A/N: Companion piece to Buddy. Margaret contemplates her new baby while her husband deals with their firstborn's adjustment issues.
Charlie - By Tessenchan
Margaret watched as Alan ascended the stairs after Don, an air of worry clouding her features. The adverse reaction Don had to his new brother was certainly not what they'd expected. Just last week, he had been so excited, just as he had been since they first told him four months ago. Months of talking to Don about having a little brother, about them growing up together and Don having someone around to play with, and they'd gotten him so excited about having a fourth member of the family that somewhere along the way they had failed to mention he would start out as a baby.
How in the world did we do that, she wondered dismally. All the advice about helping Don adjust to a new baby and no one ever warned me I might actually have to make sure he understood Charles would be an infant.
A fidget from her arms commanded immediate attention. Margaret looked down at her wide-eyed baby, squirming and gurgling happily in her arms. Instantly all worry was banished, and all she could comprehend was the utter joy she felt when she looked at his tiny face. Brown eyes wandering her face and the room around him, every moment making a giant discovery in his brand-new world. His tiny little fingers, curling and uncurling reflexively. The red jammies they had brought him home in dwarfed his little baby body; he looked like Margaret had wrapped him in a red cotton tent.
She smoothed back the brown hair that topped his head, smiling warmly at the thought that his hair would be unmanageably curly. Alan would just hate that. When Don was born five years ago with his own sprouts of curls, Margaret had been pleasantly surprised, but Alan had nearly pitched a fit. Luckily, Don's was pretty easy to manage, a haircut once a month kept it short and straight but left unattended for a few months, he started to look like he was walking around with a puppy on his head.
Unlike his father, the sole culprit responsible for bequeathing the rambunctious tresses to their boys. Alan's wavy hair was forever untamed, and terribly inconvenient --or so he complained; Margaret loved playing with it. Whenever they wanted to go out, her husband spent forty-five minutes just fighting with his hair to keep it tamped down, but he refused to cut it, insisting he didn't look good with shorter hair the way Don did. Margaret teased him about it incessantly, all the way back from when they were dating, all through school and into their marriage.
"And I don't plan on stopping anytime soon, either, do I?" she cooed at her child, "No, I don't. It's my revenge for sticking me that irritating nickname."
Maggie, Maggie, Maggie. Always Maggie. The first time he called her that was on their first date. He'd said it carefully at first, to gauge her reaction. She said nothing about it then, had even smiled shyly at him; what was wrong with a little nickname? But as the years passed, he hardly even called her anything but Maggie. It was as though the name Margaret had never come into play. He had foisted the nickname on Don, insisting on calling the boy "Donnie," and his vehement refusal to call Charles anything but Charlie was equally aggravating.
At least he wasn't saying other womens' names in his sleep. It was always his Maggie.
"Charles, your daddy is quite the irritant," Margaret told the baby, "He's lucky I don't call him 'Allie' in public, just to get back at him." She paused when she realized that the squirming in her arms had stopped. She looked down, surprised to see the baby frowning at her. His brows were scrunched and his mouth was tight, as though he would burst into tears any moment.
"What's wrong, Charles?" she asked softly. The baby whimpered. Margaret made a soft, worried noise, going over to the couch and settling on it, laying him down on the cushions next to her. Unwrapping him from his little blanket, she checked his diaper, checking it off her list when she saw that he was still clean. She tried his bottle, which he suckled at for a minute and then quickly became bored of. She spent a few more minutes poking at him a while, doing all the sorts of motherly things she was used to doing when Don was upset or sick, but couldn't find anything; Charles seemed healthy and, with the exception of the whimpering, happy.
"Well, what is wrong with you then?" she demanded of him. "You're not dirty, you're not sick, you're not hungry... What is wrong with my little Charles?" Her son responded with a well-executed moan of anguish; well-executed, as it broke her heart to hear it. Gradually, Margaret formed an idea, and she leaned over the baby, looking right into his big, brown eyes. "Charles," she said clearly.
His little face contorted, and he hiccupped, the noise a baby might make right before starting to cry. Moving quickly, Margaret added, "Charlie."
The reaction was almost instantaneous. Charlie kicked his feet, resuming his excited squirming. Margaret sighed. "You like Charlie, don't you?" He responded with a short little gurgle-wail, kicking his feet harder and waving his arms. She shook her head with amusement, badly hidden as exasperation, and gathered him up into her arms again. With the softness of a mother's touch, she leaned in to nuzzle his neck. "Everyone's against me," she teased, planting a row of kisses on his flesh.
She stood, cradling the baby against her chest, waving gently in a slow dance. "So my sweet baby boy wants to be called Charlie," she sang softly, "My little Charlie."
A creak at the stairs caught her attention, and Margaret looked up to see Alan coming down, Don on his hip. The older Eppes wore a wide grin, the younger looking quite tentative, but eager. She smiled. "It went well," she observed.
"It sure did," Alan confirmed for her, grinning at Don. "He wants to hold the baby for awhile."
"You are most welcome to, Don," she told her first son, and he nodded, clearly nervous. Alan sat him down on the couch, and Margaret knelt carefully in front of him, reaching out with the baby.
"Okay, Don. Are you ready?"
He nodded, eyes shining up at his mother with determination. "Yep."
"Okay. Now be careful with his head..."
END