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Two things, they have learned, tend to make Cat's milk come in with an immediacy that would be funny if Cat were inclined to find it funny, which she very much is not. The first is a decent orgasm. The second is the sound of Marina's hungry cry.
"Well," he starts to say.
"Don't."
"She has a good sense of timing. Better than in the middle of it."
Cat sighs, staring up at the ceiling before pushing herself up on her forearms, wincing as the movement shifts her breasts.
"She has a good sense of timing," she allows.
"Let me go get her," he suggests. "I shall fetch the principessa." He swings his legs over the bed before she can object, feeling around for his braies and stepping into them, standing to tie them. He plucks his shirt off the floor. Cat's fear of the dark embarrasses her, but her handy little glowing rune on the nightstand, made all those years ago by Bodahn's clever son, makes for much easier maneuvering around in the hours before dawn, a stretch of time they have grown very accustomed to.
"She's not a principessa because she's hungry," Cat says irritably, also dressing, though she doesn't bother with a shirt. He passes her a damp, clean cloth. There are so many pitchers of water scattered around this room that he thinks they could probably tap them with sticks and play a melody based on the water levels of each.
"Yes, I know," he assures her, splashing some water from the pitcher on the table onto his hands now, using his shirt to dry them. "But, you know, she and I, we have had this talk many times. Me? I am used to keeping odd hours. But her mother, she likes her sleep — needs it, even." He's aware he's mostly talking to himself as he tugs his shirt over his head. He likes to think he's being noisy for everyone's sake. "I tell her, Marina, my darling, kerida! We must learn to sleep through the night. I don't wish to rush you, but it has been four months, and your mother is starting to go a little crazy. Again," he says as he bends over the cradle and picks up a fussy baby who does not want Papá in the slightest and sees no reason to counterfeit delight, "me? I can stay up all night! But we must all bend to social custom on occasion, must try to keep usual hours so we do not confuse ourselves for bats."
He doesn't bother trying to bobble her into compliance any more than he bothers trying to make much sense; Marina has already started her wind up cry, her final warning before losing it, and to be fair, it's very charitable of her to give them a warning at all. She kicks her legs meaningfully so he can't bundle her with ease, though as she is only four months old, she's really much better at things like holding her head up. Opinions, on the other hand, those she has grasped very quickly. She is a prodigy when it comes to opinions. He pretends she's making it very hard for him to maneuver her, that he is very nearly bested by an irritated infant. For the sake of her dignity.
By the time he's turned around, Cat has arranged herself so that she leans against the headboard, blanket across her lap and a pillow, too, for good measure. Sensing victory, Marina starts to wail to make sure everybody feels sufficiently guilty.
"I know," Cat coos, reaching for her. He walks around to his side of the bed while Cat takes over. He mirrors her position without the pillow or the baby in his lap, leaning his head back against the headboard and closing his eyes. Abruptly, Marina cuts herself off, disgruntlement abandoned in favor of food. "Ow," Cat says pointedly. "Ow. Ow, sweetheart. She doesn't even have teeth," she complains, ostensibly to him, and he nods, opening his eyes and letting his head fall to the side to look at her. At them. Cat is already staring back down at Marina, gently tickling the baby's chin to nudge her into attempting to latch again, this time successfully. "Why do we have to pretend we're still new to this, my girl? Slow down. There you go. Better. Ow."
For a little while, the only sounds in the room are Marina's greedy little noises. Small though they are, they're borderline violent, and he can't help but chuckle.
"She was hungry," he comments.
"Mmm."
Sometimes this standing appointment takes a long time. Tonight, Marina simply falls asleep, suckling almost to the last, and so the window of time to coax her back into wakefulness without agony passes without their notice.
"No, principessa," Cat groans, but quietly. Marina merely presses her face into her mother's breast, mouth slack. "You're going to have me walking in circles." No response. "Maferath's ass."
"Did she finish that one off, at least?" he yawns.
"Maybe. Almost."
There's a thump as Cat lets her head fall back against the headboard. Daringly, she does not reach for a cloth to drape over her shoulder as she transfers Marina carefully into a more upright position. Having had lightly digested milk vomited down his back more than once, he would not risk it himself, but they will usually know within a few minutes if they'll have to wake her up to burp her. She communicates well, their little girl.
Cat smooths a hand gently up Marina's back over and over, a compromise to let her sleep, a compromise he hopes will set a good example.
