A/N: Another story from the I've Been Dreaming of a Future universe. :) Please enjoy!
It was the sound of clapping that drew Anthony out of his bedroom and sent him toddling down the hall that Sunday morning. He was partly curious about the sound but mostly excited, for in his few years on earth, he had grown to happily associate clapping with two things above all others: presents, and cake. It didn't matter that the claps he heard now were stilted, and spaced unevenly; he was thinking of cake, and maybe ice cream, and new toys, and he raced out of his room as quick as he could. He was halfway down the hall before his father looked up from the toys they'd been playing with and noticed he was gone, and by that time, Anthony had discovered the reason for the clapping and it did not, unfortunately, have anything to do with a birthday party.
It did, however, have everything to do with his mother, propped up above the carpet on her palms and toes, doing push-ups and clapping her tattooed hands in the middle of each one.
Anthony fumbled to a stop when he got close enough to her, his little feet bumping against the edge of the carpet and keeping him back, as if it were some sort of impassable boundary. Jane smiled at him, and without missing a beat in her push-ups, she fully extended her arms to reach his height and leaned forward an inch to press a kiss to his surprised forehead.
"Hi, baby," she cooed, panting a little, before clapping her hands and lowering herself down into the next push-up.
The clapping sound was much louder so close by, and Anthony flinched a little at the volume. But a moment later, another clap followed it, and then another, and then another, and soon he was smiling at the noise, cake and presents forgotten as he watched in rapture as his mother pushed herself harder and harder.
"Don't tell me you came home just to show off."
Jane looked up at the sound of her husband's voice as he walked into the room, sparing a quick smile for him, too, again without stopping.
"Gym was too crowded," she explained quickly between quick gasps of air, her arms never faltering in propelling herself first upward, and then back down again. Anthony kept his wide eyes trained on the muscles in her arms as they expanded and contracted, expanded and contracted. "I hardly had room to stretch after I finished. I thought I'd do the rest of my cool-down at home."
"Hm." Oscar took a seat beside his son, cross-legged as he watched his wife go through four more clapping push-ups in a matter of seconds. "You call this a cool-down, do you? Should I remind you of the actual meaning of that word?"
Jane smirked at the comment, holding his eye as she powered through a few more. Anthony had started clapping along with her, banging his little hands together dully to match the sharp reports of her palms.
"What do you think?" Oscar asked Anthony, clapping along in time, too, now. "Wanna help Mama count through her cool-down?" To Jane, he asked, "What number are you on?"
"Eighteen," she answered shortly.
He nodded, "Right." He waited a moment, until she had finished her current push-up and started on the next. Then he began, "One."
"Nineteen," she corrected, eyeing him crossly.
"Two," he declared, when she'd finished the next.
"Twenty."
"Three—"
"Oscar. Stop it."
He quickly hid his grin, turning his attention instead to their son. He nuzzled his face into the side of the little boy's head. "I think Mama's showing off with this clapping and this eighteen, nineteen, twenty," he murmured in Anthony's ear. "What do you think? Is Mama a show-off?"
"Mama's strong."
Oscar smiled, pressing a kiss to his son's shoulder. "Mama is strong," he agreed. "She's very strong." His eyes lit up when he caught Jane's eye. "But just how strong is she, that is the question."
"Oscar…"
"Hey, lil Ant," he continued, ignoring his wife's dangerous tone and turning to the boy, "I think you're a pretty good judge of strength, given all you've been through. Of course we know you're the strongest of all, but who do you think gets second place—who's stronger, Mama or Papa?"
Jane scowled, blowing out a harsh breath between repetitions. "Oscar, stop it. I'm trying to finish my workout. Leave me be."
"Oh, I'm sorry, are you saying you admit to the fact that you're weaker than me? I knew it, you're always gonna be third-place strong."
The sound that came out of her mouth next was less a word and more a growl. It made him grin in triumph—she was so easy to bait sometimes.
"Fine," Jane bit out after two more push-ups, retiring to her knees to catch her breath. She was panting shallowly, and the sheen of sweat on her forehead had coalesced into falling drops. She wiped her forehead clear with the back of her arm, then rested her body on the backs of her calves. "If you think you're so strong, prove it." She tipped her head towards the carpet. "You do thirty push-ups, just like me, and then we'll go from there."
"Gladly."
Jane moved to the side then, and gathered Anthony into her arms as Oscar took up the position she'd just vacated. He kicked off the socks he'd been wearing and braced his toes against the carpet, then his hands. Then he looked up at his wife.
"You sure you wanna do this with me?"
She didn't rise to the taunting, simply nestled her chin against her son's shoulder and whispered to him loud enough for Oscar to hear, "Look at that. Papa's so scared he'll lose he doesn't even want to start. I think that's the contest, don't you? Hm?"
