Like so many mornings before, Brady woke up expecting to see Severa's still-sleeping face sharing the pillow with him, only to find that the blankets on her side of the bed were tossed to the side and she was gone. "Uh, where'd ya get off to already, Sev?" he tiredly asked, sitting up and looking around the room for her, even though there was no way she was still in there, with how quiet it was. "Interesting, normally ya at least wake me up before you go off to do somethin' this early…"
He got out of bed and threw on his work clothes, knowing that he didn't have time to indulge in this game of hide-and-seek with her because he had somewhere he needed to be. Once he was dressed, he opened the bedroom door and saw Lunabel laying on the floor in front of the bathroom, her legs propped against the door. "Hiya Dada," she chirped, waving at him. "Time for icky work?"
"That's right, it's about that time." His eyes narrowing as he looked at the girl, taking note of how she was already dressed for the day despite that normally being a thing he did before he left, his attention was drawn away from her when he heard what sounded like pained groaning on the other side of the bathroom door. "Luna, is your mom in there?"
Nodding, the girl kicked the door with one of her feet. "Yeah! Mama is!" she replied, kicking with the other foot before she giggled and started trying to make music with her kicks, something that was stopped when the door came flying open and a completely disheveled and sickly-looking Severa was standing there in its wake, her face pale as she first glared down at her still-giggling daughter before looking up at Brady blankly staring back at her.
"Don't even think about worrying about me right now," she snapped, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand before groaning again. "I'm seriously fine, just must've had something to eat yesterday that my body didn't agree with. Go to work, don't think about what you're seeing here, just get lost."
He didn't consider fighting back against her demands, the sight of her looking unwell making him not want to argue with her even a little bit. Forgoing the normal morning routine of farewell kisses, he went to pick Lunabel up off the ground to take her with him, but Severa repeated her last three words before he got the chance, meaning that for the first time in a long time, he was leaving the house for work in the morning by himself.
Of course, if he was actually going to work right then, that would be some kind of accomplishment. "Can't believe I don't have the excuse to go sit and chat with Sev's dad for a little bit today," he grumbled to himself as he walked out to the parking lot at the apartment complex, giving the car a quick look before patting down his pocket and realizing he'd left the keys back on the kitchen counter. "Damn it, at least walkin' means I can kill time some way after all."
It had been a long time since he'd actually walked himself to work, due to always being the one to take Lunabel to some relative's house in the morning, and walking anywhere with her wasn't much of an option. Thanks to it being a rather mild winter morning, he wasn't freezing as he stayed outside, taking his time as he walked down the street with very few cars passing him. "Wonder if I'll actually be workin' at all today," he mused, looking at his hands and how relatively clean they seemed to be, compared to when he'd be dealing with oily car parts on the regular. "Also wonder how long I'll be able to keep this whole charade up before Sev finds out I haven't really been working." He stopped mid-stride, bringing his feet together to stand as he looked up to the clear blue sky overhead. "Gotta be thankful her dad's been funneling some money to us to help out, but it's only going to last so long."
When he resumed walking, he could feel a heaviness in his chest that he didn't want to address, something that he'd been ignoring for so long: how had it gotten to the point where they were relying on other people's money, after close to three years of being completely self-reliant? That was actually a question that didn't need answering, he knew exactly how it had gotten to this point, but he didn't want to admit to himself that it was time to start the process of looking for a new job.
By the time he got to the car shop he'd been so-called employed at, he was completely winded from the long walk he'd had to take to get there, but judging by how, like normal, business seemed to be pretty slow, he didn't expect to really be working at all. Slipping inside through the open door to the garage, Brady gave a quick wave over at Owain as he watched his cousin fiddling with some kind of car part, his cousin grumbling about how he didn't like how the greasy metal felt under his fingers while he worked. "I bet I could do it in half the time you could," he remarked as he stopped waving, hoping that he wasn't heard.
"It's about time you decided t'show up," he heard his uncle say from the doorway to the office, where he looked to see Vaike standing, that normal grin on his face. "Got some bad news t'pass along t'ya, but I'm sure you're able t'guess what it is without me havin' t'say it out loud, aren't you?"
Swallowing down all his thoughts on the matter, Brady merely nodded in response, trying not to make eye contact with his uncle as he awaited the words he'd been dreading. Except, as the pause between announcement and reveal dragged on, he found himself needing to actually look at the older man to try and speed up the process. Still, when nothing was said, he sighed and asked, "You're going ahead and firing me because there's not enough hours and business for me and Owain both to be workin', aren't you?"
"What? Why's that your guess for what's goin' on?" Laughing, Vaike reached out and grabbed Brady's shoulder, shaking it for a moment while he collected himself, Brady looking very confused at the gesture. "No, we're gonna find a way t'make both of ya stayin' on the team work out, even if it means cuttin' hours and days. He's okay with only workin' five a week, if you're cool with workin' the other one, and—"
"One day a week?" Making sure that he'd heard the proposition correctly, Brady couldn't help but feel completely appalled at the reality of everything. At least if he'd been cut completely, he could go find another job with no guilt on his shoulders, but to still have a job one day a week meant that he'd be ruining some plan of his uncle's if he left the shop. So when he got a grunt in response, indicating that he had indeed heard it right, his heart sank down into his stomach. "I, uh, I don't know if that's really the best choice for me. Can't we keep up this 'come in and work if you're needed' thing we've been doin'?"
"Because havin' both of ya work at once is killin' all the profits we could be makin', so there needs t'be some sacrifice made." Pulling back to resume standing in the office's doorway, Vaike looked over to where Owain was still fighting with that same part he had been before. "Your kid's old enough now that ya don't need all the money for everything like he does right now. Lissa and I talked about it, and while we know it's lookin' a lot like favoritism if we pick t'help him more than you, it's just that he's our kid and those kids are our grandbabies and we…we've gotta help them however we can."