"Still no summons," she remarks, as much a wish as a statement of fact. He swallows a sigh. She has said as much every few hours since the letter from Sigrun arrived this morning. Yesterday morning, he supposes. "Weisshaupt must be in chaos."
He can slip back into this conversation in his sleep at this point, and indeed, he sort of is.
"Understandably so. Can you imagine the committees that will be formed? The tribunals? I think I would rather have been a demon sacrifice. Let them scramble."
In truth, he thinks that Weisshaupt's utter failure to manage this crisis has bought them at least a few more months of relative peace. He is more worried about a summons from the new Divine, personally, or perhaps renewed interest from the Inquisition. But Leliana must be too busy to send her spies after them again. Sweet of her to do so at the time. Maybe she'd gotten the hint from their response; this stretch of the Storm Coast now relatively free of the Inquisition's presence from what they can tell, though they have not tested this theory by going outside all that much. Aptly named, this place.
Marina doesn't quite burp, but she demonstrates that air is moving freely throughout her body with a wet exhalation, and she doesn't even have to startle awake to do so. Talented.
"She gets that from you," he says after a moment of holding his breath, anyway, unwilling to push their luck. "Once she is asleep, she is asleep." Sort of.
He's said this before, a comfortable routine by now. And Cat replies, as she usually does:
"If I had to pass anything along to her, I'm glad it was that and not my nervous stomach." She kisses the side of their daughter's head, a silent press of her lips rather than the smacking variation that more often than not makes Marina chuckle warmly with the enthusiasm of someone who is working up to a proper laugh but has not yet figured out the logistics. He had not realized babies did not simply know such things.
As is not infrequent now, he tears up at this thought and the sight of Cat's nostril flaring as she smells the crown of Marina's head, almost without a swell of emotion to accompany it, tired as he is. He covers it with a yawn and a pass of his hands over his face. They are at the whims of parenthood, not the other way around. He cannot claim to be as disoriented as Cat, but he is certainly different in ways he's still feeling out.
"Would you — ?" Cat asks, but he's already easing out of bed.
"She has a light supper in the afternoon," he murmurs, negotiating Marina's weight into his arms. She's a good baby. She doesn't sleep through the night, true, but all things considered, she's awfully accommodating except when hungry, and there are plenty of adults who cannot say the same. Communicative, too. "And then dinner later. And then a snack in the middle of the night to last her until morning. She's Antivan." He would be fine standing and rocking her for a bit, but she's still mostly out in spite of being moved, and her mother needs a touch more attention, he thinks. He levers the baby down into her cradle, pausing when she spasms a little, a last ditch attempt to remain involved in the conversation, before she looks like a perfect doll, absurdly beautiful with the faint beginnings of eyebrows, her tiny fingernails on the tips of her tiny fingers. They survived the panic of having to file those nails down by the skin of their teeth.
He replaces the pillow in Cat's lap with the large mixing bowl they keep for such things, and she begins the arduous task of making sure she's as drained of milk as she can be. She's sensitive to the point of very real anger about this process, and so he has to keep his curiosity in check. It's not a matter of finding it arousing, only that — well, the body does a great deal of strange things. She finds it undignified and aggravating and endless. And to be fair to her, he had never heard of clogged ducts before this, had always assumed milk came directly from the center of the nipple in one easy stream, that this would not be the part of having a baby that would involve frustration beyond the odd hours they must keep, that it would not be something that would involve trial and error on both sides of the equation.
"I'm a broodmother," Cat says after several minutes of nothing but the soft and rhythmic hiss of the spray itself and the milk hitting the bowl. She has mentioned this often. He doesn't particularly like it when she says this, but things are too raw for him to talk about why without incident. Best practice is only one of them ends up crying. That conversation is a two-person cry and therefore off limits.
"You are missing a few nipples," he replies, which is as far as he is allowed to joke. She doesn't roll her eyes tonight. Not a good sign.
"Zev," she says after a few more minutes of relative quiet. "Tell me a story."
A holdover, a persistent one, from their early days during the Blight, when he had angled for her attention with the promise of one tale or another of his exploits. They are like any other couple; they repeat themselves, particularly while in this limbo state of discombobulation, and he has long since ceased to worry about coming up with something fresh. Lately, he has found himself reaching back into his childhood in the brothel, sifting through what he can remember Almedina acting out for him and the other children with wide gestures and hypnotic eyes. Well, he must make sure he has them ready to go whenever Marina starts to comprehend more than tone and volume.
