Work Text:
“Is it a Nintendo?” Jack interrupts through Home Alone 2.
Emily is watching the movie with blank eyes, the fist she has clutched in her pajama pants doing nothing to help her through her contractions. They’ve become more frequent in the past few weeks, unexpectedly rolling through her as her due date looms closer; January 9th seems far to her, but apparently her body thinks it’s tomorrow. Her back has already been aching for a week, and the increasingly intense contractions aren’t helping any. They went from uncomfortable cramps to sharp pain just over the course of this afternoon, fiery stabs suddenly attacking her abdomen. Still, Emily waves them away. A nagging voice whispers in her ear, but she ignores it. Because it couldn’t be. Not yet.
She’s breathing through the pain, lips parted, when Jack touches her shoulder.
“Mom.”
Emily jolts.
“Sorry, honey.” She sucks in a breath, blinking the haziness from her eyes and turning to look at him. “Were you saying something?”
“My present,” he catches her up, hazel eyes bright, “is it a Nintendo? The 3DS—”
A small laugh worms its way out of her chest. “You’ll know tomorrow.” Fondness seeps through her words, drenching them until they’re dripping saccharine. “It’s just a few hours away, Jack. Wouldn’t it be better if it stayed a surprise?”
Jack’s pout is half hearted. “Will you tell if I get you another cookie?” He bribes. It seems a dangerous skill for a ten-year-old.
“Not even if you got me all the cookies in the world.” Emily ruffles his hair, earning a grumble. Speaking of cookies—“Can you help me up, please?”
He’s up and in front of her in seconds. Emily smiles as she takes his hands, both of them a little cold despite the steady fire burning in the hearth. The moment she stands the pressure returns on her hips, Lucy weighing on her bones as she wriggles around restlessly.
“Thank you, honey,” Emily presses a kiss to Jack’s brow.
He hums, eyes already back on the TV. “Y’welcome. Tell Dad he’s missing the good parts.”
Emily manages a small laugh.
Her short walk to the kitchen is, in fact, a waddle, each shuffle of her feet sending pain down her pelvis. She makes a face and ignores it, placing a hand on her bump as if she can physically stop her daughter from dropping lower. A small flutter greets her hand; Emily smiles despite herself as she walks into the kitchen, her mission accomplished when she breathes in the warm scent of the cinnamon sugar cookies Aaron is taking out of the oven.
“Your daughter’s abusing me,” she grumbles, shuffling over to the piping hot cookie tray. Heat radiates from it in waves. Emily grabs a cooled one from the previous batch and pops it whole into her mouth.
“I’ll have a talk with her,” Aaron says, wiping a crumb from the corner of her mouth. Emily hums at the taste of cinnamon on her tongue, the cookie warm and sweet, crumbling easily beneath her teeth. But she can’t even enjoy it; mid-swallow, the pain rushes through her again, making her groan into her closed mouth.
“What?” Concern knits Aaron’s brows, “What do you feel?”
Somehow, Emily manages to swallow the cookie.
“Contractions,” she croaks. They’re not anything new, but, “They hurt like a bitch.” She all but whines, tears misting her eyes as Aaron’s hand wraps around her elbow.
“How long have you been having them?” He’s nudging her into a stool. Emily sits, her fingers clutched in his shirt as he helps her down.
“I don’t know.” Her voice shakes. Sweat slicks her skin. “Uhh…since lunch? Before—before we started the movie. Way before.” Her lip is suddenly between her teeth. “I’ve been—fuck,” she hisses, her nails sinking into Aaron’s flesh. Pain flares in her abdomen, shoots up her back. She whimpers.
“You’re in labor.”
Emily clutches at the counter. She can’t be. It’s Christmas tomorrow, almost two weeks from her due date. Two.
She was supposed to have more time.
“N-No,” she’s shaking her head, cool air slapping her cheeks from the vigorous movement, “I can’t be. I’m not ready.”
“You are,” Aaron soothes, so calm it makes her want to break something. “Honey, we have to—”
“It’s early.” She chokes out. “She’s not supposed to be here until January, Aaron, it’s still—it’s still early.” Her voice wavers again, but not from the pain. “How can you be so sure, anyway, they could just be—”
“Have they been getting closer? Lasting longer?” At her silence he cups her cheek, gentle but firm. “She’s coming now. You gotta let her, Em.”
Emily closes her eyes, her whimper stifled into her bitten lip. She’s shaking her head as Aaron holds her up, carrying her weight against his chest. There’s a quick press of his lips to her hair, a murmured, I know that pushes tears to her eyes.
She’s having her baby tonight.
The contraction is still rolling through her when Aaron calls for Jack. She feels the vibration of his voice through his chest, the pattering of footsteps on the floor static in her ears, muffled as if she’s underwater. Emily twists her fingers in Aaron’s shirt. He palms the back of her neck.
