Chapter Text
Jack found him in the nursery doorway at one-thirteen in the morning, barefoot and motionless, one hand braced lightly against the frame.
The apartment was quiet in the rare, suspicious way it only ever was when Zoya had been asleep for long enough to make both of them distrustful. The monitor was on. The night-light cast the room in a low amber glow. In the crib, Zoya slept on her back with one arm flung over her head in a gesture of tiny imperial confidence, as if she had personally conquered sleep and expected tribute for it.
Robby was just looking at her.
Not anxiously. Not checking for breathing for the ninth time in an hour. Jack knew the difference now.
This was the other thing.
The softer one.
The one parents did when they had been rearranged by love and still hadn’t fully adjusted to the architecture.
Jack came up behind him quietly and rested a hand at the small of his back.
Robby startled only a little, then leaned into the touch before he could think better of it.
“She’s out cold,” Jack murmured.
“Suspicious,” Robby said.
Jack smiled. “Deeply.”
They stood there a minute in easy silence, watching the rise and fall of Zoya’s chest, the occasional twitch of her fingers, the absurd sweetness of her mouth slack with sleep.
Then Robby said, very quietly, “I told Samira something once.”
Jack turned his head slightly. “That sounds ominous.”
Robby huffed a laugh under his breath. “It was, at the time.”
Jack waited.
Robby kept his eyes on Zoya. “I told her I thought I’d be married with two kids in college by now. Maybe have some property with a pond. We could play hockey on it in the winter.”
Jack’s hand stayed still against his back.
Robby smiled faintly, but there was old ache in it. Not sharp anymore. Just remembered.
“And then I said, look at me now. No wife, no kids, no pond.”
Jack leaned one shoulder against the frame beside him. “Harsh on the pond.”
Robby laughed softly.
Then he went quiet again.
For a second Jack thought that was all of it, just a memory surfacing because love had made him reflective and sleep deprivation had made him honest.
Then Robby said, “I meant it when I said it.”
Jack looked at him.
Robby’s face was turned toward the crib, toward their daughter sleeping in the dim light, toward the life they had built in forms and feedings and panic and love.
“I really thought that was what a future looked like,” he said. “When I was younger. Wife, kids, some very aggressively normal version of happiness. Something stable enough that if I got there, maybe it would mean I’d done life correctly.”
Jack said nothing.
Robby rubbed a thumb against the doorframe, thinking his way through the words as he spoke them.
“And I didn’t get any of it,” he said. “Not that version. Not even close.” A small pause. “No wife. No pond. Definitely no collegiate hockey children.”
Jack snorted softly.
Robby smiled, but when he went on his voice changed. Warmer. Fuller.
“But now…” He glanced down, then back at Zoya. “Now I’ve got this little girl in there. And you. And a life I didn’t know to want because I didn’t know it existed for me.” He swallowed once. “And I’m so in love with my future it feels ridiculous.”
Jack felt that sentence in his bones.
Robby laughed once under his breath, embarrassed by the sincerity of it and too tired to disguise it properly.
“I know that sounds insane.”
“No,” Jack said. “It sounds accurate.”
Robby turned then and looked at him.
There was no defensiveness in his face. No irony. Just that open, dangerous tenderness Jack was never going to survive with any real dignity.
“I used to think not getting the life I pictured meant I’d failed somehow,” Robby said. “And now I look at her, and at you, and at all of this…” His eyes flicked toward the hall, the apartment, the whole shape of their days. “And I think maybe I was just bad at imagining happiness.”
Jack’s chest tightened.
He reached up and touched Robby’s face, thumb brushing once along the edge of his beard.
“You were imagining with incomplete information,” he said.
Robby leaned into his hand a little. “That’s annoyingly wise.”
“I’m very upsetting that way.”
Robby smiled.
In the crib, Zoya sighed and settled deeper into sleep, one fist uncurling against the sheet.
They both looked at her again.
Then Robby said, softer now, “I don’t miss the pond.”
Jack barked a quiet laugh. “Good. I thought I was going to have to fake enthusiasm for pond maintenance.”
“I think you would’ve been very stern about algae.”
“I would’ve been correct about algae, but I’d rather not have to be.”
Robby laughed again, a little helplessly, and the sound was so full of contentment that Jack felt something in himself go still around it, like a compass finding north.
He slid his hand from Robby’s face to the back of his neck.
“Come on,” he murmured.
Robby looked at him. “Where?”
Jack gave him a look. “To bed, you idiot.”
That softened Robby’s whole face.
Jack kissed him there in the nursery doorway, slowly at first, just a soft press of his mouth that was meant to be simple and turned into something fuller almost immediately because Robby made that little quiet sound he did when he stopped guarding himself. Jack’s free hand found Robby’s waist. Robby’s hand came up to Jack’s wrist, then slid higher, curling at the back of his neck as if to keep him there.