"I…understand, thanks," Brady managed to say, before bringing a hand to his head and running it over his eyes. "Now I've gotta explain to Sev about how she's gonna be the one paying for everything because my pay here's not going to help at all, but it's all for those kids, right? Can't complain when it's for them."
He must have sounded spiteful as he spoke, because the look he was getting from his uncle due to that reaction was one of pure shock. "Y'mean that you're not okay with just doin' one full day here? The hours'll be a little less than what you've been workin' lately, but it's one day a week, which means six with that girl of yours. That's better than you'll find anywhere else, y'know."
"But it's not enough and you know it, Uncle Vaike. I can't be supportin' Sev and Luna with only working one day a week." Dragging his hand down off his face, Brady turned around, his back facing his uncle, while he watched his cousin still struggle with that single part. "I know why you're picking him over me, and I don't blame ya for it, but…seriously? He doesn't work very well at all. Never has."
"Can you imagine what his mother would say t'me if I chose t'drop him down from all these days to just one? She'd have my head for it, even if you're twice the worker he's ever been." Sighing, Vaike stepped forward to place both his hands on the back of Brady's shoulders, digging his thumbs into the upper part of his back for a moment before the younger man shook his head and started walking elsewhere in the building. "Now come back here right now, ol' Vaike wasn't done talkin' with ya yet!"
Brady didn't stop walking for a moment, finding himself the first clean chair in the garage and collapsing into it. "If you want to talk, talk with me while I'm sittin' down, I had to walk over here from home today and I'm tired." When he wasn't followed at all, he assumed the conversation was done and that he could just relax there for a while until he decided what else to do, but when he looked back in his uncle's direction and saw the disappointment in the man's face, he knew there was trouble. "Er, I didn't do anythin' wrong by choosing to sit rather than keep talking, did I?"
"No, don't suppose y'did, but…" Scratching the back of his neck as he formulated what he needed to say, Vaike glanced towards the opened door to the garage before motioning his head in that direction. "Maybe it'd be best if ya found somewhere else to hang around today. Not sayin' that your company's bad or anythin', but if Lissa happens t'stop by and sees ya here, she's gonna get on me for throwin' money at you even though you ain't workin' and I'd just rather not deal with that mess today."
"I'll, uh, find somewhere else then, yeah, that's fine," Brady said, standing back up and feeling the muscles in his legs aching from how little rest they'd just gotten. "I'm sure there's somewhere else I could hang to make it seem like I was here all day, so Sev isn't getting suspicious about what's happening."
"Sorry that we're havin' to have this happen like this, but it's for the best. I'll call ya next time I need ya t'come in, no worries." Grinning once more as Brady's footsteps echoed through the garage, this time it was Vaike doing the waving as he left. "Good luck out there, kid! I'll miss havin' ya around all the time!"
"Oh cool, I got it apart!" Now holding two distinct parts in his hands, Owain looked up from his work to see his father waving at no one in particular, his eyebrows furrowing as he tried to figure out what had just happened. "Did I miss someone come in while I was getting these pieces unstuck?"
The last thing Brady heard before he left the property was his uncle telling Owain that no, no one at all had come in. Hearing that made him sigh, hanging his head for a moment before the realization that he had several hours to kill before he could even consider going home struck him. "Where do I even go around here?" he asked himself, looking up and down the street for some direction to go in. "I mean, Inigo's flowershop's only a few blocks from here but he'd tell Cynthia I'm off, and Cynthia'll tell Sev, and Sev'll have my neck for it."
Looking in the direction opposite the big buildings that made up the shopping district of town, Brady found himself staring down a street he knew all too well, having come down it many times growing up as he'd been brought to the car shop. "Wonder if Ma's off today, maybe she'd take pity on me and let me in for lunch or somethin'. Don't have to worry about her tellin' Sev anything, so that would be a plus, but…" He groaned, hanging his head again. "This'd be so much easier if I wasn't havin' to play hooky from work. I'll just head downtown and see if anythin' catches my fancy on the way."
He ended up at the library, as it was right along the route he was taking to get into the heart of town, and while there he found himself sitting in a chair near the children's section of books, some gaming magazine on his lap that he'd picked to leaf through to pass the time. Watching the young children browsing through the shelves with their parents ended up being enough of a time waster, though, because every time he decided he was going to try and read up on some of the new gaming tech he'd been missing out on (because being a good parent was always more important than gaming), he'd be distracted by a new child entering the area. The way the kids were so eager to look through all the books for ones with their favorite characters or animals on them was endearing to him, and it made him wish he had Lunabel with him so that he could let her pick out a book for them to read together.
If he had any logical reason to have been at the library to begin with, he might have looked through the shelves himself to find something Lunabel might have liked, but he didn't need to raise Severa's suspicion level any more than normal. After a mother with several children ranging from toddler to young-school age left the section, he got out of the chair, leaving the magazine on the armrest in case he came back to it, before walking up to the first shelf and crouching down to get at a better level to the books. They were organized by reading level, and the ones he was staring at were all board books meant for the youngest of kids—a bit too young of an audience to be what Lunabel would want, but he wasn't actually looking for her so he could take the time to look through them.
The first books he saw were some of the textured ones, which he cringed to actually see there, because this was a library. Those books must have been either sanitized a million times or some of the nastiest things in existence, so he was going to keep away from them. Next were ones about families and how parents loved their kids no matter what, which were nice to see, even though the covers of all those books had badly-drawn families to make their points with. He couldn't even imagine taking something like that home and expecting Severa to allow it anywhere near Lunabel, no matter what. "Where's the ones showin' colors and stuff like that?" he asked, after glancing towards the animal identification books. "Don't kids need to know their colors?"
