A/N: Onward and upward, folks!
XXX
Thus ensued a very uptight sundown for Mary and Marshall. Their evenings were fairly quiet anyway, what with Marshall functioning beyond his capacity and Mary just trying to stand erect for a full day. But, this had an air all its own. Mary had transferred into giving Marshall the silent treatment after he'd directed her homeward at Stan's urging. She sat on the couch, glowering darkly at him from over the top of the book she was reading, while he tried fruitlessly to make a dinner that she could actually eat.
Marshall, the more balanced of the two, knew both were hiding what really had them in sour moods. Mary, while annoyed at being told to hang back and watch her step, had been doing as such the duration of her pregnancy, and wasn't unfamiliar with Marshall reminding her. It was her dread over the kids' well-being that made her so surly, not to mention Maureen's outlandish insinuations that Marshall was too good for her, that she didn't deserve to have children. Marshall himself was caught in a net trying to maintain his own decorated glories about being a father, all the while working diligently every day so Mary would not be scared. He hated to think of her being scared, no matter how obnoxious she was acting.
But, they sat noiseless even so, one the eternal idealist – putting parenthood on a pedestal – the other the constant naysayer, refusing to believe the opportunity for parenting would arrive until the babies were home safe and sound. Marshall knew in his heart they were going to have to find a little more equilibrium, but they were tangled up in their own worlds at the moment; a far cry from basing anything on reason.
Therefore, he was somewhat caught off guard when Mary approached him in the kitchen, her thumb marking the place in her book. She still did not look like she was anywhere near forgiving him or reducing her acidity, but the silence must've been getting to her. Marshall stayed where he was, stirring sauce on the stove.
He heard the stool scrape across the linoleum with his back turned, and he knew Mary had braved getting a leg up and sitting at the island. He could even distinguish the tiniest of sighs come out her mouth, but he wasn't tempted to turn right away.
"You know, there's a lot of shit in this book they don't explain very well."
Glad Mary couldn't see his face, Marshall smirked at the way she masked her displeasure in a question – that she held firm on being angry even when she was past endurance. When he was certain he wasn't going to lose his poker face, he rotated to see what she was talking about. She was rifling though the book she'd mentioned, her free hand resting underneath her chin. The setting sun was casting stripes on her face through the blinds on the kitchen window.
"What book are we talking about?" Marshall kept his timbre decidedly dispassionate, not showing his hand one way or another.
Mary did not lose her frown and waggled the cover at him. By squinting fast, he could see that it was one of the many pregnancy books he'd bought for them – mostly for himself. He was aware that she read them, but she usually engaged when he wasn't home. She didn't want him to know she was actually interested but, in his mind, knowledge was power given how unnerved she was.
"What's confusing?" again, Marshall didn't commit to being intrigued just yet, not when she was still sulking.
After searching for the correct page, "What's an episiotomy? They throw the word around like 'labor pains' but they don't define it."
Marshall could assume that by 'they' Mary meant the authors, but he was not attracted to specifying the details of this specific procedure. Anything that rocketed his partner's baby-peril-phobia was to be avoided. On the other hand, if he hedged his bets, Mary would know he was holding out on her, and likely for a reason. She'd led him right into the sniper fire.
"I'm not sure you want to know," he construed that being up front with her was probably the most harmless choice.
Mary scrunched her nose, true to form, "Would I have asked if I didn't want to know, Poindexter?"
Perhaps not, he thought, but sometimes ignorance was bliss. He couldn't help thinking this was one of those times. Maybe he could be honest without getting into the rockiest portions. The trouble was if Mary would buy it.
"It's an incision the doctor would make prior to you delivering so you wouldn't tear."
This altered Mary's hardened features, if nothing else. She raised her eyebrows at this bizarre statement, looking utterly baffled. Whatever she had planned on hearing, it evidently was not this. As a defense mechanism, Marshall guessed, she decided to play dumb.
"An incision where?"
Marshall took his time turning the burner down on the paste he was mixing, licking a finger that had swept his wooden spoon. He saw little to no way out of this, but he was pretty good at fine-tuning when he wanted to be. Turning and leaning against the counter, he kept eye contact with Mary, picking each word very deliberately.
She could figure this out on her own, "Well. Let's say you had a natural childbirth. Where are you most likely to tear during a delivery?"
