A/N: For Chemicalcrush, wishing you the happiest of birthdays! She requested a 1x2x3 bit of fluff with some parenting, and I hope this delivers.
A/N 2: As always, thank you so so much to Ro, for all of your support and beta-reading.
Warnings: fluff? Language
Pairings: 1x2x3
Birthday
It was one of those things, for Duo. Sort of like Heero's insistence on going back to school and then going to college. Sort of like Trowa's need to go off to the circus every few months and spend a few weeks working with them.
But Duo didn't have much in the way of academic aspirations - he wasn't Heero. He didn't need to figure out his own identity by fitting himself into the narrative of human history.
He also didn't have anyone left to feel obligated towards. He hadn't had a circus troupe harbor him during the wars, hadn't had a self-appointed sister look after him and take care of him. Everyone that Duo had ever felt obligated towards was dead.
Howard didn't count - the Sweepers had worked towards Project Meteor with more dedication than Duo ever had. And neither did Hilde. He wasn't obligated to her.
But she was his partner, when he had gone into business with her after the war, operating the salvage yard and, after a few years, setting up the engineering shop and bringing Trowa into the fold.
Trowa was better at putting things back together, while Duo was better at taking them apart, and Hilde managed the whole thing with a finesse and ability to charm buyers that Duo and Trowa lacked.
But work wasn't Duo's thing. It was something he did, because if he didn't do it he would go crazy - plus, he kind of liked not being homeless.
No, Duo's thing, his dream - his desire or whatever - was for a family.
All three of them were orphans, for all that Cathy treated Trowa like a little brother and Relena latched onto Heero like the sister he both loved and wished would leave him alone.
And while they had each other - something Duo had made damn sure of, five years ago when it looked like none of them were going to end up happy, together or apart - he wanted more. He wanted the kind of home and family that he had read about in books, or seen with jaundiced eyes in the streets.
So, it was one of those things, for Duo.
To fill out mountains of paperwork and work the Maxwell charm and actually keep machine parts out of the house for once and make sure all of the sharp or dangerous things were put away.
To actually spend two hours debating what to wear - what they should all wear - what kind of first impression they would make, and no comments from Trowa or Heero about no one else caring if he wore a navy suit or a black one could dissuade Duo from agonizing over the choice.
It was one of those things, for Duo. And when they picked up Nadia from the orphanage, Duo was the one who tripped over his own feet when he held her for the first time, who grinned like an idiot and absolutely did not start to cry when she grabbed his hair with one chubby fist and gurgled at him.
Duo who insisted that Heero just fucking film this moment while Duo carried Nadia around their house for the first time, showing her every room, waltzing with her in the nursery before finally relinquishing her to Trowa, who insisted she needed a diaper change and a bottle.
Duo who, after Nadia's first nap, cuddled against Heero's bare chest, produced an icing covered cupcake to commemorate her first day at home, and when Trowa pointed out that Nadia was all of six weeks old and couldn't eat it, Duo smushed it in his face and Nadia stared in open-mouthed delight while Heero dutifully filmed the entire thing, including the aftermath, when Trowa grabbed Duo and kissed him in an effort to smear as much icing on his face as possible.
-o-
Quatre, who was the youngest of thirty children and fancied himself an expert on idyllic childhoods, had been the one to insist that Nadia have a birthday party, at the age of one, and that other children should be in attendance. Relena had chimed in about the importance of commemorating birthdays.
Of course, they didn't know any other children. At least, not ones close to her age.
There were, of course, the gang of street waifs that Trowa and Duo alternately attempted to befriend and muttered kids these days under their breath about. And so, for Nadia's first birthday party, which Heero grudgingly filmed, Relena Darlian, Quatre Winner, Chang Wufei, Sally Po, Cathy, Hilde and ten kids in a street gang sang happy birthday to the baby, who could have cared less what was going on around her because, she had discovered, it was a lot more fun to simply tilt over until she buried her face in the cake and tried to eat the entire thing herself.
Most of the guests had left with their pockets rearranged - some missing a few credits and some having gained a few - but Wufei refrained from calling the police and the street kids at least had a decent, if sugar-heavy, meal in their bellies when they went on their way.
Of course, the house was a complete disaster afterwards - which wasn't much of a daily change. Ever since Nadia had starting crawling five months ago, and walking two months ago, nowhere in the house was safe from the chaos that she could create in the span of three seconds. Nowhere except for Heero's studio, where he wrote and where Nadia was absolutely not allowed to enter, under any circumstances.