He was half-tempted to flag someone who worked there down to help him out, all in the name of future knowledge if he ever brought Lunabel over and she wanted to try reading something for herself, but his phone started buzzing in his pocket. "Odd, everyone knows I'm supposed to be at work right now, which means no phone checks, but…" Standing back up, he reached into his pocket and saw that it was Severa texting him something, a message that started with "for when you get a moment". He inhaled sharply at the words, not sure what could follow them and not sure if he could check the message then or if needed to find somewhere a bit more private.
Looking at the time on his phone, he noticed that it was just about lunchtime, which gave him an idea. What if he went home and told her that he'd been told to take an early day after a lunch break? She'd have no reason to accept that answer, because that was how erratic his schedule had been at several points during his time working at the shop, so it was a good plan. He could always look at the message (and the couple others following it that kept setting his phone off) while he walked, as long as no one ended up trailing behind him where they could see his screen.
The weather outside had gotten a little colder in the hour or so he'd been in the library, but it still wasn't much of a bother to him to be walking in. That couldn't be said for other people, judging by how he seemed to be the only person out on the sidewalk as he started heading for home, a perfect situation to be in right then. Opening that first message up to read the rest of the contents, he found himself wishing that he'd chosen to do this somewhere he could sit down to process what he was about to see, because when, following "moment", it read, "there's a /pretty big/ chance we fucked up sweetheart", he knew that everything he'd received there in the library was nothing but trouble.
"Shouldn't have let her talk me out of worryin' about her this morning," he said as he opened the first photo message she'd sent, nearly dropping his phone when he saw that it was taken at the closest corner store to their apartment, showing the limited selection they liked to refer to as the "family planning" section, with Lunabel's head visible in the bottom corner, her small hand reaching for some kind of candy. That message, captioned, "guess we'll have to see for ourselves, huh?" was followed in succession with one from back inside the bathroom in their apartment, holding up a couple of the boxes she'd clearly bought there at the store with the caption of "ready to double check myself, hoping we're in the clear here".
That one had been followed right away with a lone message, unaccompanied by a picture, that said, "if I'm really pregnant again, you're dead to me xoxo," which was a lot more worrisome than it needed to be. Brady knew that Severa wouldn't really consider him dead to her for anything, even something as inopportune as her possibly being pregnant, but it was still concerning that this was even something that could be happening to them.
The lack of follow-up to that last message worried him more than anything, though, because why wasn't she telling him anything else? There were only two ways this could go, and he was sure she would want to tell him either of the outcomes the first chance she got, so why was she stalling? Certainly she would be quick to either send him that it was a false alarm, or the profanity-laced message that it wasn't, and that they were on the road to being—oh gods he knew why she wasn't sending him anything.
She'd want to see the reaction either way, face-to-face, him there to hear her tell him the news. She'd want to be able to watch him either sigh in relief or begin crying in fear of what this all meant, and judging by how he was already tearing up at the mere prospect of having to deal with her being pregnant all over again, that second option was not going to be a pretty one if that's what it came to. How he hoped this was just her overreacting and it wasn't the start of something they'd sworn never to do again.
The looming dread of what was to come kept him from hurrying home too fast, wanting to hold off on the inevitable as long as possible. But he couldn't take forever getting home, as his worrying was already starting to eat at his insides, and no amount of fear of what he was arriving home to could get him to convince himself that he wasn't scared of what could be happening to them.
When he got up to the front door of the apartment, he found it solidly locked, and as he'd left his keys inside when he went to "work" that morning, he was resigned to having to knock on the door for someone to let him in. "Ooh, Dada's back!" he heard Lunabel say, her hands banging on the other side of the door as she tried to unlock it to let him in, but she was only able to get one of the two locks undone. "Mama, let Dada in!"
The other lock was audibly unlatched, the doorknob turning without Brady actually having to touch it, and the door came swinging open, Severa holding it open for him to step inside. She waited until he was in and looking at her with anxious eyes before she closed it, off-handedly waving towards the bathroom once she had the chance. "I know why you're here so early, they're in there if you want to see for yourself."
"Figured takin' a half day today so I could get back for this was pretty important," he lied, feeling that yes being there for her was important, but he certainly hadn't done anything regarding work to get to be there. "I'm so sorry you had to do this today, but judging by how you're not trying to kill me or actively ignore me right now, I'm assuming that this is going to be a good reveal."
"Go see for yourself, I'm not making that judgment for you." Something about how she seemed to be spitting her words as she spoke was giving him a bad vibe, but she moved on before he had a chance to question what she meant. Lunabel was grabbing her hand, asking her to do something for her, acting as a distraction so that Brady could go see this for himself without any intervention.
All those boxes from the picture were sitting empty on the counter, their contents laying in front of them. "Wow, ya really made sure to double and triple check on this one, didn't ya?" he asked as he read the boxes, making a note of how the different brands worked so that he knew what he was looking for. "Let's hope it's all for nothing, huh? I don't think I could survive seeing ya go through that a second time…" Even though he knew the evidence he needed for either option was right there in front of him, he had to avert his eyes from the counter for a moment to collect himself and his thoughts. This was possibly going to be the second big life-changing moment they'd had like this, and he didn't want to start blubbering the moment he saw the results, no matter which way they swung.
"You didn't think I wasn't going to watch this, did you?" Severa's voice in the doorway made him jump back, nearly crashing into the wall behind him. His whole body shaking in fear as he turned to look at her smirk as she slowly let her gaze fall onto what was on the counter, her face going stone serious as she looked. "Besides, knowing you, you're going to need me to explain it to you anyway, even with me leaving out the instructions."
"Come on, I'm not nearly that stupid." After taking a couple deep breaths to calm himself down from the scare she'd given him, Brady approached the counter once more, seeing Severa lean against the doorframe out of the corner of his eye as she watched what he was doing. His first thought was to lean down to see, but she tutted as he started bending down, the noise stopping once he was standing straight and reaching for the first device with a trembling hand.
