Felicity's Beast World Apocalypse

He crossed to her in three strides that shook the floorboards, and his hand was on her cheek before she’d drawn her next breath. His palm was hot, almost feverish, and she could feel the tremor running through it, the fine vibration of something barely contained.

"Felicity." His voice was low, raw, stripped of every layer of composure he usually wore like armour. He leaned in and pressed his mouth to hers hard, claiming, desperate, and she felt the taste of copper and something wild and terrified on his tongue.

She fisted the front of his shirt and pulled him closer, because after everything, after the waiting and the not-knowing, she wanted him near enough to feel his pulse hammer against her knuckles.

A sound came from her chest.

Not from her, but on her. A tiny, rumbling growl that vibrated against her sternum, so small and so fierce that it shouldn’t have carried any weight at all and carried all of it. The panther cub had woken, his blue eyes slitted, his tiny lips pulled back from gums that didn’t yet have teeth, and he was growling at the massive figure looming over his mother.

From Damien’s arms came a hiss thin and reedy, the snake cub’s tongue flicking out in a flash of pink and from Ivan’s, a sharp, startled bark that cracked halfway through into something almost comically high-pitched.

Victor pulled back from her mouth and looked down.

Felicity watched his face, watched the way the tension in his jaw unspooled, watched the corner of his mouth twitch, watched something ancient and warm move behind those blood-red eyes.

He chuckled. Low and rough and real.

"Hello, little panther," he murmured, and bent down and pressed his lips to the cub’s forehead. The growl stuttered, caught, and the cub made a grumbling sound deep in his tiny chest, but his tail, that traitorous tail, had started wagging against Felicity’s wrist in slow, sweeping arcs, and there was nothing he could do about it.

Victor straightened and turned to Damien, who held the snake cub up with the reverent care of someone handling something made of glass and lightning. Victor reached out and poked one finger gently into the soft, round belly, and the cub’s scales shimmered gold in the lamplight, and then Victor kissed his forehead too, and the snake cub.

The snake cub grabbed his nose.

Two chubby little hands, fat fingers splayed, latched onto Victor’s nose with a grip that made the massive man’s eyes go wide, and the cub laughed. A bright, bubbling giggle that filled the room like sunlight, that made Damien’s breath catch audibly, that made Felicity’s heart do something complicated and painful and beautiful behind her ribs.

Victor’s mouth curved into something almost tender as he carefully extracted his nose from the tiny grip. Then he turned to Ivan, and to the blonde wolf cub cradled against the lion’s broad chest, and his gaze flicked sideways to where Voss stood, still on his knees, still wrecked, still watching.

Victor raised one dark eyebrow.

"Look," he said, flat and dry. "It’s you."

The wolf cub grumbled, a low sound in his chest that was pure Voss, and then chuffed a short, dismissive exhale through his nose that was so perfectly, devastatingly his father’s that Felicity heard Voss make a sound like he’d been punched.

She was laughing. She was crying. She was looking at this impossible tableau, her husbands, her cubs, this family that shouldn’t exist and did—and she was about to say something, about to reach for Victor’s hand, about to ask where he’d been, what had happened, if he was hurt—

The contraction hit.

It rolled up from somewhere deep and dark, a wave of pressure and heat and wrongness that made the world go white at the edges. She bit down on the scream, felt it shred against her teeth, felt her jaw lock so hard her molars creaked. Her back arched off the mattress, and her hands—both hands—clenched, one in the sheets and one around the panther cub, who made a startled sound against her chest.

The pain crested, held, held, held and then began, slowly, to recede, like waves crashing on a beach.

She was panting. Her vision came back in pieces: the ceiling, the lamp, Dimitri’s white hair, Victor’s hand still on her cheek, his thumb now moving in slow circles against her skin.

"One more," she whispered, and her voice was barely a sound. "One more. There’s one more."

The panther cub had gone still against her, his blue eyes wide and fixed on her face, and she could feel the fine tremor running through his small body, not fear, she thought. Something else. Something that felt like knowing.

Victor’s hand tightened on her cheek. His red eyes burned.

"We’re here," he said. "All of us. We’re right here."

She looked down at the cub in her arms, at the dark ears and the dark tail and the blue eyes that were so much like hers and so much like the man who wasn’t here, and she pressed her lips to his forehead one more time.

"Your father’s coming," she whispered, and didn’t know if she was telling the cub or herself. "He’s coming, sweetheart. He’ll be here."

Somewhere, in the dark between worlds, she was almost certain she could feel it: the pull, the shift, the way the fabric of things bent toward something inevitable.

Voss’s jaw dropped, his hands freezing in mid-air as he stared down at his completely empty palms in absolute, stunned shock.

A tiny, happy squeak echoed from the top of Felicity’s pillow, right above her left ear. The newborn panther cub had casually teleported himself out of the medic’s hands, safely nesting himself directly against his mother’s blonde hair before his fourth sibling could even arrive.

Voss stared down at his completely empty hands, his fingers still curved into the shape of a newborn cradle. He blinked once, twice, his brain completely short-circuiting as he slowly tracked the soft pop of displaced air up to the top of Felicity’s pillow.

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