Summary: AH – Every man has two duties in this life: one to his family and one to his community. Is it possible to fulfill both?
"Do your duty in all things. You cannot do more and you should never wish to do less."
~Robert E. Lee
Captain Jasper Whitlock sat among the other U.S. Army captains as he joined the staff meeting. Together they waited for the Colonel to begin the conversation they knew was coming but dreaded all the same.
"Alright gentlemen, let's cut through the crap and get right to it. You're being sent to Afghanistan and not to the nice part either…"
"We still have time, baby." Jasper tried to reassure his wife as they lay in bed.
Every negative test was another heartbreak, felt like another failure on his part.
Why couldn't they get pregnant?
They'd been trying for over a year, and now with him being sent to fight, their dreams seemed further away than ever. But still, he tried to comfort his wife, tell her that the time they had before he left would be enough – even though he didn't really believe it would be.
"I know, Jaz. It'll happen. I know it will."
He saw her wipe away her tears, so he climbed atop her to make them both forget.
The doctor looked uncomfortable as she delivered her opinion. To be honest, Jasper wasn't too keen on hearing it either, but he and Alice were out of time and that meant out of options. So he listened with as little emotion as he could manage.
"You leave in a matter of days, Mr. Whitlock, and while I appreciate that the circumstances are not ideal, I do believe it is the best option for you both. Besides, in the event that – God forbid – something happens over there that renders you…incapable or, worse, you don't return…Alice can still use what you give us and perhaps have your child despite your absence."
He looked down at his wife's hand in his. She sat beside him holding back tears, bearing the brunt of his chosen profession with the strength that being a military wife forced her to have.
He smiled at Alice a little sadly but spoke with determined resignation. "Okay. What do I have to do?"
Alice took the little cup from his hands and whispered in his ear. "Don't think about it, baby. Think about these."
Jasper watched as his wife unbuttoned the plain cotton blouse to reveal a red bra. He could see her nipples peeking through the lacy fabric, the darker tint of them teasing him with not-quite-enough of a good look.
"Let me see, darlin'." He pulled at the fabric, needing her distraction from the cold, clinical little room around them.
"What, baby? What do you want to see? This?" The hem of her skirt rose as she turned, revealing a lot of flesh split with a single, lacy, red string.
He groaned, half in appreciation and half in misery, knowing that he wasn't going to end up in the place he wanted to be…not this time.
"Or was it this, Jazzy?" Her sultry voice dropped an octave as she bunched the skirt around her waist and turned back around giving him a quick peek of a black triangle under a red, flowered pattern just before she dropped to her knees.
"Are you hard for me, baby?" she asked, and he was free of his jeans with her suddenly slick hand stroking him before he really knew how she accomplished it.
"When I get you home…god, the things I'm going to do to you," he promised her, groaning and straining in her hand.
"What are you gonna do to me? Tell me." Her palm came up and swirled around the head of his cock, temporarily stunning him into silence. When he opened his eyes again he looked between his knees at the raven-headed beauty kneeling before him.
He couldn't help it. He'd always been too big a softy when it came to her. Though he'd entertained fantasies of doing nasty, dirty things to her, right then he was overcome with emotion. Jasper stroked his wife's cheek as she stroked his cock.
"Love you, Alice…that's what I'm going to do…love you all night."
It wasn't much time before his deposit was made. He tried not to think about it, tried to see it as merely a promise kept. He had another promise he intended to make good on as well, so he led his wife to the car and took her home.
The damn phone he'd bought her had cost a small fortune, not to mention the month service charge to get every feature and unlimited usage that it allowed. But in this moment he was intensely grateful for its video capabilities.
Jasper sat in front of the computer screen watching his wife watch him. Her head rest on a pillow, and her face made little grimaces every now and again.
"Does it hurt very much?" he asked her, worried about the lines that marred her face despite her efforts to hide them.
"It's not exactly comfortable but it doesn't really hurt either."
"I love you," he said, because he felt guilty for not even being on the same continent or in the same time zone let alone the same bed when their child was conceived. And he said it because it was true.
Her smile was all he needed, but it felt good to hear her say it back to him. "I love you, too, Jaz."
"All done." The doctor's voice. "Congratulations are a bit premature. We still need to make sure the pregnancy sticks, but I'm going to say it anyway. Congrats you two."
Alice turned the phone to face the doctor, and Jasper watched the woman's face appear on his screen. It was a truly odd view considering she was framed by his wife's legs held up by the stirrups in which she rested her feet.
"Thanks Doc," he said, envious of the doctor's position. It should've been him there, not some woman in a white coat. It wasn't natural but it was the best they had at the moment.
"You're fucking kidding me." Jasper was staring at the screen just like he did every day at this time – when he wasn't out killing terrorists, that is, but he didn't tell Alice that part.
Alice's face looked radiant. He was pretty sure he looked nauseous because that was exactly how he felt.
She shook her head. "Nope." His screen was filled with the grainy black and white picture that Alice was holding up to the webcam. He wasn't entirely sure what exactly it was he was seeing.
"Alice, I can read a desert map that looks more like a piece of sand paper than anything else, but I haven't got the foggiest fucking clue what the hell I'm looking at." He didn't really mean to swear that much but days, weeks, and months in a hundred and twenty degree weather surrounded by men did that to him.
Her tinkling laughter came through the speakers and several soldiers around him looked up from their own computer stations where they talked to loved ones.
"One, two, three." Her finger pointed to one dark circle with a tiny white dot in the center after another.
"Motherfucker," he breathed.
"Whasamatta, Cap?" the soldier next to him asked.
Jasper blinked as he looked to his right, but he couldn't see anything except those three tiny dots.
He swallowed down his suddenly sand-dry throat and gasped out, "I'm having triplets."
The soldier slapped him hard in the gut. "Well, there goes your girlish figure." He laughed hard with his head thrown back. The sound jarred Jasper to look again at his own monitor.
"We're having triplets," he said dumbly.
"I know, baby."
He couldn't help but return his wife's beaming smile. "I'm a dad."
The first time Jasper saw his children in person, his world shifted. He fell to his knees and stared at the three tow-headed, blue-eyed babies that stared up at him like he was crazy. How none of them managed to get Alice's coloring was beyond him, but even he had to admit that every one of them was the spitting image of what he saw in the mirror every day.
He looked up at his wife as she stood, hands on the stroller, smiling through her tears. It had been a long-ass eighteen months, but he was finally home. He was going to talk to his children face-to-face, not through a computer screen, for the very first time.
Jasper looked back down at them. It felt a little daunting to him, this very first conversation with his children.
Better to start out simple, he thought, staring into three tiny faces.
"Daddy loves you," he said.