"Oh good gods you're taking forever at this," she interrupted, pushing him out of the way to grab exactly what he'd been reaching for and shoving it in his face, which made it impossible for him to not look at it and see the two parallel lines running on its test box. "Look at them, look at what you've done." Throwing that one at him, it bouncing off his shirt and hitting the ground, she picked up the second and let him see it the same way, its indicator also giving a "positive" reading.
She had already thrown that one and was reaching for the third when he grabbed her wrist and pulled her into him, her anger-filled eyes locking with his teary ones. "You do not need to show me anything else to prove your point," he sternly said, his voice cracking as he spoke, "because I get it. Told ya I'm not stupid, then you went and treated me like I am."
"You're a complete idiot, Brady, and I hate you for that." Trying to jerk her arm out of his grasp, Severa found that he was holding onto her tighter than she figured he would, meaning she wasn't getting away from him until they talked their problem out. "I hate you for being my husband and for being so dumb and so attractive and for actually loving me and for…" Her voice was starting to crack as well, until she reached a point where her mind couldn't formulate the hateful words she was trying to push out. "…I hate you for what you've done to me. Again."
Like it was perfectly timed, Lunabel could be heard out in the living room, loudly singing a song to herself before abruptly changing her mind mid-lyric to say, "Mama said only one candy. A bag is candy," only to go right back to singing.
"I'd like to think we lucked out on the first one," Brady remarked, while Severa's face had gone completely colorless and she was trying to pull away from him even harder than before. "She's a good kid, and I'm sure that, uh, ya know, this next one will be too?" Watching as she struggled, he had lost his steam in his statement, ending up with some wishful thought than a positive reminder like he'd hoped. The reason for her struggle, however, was completely lost on him until he finally let her go after a few minutes of actually starting to talk about their situation. When she bolted to go stop Lunabel from whatever she was doing, he followed, just to find the little girl, covered in various candy pieces with several half-empty bags of sweets laying on the floor around her, sitting in what looked like a sugar coma.
Before he could even ask what had happened, he got his answer through Severa shaking the girl back awake, yelling at her as she did. "I told you one candy, that meant one piece from one bag, not all the candy from all the bags!" As the girl came back around, looking sickly from what she'd done, she was still getting an earful from her mother. "I should've left you here when I went to the store, it would have made leaving so much easier! You only got all that candy because you were told one piece at a time, not all at once!"
"Maybe she's not as good as I thought." Scratching the side of his head as he counted the bags on the floor, finding at least a dozen within sight, he sighed at the realization that a second child would result in more incidents like this one. But as he watched Severa, still berating Lunabel for what she'd done, reaching for the candy herself, he was reminded that even before he'd have to face this situation with another kid involved, he'd have to deal with the next many months of Severa being just as bad, if not worse, when it came to sweets.
He let his head fall back as he groaned at what this was shaping up to become. Between barely having a job anymore, having a child to raise, and having a pregnant wife to have to appease all the time, it didn't look like things were going to be easy for him at all. But, at least, he was pretty sure they couldn't get too much worse.
The plan had been to try and keep the news under wraps for a little while, to be able to have some great reveal that would take everyone's minds off the fact that maybe them having a second child wasn't the best idea, but that plan got thrown right out the window a couple of days later, at a family gathering celebrating Severa's birthday. It started innocently, with her parents wanting to shower her with some kind of affection for one day of the year, but the moment her mother broke out a bottle of wine, explaining that it was the same age as Severa was and that it would be a fun experience to taste it and see how it had aged over the past twenty-five years.
She took one look at the bottle, it decorated with a bow to show that it was indeed a birthday gift, and cringed at what she knew she had to do. "Mom, listen, it's a great idea, it really is, but I'm not much of a wine drinker, so…" Forcing a smile as she looked at her mother, Severa could see in her eyes that she knew something was amiss, but when Cordelia chose not to comment on something, she was doing it to avoid any kind of conflict with the child she had such a strained relationship with. "Maybe you and Dad and Brady can all share the bottle, but I think I'll pass."
"I have never known you to toss aside an opportunity to drink," Cordelia said with a sigh, ripping the bow off the bottle before setting it down on the table everyone was gathered around. "Even before you legally could, you were always attempting to get into people's alcohol just to say you did it."
Shrugging, Severa gave the first reply that she thought of, not realizing how dumb it was to keep lying to her mother until after the words had left her mouth. "Yeah, well, I've grown up and changed. Gotten a taste for what drinks I like and which ones I don't, and right now I'm just not feeling that wine."
"This is the same kind of wine we've had at every birthday celebration in the past few years, Severa, just a different and older brand." Narrowing her eyes at her daughter for a moment, Cordelia's gaze drifted over to where her husband was sitting, watching the man's focus on the bottle she'd set down. "Gaius! Are you listening to this? She's insisting that she doesn't enjoy your favorite sweet wine. What kind of daughter did we end up raising?"
The word "sweet" sent a chill down Severa's spine, her jaw trembling a bit as she thought about what she was having to refuse. She caught her father's eye as he went from staring at the bottle to looking up at Cordelia with raised eyebrows, quickly looking away from him so she didn't watch as he gave his response. "Seeing as I wasn't around for most of the raising thing, I'd say you should be asking yourself that question and not directing it at me. I didn't do a single thing wrong here."
Rolling her eyes, Cordelia reached for the bottle again, pushing it towards Gaius so he could grab it and uncork it like he wanted to. "Yes, well, I'm not the one who enjoys drinking that stuff at every chance I'm given, I only do it to indulge you and—until right this moment, apparently—Severa." Hearing her name said the way it was had Severa's head perking up, her attention turning to her mother, but the speediness of how she moved made her incredibly dizzy, her eyes fluttering a bit as she tried keeping herself from getting sick off her dizziness. If she hadn't been sitting right next to her mother when it happened, she might have been able to move past it without issue, but Cordelia happened to see the end result and, because of it, pulled her lips tightly together in silence.
