"Voss." She reached out with her free hand and laid it against his forearm. His muscles were rigid under her palm, trembling faintly. "Hey, look at me."
He lowered his hands. His eyes were red-rimmed, wet, and so achingly soft that her own throat tightened in response.
"She’s perfect," Voss said, like it was a confession. Like it cost him something to say out loud. "She’s-Fel, she’s perfect."
"I know." She smiled, feeling her own eyes sting. "I made him, with a little help."
That startled a broken laugh out of him, half sob, half real amusement, and he leaned down and pressed his mouth to her hair, then to the baby’s, so gentle it barely counted as touch at all.
His hand, the same hand that could crush bone, came to rest against their daughter’s back, covering nearly the entire small body, and he held it there like he was memorising the rise and fall of that tiny breathing.
Neither of them said anything else for a long while. There didn’t seem to be a reason to. The room was quiet except for the small, even sounds of their daughters and sons sleeping, and somewhere beyond the window, the settlement was waking up around them, but in here, in this bed, with the morning light falling soft and gold across all three of them, nothing outside that circle mattered at all.
Dimitri had settled into the armchair by the window, one ankle crossed over his knee, watching Harry doze against Felicity’s shoulder with an expression he probably thought was unreadable. It wasn’t.
Voss could see the want in it plain as day, the way his red eyes tracked every small movement, every twitch of that tiny black tail.
Then Harry made a sound. Not a cry, a thin, high-pitched ping, like a plucked wire, gone almost before it registered.
The air folded.
One second Harry was a small dark shape against Felicity’s collarbone. The next, he simply wasn’t there, and Felicity let out a startled little "oh!" as something small and warm thumped down inside the loose collar of her shirt, right against Tilly, who woke immediately and gave a long, put-upon grumble of protest.
"Oh- sorry, sorry," Felicity said, laughing, already shifting Tilly free of the tangle of fabric and small limbs. She held the grumbling bundle out, and Voss took her automatically, cradling her against his chest with the ease of long practice.
Tilly huffed once more, then went boneless against him, already drifting back into sleep like nothing had happened at all.
Voss glanced up in time to catch Dimitri’s face.
"Huh—" Dimitri sat forward, staring at the space where Harry had been a heartbeat ago, like he could will the boy back into existence through sheer confusion. "Where did he?"
He looked to Felicity.
Harry was already there. Latched on, purring like some tiny black-furred engine, one dark eye cracked open just enough to fix on Dimitri with an expression of pure, unbothered smugness.
Dimitri let out a breath that was half laugh, half groan, and dragged a hand down over his eyes. "He’s using spatial magic. To get to his mother faster. He’s a day old."
She winced faintly as Harry settled in properly, her breath going out slowly and a little shaky.
Voss watched the tension pull tight across her shoulders, watched her adjust the angle of her arm to take some of the ache out of it, and felt the old, familiar itch to do something, fix something, even though there was nothing here to fix. Just a body doing what it was built to do, and doing it hard.
"You alright?" he asked quietly.
"Sore," she admitted, but she was smiling when she said it, eyes half-lidded, that soft, wrung-out look she got when the boys fed. "He eats like he’s starving every single time."
Harry’s tiny nose twitched. A fleck of dust, dislodged from somewhere in the sunbeam falling across the bed, drifted down and landed square on the black bridge of it. His whole small face scrunched.
"Uh-oh," Dimitri said, sitting up straighter.
—and Harry sneezed. A minuscule, powerless little sound, barely there at all, and immediately followed by another ping, softer than the first. Harry vanished from the curve of Felicity’s arm and reappeared three inches higher and a foot to the left, dropping neatly upside-down into the front of her shirt, one small black tail flicking out over the collar like a flag of surrender.
Felicity clapped a hand over her mouth, shoulders shaking, eyes screwed shut against the laughter trying to claw its way out of her.
Underneath the fabric, Harry wriggled indignantly, tiny limbs pushing at cloth that wouldn’t cooperate, his outraged squeaks muffled into nothing.
Voss felt his own mouth twitch. Beside him, Dimitri had gone very still, watching the shirt move with an expression that was somewhere between delight and something rawer—something that looked a lot like a man watching someone else get to hold what he wanted with both hands.
"Little help," Felicity managed, voice thin with suppressed laughter, and reached in to gently work Harry free before he suffocated himself out of sheer stubbornness.
She got him righted eventually, tummy-up in the crook of her arm, and he simply relatched without so much as a flicker of protest, one tiny fist curling against her skin as he’d never been displaced at all.
Felicity stroked a finger down the small belly, over the place where his ribs moved in quick, contented little pulls, and dissolved into giggles all over again, helpless, wheezing laughter that made her wince even as it kept coming, because laughing hurt when you were this sore, but she couldn’t seem to stop.
"He’s so pleased with himself," she managed, wiping at her eyes with the heel of her hand. "Look at his face. He’s not even sorry."
He wasn’t. His single visible eye had drifted mostly shut again, dark and glazed with the particular smugness of a creature who had gotten exactly what he wanted and intended to keep it that way.
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