The hum of the microwave drowned out the sounds of vomiting in the master bathroom, which was why Rogue kept the microwave running even after he'd finished reheating the previous night's leftovers. He only stopped it when he turned the faucet on to wash the dishes he'd made, letting the water cover up the noise instead.
Was it insensitive of him to try so hard to ignore Sting's suffering? Yes. Obviously. Especially considering that he'd had a bout of morning sickness here and there throughout his own pregnancy. But his had manifested more as a general queasiness at the start of the day, and he'd only thrown up when an absolutely terrible scent hit him. In the past week Sting's dry heaving had become Rogue's alarm clock. Breakfast was out of the question, and later meals could be a battle.
While the water was running, Rogue filled a pot and minced ginger, setting that on the stove to boil. In the interest of not completely abandoning Sting to his symptoms, he figured he owed it to Sting to brew something to help settle the blond's stomach.
Alex sat on the counter, watching her mother work. She'd been given a bright yellow plastic knife and a lettuce leaf to play-cook with while Rogue prepared lunch. Vegetables, he'd found, were easier on Sting's stomach than meat. And rinsing out all the individual lettuce leaves or cilantro or whatever it was that he chose to work with was a wonderfully innocent looking way to drown out the noise of Sting's sickness. He had been getting more and more creative with different salad recipes over the course of the week.
It helped his that he needed to improvise a lot with ingredients. The lettuce had been a splurge. If he didn't work soon, they would have to dip into the money set aside to pay rent in order to buy more groceries. And it wasn't like Sting was going out on a job any time in the near future. Even if he wasn't so worried about losing this third baby, his pregnancy was off to so rough a start that Rogue wouldn't dream of letting him go out on any job. Much less the combat heavy fair that the two of them were specialized for.
With the water running, he didn't hear the noises from the bathroom stop, but he looked up from slicing lettuce and saw Sting there.
"How are you holding up?"
"I didn't see my intestines in the toilet, so I don't think I threw up everything," Sting reported. "I think this baby hates me. I don't know what I did to them, but they must hate me."
"they haven't developed enough to have a functioning brain, Sting. I don't think the baby is capable of hate yet."
Sting grunted and sat down at the kitchen table, trying to watch Rogue without looking at the food.
"Sting?"
"Yes."
"You're being ridiculous."
Sting sighed and shut his eyes, resting his forehead against the back of his chair. "I know. I know. I just… I don't feel good. And Alex adores you even though you had to go through this too, so I'm talking nonsense, aren't I?"
"Was Rogue sick all the time?" Frosch, who had been playing with her own toy knife alongside Alex, asked. "Fro doesn't remember him having to cling to the toilet like Sting does."
"I had morning sickness too," Rogue protested. Not that his compared to Sting's, but he didn't want Sting to—
"You didn't have it this bad?"
Crap. "Well… No, but that's… Sting?"
The blond had already gone pale, and looked down at the floor, no doubt wondering if this was another sign that his body wasn't meant to carry a child. Really, the fact that he was male ought to have been sign enough. But Alex came out healthy, and Rogue knew that Sting had hoped to see lightning strike twice.
He pulled the pot off the stove, straining the ginger chunks out and pouring a mug of warm tea for Sting.
"Here," he said, setting it down next to the blond. "This should help you keep lunch down. I'll store the rest in the fridge. Heat it up whenever you feel sick."
Sting picked the mug up and stared at it, scrunching his nose in distaste. Most of the battle with lunch was getting Sting to keep the food down, but getting him to eat when he didn't feel well also took some effort.
"Drink it, Sting. It will help."
"It doesn't smell good."
"Drink it or I'm sleeping on the couch tonight."
On the outside that might have sounded like an odd threat, but there was a rational behind it. Rogue wouldn't dare put his sick, pregnant lover on the too short couch. But Sting didn't like the idea of Rogue being uncomfortable overnight either, so he would try to avoid making Rogue feel the need to threaten as much. More importantly, though, the couch was too small for both of them to sleep on. Even early on in their relationship, Sting had loved sneaking into Rogue's bed and cuddling up with him to go to sleep. Since officially starting a family together and sharing a bed around the clock, Sting could hardly bare to be without Rogue in bed anymore. In fact, Rogue found himself napping alongside Sting lately when he still had energy to burn for the sake of helping Sting nap more comfortably.
Sting pouted, and for a moment Rogue worried he might still resist. Then the blond picked up his ginger tea and began to nurse it.
Rogue scooped Alex off the counter and set her in her highchair before gathering up lunch and placing it on the table. Before sitting down, he also gave Alex a cherry tomato to play with, and was unsurprised to see her throw it on the floor and giggle before he could even pull his chair out.
Too lazy to bend over and pick it up, he let a shadow snatch the tomato and pull it under, only for it to pop back up in front of Alex. She squealed with delight and threw it again, and Rogue picked the much more mundane bending over and picking it up to return it to her, giving it a roll in the hopes that she might decide to do something different with the tomato if she had an example to follow.
He sat down and looked back at her just in time to see her roll the tomato off the table.
"Lector, get that," Sting instructed.
The exceed took over entertaining the toddler while Rogue ate and Sting nursed his drink. When Rogue finished he got in on the game, adding a few more tomatoes for Alex to make them chase around the room. Sting sat and watched, eventually taking a test bite a his salad and, after he didn't throw it back up, slowly eating the rest.