"Er, Sev, you feelin' okay right now?" Brady quietly asked, reaching to put a hand on her knee while she worked to keep herself from feeling so dizzy. "I don't like seeing ya acting like this, and it's kind of worryin' me…"
"I'm perfectly fine, I don't know what you're asking about," she replied, brushing his hand off of her as to lower any suspicion. "I just moved a bit too fast and had to take a moment, that's all. Nothing to worry about here."
It was too late to keep Cordelia from jumping to conclusions, though, and Severa knew it, especially when she felt her chair get forcibly turned by her mother, so that they were facing each other a bit better. "Refusing your favorite wine on your birthday, getting sickly just by moving a slight bit, if you're trying to keep something from us you're doing a rather horrendous job of it." Holding her hand out in front of her daughter, Cordelia waited until Severa reluctantly gave her one of her own before she said anything else, her first words timed perfectly with how she started gently squeezing the hand she now held. "Sweetheart, you don't have to beat around the bush with us here. Are you expecting to be given money or aid from us again?"
"W-what? Of course not!" Taken by surprise at the question (although if the two ladies weren't so focused on each other they might have seen the odd look shared between Gaius and Brady at the mention of money), Severa pulled her hand out of her mother's and brought her whole arm to rest protectively in front of her, before opening her mouth and revealing exactly what she'd been trying not to. "We got through the whole pregnancy thing last time without you helping us much in the end, we so can do it this time by ourselves."
"I…hm, wasn't expecting you to be so open about things this time around." Cordelia's eyes were watching how her daughter's arm had been positioned, unable to pull herself to look anywhere else, while Severa was going slack-jawed at what she'd just said and the uninspired reaction to it. "At least I found out this time from you yourself and not from your father telling me." When she finally looked up to her daughter's reddening face, her eyes were beginning to brim with tears. "Darling, this is such great news to hear from you! You're going to have to tell me everything you know at this point, it doesn't seem like it could be much judging by how you're still so small, but I need all the information you have!"
In the chair on the other side of Severa's, Brady was leaning forward to rest his head on the edge of the table, sighing as he made himself comfortable there. "This wasn't what we were supposed to do while here today, Sev," he grumbled. "We were supposed to make it through today without someone finding out. Now that your folks know, mine'll know in no time, and that's just…not what we wanted."
"Cheer up, bud," Gaius said, also leaning down so that he could speak to Brady in whispers without being caught. "If anything, this makes me helping you out loads easier. Can't imagine Cordelia getting too upset if she finds out I'm passing you two money so you can raise our other grandbaby just as well as you raised Luna."
"Luna, 's me!" the little girl squealed, sitting across from the two men and completely unaware that she shouldn't have been trying to listen to what they were saying. "Luna a big, big, big girl!" Her arms were spreading wide to show just how big she meant, and while she was doing that she realized that none of the attention in the room was on her, causing her to puff her cheeks out and start screaming loudly until someone looked.
All four people it could have possibly been looked at once, the mother-daughter pair being interrupted from their one-sided conversation due to the screaming while the two men had to sit back up to not seem suspicious. "Gods, how's Luna taking this news?" Cordelia asked, being the one to actually grab the girl and take hold of her to get her to stop screaming. "I'm sure she's over the moon to know that she's—"
"We aren't telling her yet," Severa cut off, miming zipping her lips to get her mother to not get offended at not being allowed to finish her thought. "We'll have to come up with a good way to do it, but while she's throwing a spoiled little girl fit at what should be my birthday lunch isn't how it's going to be." The girl didn't appreciate being referred to in such a way, as evidenced by how she loudly told her grandmother that she was a good kid, which in turn led to Severa dropping all sense of being a mature adult to stick her tongue out at the girl, exposing the metal bauble she still wore despite supposedly being that mature adult.
That led to a round of laughter started by Lunabel herself, finding her mother's behavior impossible to not laugh at. It was a good way to move past the sudden revelation of an unexpected and unpredicted pregnancy, even though that topic was far from done with. Throughout the lunch, it was vaguely mentioned and discussed, but very little was actually said; it wasn't until the coming months where it was actually talked about in more depth.
Barely a month later, at the large birthday party that was thrown for Lunabel, a much larger discussion of the news took place, after Cordelia innocently asked Maribelle what her thoughts on the matter were. As Maribelle hadn't been told at that point, due to Brady's reluctance to get his mother involved, a lot of yelling happened, combined with the utter disbelief that something so important was going on without her knowing, but once she was clued in to the fact that Severa was just over eight weeks pregnant and hadn't been intentionally telling anyone, she was lot less offended at being left out.
It still resulted in an hour-long discussion about everything they knew about the baby at that point, which detracted from the whole party thing for Lunabel, who was not taking being neglected very well. The other party goers, torn between getting involved with whatever conversation Maribelle was passionately having and getting involved with making sure that the birthday girl wasn't having a total meltdown, ultimately didn't have as much fun as they could that day, but really, it was a little girl's third birthday party, how much fun were they really going to have?
If there was one positive from the day, it was how Cynthia, knowing exactly what her best friend was getting grilled about, finally found a way to casually drop the news to everyone that she too was pregnant, using the exact same timeframe that Severa was as her base for her revelation. The one issue with it was, of course, that she was at least a month further along, but as she wasn't showing that didn't seem to be that much of an issue at all.
One week later, though, and it would have been near impossible to believe that Cynthia was the one that was more pregnant between the two of them. "Gods, Severa, did you like eat all the leftover cake from Luna's birthday party?" she teasingly asked when they both showed up for work one morning, poking her in the side before getting her hand smacked away. "Sheesh, I'm just asking a question, no need to get mad like that."