Oscar scowled at her, and looked for a moment like he going to say something back, but instead he bent down and put all his effort into executing as many push-ups as quickly and perfectly as he could. His claps were sharp and firm, loud enough that they reverberated on the walls of their little apartment. Anthony soon started clapping along with them, as he had with his mother, but Jane held back. She wrapped her arms around her son and snuggled her head next to his.
"Papa's slow, isn't he," she whispered in her son's ear. "He's nowhere near as fast as Mama. He's gonna burn out soon. He's gonna give up."
"Quiet, peanut gallery."
Jane ignored him, and bent closer to their son, pointing a finger at his father. "Look, I think I can see his arms trembling. You didn't see Mama's arms trembling, did you? No, you did not. But Papa's been losing his touch. All this child-raising has made him go soft, I think."
Oscar muttered something under his breath that sounded an awful lot like a curse, but quickly covered it up with one of the requisite claps. Then he lowered his chest to the floor, pushed back up again, and caught his wife's eye. He jerked his chin towards her.
"Give me the boy."
Jane raised her eyebrows. "'The boy'?" She snorted, holding the child in question closer. "Excuse you."
Oscar ignored her, turning his gaze instead to their son. "Hey, Ant. Anthony. You want to help me out? You want to sit on my back while I go through these push-ups? You want to help me prove that I'm even stronger than your mama?"
"That wasn't part of the deal," Jane started to protest, but Anthony was already scrambling out of her lap, and waddling over to his father, holding up his arms, calling, "Up, up!" No matter the situation, he never missed a chance to be carried, and both knew it.
Oscar grinned, pausing in his challenge to pick up his son and place him on his back as he knelt. "Lie flat there, kid," he instructed. "On your stomach. There. Now hold onto the back of my—Ow! No, not my hair! Shirt. Shirt, Anthony. Hold onto the back of my shirt." It took a few minutes, with Jane helping, but eventually Anthony got situated, and Oscar bent down again, arms spread and braced.
"If he falls, Oscar…" Jane threatened.
"Oh, hush." Oscar craned his neck back to meet his son's eye. "You're not gonna fall, are you, Ant? You've got phenomenal coordination for a three-year-old. You are physically incapable of falling. You're like Superman."
The boy nodded with such seriousness at this claim that even Jane couldn't help but smile. She covered her laugh with a hand.
"Okay," she told her husband when she'd recovered. "Go."
He went slow on the first two, checking that Anthony really could hold on, but when it was clear he was content to lie prone while his father worked, he picked up the pace. Soon, he was moving so quickly he'd excited Anthony, and the boy was chanting, "Faster, faster!" and pulling at the back of his shirt, causing the collar to dig into his throat.
"Jane," Oscar bit out. "He's choking me."
She shrugged, pretending to inspect her nails. "I don't really see how that's my problem. I wasn't the one who told him to climb onto your back, with a desperation to prove something." She lifted her gaze idly to him. "You still have fifteen more to go, by the way. No slacking off now, show-off. Death by suffocation is not an excuse for failing to complete your own silly challenge."
Oscar looked like he wanted to yell, but he settled for pressing his lips together and glaring at her, not once looking away as he finished the last fifteen in what had to be record time.
When he finished, he laid down, and let Ant roll off him. He lay there on the floor for a couple minutes, catching his breath while Anthony plopped onto the floor beside him. He reached a little finger out to trace the enlarged veins on the back of his father's hand, poking at the bulging trails and giggling at their squishiness.
"Think that's funny, do you?" Oscar asked with a chuckle, watching the toothy smile spread across his son's face. "Think it's silly?"
Anthony caught his eye, nodding happily as he poked, and Oscar watched for a moment more before lunging forward, grabbing his son around the middle and tickling him until he shouted in laughter for mercy. Then Oscar set Anthony down on the edge of the carpet where he could watch, and turned to Jane.
"Okay, now for the main event: no clapping, and we do each push-up in time together until someone surrenders."
"Until you surrender, you mean."
Oscar ignored that. "It's not about speed this time, just stamina. Ant can't count above ten and to be honest, I don't trust you to keep your own count."
Jane raised her eyebrows. "And you think I trust you?"
He grinned, assuming the start position at her side. "We'll count together, then. Ready?"
"Go," she replied, and they went.
The first ten went fast, with each watching the other in their periphery to make sure they were on the same page. After the first ten, though, they fell off a bit. They were both feeling the prior thirty, and together, they let up some. Anthony kept cheering them on—Faster, faster!—but they steadily went in the opposite direction. By fifty, they were both panting. By seventy, they were both visibly shaking.
"Ready to quit?" Oscar gasped at one point, spending precious little air on insult.
"Only after you," Jane returned. "And probably not even then."
They sped up for two, then slowed down again. Their breaths were short and sharp, their shoulders trembling with effort. They made it to seventy-five. Then eighty. Every breath was a fight, every push upward, torture. Somehow, they reached eighty-five. Ninety.