“—shoes on and come here when you’re done, stay with Mom while I get the baby’s things, okay? I’ll stay with her till you come back.”
She doesn’t need anyone to stay with her. Emily opens her mouth, about to say it, when another contraction hits. It sends pain across her abdomen, burying the feeling of Lucy shifting around. She closes her eyes and gnaws on her lip.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
“She’s having the baby now?”
“Yeah. Let’s go, we have to get to the hospital.”
“But isn’t it too ear—?”
“Jack,” Aaron says tightly, feeling the way Emily tenses, “buddy, it’s okay, it happens. Babies are rarely born on their due dates. Can you do what I asked?”—a soft, breathless yeah—“Quick, bud, c’mon.”
A swish of air. A hand skating up the length of her arm, the warmth of Aaron’s fingers cupping her cheeks. Emily opens her eyes, finding his blurry outline crouched in front of her.
“Hey,” he says quietly. “How are you holding on?”
She shakes her head. Her tongue is heavy, her jaw tightly clenched against the pain.
Aaron’s eyes are pinched with poorly concealed concern. He stands up and rubs her arm, mouthing some reassurances she can’t hear into her hairline. They vibrate through her skin until Jack’s sneakers come into view, from the corner of her eyes. He’s holding a pair of her shoes—the only pair that fit her anymore—which Aaron takes in hand and kneels down to fit on her feet.
He slips her right, already sock-covered, foot into her shoe, deftly tying the laces together in a double knot. When he’s done he moves on to her left, and through the haze of pain she can only think of one thing.
“I’m in my pajamas,” Emily mumbles, teary-eyed.
Aaron looks up. His mouth opens, no doubt to console, but Jack beats him to it.
“It’s okay, Mom.” Emily looks up to find his eyes wide and earnest. “Me and Dad are in our pj’s too. We won’t change, right?”
She never imagined she’d cry before even stepping foot in the damn hospital.
****
Forty eight minutes later she’s shivering in a hospital gown, numbed from the waist down from her epidural. Six centimeters dilated and the clock inches closer and closer to 9.
It’s there, under the annoyingly bright fluorescent lights of her hospital room, that it hits.
She’s having her baby on Christmas.
Emily’s vision is blurry before she knows it, hot tears rolling down her cheeks with all the ease of a hot knife slicing through butter. Her control on her emotions hung on a thread that has long since snapped, pregnancy a pair of scissors that rendered her a puppeteer with no control over her puppets. From the first few weeks she started crumbling, compartmentalization blown to pieces before she even started to show. It’s something she despises, even more than the aches and pains almost continually rolling through her body. Tears drop at wrong delivery orders and itchy clothes, unsatisfactory baby names and ugly shades of paint for the nursery. And now her daughter is going to share her birthday with a major holiday for the rest of her life.
The sob doesn’t build long in her chest before it breaks free.
Aaron straightens from where he’s sitting next to her bed. “Emily,” he perches on the edge of his chair, leaning against the handle separating them, “what is it, sweetheart? Are you still in pain?”
Emily’s lip wobbles. “Our daughter is gonna be born on Christmas. Do you know how much it sucks to be born on Christmas?” Her voice breaks on the last word, thick with the taste of her tears.
Aaron blows out a slow breath. The sound irritates her, a flash of annoyance sparking under her skin. But then he takes her hand and rubs his thumb into the tight skin stretched over her knuckles, replacing the bone-deep cold with his warmth.
“It would suck,” he agrees quietly. Emily chews on a sob and turns away, the confirmation in his voice too much for her to take. Aaron brings her back with warm fingers under her chin, gently forcing her eyes on his. “It would suck,” he says again, “if we weren’t her parents. We’ll make it special for her, Emily, you know we will.”
The distant feeling of a contraction ripples through her body. Emily clutches his hand, blinking back superfluous tears until it passes. “How?” She croaks.
His brows tick the slightest bit upwards. Aaron idly brings her hand up to his lips, muffling his thoughtful hum into her knuckles. “Well…we could split the day. Merry Christmas in the morning and happy birthday in the afternoon.” He murmurs. A few more ice-cold breaths and the corner of his mouth ticks up. “Gingerbread pancakes for breakfast and a cake after lunch?”
“...Gingerbread pancakes?” Emily frowns tearily. “Do those even exist?”
“We’ll make them exist. We’ll make up a new tradition for her—for us. It’ll be ours.” Aaron reassures, squeezing her hand. It warms in his grip. “We’ll make it work, Em. It’s hardly the hardest thing we’ve had to do.”
Truthfully, he almost convinces her. It’s hard not to; his eyes are warm, his hand warmer still and his voice bucketfuls of cloud-like softness to calm her down. Emily sniffles, seeing gingerbread pancakes, and almost starts to smile.