Trowa had been the quick one, had volunteered to give Nadia her bath and get her tucked in, which left Heero and Duo to clean up the house, Duo mumbling about spoiled blond aristocrats and destruction unrivaled by even the war.
When the house was clean enough (Not spotless. Never, ever spotless. Probably never again, Heero feared.), Heero came up behind Duo, wrapped his arms around him, and held him close until Duo relaxed into his embrace, turned around, and kissed him.
They had progressed to a horizontal position, minus several items of clothing, by the time Trowa found them on the living room floor and joined in.
-o-
Her fifth birthday, Heero would always remember - or relive in his nightmares - had been an utter disaster. She had friends, by then, or at least children she knew well enough from school to rattle off their names when asked who she wanted to invite to her party.
She had also, two weeks before the day, insisted on mermaids. She wanted a mermaid cake. She wanted a mermaid robot. She wanted a mermaid dress. She wanted a mermaid lamp. She wanted-
Mermaids, Trowa had repeated, exasperated, late at night when they were lying in bed, exhausted after a day of work and wrestling Nadia into bed.
But then, a week before the day, it was dinosaurs. A dinosaur cake. A dinosaur robot. A dinosaur dress. A dinosaur lamp. A dinosaur-
Dinosaurs, Heero had repeated, eyes bleary from a lack of sleep after staying up with her all night while she struggled through a low-grade fever, the next morning while Duo pushed coffee into his desperate hands.
And then, the day of her birthday, when Duo presented her with a dinosaur cake, her eyes welled up with tears and she asked if there was going to be a sandcastle cake, like the one Quatre had said she would like, and-
Duo had whirled on Quatre, his eyes filled with deadly fury, as Nadia started to cry and Quatre had backed away, hands up, apologizing profusely and saying that his favorite birthday cake as a child had been a sandcastle cake and he had mentioned it to Nadia that morning, and-
Trowa had intervened, had nudged Duo and the totally unacceptable dinosaur cake back towards Nadia, who had sniffled back tears when everyone started to sing happy birthday.
They had hedged their bets, with the gifts, Trowa making her a dinosaur robot and Duo a mermaid lamp, Heero buying a mermaid dress because they all agreed that a dinosaur dress would be hard to come by and none of them had any sewing skills to speak of.
After the cake fiasco, there was the sugar high five year olds fiasco of the little hellions running wild in the yard between the house and the scrap yard and, inevitably, one of them got hurt, and then there was a fight and then there were tears and-
It took hours to get Nadia settled into bed that night, and when Duo finally joined Trowa and Heero in the kitchen, they shared a bottle of wine and Duo candidly suggested they find a way to murder Quatre in his sleep.
-o-
Eleven, Nadia had insisted, was too old to have a themed birthday party. She just wanted to hang out with her friends. Mark's birthday two months ago had just been all of them going out to see a movie and having cake there, and there hadn't even been any other adults besides Mark's mom, and-
Heero had muttered something about the poor woman probably taking a coma-inducing level of valium to get through that kind of ordeal.
But they gave in, rented out a theatre and sat in the party room with the cake and boxes of pizza, and prayed that their daughter, who had recently decided to spend her free time working with Trowa and learning all about how to wire things, wasn't teaching the other kids how to destroy the movie theatre.
The movie theatre survived - or at least the kids hadn't damaged the structural integrity to the point of triggering an immediate collapse or a fire, and Heero, Duo and Trowa wearily chaperoned the almost-teenagers as they ate and teased each other and Nadia opened the piles of gifts from all of her friends, the handful from the old war buddies as she called the grown-ups who made up their strange, extended family, and the three presents from her dads - a soldering iron from Trowa, a book of old Terran fairy tales from Heero, and a chemistry set from Duo.
Almost as heart-warming as seeing Nadia's bright smile at each of the gifts was the arrival of an attendant who insisted that they didn't need to clean up the room - it was part of the fee.
Trowa had actually hugged her, Duo had apologized - both for the mess and for Trowa's uncharacteristic affection towards a stranger - and Heero had smugly suggested they have her birthday here every year.
