But god, he missed her. Missed the smell of her, that soft warm thing underneath the soap honey, wild flowers and peach that used to fill up a room the second she walked into it.
He wouldn’t have said that out loud for anything. Wouldn’t have admitted, even to himself in most lighting, how many times a day he found some excuse to walk past her door just to catch a hint of it drifting through the crack.
This, the front room, the shrieking, the wet carpet this was as close as he got. And if some small ugly hopeful part of him thought maybe she’d come down at some point, maybe she’d stand in the doorway and see him sitting there being good, being safe, being exactly the kind of steady uncomplicated presence a woman wanted around her children, well. Nobody had to know that either.
"You’re squeezing kind of hard," he told Frost, mildly, not actually minding.
Frost loosened his grip by approximately nothing. He kept staring at the tail like it might reveal some secret if he looked long enough.
Across the room, Luna had climbed fully onto Tommy’s soaked chest, both fists raised in victory, screaming something about being queen of the puddle.
Tommy laughed so hard the whole floor shook, and a fresh wave of water sloshed up out of nowhere and slapped both of them in the face.
Luna went silent for exactly one second, long enough for Marx’s stomach to drop, thinking here it comes, here’s the meltdown, here’s the thing that gets back to Felicity as Marx let the baby cry and then she burst into laughter so hard she started hiccuping.
"Again," she wheezed. "Do it again."
"I literally cannot," Tommy said, flat on his back, arms starfished out, grinning up at the ceiling like he’d just won something. "I am so tired and i am so happy, i might die here."
"You’re not dying," Marx called over, keeping his voice light, easy, the kind of voice a good father figure would use. "You’re just old."
"I’m younger than you."
"Debatable."
Frost patted his knee again, twice, like he was agreeing with something nobody else had said, and Marx looked down at him and felt something in his chest go soft and stupid and warm, the same way it always did when Felicity smiled at him from across a room. He wondered, not for the first time, if loving her kids was just another way of loving her that didn’t require her to notice.
He hoped she’d notice anyway and right then, as if the world wanted to prove it could still surprise him, Felicity walked in.
She was not alone. Dimitri, looking for all the world like he had never let go of her hand in his entire life, trailed two steps behind her.
One of the new baby cubs was clining against Felicity’s chest in a sling made from Dimitri’s own shirt. They were a the picture of domesticity so inconceivability that for a moment, even Luna went silent. The room shivered with the abrupt arrival of real, fragile peace.
Frost was the first to notice. He went very still against Marx’s knee, his ears swiveling forward with a precision that looked almost mechanical, and then his mouth fell open. "Baby," he said.
That was all it took. Luna scrambled off Tommy’s chest so fast she left a wet handprint on his shirt, skidding across the soaked carpet in her socks, arms already reaching before she’d even crossed half the room.
"My baby sister is here!" she shrieked, loud enough that Marx felt it in his teeth. "HI BABY! HI BABY, IT’S ME!"
Felicity laughed, that soft startled sound she made when Luna caught her off guard, and dropped carefully to her knees on the one dry patch of carpet Victor hadn’t gotten to yet, curling protectively around the small bundle at her chest before Luna could quite launch herself into it.
"Gently," Felicity said, though she was smiling too hard for it to land as a real warning. "Gently, baby girl, she’s brand new."
Marx couldn’t move, he was fairly sure his heart had stopped somewhere around the doorway and hadn’t restarted. The cub was. God, she was small, but not small the way he’d expected. White hair, fine as dandelion fluff, already curling at her temples. Blue eyes, wide open, tracking. And wings actual wings, small and white and downy, tucked against her back like she’d been born already knowing how to fold them away.
She looked weeks old, not hours. Days old, not minutes into the world. He didn’t understand it and didn’t care to, not right now, not with his chest doing this thing where it felt too full for his ribs to hold it.
Beside him Tommy hadn’t said anything at all, which for Tommy was its own kind of miracle.
"What," Victor said as he walked in past Dimitri, from somewhere behind Felicity, in a voice so flat and dangerous it could have frozen the puddles solid, "happened in here."
Marx dragged his gaze away from the baby just long enough to see Victor’s blood-red eyes sweep the room the soaked carpet, the overturned water jug, Tommy still flat on his back like a man who’d been struck by lightning, Frost’s damp hair plastered to his forehead.
"It was an accident," Tommy said, sitting up too fast, water falling off him.
"An accident." Victor said the word like it personally offended him. He lifted one hand, and heat rolled off his palm in a visible shimmer, and steam began curling up off the carpet in lazy grey ribbons. "You are a grown man. I have watched you disarm three zombies in a hallway with your bare hands. Explain to me how a jug of water defeated you."
"Luna helped," Tommy said, which was, Marx thought distantly, an extremely cowardly thing to say.
"I did," Luna confirmed, without an ounce of remorse, already burrowed into Felicity’s side, one small hand hovering an inch above the baby’s wing like she was afraid to touch and afraid not to. "It was funny."
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