Upon hearing this, Mary shut the book with a snap. Marshall even thought he saw her shudder once she put the pieces together, a sight that made his frustration with her decrease slightly. She might be driving him up the wall, as Stan had said more eloquently, but she did have far more uncertainties to contend with than he did – none of them amusing and all of them pending until further notice.
Her green eyes, droopy and sapped of resilience from lack of sleep, blinked resolutely at the countertop in front of her so she wouldn't have to look at Marshall. He had the notion she was self-conscious just trying to represent an episiotomy in her subconscious.
"They do this for sure?" she said to the table, donning 'they' as the doctors this time.
Marshall shook his head, "No. Only if the kid – kids – don't seem to have enough room to get out, for want of a better term," he was beginning to wish she would look at him again, but she was determinedly fiddling with a stray thread on her shirt. "I'm not an expert, but I would think that in the unlikely event you go through natural childbirth, the probability is not very high that you would need one."
He could tell Mary didn't want to put forth any more issues, but was curious against her will, "Why not?"
And this was where Marshall felt stuck, trapped beneath Mary's looming glare. She would whack him as she had almost whacked Maureen if she found out he was lying, as he wanted to. But, it was equally possible she would be just as pissed if he explained the reasoning behind his theory. Knowing he had no choice, he landed on the truth once again, centering himself with a hand on the counter across the room for support.
"I am inclined to believe the twins will be small enough that enlarging their exit route will not be necessary…" he even tried to be funny, tried to lose his stately persona, but knew from the way Mary's eyebrows pinched inward that he was ruined before he'd finished. "It's more common in larger babies – over nine pounds – and you are not carrying eighteen pounds of child."
His lighthearted jokes did not cheer Mary up. As soon as he'd mentioned the size of the babies, she'd pawed the book aside, where it fell into the extra sink at the island. She stood up much faster than Marshall would've thought she was capable of, and gave him a glance that clearly said she was dying to release her dissatisfaction.
"You really think you're clever, don't you?" she snarled spitefully. "'Enlarging their exit route…'" a scoff. "You are such a trip. I can't believe I even asked you."
Marshall did not take well to being blamed, given the day they'd had, "But you did ask, and I told you what I knew," he asserted boldly. "It isn't my fault you didn't like what you heard. I'm sure it's unsettling, but…"
Even trying to give her kudos didn't work, "Do you ever stop with all this guaranteeing at every turn?" she leaned on the outside of the island now, about five feet from Marshall's nose. "Are you in this house?" a finger jutting at her belly. "Are you feeling the way these kids twist and pull my every internal organ? Are they wielding swords and pitchforks against your hoo-hah, ready to strike?!"
She became still more disturbed the longer she ranted, her hand flying violently in front of her, implicating meager Marshall, whose obliging reassurances had no effect on her.
"Until they do, you don't know what's going to happen to them, and you sure as hell don't know what's going to happen to me!"
"What do you want to hear then?" Marshall shot back, shocked at his own audacity; sparring with Mary in the current climate could not produce a constructive result. "Do you want to hear that there's a definite prospect the twins will have problems when they're born? Do you want to hear that they're going to be hooked up to monitors and tubes – that they might not be able to breathe correctly? That they'll be in the hospital for weeks?"
Marshall was alarming himself with such talk, as he never let those horrific images invade his sanguine vision of paternity. But, it was child's play compared to how Mary looked; she was nothing short of mystified that he would put those potentials on the table. If he alleged that it could happen, it almost certainly could. She was shaking her head at him, puffing for air she had lost in hollering.
But Marshall, in a stroke of dominance he hadn't known he possessed, was weirdly satisfied to have knocked Mary off her game. It proved that her misgivings could not be quenched, no matter how hard he tried; that it wasn't because of a blunder he'd made.
"I didn't think so," he'd accomplished something, though there was injudicious, unplanned savage pleasure in his four words. "If you wanted to hear the truth, you wouldn't freak out every time someone mentions that the kids will be premature."
"Maybe not…!" Mary found her viciousness once more and got right back on the horse. "Maybe I don't want to hear it, but you and your sunshine and roses fantasy is a crock! You can't make whatever happens to them go away by writing some enchanted woodland story where they're riding unicorns over some rainbow!"
This was a gross exaggeration, but Marshall had to be at least somewhat awed that Mary knew him so well. He'd strived very hard not to lose the positive side of his personality when he'd gotten together with Mary; he harbored her cynicism very fondly because it was part of who she was. But, not wanting to become acerbic as well, perhaps he'd gone too far the other direction.