"A very long time ago," he says slowly, "there was a king in one kingdom and a gardener in another. On the exact same day, almost at the exact same time, the king's wife gave birth to a daughter, and the gardener's wife gave birth to a son. Many years passed, and the little princess grew into a lively young woman. Her father called to his side his advisor, wishing to know what her mazál, her fate, would be."
Some of what he remembers is in a language he's only heard from a few people besides Almedina, a careful dialect that hides in plain sight and yet was everywhere in his childhood, but what words he knows, he wants Marina to know, too.
"'Woe is me!' the advisor groaned." Almedina had made a meal of the parts she could embody. "'I have divined what I can, and your daughter is fated to marry a gardener's son in the kingdom of such-and-such.' This was not welcome news. 'Not if I can help it!' thundered the king, and after a fashion, he summoned the advisor again, handed him a letter, and commanded him to take it to the king of the kingdom of such-and-such."
Cat cannot abide touch while she wrestles her body into submission, though exhaustion and repetition and inconvenience has whittled away her compulsion to seek out privacy to do this, behaving as her diminutive's namesake does, slinking away to suffer alone. He tries to make his voice do what his hand would.
"The advisor did as he was bid, and the king of the kingdom of such-and-such, upon reading the letter from his royal peer, ordered that the gardener's son be brought before him. 'Look here,' he told the young man. 'You must take this letter' — a new letter, this story has many letters — 'and travel to the kingdom of what-have-you' — the first king's kingdom, you see — 'and deliver it to the king there.' Well, what could the gardener's son do? Off he went with barely a chance to kiss his father's cheek goodbye, through the fields in the hot sun until at last he was forced to rest beneath a tree. There the poor boy fell asleep, the letter held loosely in his hand. Two strangers came walking by, following a pair of ravens, who led them to the sleeping gardener's son. The first stranger was curious and read the letter. 'Greetings from the kingdom of such-and-such,' it said. 'As soon as you read this letter, behead its carrier!'"
"Oh, dear," Cat comments. She sounds as sleepy as her daughter.
"'Oh, dear,' said the second stranger," Zevran concurs, earning a chuckle from Cat. "So the next day, the youth woke up, horrified to have slept so long. He hurried to the city gates, begged an audience with the king, and there he presented the letter, explaining that it came from the king of the kingdom of such-and-such. 'Greetings from the kingdom of such-and-such!' the king of the kingdom of what-have-you read. 'As soon as you read this letter, wed this youth to your daughter. Make great haste!' Well, this king, he was superstitious and very trusting of letters, and so within the week, the preparations for the wedding were finished, and a grand party was thrown to celebrate the union between the lively princess and the mysterious but fortunate young man. Among the guests was the king of the kingdom of such-and-such, and upon seeing the groom, his mouth fell open. 'Didn't you read my letter?" he cried to the king of the kingdom of what-have-you. 'This is the very gardener's son you asked me to find! I sent him back to you so that you could have him beheaded and instead you have married him to your daughter!'"
He thinks the business is wrapping up, though it's hard to tell. Cat manhandles her body with the same grim determination her daughter summons to feed from it, and it really is astonishing how much milk can hide if she were only to express it in one position.
"The king read the letter once more, finding none of what the other king insisted he had written, and so he called his advisor to his side. 'What can this possibly mean?' he asked him. 'My lord king,' the advisor replied, 'you cannot outwit mazál! This was fate.'"
"Did they live happily ever after?" Cat asks after a moment. "The princess and the gardener's son?"
"We must assume so," Zevran replies. It had bothered him as a child, too. He had been too distracted by the lovers to realize the story is actually about the king. They sit in silence once more.
"We're lucky," Cat says abruptly. "That things have fallen out the way they have. The false Calling, the Breach. The Wardens in disarray. We have more time and cover than we would have, had everything not gone so sideways."
He bites the inside of his cheek, chest aching. She pursues this train of thought on and off, more and more as the weeks pass. No joy in being lucky, only dread.
"Yes," he agrees.
"It can't last forever, though."
"No, it cannot."
"It's been six months since Adamant."
"I know, mi amor."
"I don't know what leverage I still have with Warden leadership. I can't assume they won't resent me for not being duped by Corypheus, even though I was, I just didn't go to Adamant." He understands very much the compulsion to tread and retread the same worries over and over again, but this also, quite frankly, makes him want to die, and so he gets out of bed to fetch a clean breast band and damp cloth and to light the candle in its pewter holder. She accepts the former two, passing him the bowl of milk, a respectable amount given the circumstances, and this he takes to what serves as the kitchen of this safehouse, once used by displaced mages. Most of them have remained with the Inquisition for the time being while the new College of Enchanters finds its legs.