"I was hoping no one would notice," Severa said, looking down at herself and pulling at her shirt over her stomach, feeling it being more constricting than normal. "I mean, I did eat most of that cake, but…I didn't think it would, you know, matter right now. I shouldn't already be getting fat again."
"You just admitted to eating most of a huge cake, I don't know why you're acting like you didn't see this coming." Cynthia laughed for a moment, until she saw Severa glaring at her with dagger eyes, then she swallowed down the last of her giggles and grinned at her friend. "Okay, I'll stop making a big deal of this. I'll just be happy that you're already showing and I'm not, which makes hiding the fact that I've been pregnant longer than you so much easier than it should be."
The glare softened, as Severa's eyes tracked down to her friend's stomach, finding it impossible to see anything different about her through her work clothes. She opened her mouth to say something, but all that came out was a breathy "what?" that was barely audible to herself, let alone Cynthia. She stared in disbelief for a moment, tugging at her own shirt again as she tried to understand that she was, despite once making fun of the impossibility of this, acting as her friend's perfect cover for her mistake.
That only became more obvious over time, as every shift they worked together they would inevitably spend at least a few moments comparing themselves, much to Severa's complete dismay. She hated how she felt every time she'd see Cynthia come up to her, pulling her baggy shirt back to expose whatever tiny little stomach she had gotten by that point, because that meant that she had to do the same for the sake of the comparison. After the first couple of weeks, it was honestly unnecessary for her to pull any excess shirt fabric out of the way because of how tight her top had quickly gotten; by the time they'd been doing this for a month she was struggling to even keep her shirt tucked in while she worked, making it easy to make the visual comparisons.
"Whatever baby you've got growing in there, I'm sure they're super comfy with all the room you're giving them," Cynthia said after they'd finished up comparing themselves one afternoon at the start of their shift, beaming because it was the first time she'd come into work with her stomach pressing against her shirt on its own and she was so excited to show off that development. "The doctor yesterday, she said that my baby's got enough room too, even though I'm not nearly as big as you are."
"Can you please stop using me as your springboard for everything?" Irritated not just at her friend but at how she could feel the front of her shirt slowly creeping up out from where she'd tucked it, Severa rolled her eyes when she heard Cynthia's apology for what she'd said. "No, you're not sorry, because if you were, you'd remember that this happened to me last time too. It's because I'm a fucking glutton for everything sweet that comes into my sight."
"Don't talk about yourself like that, I don't like hearing you say such rude things about yourself." Hanging her head, Cynthia bit down on her lip as she thought about if there was anything else she could say, but the sound of footsteps walking away from her let her know that she had wasted her opportunity. "I just…I didn't mean to offend her or anything…"
Walking through the dining room to check her section and make sure the tables were all clean and ready, Severa saw that one of them was already seated and groaned at the idea of having to go over there and get an earful from people who'd been sat in a closed section. "Maybe they'll see that I'm ginormous and give me a damn break about not rushing to them right away," she told herself, rubbing at her stomach while she made her way towards the table. About halfway there, she accidentally tugged her shirt up out of her pants, which meant that she had to stop and correct that before anyone saw, but while she was focused on that she didn't notice that the people at the table had both turned to look at her.
When she had it tucked back in the best she could, she looked up and saw the two faces pointed towards her. The first instinct she had was to get offended that they'd been watching, but then she actually looked at who was there, and her face went from trying to work through anger to complete surprise. As fast as she could, she made it to their table, bringing her hands up to her face as she worked through her conflicting emotions. "I really hoped when the guy up front said you were here today, he meant you and not someone else with your name," the woman at the table said, her voice mostly flat but giving off just enough emotion to let Severa know that she was happy about this turn of events. "It's been, what, five years since we last spoke?"
"It has, oh gods, it really has!" Despite being on the clock and supposed to be serving this table, not chatting with them, Severa slid into the chair next to the woman's, giving her a quick one-armed hug while she had her other hand still covering her mouth. "What are you doing back around here, you guys? I thought you two left for good!"
"We thought we had too, but sometimes coming home for a while is best for everyone." That was the man speaking, adjusting the sunglasses on his face so that he could look over them a small bit, while he spit his next statement out. "Or, should I say, it's best for those of us who actually care about our parents."
The woman raised her shoulders defensively, bringing her hands up in the air. "Whoa now, Gerome, I just said that coming and making sure they weren't dead was a good idea. I didn't say anything about one or both of us caring about them, I said that they hadn't tried contacting us in a while and we needed to make sure they hadn't kicked the bucket."
Severa, still hugging the woman up until she mentioned a lack of contact, retracted her arm and scrambled to get to her feet as she realized what that had meant. "Your parents didn't try getting you two to come to Cynthia's wedding? They were all there, they spent the entire time with her parents, but they didn't even bother trying to tell you to come?" She glanced towards the kitchen, where she saw Cynthia's head poking around the corner to look at her own section of tables. "I should let her know you two are here, she'd be so happy to see you after that happened."
One of the woman's hands slammed down onto the table's edge, while she too turned to look in the direction of Severa's gaze. "She works here as well? Huh, never would have guessed she'd have it in her to serve tables. But, wait, she got married?" As quickly as she'd turned away, she was looking back towards Severa, waiting for an answer, but as Severa's mind was focused on deciding whether or not to get Cynthia involved, she wasn't given it. That left her the opportunity to take a good look at her server, though, head raising and turning a bit as she let her eyes cover every inch of her, before… "Oh good gods, before you talk to me about her, what did you do to yourself?"
"I got married to Brady like a year after you left, no big deal," Severa replied, still looking towards where she'd seen Cynthia, but when her brown-haired friend disappeared into the kitchen and out of sight, she was looking back at the table, holding her left hand up to show off her ring. The man there gave an impressed smirk as he pushed his sunglasses back on his face properly, but the woman still looked like she was waiting for more explanation, eyebrows raised as she went from looking at the ring back to the stomach that hand was trying to obscure.