"You can't do this for me!" Mary burst again as he thought about all this, and he distinctly heard her voice break, a red alert because it meant she might cry. "The kids depend on me and only me until they get here! Why does everyone think that if they fuss over me until I'm in pieces that-that changes?"
"I don't think that…" the man attempted to bring down the appearance of a warzone because he was glad that Mary was finally opening up a little, though if she surrendered to tears he would feel terrible.
Mary cried just as little as she had before she'd lost Jamie; if she were to revert to that, he would know her emotions were identical to what she'd felt after the miscarriage; a danger sign if ever there was one.
"I just think that you're so scared…" Marshall tried to pick up his thread, to school her on where he was coming from, but the final word was the only one she seemed to hear.
"But…can't you just…let me be scared?!" she practically detonated, voice reverberating in the kitchen so powerfully that Beatrix skittered into their midst, wondering what on earth all the commotion was about. Her ears were perked, her head twirling almost three hundred and sixty degrees around, but Mary ignored her. "I am scared…!"
And Marshall knew then that he would have to step down; be the bigger man. Mary admitting she was scared, point-blank, was monumental. There was no telling how humiliating it was for her to say it out loud. He was proud, but discouraged all at the same time.
"I'm gonna be scared for the next eighteen years and then some – can't you just get used to it?!"
Marshall didn't know what to say or do. He was absorbed in this woman, this woman he loved so deeply, and yet found it tragic, watching her scream herself hoarse. Her eyes were wild, almost maddening, she was so frantic to make him understand. There was an intimidation about her nonetheless; the way she stood stock still in front of him, imposing her gargantuan size, as if to say, 'I am here and I am woman. Take me as I am.'
Unfortunately, he pondered this one second too long, because blurting out that she was frightened seemed to come back to Mary. She tried to dash forward, to cover up the entire argument.
"Oh, forget it!" she waved a willful hand in his face and rolled her eyes. "Just…give me dinner or something! I'm done with this!"
Before Marshall could blink, she'd trudged across to the oven, grabbed the wooden spoon he'd been using to stir, and dipped it into the cooling sauce on the stove. He opened his mouth to caution her, to tell her it might be better seasoned with something so it was not so spicy, but she'd already combed the utensil clean before he could speak.
"What's in this?!" she flung into their boiling squabble, mouth still full of the substance.
"It has jalapeños; I think it would be improved if…"
He didn't bother going on. He knew from the way Mary dropped the spoon with a clatter and covered her mouth with her hand that it was too late. Her face went from rosy to green to sheet-white so fast he was astounded someone wasn't turning a dial somewhere.
In a flash, all the tension between them vanished, "Mary, I'm sorry; I didn't know…"
She barely had time to shake her head and croak, "Jesus…"
And then she was gone, pattering down the hall, Beatrix in her wake, a mad rush for the bathroom; Marshall's only hope at this point was that she made it in time. He thought it best that he not follow her initially, not after the way they'd been dueling; that he wouldn't add to her mortification by watching her vomit.
He might not have had a backstage pass, but he was still in the middle balcony, as he could hear the spattering and retching from a room away; every sickening splash in the toilet made him feel worse. She would cough once or twice, and then her stomach would betray her again, fueling more of the day's food up her throat. Beatrix even mewed pitifully amongst the regurgitation, like she knew her master was alone and was begging Marshall to come and ease her pain.
After a few minutes, Marshall rubbing his eyes leisurely and trying to wait it out to spare Mary a little bit of dignity, he knew he couldn't stand sedentary any longer. The noises of Mary heaving and choking, puking what sounded like everything she'd eaten in the last week, made him ache, in the flesh. It seemed jalapeños were just as bad as pickles, if not worse. He left his spot alongside the counter and wandered back to the bathroom, eyes landing upon a sight that never failed to beat a triad of mercy, kindness, and humanity in his heart.
Mary's cheek was resting against the cool porcelain of the toilet, just below the seat; her eyes were closed and her mouth partially open. She was trying to draw breath while concurrently gulping down the vestiges of her digestive system, praying it was over. Her skin was waxen and pallid, while also shining with sweat; a cohort as friendly as the toilet itself these days.
"Mary…" he whispered, as he had on so many other occasions, but to the innocent bystander, his voice was acting as a trigger.