-o-
Sixteen was way too young to be dating, Heero insisted, his words falling on the deaf ears of Nadia and Trowa. Duo, the deciding vote on the issue since Heero and Trowa were, for once, in complete disagreement, watched with amusement as Heero and Trowa argued.
In front of Nadia. In front of Nadia's date.
It was her birthday, and while Duo felt a stab of pain at the knowledge that she would rather do something special with her girlfriend instead of her parents, he also understood it.
Heero was in the middle of suggesting that none of them had dated when they were sixteen - to which Trowa pointed out that they had all been murdering people, and did he want Nadia to go pilot a mobile suit instead of kiss her girlfriend?
Duo tuned them out, as did Nadia, but Alice, Nadia's girlfriend, watched the two war heroes argue with wide eyes. Duo thought that watching the two men fight was as much of a warning as a don't break our daughter's heart speech. Probably more impactful, all things considered.
They negotiated her curfew - Duo wanted her home by nine, Nadia insisted on eleven, and they settled on ten. Alice promised to make sure Nadia had a good time, promised not to bring her back late, promised to only go out to dinner and then a movie, and nowhere dangerous.
Duo was pretty sure Alice would have promised just about anything, from the way she still watched Heero and Trowa with fear in her eyes.
But Nadia was smug, accepted Duo's hug and kiss and wish for a happy birthday with a kiss and hug of her own, and then the girls were gone.
Duo left Heero and Trowa to argue and went in search of a bottle of wine.
They had the house entirely to themselves for the first time in sixteen years - none of them felt comfortable with Nadia going to other people's homes for sleepovers, but had hosted a nightmarish number at their home over the years; and while Nadia had gone on overnight school trips, one of them had always finagled - usually threatened - their way into being a chaperone for the trip.
He had to wait a full fifteen minutes before they stopped arguing and joined him in the kitchen.
Heero accepted defeat with poor grace, but after a few glasses of wine and the combined attention of Duo and Trowa's talented mouths and hands, he at least pushed his fears of something catastrophic happening to Nadia to the back of his mind.
-o-
Trowa took her out to her first bar for her eighteenth birthday, and, amused and calm, watched his daughter get very drunk and then took her home, forced her to eat and drink water and take aspirin, and swore her to secrecy - Duo and Heero were away, dealing with one of the infrequent crises that Une still called on all of them to solve when the situation was dire enough.
He even taught her his - and Duo's - preferred hangover cure the next morning, and when Duo and Heero got back a week later and they all took her out to a nice restaurant and Duo offered her a glass of wine, she pretended like it was her first drink, over-acting to the point that Trowa actually choked on his own wine, and Trowa really should have known that Nadia would be as terrible at lying as Duo was, and the entire story came out.
Which resulted in Duo insisting that Trowa was a selfish asshole and Heero pointing out all of the terrible things that could have happened to her - to both of them - and Trowa had had to deal with their combined wrath for weeks before he found a way to make it up to them by shipping Nadia off to see Quatre for the weekend and letting the pair do all of the kinky things to him that they weren't able to when she was around.
-o-
It wasn't until Nadia's twenty-ninth birthday party that Duo realized he was old. Well, not old old. But old. Older, at least. Fifty. Not an age he had even dreamed of living to see. And while he had dreamed of a family and a home, none of his fantasies could match the reality.
Heero had long ago accepted his role as the documentarian for Nadia's birthdays, and even though he still grumbled about it, he dutifully recorded every single moment, even more vigilant now that Nadia had to juggle four-month-old Crina in one arm while she blew out her candles and Alice held two-year-old George's hand and refused, despite his wails of protestation, to let him burn his hand on the candles.
But, as soon as the candles were extinguished, Heero shut off his camera and took Crina from Nadia, lavishing her with attention and affection, as he did every time he saw her. He loved George, of course, but everyone couldn't help but smirk at the way Heero had fallen completely and immediately for Crina, and seemed to devote himself to spoiling her as much as humanly possible.
Fifty. Surrounded by family. Surrounded by love.
None of them had birthdays, and they had never really thought about the absence of them until Nadia had come into their lives, had never really bothered to mark a day on the calendar until, at the age of eight, Nadia had insisting they pick a birthday and, when no one had been able to decide, she had declared her birthday their birthdays too.
And this, Duo couldn't help but think as Trowa wrestled Crina out of Heero's arms and crooned a lullaby to her and carried her off for a nap, was the best birthday present anyone could ever want.