Until a thought unfurls in her head and more tears spill down her cheeks.
“J-Jack’s not gonna have a normal Christmas anymore.” She hiccups, eyes burning. “Neither of them will. And”—she aggressively wipes the hot tears on her face—“I think I traumatized him. Fuck, he saw me crying—”
“Emily—”
“We should tell him we got him the Nintendo.” She sniffles, “He’s probably upset. God, what kid wouldn’t be upset that their sibling is being born on Christmas—”
“Honey, you’ve got to save your strength.” Aaron says gently. He wipes her tears, uselessly, because more spill down her cheeks. “Jack isn’t upset, okay? Jess just texted that he can’t sleep, he’s so excited.”
Emily blinks damp lashes at him. “She did?”
Aaron’s smile is endlessly patient. “Yeah, she did. Come on now, let’s think of the good stuff.” He slips the hem of his sweater over his heel and gently dabs under her eye. “In a couple of hours, we’ll have our baby. And, just think about it—we’ll have more time with her than we thought we would. Fifteen more days than we thought we’d have. Isn’t that—” Aaron swallows, his hand faltering as a faint shine gleams in his eyes. “Isn’t that good, Emily?”
Fifteen days. Fifteen more days to know her baby, to get to speak out her name and run her finger down the length of her cheek.
More tears pool on her lashes. God, she’s sick of them. “Yeah.” Emily croaks, half laughing, half sobbing. “Yeah, it’s good. Fifteen days.” She wipes under her eye.
Aaron smiles softly. “She just couldn’t wait,” he lays his palm on the curve of her stomach, “must’ve heard about all the fun we’ll be having and got jealous. Did you, Lucy?” Impossibly, his voice softens further. “You just wanted to be part of it, huh?”
Emily smiles blurrily as she dries her face with the heel of her hand, watching Aaron lean over the handle to talk to her bump. That in itself isn’t unusual, but:
“You’re talking so much,” the thought slips past her lips before she can catch it, half delirious already from the pain and her epidural. Her hand finds his face, the pad of her thumb dipping under his jaw. “You never talk this much.”
She must really be on the ledge.
“Well, you’re freaking out. I have to do something.” Aaron murmurs. “What, should I stop?” The teasing lilt to his voice makes her cringe.
“No. Sorry, I didn’t mean to say that.” Emily mumbles, apologetic even though the brown of his eyes is warm. “S’mean.”
Aaron’s hand covers hers. Their fingers lock together, the metal of their rings notching with a tiny click. “You’re in labor, Emily. I think you saying a few mean things is warranted.”
“So you do think it’s mean?” Her eyes brim up with tears again. Great, she traumatized Jack and is bullying his father—
“No, baby.” He smothers a sigh into her knuckles. “I think you should stop worrying about my feelings and focus more on getting this little princess out,” his other hand drops to her stomach, knuckles gently tracing over the scratchy material of her hospital gown. Lucy stirs, but she doesn’t jab an elbow into Emily’s gut in response. “She’s not kicking anymore,” he notes.
“Mmm,” Emily sniffs, stealing her hand from his grip to place it on the palm lying on her stomach. It’s a bit of a useless exchange. “S’weird. She’s, like…rolling. Shifting.” Her brows furrow, even as Aaron smiles. “Can’t really explain it.”
A contraction makes her lace their fingers together, squeezing his hand though it doesn’t hurt, not really. When it passes he grabs a water bottle off her beside table and pushes it into her free hand, murmuring something about restoring all the water she’d lost. Emily glares at him weakly but takes it, her throat drier than she’d like from what seems like hours of crying. Neither of them are surprised when she drains the whole bottle in one go.
Emily’s eyes restlessly flit to the clock again; she groans when she finds it’s not even 9:30 yet, the clock’s long hand hovering between 4 and 5. The exhaustion is heavy in her bones, though it seems she’s hardly done anything but cry. Aaron makes her down yet another bottle of water at that, and when she’s done he wordlessly conjures a wet wipe and wipes the dried tears from her face.
She’s about to scold him for opening up their unborn daughter’s pack of wipes when a knock sounds and the door opens. The nurse comes in, cheerily announcing that it’s time for another checkup.
“How are we doing, Mrs. Hotchner?” She asks as she pokes and prods, pressing the transducer to Emily’s stomach. Lucy’s heartbeat comes through, and both Aaron and Emily exhale.
But the relief quickly disintegrates.
“Tired.” Emily grumbles.
Izzy smiles sympathetically. “You’re still at six centimeters. You could take a nap, if you’d like. It’ll probably still be a while.”
“It’s a good idea,” Aaron says when she’s gone. “Today was busy.”