His partner threw up for the fourth time, ensuring there was nothing more within. Marshall was able to see as well as hear at this juncture, even from his spot on the doorframe. Her face was suspended into the bowl, lids closing once more, so she could take the place of Marshall and listen rather than watch. When the spell subsided, she arched back once more onto the ground, pausing only briefly to reach over her head and flush.
Marshall took this as a symbol that she anticipated the worst being over, and distaste of heroism be damned, he could not sit and observe her despair from a spectator view. His resentment had all-but evaporated in lieu of such a sad sight.
Stepping fully into their shared space, careful not to tread on Beatrix, he extended his hand.
"Come on. Come here…"
And it seemed the reality of her affliction had beaten Mary down as well. Opening her eyes to gaze upward at Marshall, she grasped his fingers and let him tow. While it was like a pulley system slowly reeling her upward, she had no room to complain.
And the fishing pole that was Marshall's hand didn't stop once it hooked the catch. It continued to spool, guiding her into his chest, locked in an embrace that had been a long time coming. Mary rested her weary head on Marshall's shoulder, his arms encompassing her against his long, lean form. The presence, the sensation of his gentle touch brought her back to earth; the epithets she'd been screaming all day no longer mattered.
Marshall was liberated when he heard the loud exhale from behind him.
"I'm sorry…" she groaned in defeat. "I'm sorry about what happened with Maureen and I'm sorry I've been such a nightmare…"
Marshall just nodded, knowing that this was all he'd needed to hear. He rubbed the knotted muscles in her ailing back, which elicited another sigh, this one of contentment.
"I know," he told her sweetly, circling his head to press a kiss to her temple. "It's okay."
Mary wanted to say that it was not okay, but she was too wrapped up in the refuge of his hug that she didn't make it there. This close, it was like going home.
"It's just…" this was suddenly easier when she didn't have to look right at him, poised over his shoulder. "If I lose these kids, I don't know what I'm gonna do…"
Again, Marshall heard the tremble in her tone, the indication that crying might follow, but she held it together by swallowing down the rest of her sentence. He remembered her request that he not sugarcoat the situation, nor dole out all the cold hard facts, and found that middle ground as fast as he could.
"I know…" he repeated himself, but then went on. "Every prospect is a lot to reconcile – a lot to take on."
Marshall felt her nod next to his temple and this convinced him he was saying the right thing.
"And, I may not be able to make it anything less than it is; I may not be able to halt the train when it decides to come down the tracks…" the train being the babies. "But, I'm here and I'm here to stay."
Another nod, "I'm glad you are."
Marshall found that was consoling to know, though he'd never disbelieved it. He was beginning to detect Mary weakening in his clutch; she'd held on hard and strong at first, but now she was dipping, allowing the fatigue to take her away. Her bones lost their rigidity, but the obsession was not erased.
"I just don't know if I can go through what I went through with Jamie. I can't do it again; I can't take that kind of blow. After my father, and then Jamie, and…"
She was rambling now, losing sight of the origin, but Marshall intertwined his thoughts with hers.
"You're tough; give yourself a little credit…"
He thought she heard, but she didn't latch on, "…I've never wanted anything like this in my whole life; I've never wanted anything this badly…"
"I know…" this seemed to be working.
"It's so close I can taste it, but it's getting so much harder to climb…" metaphorically speaking, Marshall knew, but this spun very hastily into the literal. "And I'm just, I'm so tired…"
For the third time, there was that hint of tears; the way Mary's tone quavered on the word 'so.' It said her exhaustion was beyond comprehension; beyond anything she could've expected. It was running her ragged.
"Of course you're tired," he acknowledged her claim brilliantly. "The third trimester is nothing to sneeze at, especially not with twins."
"I don't know why you're so patient with me…" she murmured somewhat apologetically, but then the earnestness turned right around, possibly to distract from those pesky, confined tears. "You need your head examined, doofus."
And this comment, Marshall knew, in the dim light of the chilly bathroom, wrapped in a forgiving embrace in front of the mirror, was the perfect segue into, 'I love you.' He smiled over Mary's back and squeezed one last time.
"That's my girl."
XXX
A/N: I admit that the bit about the episiotomy may be stretching the truth a little, in terms of it being more common with bigger babies. From what I've read, that's not necessarily true, but oh well. ;)
Also, I don't know if anyone remembers from 'Empty Arms' that 'That's my girl' was Mary's and Marshall's code for 'I love you' for better or worse. Thanks for reviewing!