Ninety-one, ninety-two…
The shaking got worse. Jane was having trouble breathing enough and Oscar was gritting his teeth so hard he feared they might crack.
Ninety-three, ninety-four…
One of Jane's hands slipped, and she almost fell out of position on the way to ninety-five.
"C'mon," Oscar muttered from beside her. He held himself still, stalling until she had herself straight again. He took as shallow breaths as he could manage, but each tore through his abdomen, threatening to rip him apart from inside. "Hey, c'mon," he encouraged. "We can do a hundred. Let's go. We can do a hundred and be done."
"Done?" Jane gasped, righting herself. "Is that a surrender I hear?"
He groaned, first in anger and then determination.
"Truce," he offered finally, exhausted, and she flashed him a smile.
"Okay," she agreed, equally spent. "Truce."
They completed the last five as quick as they could (which was not quick at all) and then collapsed onto the carpet, panting, as Anthony ran between them clapping.
"Done, done, done!" he cried, narrowly missing trampling on their arms and tripping over their shoulders.
"Done," Oscar groaned, attempting to rub feeling back into one numb arm with the other. "All done. Forever done."
Jane tilted her head back, calling to her son. "Who won, Anthony? Who's stronger, baby? Hm? Say Mama and I'll give you a cookie."
"Hey!" Oscar protested. "Don't bribe the ref! That's illegal." He turned to Anthony. "There will be no cookies, you hear? You gotta judge us on performance alone, Ant: Who's stronger, Mama or Papa? Who did the better job?"
Anthony surveyed them both for a moment, his little forehead creased in a picture of almost comical focus as he inspected his contenders. They each lay there panting, lungs desperate for air and arms and abdomens burning with pain, and waited. Anthony peered in their faces, first one and then the other, poked at their sore arms, and stared at their rapidly rising chests.
"Tie," he decreed finally, and they both groaned loudly in disappointment, bemoaning his name, which caused him to laugh and run across the room in gleeful triumph at having gotten away with something in front of his parents.
Too tired to chase after him, Jane and Oscar just lay on the carpet, heads turned towards each other.
"What a traitor," Oscar muttered. "I carried that boy on my back for fifteen push-ups."
"I carried him for seven months! Inside me!"
Oscar grinned. "Hey, maybe if you'd carried him for the full nine, he would've picked you as the strongest."
Summoning what strength she had left in her arm, Jane lifted it and smacked him hard in the chest. "Shut it," she ordered.
"You gonna make me?"
Jane rolled her eyes, and then groaned, pushing herself up into a sitting position. "I'm gonna go shower, is what I'm going to do," she said, getting to her feet.
"Ooh, can I come?"
"And me too?" Anthony, hearing that a new activity was about to commence and not wanting to be left out, poked his head around the couch. "Can I come too? What are you doing? Mama, can I come?"
Jane laughed. "No, you cannot come," she told her son. "You neither," she told her husband.
"Pity." Oscar stretched out on the floor with an overblown sigh. "What am I going to do with all this newfound energy, I wonder."
She smiled. "Do a few hundred more push-ups. I think that should tire you out."
"But it won't be nearly as fun as the alternative."
"No, it won't. But how about this: if you don't sass me for the rest of the day, you might get your alternative later."
He laughed. "Oh, don't tell me the two are mutually exclusive now? When did this new rule come about? Because if I recall the last five years correctly, and the six before that, mind you, you've always been very fond of how I…"
She left him there, talking to himself on the carpet, and headed to the bathroom. She passed Anthony on the way; he was playing by himself behind the couch, lying on the floor and doing some sort of wiggling dance. She smiled to herself, wondering what ridiculous thing Patterson had taught him now, as she asked, "What're you dancing about down there, little Ant? Did Aunt P teach you the worm?"
Anthony looked up at her, pausing in his activity to shake his head. "Not dancing, Mama."
"Okay…" She reached out a hand to comb some of his hair away from his forehead. It was the same brown as his father's, and she smiled at it, at him—at her baby that was, against all odds, right there in front of her, close enough to touch. "What're you doing, then?" she asked.
"I'm getting strong like you and Papa," he answered without missing a beat, and she laughed in realization: he hadn't been dancing; he'd been trying to do push-ups.
"You wanna be strong, huh?" She affected a man's low, gruff voice. "Big and strong, hm? Full of muscles?"
"Yes," he answered solemnly, looking up at her with a face full of that single-minded determination only young children can pull off. "I'm gonna be big and strong and full of muscles and I'll never have to go back to the doctor ever again."
She stopped combing his hair. Her easy smile froze on her face. "Hm? What's this about the doctor?"