It was busy. They’d been up since the morning, wrapping presents and hiding them—Jack’s—in their closet. Aaron had gone to the mall for some last minute gifts that slipped through the cracks, and she’d stayed home with Jack, hanging stockings while stepping through mountains of wrapping paper, half of them shredded to streamers from Sergio’s claws. But it was a good kind of busy, a good kind of ache that lingered alongside Lucy’s constant presence. It’s a kind of busyness she never thought she’d get to have, fated to celebrate holidays surrounded by friends but ultimately on her own. Now warmth flows from a home she can call her own, a family that makes her count lucky stars she never even believed in.
“Yeah,” Emily hums, abruptly closing her eyes at the feeling of another contraction. She lays her hand on her bump, thumb drawing circles as she tries to imagine meeting the little girl beneath her skin, finally getting to hold her, place a face to the name. She’d already imagined Aaron’s eyes, their dark hair—and hopefully those Hotchner dimples that she wouldn’t stand a chance against. The vision makes her breath hitch.
“Does it hurt?”
“Mm, no,” Emily mumbles, trying to open her eyes. She does it with some difficulty—forehead scrunched, squinting into the same alert pools she just saw beneath her closed lids. He is a little blurry again, but she blinks forcefully. “I fucking love drugs.”
Aaron laughs lightly and leans over the handle of her bed, kissing her temple. “I think that’s your cue for that nap. Close your eyes,” as soft as his voice, he adjusts the blanket up to her chest, “it’ll probably be the last good sleep you’ll have in a while.”
Emily snorts weakly. “If you can call having the whole bottom half of your body numb good…”
But she can’t complain too much. Except—
“I’m cold.”
Aaron reaches for the hem of his sweatshirt. The pajama shirt he’s wearing underneath rides up his stomach as he pulls it off, exposing a sliver. Emily chews on a smile, trying to hide it as his pajamas come into view. Jack had insisted on them—she kind of had, too—and Aaron stood no chance in refusing the bright red pajamas. He tried, but not very convincingly; Emily thinks she—impossibly—loves him all the more for it.
Aaron fishes his arm through the neckline and folds the sweatshirt back the right way. Softened strands of hair wilt into his face, shaken loose in raven threads above his eyes.
“Here,” he kisses the skin between her brows before gently stretching the neckline of his sweatshirt and guiding it over her head. Her hair gets trapped under it; Aaron pulls it out as she clumsily shoves her arms into the sleeves. Warmth settles over her, stretching over half her belly, though the blanket over her legs doesn’t do much.
Hospital beds always leave her with a distinct chill. The ones for her checkups were different, but beds like these remind her of the crushing fear she’d been left with last time, the loneliness and pain knowing her friends thought her to be gone. Now the extra space is heavy with the cold, even though she’s not anymore.
Emily stretches her hand over the handle. Aaron takes it, pressing his lips to her knuckles before encasing them between both of his warm hands.
“You’re in your pj’s,” she mumbles, a half smile getting squished into her pillow. Christmas pj’s, no less.
A faint smile curves his lips. Dimples. “Mm, solidarity and all that,” he says. “Go to sleep.”
“Bet the nurses had a good laugh,” her words start to slur.
“Bet they did,” his teeth show, a small laugh escaping as pink colors his cheeks. “Now close your eyes.”
“Y’know, I’m starting to think you just don’t like me.”
“I love you,” he murmurs, dipping his head down to catch her lips. They’re warm; she tingles all over. “I just want you to rest up, okay?”
“I guess.” Emily whispers. Her eyes flick up to his. “Just don’t let go of my hand.”
Aaron threads their fingers together.
“I won’t.”
****
Emily is in awe.
She’s sticky, she’s sweaty and numb, her legs useless, but she’s in awe. Her arms are full of her baby, the downy pink of her blanket rubbing softly against her arm. Lucy’s eyes are closed as she sleeps, quiet as the stillness of the room, and Emily can’t stop tracing the soft, miniature curve of her nose—her own nose, in a different face.
“I did such a good fucking job,” she mumbles tearily.
Aaron’s lips press together, dimples blooming in his cheeks. “You did.” He nods.
“And you did, too.” Emily sniffs. She takes his hand and squeezes. “Thanks for my baby, Aaron.”
This time he does let himself laugh. “It was my pleasure, sweetheart.” He tucks stray bangs back behind her ear, escaping from the braid he’d put her hair in. “Believe me.”
Emily bites her lip between her teeth, a poor effort to conceal the bubbly giggle in her chest. It’s strange; she’s distantly aware of bone deep exhaustion, a heaviness lining her eyelids, but she looks down and feels floaty. Christmas miracle, Aaron had called her when she was placed into Emily’s arms, red and screaming.
She has to agree.
When Jack sits on the edge of her bed and holds his sister, Aaron’s hands supporting his, he looks up at her with wide eyes.
“She’s way cooler than a Nintendo.”