The mages have good reason to hope the new Divine will not give them cause to need safehouses for at least a little while, and so he and Cat have the luxury of the entire place to themselves, relatively assured of privacy without interruption for the first time in a long time. The amenities, illuminated by the candle in his other hand, though sparse, do have the advantage of magical modification. They can store breast milk here, for example, without going into the cellar, which unnerves Cat so badly that even though the blood has been cleared out, even after weeks and weeks here, she refuses to so much as entertain the notion of putting a foot on the stair. He can't really blame her. They leave that door locked and barely venture outside of their bedroom unless it's to go all the way outside, anyway.
The mixing bowl has a small spout that makes it easy enough for him to transfer the milk to one of the glass bottles he'd boiled in the afternoon. He'll wash the bowl later, when there's light in the sky, but for now he can bring back the bowl without a spout, annoying as it will be for the him of six hours from now if Marina wants a light breakfast. He stows the bottle in the little ice box with its perpetual ice and the rest of the oversupply, and then he stands there for a moment, wondering if he should hurry back or drag his feet. The latter is a coward's impulse, but he would be both a coward and a liar if he did not admit at least to himself that sometimes it would be a relief to be a worse man than he is.
He lands on the former, and Cat is indeed quietly weeping when he returns, too late to head it off at the pass. Despair settles easily upon them in the dark hours of the morning; this happens every few days, and he is genuinely grateful that it's no longer every few hours. Anders had warned them this could happen, that there would be an initial drop but that anything persisting beyond the first few weeks qualified as something he, Zevran, would have to monitor diligently. Of course, that had been when they had still been on Isabela's ship, when there had always been someone else around to help.
In truth, he thinks it's simpler than what comes after birth: they do not lead lives that easily transition into parenthood the way some people do, and on top of everything else, they will have to choose the best bad option amongst an array of worse bad options. They were not fated to relax, are in fact forced settle for reprieves where they can catch them. It is not the sort of framework he feels is fair to impose on a child, but until they have better options, they have little choice in the matter.
She's had the wherewithal to put on the breast band and shirt, which is cause for whatever passes for optimism currently. It means, bare minimum, that he can touch her without her recoiling. He sets the clean bowl on the table by the crib with the candle, which he blows out.
"What are we going to do?" she whispers as he crawls onto the bed and holds her as best as he can. "Zev, what have we done?"
There's a script she follows, unchanging regardless of whatever he improvises.
"We had a baby, mi amor," he says. "Well, you did — I will not steal your valor. I was certainly present for it." For much of it. Once he'd tracked her down.
"First the archdemon, then the Architect, then Avernus, now a baby I'm not supposed to have been able to have. They can't know about her. I want her to have some semblance of a normal life."
"We will figure it out."
"What if we don't?"
"We will."
"I can't leave the Wardens, not if I want to find a cure. You can't raise a baby and do what you do either." She has always loved a debate. He indulges her when the stakes are lower, but he is no fan of this type of argument, and she can handily overpower his evasions and platitudes with a battery of facts he can't bear to think about right now with Marina sleeping in the same room. "Do we have another option besides Fergus? They don't even like that I'm still in contact with him."
"Your brother is a good option. If we must leave her with anyone, we could do much worse than an honorable man who has managed to remain so, as much as any teyrn can." He strokes her hair while her diaphragm spasms, drawing from her instinctual, involuntary sounds that echo her daughter's when she is overwhelmed. "She would not want for much. It would be easy enough to visit for long stretches of time, even if Weisshaupt doesn't like it. She already has a Cousland's nose and lungs, it would not be difficult to pass her off as Fergus' bastard."
Like Alistair, he thinks as he always does when this topic comes up, though he has yet to find either the courage or the foolishness to point this out. Let the dead rest.
"It'll all come out," Cat sobs, and she is probably right. If he looks at that thought head on he will have to dry heave until he's exorcised himself of the terror it brings with it. "I've ruined her life already."
Well, he should get a little credit for that, too, he thinks, but Cat guards guilt with the vehemence of a jealous lover. He is not above gently weaponizing that.
