The last thing Harry did before finally giving up on the world for a few hours was clamp one fist around a chunk of Felicity’s hair and refuse to let go, even in sleep.
She sat frozen on the edge of the bed, arm gone slightly numb under his weight, not daring to move in case the tiny fierce grip somehow woke him again. For Voss, it had taken forty-five minutes of pacing and humming.
For Felicity, it had taken the walk from the door to the bed. She kept that to herself.
---
"Don’t move," Voss said, like she’d been planning to sprint a marathon.
"I wasn’t going to."
"You were thinking about it. I can see it in your ears."
Her ears, traitors that they were, flattened self-consciously against her skull. Voss huffed something that might have been a laugh and crossed the room in that quiet, deliberate way of his, all that mass moving like it weighed nothing at all. He crouched in front of her, and up close she could see the soft way his expression had gone, the sharp lines of his face rearranging themselves into something gentler whenever Harry was involved.
"Give him here."
"He’s got my hair."
"I noticed." Voss reached out and, with more delicacy than a man his size had any right to possess, worked Harry’s fist open finger by finger, freeing the strands one at a time. Harry made a small disgruntled noise and burrowed his face into Voss’s shirt instead, and that was that—transferred, resettled, gone right back to sleep against a chest built like a brick wall.
Felicity flexed her fingers, feeling blood rush back into her arm, and watched Voss straighten with the baby cradled against him like something precious he’d been trained his whole life to carry. His wolf ears tipped down toward Harry, then flicked toward her, tracking her the way they always did.
He leaned down and pressed a kiss to her forehead, and it startled a soft breath out of her; it always did, that gentleness from someone who could probably bench a car.
"Alright, mummy," he said, and then he winked at her.
Heat crawled straight up her neck and into her ears. "Don’t call me that."
"You are one."
"I know I am one, I just-" She gave up, because there was no arguing with that low rumble of amusement in his voice, and pressed her hands to her hot cheeks instead. "You’re doing it on purpose."
"Obviously." He shifted Harry higher against his shoulder, and the ease of it, the casual competence, did something complicated to her chest. "Time to get you up. Teeth brushed, showered, dressed. Pancakes and coffee after. Luna and Frost have been asking for you all morning and to meet the cubs too."
"I am up."
"You’re sitting on a bed in one of my shirts staring at nothing." He said it without heat, just fact, the way he said most things. "Go on. I’ve got him."
She wanted to argue, but her body had already decided to listen, swinging her legs off the bed and standing on legs that still felt half-asleep. Voss watched her the whole way to the door, ears angled toward her like she was the only thing worth listening to in the entire house, and didn’t look away until she’d actually crossed the threshold into the hall.
Which was, of course, where she found Dimitri. He was leaning against the wall outside the bathroom door with the particular studied casualness of someone who had been standing there for a while and wanted it to look like an accident. His arms were crossed. His hair was doing its usual thing, like he’d run his claws through it forty times before giving up entirely.
"Morning, Bug."
"Were you just standing here?"
"Waiting for Voss to hand you off." He said it like it was the most reasonable admission in the world, then pushed off the wall and dropped into step behind her, close enough that she caught cedar and the faint char of coffee he must have already burned. "Toothpaste’s on your brush. Water’s hot; I checked twice. Go on. Don’t argue."
"I do know how a bathroom works, Dimitri."
"Never said you didn’t." He didn’t leave, though. He propped himself against the doorframe while she found her toothbrush prepped exactly as sworn, stayed put while she cranked the shower and steam began coiling toward the ceiling, held his ground right up until she leveled a look at him over her shoulder that said privacy, please, at which point he retreated a grand total of one foot into the hallway and planted himself there anyway, a broad shadow warping the frosted glass.
"I can hear you breathing out there."
"I breathe. It’s a whole thing I do."
"You’re guarding a bathroom door."
"I’m loitering with excellent intentions near a bathroom door. Legally distinct." He grumbled a bit muffled, like he’d turned his head away: "Also, I’d take a knife for you, but I’m absolutely going to open that door while you’re naked, so if a spider comes at you, you’re on your own, Bug."
She pressed her lips together, but the laugh escaped anyway, quick and helpless.
"I’m going to go start pancakes," he added, gruffer now, as the joke had cost him.
"You don’t have to..."
But he was already gone, boots hammering down the hall and thundering the stairs two at a time, and a moment later Damien’s low rasp drifted up from the kitchen, threaded with dark amusement.
"He ran the pan under water for a full minute before he remembered you like them dry first," Damien said, pitched to carry, clearly aimed at her as much as anyone. "Very smooth. Very casual. A man who was definitely not stationed outside a door for twenty minutes memorising the sound of the shower."
"I heard that; I am the leader, by the way." Dimitri snapped from below.
"You were meant to hear it."
Felicity stood under the spray, with warm water washing down her shoulders and pressed both palms over her mouth to trap the laugh trying to bubble up, because under the steam and the soap and the plain business of getting clean, that was the sound of her house. Two apex predators bickering over a frying pan.
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