agreed, recognizing the cover of the book. “But not so mad that he skipped reading Paddington.”
Ellie scowled. “Only one chapter.”
“Did Daddy take that medicine?”
“No. He said he hadda wait for you.”
“Okay. Good.” She rubbed the little girl’s back, feeling each tiny vertebrae under the damp fleece pajamas. “You know, Muffin, I’m also kind of wondering how Bea could pitch a fit with your food. Since Bea isn’t old enough to eat circle peas or nuggets.”
Her daughter looked her dead in the eye and said, as if it were obvious, “She used her magic, Mama.”
Jenny’s eyebrows went up. “Her magic?”
It was jarring to see Rupert’s inscrutable stare coming at her from their daughter’s green eyes, moreso to see her whole face settle into his “I’m right and beyond reproach” expression. The nose and lips were Jenny’s, but in all other ways, this was Rupert Giles 2.0.
Her lips…
Ellie suddenly buried her face in her mom’s chest again. “I missed you, Mama.”
“I missed you too, baby. Sweetie -- ” She tried to disengage herself, but Ellie held on.
“Now you can come to the pageant!”
“Elinor – “ Jenny took her wrists and gently pushed her back until she could see the deep red smeared across her lips. “What did we say about playing with my make-up?”
“I didn’t,” she protested, loud enough to rouse Rupert and immediately send him into a violent coughing fit. On the other side of the room, a loud wail went up from the crib. Ellie used the distraction to bury her face in her pillow, covering her head with Porcel, for good measure.
“You’re home,” said Rupert, sitting up, still out of it as Jenny picked her way to the crib.
“I’m home,” she replied, fake-cheery. She lifted Bea to her shoulder, making quiet soothing noises. The baby promptly dropped her face into Jenny’s neck and rubbed a trail of slime and slobber from ear to shoulder. “Thanks, kid,” Jenny whispered, stomach flipping again. Her hand went under the baby’s bottom and snot was suddenly the least of Jenny’s worries. “Oh, Bea. Oh sweetie,” she crooned, grabbing up one of the receiving blankets as a barrier to try and staunch the blowout.
She single-handedly stripped the crib sheet and mattress protector from the bed.
Slow on the uptake, Rupert jumped to his feet and wavered there for a long second. God, he really is sick. “It’s the antibiotics,” he explained, reaching for the baby.
“I’ve got this,” she said, shoving the balled-up sheets at him.
“Jenny, let me –”
“Rupert. You’re sick. Put those in the laundry sink and then take your medicine, okay? It’s fine.”
She carried Bea into the jack-and-jill bathroom that connected with the master and closed the door with her foot. This wasn’t her first diaper blowout. She could maneuver stacks of towels and a squirmy, soapy, screaming child through the process in her sleep. And had.
But once she stripped off the baby’s sleeper and oozing diaper and began wiping her clean with a lukewarm washcloth on a thick towel bunched on the tiles, the sickly sweet smell of bile and half-digested milk and the humidity and the week of little sleep and the hours on the plane and the “chicken dinner” and the adrenaline and the jet lag suddenly hit Jenny, all at once.
She wasn’t fine.
Even in that terrible moment, knowing that the inevitable was about to happen, Jenny managed to throw an extra towel over her naked, squalling daughter before turning to the toilet.