If there was one thing Adrien knew never changed it was that his wife was a woman who did not accept defeat. He had thought Domita dead when she had been in Cipritine when the Reapers hit but a year after the war she reappeared in his life, crippled but no less strong. "Brute to the face." she'd laughed, "State of things they could only regrow me one leg. Hope the people don't mine their Primarch being married to an invalid." No one would have and even if they did he couldn't have given a damn. All this time thinking she had gone to join their son with the Spirits, it...
What they hadn't counted on was the fact that enough time had passed for their chemical birth control implants to expire. In better times it would not have been an issue: a child could be transferred from a weakened mother to an artificial womb. No such facilities survived now. Tarquin's birth had been difficult on her body but now? Weakened by the war as she was it could be her death.
Adrien hadn't wanted to take the risk but Domita was as stubborn as ever. She had never broken down in front of him in the 50 years he had known her and she did not start now. The look she gave him was one of determination with an undercurrent of pain in the quaver of her mandibles.
"I am not giving up on this one! Not after what happened to my son. I was gone so often when Tarquin was young, I always felt so guilty, and when I heard..." She paused to breathe and Adrien to swallow down the lump in his throat. She had been told the public version of what had happened on Tuchanka on the way to his home. In private he had told her the true story. As much as she loved him she might never forgive him for putting Tarquin in a post he was not ready for. It was not something he begrudged her for; after all he had never managed to forgive himself. "This is my last chance Adrien, our last chance to start over. I lost my son. I'm not giving up on this one."
Which was what found him sitting outside the door of the surgery room, head in his hands. Despite the fact that he had every faith in Domita and doctors this was not the best of times. Facilities were still limited, medicine scarce. He could not even be present because of the tenuous condition of the patients. It was out of his hands now. The time passed all too slowly and all he could think of was thirty years ago, his son in his arms for the first time and how at the end there had been nothing to hold.
Sixteen hours later a doctor emerged from the door and Victus' head snapped up from his omnitool. He excused himself from the policy call that had been going on for the last hour and stood, mandibles clasped tight to his face. The doctor's petite dark ones were flared in a smile however and it let him hope.
"Come meet your daughter Primarch."
The lights in the large room were dimmed. To his right Domita slept while a nurse monitored her vitals; they had needed to sedate her partway through when her body wasn't reacting properly. She'd acquired another scar and would be weak for some time but would recover. At the far side of the room in a small radiation-shielded incubator slept a sandy colored child curled up under a heating pad with a doll nearly the size she was. Her plates were darker than Tarquin's, more Adrien's shade than her mother's. He knelt down beside the incubator to touch a hand to the plastic. "Is she...?"
"Underweight, and with the complications it's best to err on the side of caution. Has your wife told you her name?"
It was an old tradition not to speak a child's name before they were born but modern couples tended to get around it by sharing it via text. "Yes, Octa."
At the sound of his voice a small chirping peep began in the chamber, a pale of pale eyes squinted up at him. She was too young to be able to see much but his hand was visible enough on the plastic- her tiny talons grasped her blanket and she dragged it with her as she rolled over to the strange shadowy incursion against her tiny world. Octa peeped and patted the dark spot with tiny uncoordinated limbs and he felt the hole that had lingered open and broken in his heart since that day on Tuchanka start to close.
It would be days before he could hold her, weeks before Domita was stable enough to walk on her own again. In the meantime the Primarch conducted meetings in an office that had been vacated for him. Palaven and the Hierarchy were rebuilding slowly at the same time as his family, and while the road would be long and difficult the Spirits showed the way for those who would listen.