"And what about the other thing that's clearly going on here?" the woman asked, trying not to sound impatient as she spoke. "Come on, it's been five years, you've got to catch me up to everything we've missed since we've been gone."
"Right, right, I guess I should get around to doing that." Awkwardly laughing, Severa tried looking at her ring on her finger for herself, but all she could bring herself to look at was her stomach, feeling nothing but anxiety building inside of her as she tried to figure out how to condense the last few years into a quick and easy story that she could tell this table of old friends. "So, uh, if it's not completely obvious, I'm kind of pregnant, and—"
"Kind of? Look, I've seen my fair share of pregnant lades while we've been gone, and the way you seem to be, there's no 'kind of' about it." The woman's eyebrows dropped as she gave a quick laugh. "I never would've expected this from you, Severa. Always thought you'd realize you could do so much more than marry your high school sweetheart and have his kid." She laughed again, while Severa forced a smile to hide the fact that she didn't like hearing what had just been said. "But what do I know, you could be lying to me and that's just a sweets baby growing in there."
"…It's been five years and you haven't changed a bit, Kjelle." Her smile becoming more genuine, Severa gave a soft sigh as she looked between her old friends. "Neither of you really have, and that's…wow. Let me get you two started with some drinks or something and then we can keep talking, okay?" It was weird to her to have to get back into the working mindset, but she was being paid to be there, even if it wasn't much, so she needed to do work while she talked. Chatting with them had to happen in the time between dropping things off at their table and the other tables in her section that were getting seated, and if that meant small snippets of conversation, so be it.
It was only a mid-week lunch shift, though, so business never picked up too much, leaving her a lot of time to stand at their table and talk to them both. For every thing she had to reveal about what she'd done with her life, they each said something about theirs, leading to a lot of back and forth about her job versus their free-roaming lifestyle. "Okay, so, I think we've beat around this bush long enough," Kjelle said after a moment of watching Severa absentmindedly rubbing her stomach. "How close to having that baby are you?"
"Not close at all," she replied, her answer greeted with a grimace from Kjelle. "No, you don't understand, I'm mostly just carrying cake weight at this point, it's what happens to me when I'm pregnant and can't resist anything sweet."
"The way you're talking makes it sound like you've been through this before." As she watched Severa's reaction, which was to deeply sigh, Kjelle propped her elbow on the table and set her jaw on her hand. "You have, haven't you? I can't believe this, what happened to the free-spirited Severa who didn't want anyone to actually tie her down?"
"I don't know, dating Brady for as long as I did must've made me change my mind." Severa was reaching into her back pocket for her phone, so that she could show Kjelle a picture of Lunabel, but when she didn't find her phone in either pocket, she groaned. "I'll be right back, I can't find what I'm looking for to show you something."
As she walked away, Gerome was pulling his glasses down his face once more, locking eyes with Kjelle as she turned towards him. "Remind me again why you wanted to come see her first, of all people?"
"She was one of my best friends growing up and, well, you know about how she's the reason why I—no, I'm not saying that here." Shaking a hand in front of her throat to silence herself, Kjelle turned right back to where she'd been facing Severa, despite the other woman being gone. "We'll talk about that when we're out of here."
"No need, I think I follow what you're getting at."
"What's she getting at?" Coming back to the table by coming around its other side, Severa managed to catch them both by surprise, stunning them into a silence that she took as them not wanting to divulge anything. "I guess it was nothing," she said, as she waved the phone she now had up in front of them. "Here, I needed to get this so I could show you a couple pictures, Kjelle. Hope you don't mind that this is how you're finding all this out."
"I don't mind at all," she replied, looking at the phone's screen as it was shown to them, the picture on it one of Lunabel from at her birthday party. "So that's your other child, hm? Looks an awful lot like her father, doesn't she?"
"That's what some people say, but she's clearly mine when you get to know her. Her name's Lunabel, by the way, in case you were wondering." Turning her phone back around as she looked for another good picture of the girl to show, Severa ended up flipping to a picture of a sonogram that she didn't recall taking, until she zoomed in on it and saw that it most definitely wasn't her own. However, seeing it gave her an idea, and so she was showing that picture to the two at the table as well. "This isn't anything to do with Luna, or the new baby, or anything with me, actually," she explained, having re-zoomed out on the picture so the name and details weren't visible. "But you'll never guess whose baby this is."
"Huh, it would have to be someone who we also know, so I'm going to take a wild guess and say it's Cynthia's. Which you still haven't even started explaining how she's married now, so we're going to need some real answers on this one." Kjelle looked from the picture over to Gerome, who was holding a curled hand to his mouth as he took in Kjelle's guess plus the image itself. "Poor guy over there might've been hoping she'd be holding out for a hero like him when he came back."
"Don't you fucking lie about me like that," Gerome coldly said, glaring up at Kjelle while she laughed. "I only said that because you forced me to."
"Forced you to? I'd do no such thing, you liar." Gesturing to wipe tears from her eye that had collected due to her laughter, Kjelle turned to Severa and saw her nodding at the guess she'd made. "Huh, how about that, though. Little Cynthia's also gone from wild and free to being held down by some guy. You two have really changed."
Severa shrugged, going back to flipping through pictures to see if she had any other good ones of Lunabel, which she knew she did but there was a difference between the good pictures to show old friends and good pictures a mother kept for her bad days. "I wouldn't say we've changed so much as it is you haven't," she said as she kept looking, not paying attention to how Kjelle was making a face of disbelief at the statement. "I mean, aside from the fact that it looks like you've let your hair go back to natural color, everything about you is the same it was when we last saw each other. Both of you."