"Shh, mi amor, you will wake her." He pulls her out of his neck, holding her face so she can see him, and though it hurts him to look at her, eyes and mouth swollen, washed with tears, it's not as though either of them are people who balk at pain. "If there are rumors, let them be rumors. There are rumors about you and I, yes? And we have managed those for many years, have we not? It can be a temporary solution while we figure out something better. What's important is that both you and she are healthy and alive. You have not ruined her life. We are having to adjust our expectations, that is all. All things considered, given that she is perhaps the most unexpected baby on this continent, I think we are doing very well."
He sounds convincing. He thinks maybe in the daylight he could convince himself. In the miserable hours between midnight and dawn, he will settle for calming her down enough to get the sleep she requires to haul herself out of an admittedly seductive spiral. He rubs his thumbs over her wet cheekbones.
"I think you have much more leverage with Weisshaupt now that they have been humiliated," he says quietly. "I think you will have much more support from the other Warden-Commanders than you have had, and you have spent enough time making sure those lines of communication are open and friendly that you already have more allies than you realize. I think everyone will be much more comfortable with the idea of a cure now that they have been interfered with in this way, and truly, mi amor, the rank and file will be glad to know someone sees them as more than Deep Roads fodder. The brass have always been fools, you excepted, their reluctance thus far has been entirely supported by the idea that the taint is not something that can be manipulated — and now, lo and behold, it would seem you are ahead of the game." Maybe he's convincing himself now. Who knows.
"They'll never forgive me for surviving the archdemon."
"Or for continuing to want to be alive, yes. Victory, vigilance, sacrifice. Why would anyone desire more than that?" If he's bitter, he has cause to be. "It is only surprising that the Order has not been so publicly compromised before. Imagine if the business in the Vimmarks had been common knowledge, imagine if they had done something then. Who needs forgiveness from hypocrites, Cat?"
She looks cried out, eye contact no longer sustainable.
"I want you to be right so badly," she whispers as she nudges herself back into his neck.
"It will end up somewhere in the middle," he replies honestly instead of reaching for the obvious joke. He reaches for her instead, cradling her in a position he associates with shielding her from projectiles, covering her head and neck with one arm, the other around her back. His mind, it conjures up all sorts of nonsense when he fails to give it sleep. "It will be all right."
Her breath hitches and she holds him tight. It's been a few months, but the novelty of embracing face to face again has yet to wear off. The time was once this sort of behavior made him feel completely out to sea. Now he is well-practiced in tracking the shifts and swells and now thankfully ebbs of a fit of tears through the breath. She gets that from you. They say it seriously and about the most nonsensical things. The tenor of her hiccups. Her solemn, slightly concerned gaze when they talk to her. How chatty she's gotten, how she mutters to herself to keep herself awake. She gets that from you.
"Next time," he says in Cat's ear, "I get to be the one who cries." This time her breath hitches with a watery laugh.
"It's your turn, yes," she agrees in a voice that sounds more like herself, albeit herself when she is very sad. "Though I think I've taken some of your turns."
"Who's keeping track, mi amor? Not me. I am merely letting you know so you can prepare." She tightens her hold on him again, and he sways them as best as he's able. "Let's see if we can get back to sleep, yes? It would be a shame to let an infant show us up. Even one as talented as our daughter."
The light from her rune continues to glow, maintaining a steady and comforting level of gloom that all of a sudden is best suited to falling asleep, and they settle shoulder to shoulder. Clever, clever boy, that Sandal, who by now has not been a boy in some years. Zevran wonders where he and his father have ended up now, if they have fared well.
"They have to have names," Cat says after a few minutes of silence other than the slight increase of the wind outside. Perhaps an early morning rain approaches. Skimming the sea and riding inland.
"Hmm?"
"It can't be the kingdom of such-and-such and the kingdom of what-have-you. They have to have proper names."
"I cannot remember what they were called," he admits.
She sleeps primarily on her back, and nursing is an achy affair, so she cannot sustain much of a weight on her chest for long, much less relax enough to drift off. Still, she hooks her pinky with his.
"You can make them up, sweetheart," she points out, amused, and. Well. It genuinely hadn't occurred to him to do that.
"You are right," he replies after a moment, and the pinky is joined by the rest of her hand, lacing their fingers together.
She brings his hand up to her face, turning into it so that the bridge of her nose bumps over his knuckles, and smacks a kiss to the back of his hand, exactly the sort of kiss that makes Marina go into hysterics no matter how many times he and Cat do it, and he understands Marina's frantic glee a little bit. Certainly, he is too tired to do much about it, but he understands it all the same.
