Exile was holding something against his chest with a carefulness that looked almost comical on him. Something blonde and round and squirming. Something with a tail that was going absolutely berserk.
The orange eyes found her first. Then the arms came up, both of them, fists opening and closing, chubby legs pedalling against Exile’s forearm with a determination that had no business being that coordinated.
"Muummy!" A wobble in it. The round little face was doing the thing faces did right before they stopped being happy and became something much louder. "Muuummy."
Exile was already moving. He set the boy against her chest in one smooth transfer, and the kicking stopped instantly, replaced by two fistfuls of her hair and a tail that thumped against her hip like a small, ecstatic drum.
She sat with him for a moment, taking in his soft blonde ears, his cheeks like rising bread dough, and the pleased expression of someone who had gotten exactly what he wanted.
She looked up at the room full of men who were all very pointedly not looking at each other.
"Someone needs to explain how my son went from a squalling newborn to this in only six hours," she said, her voice low. She patted him, and he grunted, holding on tighter.
Voss cleared his throat, and his ears, usually so carefully controlled, flattened back for half a second before he caught himself.
"Told you," he said. "Fast."
"Fast," Fel repeated flatly. "Voss, he has teeth and can talk." She peeled back his lip with her thumb to check, and sure enough, four little points gleamed white against his gums. "When did that happen?"
"A couple of hours ago," Ivan offered, far too brightly, still hovering half a step closer than necessary, like he expected her to keel over any second. "Bit Exile. Drew blood, actually. Very impressive.
"He bit Exile?"
Exile, from his coil near the doorway, said nothing, but the muscles along his forearm shifted, just slightly, in a way that might have been pride or might have been the ghost of a wince.
"He’s a wolf," Voss said, like that explained everything, which, annoyingly, it kind of did.
Fel looked back down at her son, and the facts warred with the feeling. A baby the size of her forearm last night now weighed as much as a toddler; his solid, chubby little limbs already made her arms ache. These things should have been alarming. But his wild tuft of blonde hair and his soft wolf ears twitching while he sat there, none of it felt wrong.
But he was warm. He smelled like apple sauce and clean skin and, faintly, like Voss, that same grounded, earthy scent that had wrapped around her the first night they met. His little hand was still fisted in her hair, and every few seconds his fingers flexed like he was checking she hadn’t gone anywhere.
"He’s beautiful," she said, and her voice cracked a little around the word, because it was true, and because half a day ago she’d been terrified he wouldn’t survive the birth at all, and now he was here, heavy and real and snoring against her throat.
Victor, still looking faintly like a man who had personally lost an argument with the universe, uncrossed his arms and crouched down slowly beside the bed, red eyes fixed on the cub’s face with an intensity that would have been unsettling on anyone else.
On Victor, it just looked like devotion filtered through barely restrained panic.
"Does he have a name yet?" he asked, voice quiet.
Her mind went blank. In the chaos of the birth, and now apparently the chaos of the aging, she hadn’t even thought about it.
She looked at Voss. Voss looked back at her, and for a second the tension in his jaw went slack, a flicker of something unguarded before his expression hardened again.
"Thought you’d want to choose," he said.
The cub stirred against her, made a small unhappy noise at the movement, then settled again with a wet little sigh, his cheek smushing further into her skin.
Fel looked around the room. Voss stood too still, a statue of forced calm. Ivan practically vibrated, fighting the urge to ask if she was okay. Victor’s hand hovered an inch from the cub’s back, as if he wasn’t sure he was allowed to touch. And from across the room, Exile’s pale eyes were fixed on her, unreadable and unmoving.
"Give me a minute," she said softly, pressing her lips to the crown of light yellow, wolf-soft hair. "I want to actually look at him properly first."
She shifted him carefully, easing him back just far enough that she could see his whole face without breaking the sleepy fist-grip he had on her hair. He grumbled at the movement, brows pinching, and for a second she thought she’d wake him properly, but then he settled, mouth going slack again, and she finally got a good look.
He was, God, he was strong-looking, even asleep. Not chubby and soft the way she’d expected a newborn to be, but solid, with a little furrow between his brows like he was already annoyed at the world for interrupting his time with his mum. His jaw had a stubborn set she recognised instantly from Voss, the exact expression he wore right before winning an argument by simply refusing to continue it. His nose was small and blunt, hers, she thought, and his lashes were dark and thick against round little cheeks flushed pink from sleep.
He looked like someone who was going to grow up to be good trouble, the kind that made you laugh even while you were yelling at him.
"Harry," she said before she’d even decided to say it out loud.
The room went very quiet. "Harry," she said again, testing the shape of it, watching his ear twitch like he already recognised the sound. "That’s, that’s his name. Harry."
Voss’s ears came forward, alert, and something in his shoulders loosened that she hadn’t even noticed was tight until it wasn’t. "Harry," he repeated, low, like he was trying it against his own tongue, seeing if it fit.
"Strong name," Victor said, quietly. When Fel glanced at him, his red eyes had gone soft, a rare vulnerability she’d only seen when his attention was fixed completely on her. "Suits him."
"He’s got your stubborn face," Fel told Voss, reaching out to trace one fingertip down the bridge of Harry’s small nose, careful, reverent.
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