"Face it, we've not exactly had the experiences needed to change like Severa here has." Gerome, crossing his arms in front of him and sliding back into his chair, watched as Kjelle's disbelieving look was turned towards him. "Think about it. How many times have we had to restart new because we didn't find what we were looking for, wherever it was we were at the time? Countless times."
"You were the one who always insisted we find somewhere new to scope after one run-through of the local scene on dating websites," Kjelle replied, mimicking Gerome's position down to the slightly cocky way he was sitting. There was a clanging of metal as she kicked her foot up into the chair next to his, her shoe hitting the lower rungs of the chair as she lifted it into position, but she seemed unfazed by it. "How many girlfriends have you managed to actually get since we left, huh? Bet I can count that number on one hand if I wanted to."
"This isn't about my lack of girlfriends, miss 'I can bring the ladies home, but won't sleep with them'. I can't believe you'd try using that against me." With the anger starting to boil between them, despite wanting to see what other points about their time away Gerome was going to throw out, Severa knew it was for the best if she took that moment to step away. She locked her phone's screen as she shoved it into her back pocket, before heading towards the kitchen, hoping to cross paths with Cynthia while on the way.
While that didn't happen, she was able to meet up with her friend while she was preparing a tray for one of her tables. "You won't believe who's here and sitting in my section," she started, coming up behind Cynthia and giving her long ponytail a hard tug to startle the woman. When she got a shriek followed by a look that was only asking for the answer to the question, she was happy to deliver. "Some good old friends of ours. Friends that didn't even know you'd gotten married because their parents never gave them their invites."
It took Cynthia a second to get who was being referred to, time that she spent rubbing at her head where her hair had been hardest pulled, but when she put the pieces together her face lit up. "Kjelle and Gerome? They're here? Right now?" Severa didn't even have the time to give a proper nod before Cynthia was forgetting all about her tray she was supposed to be taking care of, rushing towards the exit from the kitchen to be shown where their friends were. "Oh gods, I didn't think they'd ever actually come back! Do you think they'll remember me? Did they remember you?"
"Why would they be at one of my tables if they didn't remember me?" Catching up to Cynthia as fast as she could, Severa had to lean against the wall to give herself a moment to catch her breath while her friend excitedly looked out into the dining room, spotting the table in question and shaking from the joy she felt seeing it. "Okay, calm the hell down, you're going to hurt yourself if you keep freaking out like this."
"I'm just so happy to know they came back after all. Come on, come on, let's go over there so I can talk to them!" Grabbing Severa's arm and pulling her up off the wall, Cynthia lead their charge to the table, trying her hardest not to lose control of her excitement and start screeching when they got there. But when she saw both Kjelle and Gerome, their argument having finished without conflict, watching as she approached, she couldn't help but squeal a small bit. "Hiya, friends! Bet you didn't expect to see me working somewhere like this, did you? Just like I didn't expect to see you dining somewhere like this!"
"Good to see that you haven't lost your spunk, even if you've grown up a lot more than I thought you ever would." At Cynthia's appearance, Kjelle pulled her leg down off the other chair and pushed her own chair out, standing up to open her arms for both of the servers to come into a hug. Neither of them took up the offer right away, leading her to say, "Okay, I get you're on the clock, but we haven't seen each other in so long that one hug can't be too bad. Now get into my arms, damn it."
After looking between each other because of the roughness of the demand, the two gave in to the request and got wrapped up in one of the biggest hugs they'd experienced in a while, Kjelle squeezing them both as tightly as her muscular arms were capable of. However, even with the friendly nature of the hug, and the fact that it was multiple people and there were witnesses, Severa couldn't help but feel like someone's hand was brushing against her in odd places, and she was fairly certain the culprit there wouldn't have been Cynthia. "You three can break apart any time now," they heard Gerome say as he watched them getting all touchy-feely. "You're getting an audience."
That was incentive enough to end the hug, Kjelle grinning at the two as she pulled her arms away, one of them going up so that she could ruffle the back of her red hair. "We should do that again sometime, eh ladies?" she suggested, Severa and Cynthia once again sharing a look between them. "We've got a lot of catching up to do, and no matter how much talking we can do here it's not going to be enough. I need the details on your lives, and I need them as soon as possible. Got that?"
"We've definitely got that, yeah!" Cynthia replied with a thumbs-up towards Kjelle, although Severa was inching backwards, unsure if she wanted in on that arrangement after all. She was used to people being a bit weird when it came to how they acted around pregnant ladies, but what had happened there in that hug wasn't something she'd ever had happen to her before. Normally they'd go for touching her stomach without permission, not trying to grab anywhere else…
"What do you say, Severa? Dinner at our place later this week?" There must have been some conversation that had kept going that she'd lost focus of, because Kjelle was looking at her and expecting an answer to some offer she hadn't actually heard be given. Swallowing whatever fears and worries she had on her mind, she gave a quick nod, not even processing that Kjelle had just mentioned having a meal at her own place until it was hours later and she was trying to move completely past what had happened.
It was when Brady had come home and had asked about her day at work and why she seemed to be so out of it that the wording there clicked in her head, and all she could bring herself to say to him was, "I think I accepted a dinner invite to a one-time girlfriend's house that may or may not exist, and I don't know what to do about it."
He was honestly as confused as to what to do as she was, which meant that when the fateful night came they just had to go together, Lunabel in tow. If this was any test of what kind of attraction to Severa that existed within Kjelle, it was best to crush it completely by her bringing her husband and child along. It didn't seem to be a test, however, not when it ended up being merely a night of talking and dining in a cramped apartment filled with boxes that hadn't even been unpacked yet. But the fear remained in Severa's mind every time she looked at Kjelle and how happy she seemed to be in the company of her grown-up friends, and she was sure that wasn't going to change right away.
A/N: and so all the karma-directed pieces fall into place...