It wasn't desperate.
It was warm and certain and a little smiling at the edges, the kind of kiss people fall into when the worst thing in the room is joy too large to carry politely.
When they broke apart, Robby kept close enough that their foreheads brushed.
“You know,” he murmured, “for a man who mocked sentiment, you’re responding to it with a lot of kissing tonight.”
Jack kissed him again just to shut him up.
This one made Robby laugh into his mouth, and Jack felt the laugh answer in his own chest. They stood there in the dim hall outside the nursery, kissing like the happiest kind of fools, quiet enough not to wake the baby and far too gone to care much about dignity.
Then Jack drew him down the hall, one hand still at his neck, the other briefly catching his fingers.
They paused once more at the bedroom door, listening for any sign from the nursery.
Nothing.
Just the monitor’s soft static hush and the sleeping sounds of their daughter.
Robby exhaled and let Jack guide him backward into the room.
“This,” he said quietly, as Jack sat him down on the edge of the bed and stepped between his knees, “is a much better future than the pond.”
Jack bent, kissed him once, then again, slower the second time, letting it linger.
“Obviously,” he murmured against his mouth.
Robby’s hands came to Jack’s waist, then around him fully, drawing him closer with a confidence that still felt new enough to be precious. Jack went willingly, one hand braced on the mattress, the other sliding into Robby’s hair. Robby tipped his head back for him, smiling when Jack followed the line of his jaw with one more kiss and then came back to his mouth as if there were nowhere else worth being.
They were both smiling too much for it to become anything feverish.
It was better than that.
It was the long, happy making out of men who had crossed too much dark country not to appreciate arriving. Jack kissed him until Robby was laughing softly and a little breathless, until the room had gone warm around them, until every time they pulled back half an inch, one of them leaned in again like magnetism was no longer theoretical.
At one point, Robby looked up at him with dazed affection and said, “You are impossible.”
Jack kissed the corner of his mouth. “And yet.”
“And yet,” Robby agreed, pulling him back in.
Eventually, practicality, that old third party in their relationship, nudged its way back into the room.
Jack straightened with obvious reluctance and said, “Hold that thought.”
Robby, pink-cheeked and rumpled already, blinked up at him. “That is a hateful sentence.”
“Mm-hm.”
Jack sat on the edge of the bed and reached down to unfasten his prosthetic with the ease of long habit. The room quieted around the small familiar sounds of it, the release of straps, the shift of weight, the careful economy of a body that knew exactly what it was doing. There was nothing dramatic in it. Nothing to be pitied. Just the ordinary intimacy of night, of getting comfortable, of setting down what the day required.
Robby watched him for a second, expression softening.
Not because it was new. It wasn’t.
Because it was Jack. Because this too was part of home, now.
Jack glanced up. “What?”
Robby shook his head and smiled a little. “Nothing.”
“Liar.”
“I’m having a fond moment. Don’t make it weird.”
Jack snorted softly and set the prosthetic beside the bed where he always kept it, within easy reach for morning. Then he shifted back under the covers with the slight carefulness that came with habit more than pain.
Robby lifted the blanket for him without being asked.
That tiny, matter-of-fact gesture hit Jack harder than it had any right to.
Once Jack settled, Robby leaned in and kissed him again, gentler this time, less laughter in it and more tenderness. Jack’s hand came up to the back of his neck. Robby’s fingers brushed once over his hip, then rested warm and easy at his side like they had every right to be there.
“Well,” Robby murmured against his mouth. “Now you can continue.”
“That,” Jack said, kissing him once more because he was helpless not to, “is a very bossy tone for somebody who was just praising my emotional wisdom.”
“I contain multitudes.”
“So does Zoya. She still doesn’t get to make policy.”
Robby laughed into the kiss that followed, because they both knew that was a lie.
Then Jack got him properly under the blankets, still smiling, still stealing soft kisses between words and no words, until Robby was flushed and loose-limbed and looking at him like he could hardly believe this life had happened to him.
Jack lay down beside him and drew him in close, and Robby came easily, fitting himself against Jack’s chest with the ease of somebody who had finally stopped pretending he didn’t belong there.
Jack kissed his forehead, then his temple, then once more the mouth that was still smiling faintly.
In the next room, Zoya slept on.
In this one, Robby tucked himself against the man he loved and breathed out, like a person setting down weight he no longer had to carry alone.
“This,” he murmured, already drifting, “is better than the pond.”
Jack smiled into his hair and held him tighter.
“Way better,” he said.
And then, warm and tangled and still tasting like laughter, Jack took him to sleep.