"She will be all right," he says through a throat that suddenly hurts. "We have achieved many strange and difficult things." Cat sighs.
"This is worse than the archdemon."
"Well, we were not trying to raise the archdemon. Hmm. Actually. Do not compare our child to the archdemon."
"She's loud enough."
"She gets that from you."
"Mmm."
She has not yet relinquished his hand. Outside, the rain begins, a gentle patter on the roof, against the walls. He misses Antiva. They need sun.
Again, his nose burns with tears he really can't indulge right now, and he covers his eyes with his free hand, massaging his brow, crumpled beneath his fingers. He is only tired. He has not had as much sleep as he would prefer, has not had enough sleep to think clearly and calmly.
"I don't ever want you to think that I regret her," Cat says after a moment. "Or that I don't think you're — more than capable. A good father."
He's used to it, but the word father nevertheless sends a sharp jolt of fear through his stomach. He wonders if his own father had felt the same way. If he had known about Zevran at all.
"A wonderful father," Cat amends, quieter. "A wonderful husband. We're very lucky."
But it's been six months since Adamant. But a crow feather in Marina's otherwise empty cradle has been the central feature of nearly every nightmare he's had for four months now. Pressure builds in his chest, and he blows it out carefully. He is tired and unreliable right now. Many things will feel different in the morning. If they have learned nothing else, they have certainly learned that.
Cat's fingers uncurl from his, and he peeks out from under his fingers.
She shifts onto her side, propped up on her forearm. The movement costs her more than he wishes it would, but he's flinching at shadows. It's the nursing, not injuries that have long since healed. She places a hand over his cheek, looking at him with the same solemn regard their daughter does.
"We will be okay," she says. He nods beneath her palm, staring at her. Her thumb brushes at the outer corner of his eye. "We'll be okay."
"This is not my cry," he warns her, pretending he does not notice the wobble in his voice. "This does not count."
"You can cry," she says, as she has told Marina often, "as much as you want."
"It is wet enough here as it is."
"Oh, well."
"But you like this weather," he says after a moment. "You like this Fereldan wilderness."
"There's a beach," she replies, as if this explains it. It might, given the rain-lashed coast of her childhood. Not all that far from here. Fergus plans to visit soon.
"There is that cult," he points out, so he cannot linger on Cat's brother and what they might ask of him.
"They haven't bothered us yet. There's a river."
"There are bears."
"We have achieved many strange and difficult things," she parrots, and he smiles in spite of himself, eyes slipping closed.
"Do you think," he asks, "that we could achieve a little sleep?"
"I think we can manage that," she says, settling on her back again. He reaches out a hand to stroke her hair back into the crown of her head, arm at an awkward angle, but his thumb can brush her hairline. "I love you so much."
"I love you, too," he replies quietly. She drifts off within minutes, partially from exhaustion, partially because she simply has always done that, and some things have not changed. And then it is only him awake in the low light of the rune, listening to the breathing of two people he never, ever thought he would be allowed to have when he was a younger man, any more than he had been allowed a single pair of soft, leather gloves. He folds his hands over his stomach, closing his eyes.
Well, it is just You and me now, he thinks in the general direction of whatever listening ear is out there. We have survived tonight. If You could give us an easy day tomorrow, I would be much obliged.
There is no answer any more than there ever has been, but he feels better for having asked, anyway. They will tell Marina stories about this time when she's older.
He doesn't remember falling asleep, but he wakes to a low rumble of thunder. Despite the dark, green gloom outside the window, he thinks it's well past dawn. Beside him, Cat stirs but slips back under. From the cradle, however, comes an uneasy babble.
For a moment, he lets his eyes fall closed, feeling the heaviness of his body, the ease with which he could go back to sleep for hours, maybe. Then he swings his legs over the side of the bed, padding over to the cradle where an anxious baby stares up at him with definitively alert, relieved eyes. Like she had been afraid, even if only for a moment, that she would need someone and no one would come. Well, the world has righted itself.
"You look lonely, I think," he says, fitting his hands beneath her back, lifting her up to hold her to his chest. "Shh, it is only a little rain. Here I am." She does that funny thing where she forgets she has to open her mouth to make a proper noise, resulting in a pseudo-raspberry. She's a good little girl, their daughter. Talented. Communicative. "Yes, exactly. Here I am."