When he stood and carried his dishes to the sink, Rogue stepped away from the tomato game to check over him. Seeing nothing obviously wrong, he asked, "Feeling better?"
"A little. I don't remember it being so bad with… with the first one."
"Maybe it's a good sign. The baby's thriving in there, so you're actually feeling the symptoms the way your ought to."
"Maybe it's a bad sign. Things are going to go even worse this time."
The worst pregnancy Rogue could imagine was one where the strain of carrying a child took Sting from him, but that wasn't a fear he dared voice. For as desperately as Sting wanted this second child, anything other than encouragement was taken as a personal attack. And having already forbade that Sting make a fourth attempt, Rogue dared not hint in any way that he actively didn't want Sting to be pregnant at all.
Alex was a joy, he reminded himself, and that was in spite of how much he'd hated being pregnant with her. Once he had time to get excited for this new baby, to get to know them, he would be as hopeful that they would survive and be born into the world as Sting was.
But just then, the only one he could worry about is Sting.
"Do you mind doing dishes? I still feel worn out from… sitting… I want to lie down."
Rogue nodded. "Will you want any company?"
"I wouldn't mind it."
"Lector? Frosch? Come get me if you need any help with Alex," Rogue instructed.
They had to pause a moment and process this instruction, despite Sting having given the same one word for word quite often.
Sting was the one was child rearing came naturally to. That might have had something to do with his having a far greater desire for a second child than Rogue did, come to think of it. While Rogue wasn't a terrible mother by and stretch, he'd had quite a bit of learning to do when it came to managing Alex, and it had always been Sting that he and the exceed deferred to whenever the little girl threw something unexpected at them.
Except for the past three weeks Sting had done almost nothing. The blond was so terrified of the possibility that he would lose this latest child that he only got out of bed to take care of basic bodily needs. While Rogue was willing to oblige that, at least for a little while, it all but completely took Sting out of the picture when it came to taking care of Alex.
Sooner or later the pregnancy would either meet another premature end, or it would last long enough for Rogue to claim that this one was sticking well enough that it was safe for Sting to try and do a little more. Maybe not guild work, but a hand around the house would be nice. Being the primary parent for Alex on top of the one everyone else was financially dependent on was asking a bit much. How Erza and Macao managed as single parents was beyond him.
The first miscarriage had come at the one month mark. At week five, Rogue decided, he was going to tell Sting to get his butt out of bed and stay up for the full day. But until then, for Sting's sake, he could try to be obliging.
He followed Sting into the bedroom, shucking off excess clothes by the door, and crawled into bed alongside the blond. He'd only gotten himself into bed a few seconds ago, but Sting had already gotten himself wrapped up in a downy comforter and was sinking into his pillow. Rogue had to do a bit of finagling to get himself into the comforter too.
"Thanks," Sting murmured.
"No problem. We can't do this tomorrow, though."
Sting opened his eyes halfway, not overly concerned, but not content. "Am I in trouble?"
"No. I need to work."
"Oh… Alex—"
"I'll see if Erza can babysit. We help with Kiseki often enough that it shouldn't be a problem, so long as she isn't working."
At the same time that Rogue had been pregnant with Alex, Erza's secret lover had been expecting a boy of his own. Since Jellal hadn't been able to stay in one place and take care of the newborn, Erza was effectively a single parent. Her lover's sporadic visits to see how the two of them were doing weren't enough to lighten the burden of parenthood. As the other newer parents at the guild, Sting and Rogue regularly lent a hand. Their assistance made her the first to forgive the two of them for not only dragging Natsu into their relationship drama, but for deciding to stick to the Fairy Tail guild when the whole mess resolved with Natsu brokenhearted.
(In all fairness to the members who were still a little sore about that, they really shouldn't have done that to Natsu, even if he gave them his blessings.)
"She might be gone. Christmas is coming up. If she doesn't have enough set aside for Kiseki and Jellal…"
"I'm sure Jellal visiting is Kiseki's present," Rogue said, although he was also sure that Erza planned to splurge on cake, and had been stockpiling toys for the boy. Thank goodness he'd already set aside gifts for Alex and the exceed. "And I would be surprised if her gift for Jellal costs anything."
"We have to do that some time before this baby is born."
"Yeah."
"It will be born."
Maybe. "Here's hoping."
"You were pregnant over Christmas, right? How miserable was it?"
"With you not there?"
Actually, it hadn't been that bad at all. That was before the competition between Sting and Natsu really heated up, and Rogue had spent a pleasant evening with his then boyfriend Natsu, enjoying gifts and sweets and not fretting too much about how the ex who's child he was pregnant with was trying to win him back. But considering that his ex did win him back, that wasn't the nicest thing to admit.
"I would probably get sick just smelling eggnog right now…"
"Good. Eggnog has alcohol in it."
"Oh. No wonder we don't have any. I thought at least Alex…"
"I'm not giving our daughter alcohol any more than I'm giving it to you. She's fine with candy canes. And we borrowed the oven at the guild for gingerbread. I wasn't sure how you'd handle the smell."
"Oh… thanks. You've been busy, haven't you? Neither of us have gotten decorations up."
"I'll get something thrown together." Rogue kissed Sting on the forehead. "If you can't enjoy any foods over Christmas, I'll at least make sure it looks exactly as it should."