"The doctor always says I'm small," Anthony explained, going back to his wiggling push-ups. "And he makes me come back, all the time. But if I'm not small anymore, if I get big and strong, I won't have to go all the time, I'll never have to go, and then there will be no more doctors never ever and then—"
Jane cut him off with a shake of her head. "No, baby. No, no, no, that's not how it works." She put her hands on his shoulders and brought him up into a sitting position, so they could look each other in the eye. "You're always gonna have to go to the doctor, okay? That isn't up for discussion. That isn't changing. You have to see the doctor. We need you to see the doctor; your papa and I need you to go."
"Why?"
"Anthony, we've been over this, remember? You have to see the doctor because you were born very early and very, very small—"
"But Mama, if I get big and strong—"
"Baby, that isn't something we need to be thinking about right now," Jane interrupted firmly. "When you get older, you'll have plenty of time to get big and strong. We'll help you, your papa and I. But for now…" She knelt down in front of him, held his face—his tiny face—between her suddenly huge hands. "Anthony, for now all you need to be is happy, okay? Healthy and happy. You don't need to be big, and you don't need to be strong, you just need to be here with us, okay? You need to stay here with us. Understand?"
After a moment of frowning thought, his face cleared, and he nodded. "Okay, Mama. I'll stay here."
She smiled, and bent forward to press a long, firm kiss to his head. She made sure she'd blinked back all the gathering tears before she pulled away again.
"One day you'll be very strong," she whispered to her son. "I know it."
"You promise it?"
She nodded, and took his little hands in hers. She kissed the back of each, then held them close between her two. "I promise."
He nodded firmly at that, conversation over, and then toddled away, back to his room. Jane sighed, laughing despite herself, and fell back against the couch, watching him go. It was hard to reconcile sometimes: the reality that this lively boy that brightened her home and life had once been so tiny they'd feared he wouldn't ever see the outside of a hospital. For weeks, they'd feared he'd die in the NICU. But he'd survived, he was home, he was healthy—all things considered—and some days, Jane forgot about it. Some days, like today, when she was fooling around with her little family and laughing and playing, she forgot she had troubles. She forgot she had almost not been a mother.
"You want me to have a talk with him too?"
She looked over at the sound of Oscar's voice, just in time to see him sink onto the floor beside her.
"No," she answered. "I think he understands—for now, at least. If he asks again, yes, I'll probably field to you. But I don't want to bring it up unnecessarily and get him focused on it."
Oscar nodded, agreeing with this plan. It was quiet for a moment as they sat side by side. Then he took her hand, and squeezed it tight in his. "You doing all right there?"
She nodded, but at the question, tears sprung to her eyes again. She pressed her lips together and bit the inside of her cheek to keep them from falling. Her son was three years old; there was no cause to cry over his birth anymore. He had lived, and he was still living—that was all that mattered.
"I'm fine," she whispered finally, a good two minutes late, but Oscar didn't comment. He just squeezed her hand, pressed a kiss to her temple, and moved closer to offer his shoulder. She held herself steady as long as she could. Then she curled into him.
"Oh, it's okay," he whispered, moving to hold her the moment she gave in to the returned fear and grief. "Sweetheart, it's okay." He kept one hand tight around hers, and used the other to rub soothing circles on her back. He could feel his own eyes stinging—her crying always set him off, always—and he buried his face into the crown of her head. "It's okay," he whispered for them both. "He's okay. He's gonna be fine. The doctors have all said he's progressing normally. He's still little, but that's expected at this stage, you know that. His heart is functioning well, his lungs are keeping up with him, he's okay. If something happens and he needs surgery—well, we'll do that. And he'll pull through. You know he will. He's a child and they bounce back. He's our son, and he's tough. He's a good boy. He's our baby boy—"
Oscar choked off then, unable to continue, but Jane finished for him.
"He's our baby boy and nothing's gonna happen to him. Nothing, Oscar."
He nodded, sucking in a deep breath. He rested a moment more, his forehead pressed against hers, until he could breathe and think properly. Then he pulled back.
"Well, Jesus," he whispered, wiping his eyes quickly. "Been a few months since we got into all that, huh? When's the last time we cried over him, January?"
Jane smiled a little, and kissed his cheek. "We're getting better."
"Mm," he hummed. "We are. So's he."
Jane nodded. "So's he," she echoed. Then she reached forward, pulling her husband close for a tight hug, before releasing him. "I'm gonna go shower, all right?"
He nodded, closing his eyes and resting his head against the back of the couch. "Okay."
She got to her feet, and made it only five steps before she turned back to look over her shoulder. "Hey," she called. "You coming with me or what?"
His eyes blinked open in surprise, and when he saw her standing there waiting for him, he grinned. A second later, he was on his feet, hurrying after her.
"Truce on all fronts, huh?" he teased once he was at her side.
She laughed, wrapping an arm around his waist to hug him to her. "Truce on all fronts," she confirmed, leaning into him. "Always a truce with me and you."