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It took multiple attempts to get Weiss pregnant. That meant waiting three week intervals skipping her cycle and trying again. In contrast Ruby got pregnant again right away.
It took six attempts to get Weiss pregnant. That meant half a year of waiting and failure and that was hard on her. Success usually came to Weiss like a moth to a flame. That wasn't to say she didn't work hard and it probably could have gone by faster if she was willing to implant multiple eggs at once. But that carried the risk of a multiple birth and she didn't want that. So Ruby got pregnant again before Weiss did which was a little head warping and she was already five months along by the time Weiss missed her cycle for the first time.
It was jubilant. The celebration Weiss beamed under when she finally missed her cycle. Ruby clapped her hands giddily for Weiss's sake and expressed all the joy Weiss was trying to keep under wraps. She was ice cold and tried to deny her happiness but she would break into a broad grin and rub the place below her navel where our daughter was growing.
Nebel learned to walk. That was pretty exciting and he bounced through the house unaided on his little feet. He would dash up to Weiss and fall and gurgle at her for something. Probably attention. He loved mommy attention. He'd do it to Ruby too.
He paced over to me where I sat on one of the living room chairs. He fell over and got back up and stared me down. I just waited.
"Dadda," he accused. I flinched in my chair at the sound of his first words. "Dadda!" It was clear what he was saying.
"Aw!" Ruby hummed. "He wants his daddy! He's so smart."
"Come here… bud…" I held out my arms to him. He waddled over and I swept him upwards. I tossed him gently into the air and he giggled. I caught him and nestled him down against my shoulder.
"Dadda!" He insisted.
"I'm right here. I've got you," I hummed. I realized there were tears moving down my face. I blinked hard at that and tried to dispel them.
"Aw…" Weiss trailed as she watched me wipe tears from my face. I wasn't crying that hard even. "He's crying. You're crying."
"Shut up you," I managed through the excited joy. "Can you say momma? For Weiss and Ruby can you say momma?" I asked the crawling writhing child in my arms.
"Daddy," he denied. Well, we'd get it eventually.
"My heart," I grimaced. My chest hurt something awful. Like a tender spike was being driven between my lungs. "I don't know if I can take it…" I trailed.
"You're such a honey," Ruby purred at me. "And you got his first words! Your little son! How does it feel?" She laughed at the pain I was in over my son's first words. She was laughing at me for crying too. And I wasn't even crying that hard! Just a little… not too much… but still she laughed at me and for what? I was allowed to have emotions. I was allowed to feel stuff. And my son's first words were a part of that. They definitely were.
"Like my chest is going to explode," I confessed. "Is that normal?"
"Probably for you," Weiss agreed with a beaming smile. She rubbed her belly. "Can you say sister? Little sister Garnet?" She wondered with a cooing voice at Nebel. "Little sister Pearle? You haven't met her yet but you will."
"Sis-rnet," Nebel shouted.
"That was pretty close," Ruby hummed.
"It was so close," Weiss agreed.
"I didn't hear it," I denied. I tossed my son and caught him again and he giggled from the roller coaster I was sending him on.
"You did too!" Ruby accused.
"You're such a liar!" Weiss ordained.
"Daddy!" Nebel called out.
"What'sa matter? You hungry?" I asked. "You should have gone to momma if you were hungry."
"You can feed him some solid food now. We do it all the time," Weiss informed me. "He's old enough that soon we'll stop breastfeeding him entirely."
"You sound sad," I pointed out.
"A little," Ruby whined. "He's growing up. And his face is so much like yours. I hope my next one is a son. A blonde baby boy."
"I will miss breastfeeding him. It's so intimate with our babies. I will miss it," Weiss agreed with Ruby. "Really you want a son? I thought you wanted another little girl."
"I hope not. I hope we get another little girl like Garnet," I denied. "Say little sister Garnet."
"Dadda," he shouted in my face with a little drool. I wiped him off and tossed him again and he laughed the entire time.
"Don't throw the baby!" Weiss demanded.
"He loves it though. I'm not going to drop him," I disagreed. "He loves it when I fling him into the air. He laughs so much the entire time he's airborne and afterwards. He really loves it. Flying is awesome. It's the best. Why shouldn't my son get to try a piece of that cake?"
"You're really sure you won't drop him?" Weiss wondered.
"Totally and completely. If I thought there was a chance of me dropping him I wouldn't do it. Say momma for dadda. Say mommy Weiss or mommy Ruby."
"Ice!" He shouted at the top of his lungs. "Oohby," he continued.
"That was a good one," I bopped his nose and he recoiled like he was about to sneeze. "You were so close. Now say momma. Say momma for me."
"Om-om-om-ah…" he squealed and fell over but I caught him before he could roll off the edge of the couch we were on. "Ah," he squealed again. "Omma?" He tried again once I'd stabilized him.
"So close," I hummed in his face. He sneezed right into my eyes. It came out of nowhere and I blinked rapidly. I got up and held the toddler out to Weiss who took him and left to the kitchen to wash my eyes out.
There were a lot of bodily fluids that came with raising a baby. And that was fine. Just not in my eyes. It happened sometimes. Wasn't worth getting upset over. I just rinsed them out and came back to see Nebel wandering around in a little circle around the coffee table. He stumbled near me and I caught him and set him up straight again and sent him walking.
"Garnet can't walk yet, can she?" I affirmed.
Ruby waggled a hand and Weiss said 'eh.'
"So not like this?" I ensured. I just wanted to double check. Double check I hadn't missed anything that was important.
"No, not like this. She needs assistance to go anywhere but she's working on it. She wants to be able to walk. But she hasn't taken those independent first steps yet," Weiss indulged me.
"Well I'd hate to miss that…"
"Sarcasm?" Ruby tried to detect. She wasn't good at picking up sarcasm.
"Not really," I denied. "I was there when Nebel took his first steps. I'd like to be there when Cherry does too. It's just hard because I'm at work all day. I'm bound to miss something," I grimaced.
Weiss just nodded. She was on maternity leave now. She had a baby and another one on the way and we figured now was a good time to use it. Besides, there was another politics teacher at Beacon. They were in good hands. Those maternity leaves didn't stack but we wanted to be able to use them to their fullest.
Ruby was a stay at home mom and she was a rockstar at it. Taiyang occasionally came over to help but Ruby usually handled things just fine. Weiss wanted more time with the babies which left me the only one working and once more I was the odd man out. I was the only one working while my wives looked after the babies at home. That meant I was bound to miss some stuff. Which would be fine if it wasn't so heart rending. Not to be dramatic but I'd be okay with it if it wasn't dog awful. But it was. I didn't get maternity leave. That meant I was busy helping students while Ruby and Weiss were busy with our babies and I would frankly rather be here with those babies and working with them instead of dealing with drama at school.
I was absolutely lucky my son's first words were 'dadda.' Though Ruby and Weiss could just be lying to make me feel better. And for the record I barely cried while he came up to me and called me dadda. Barely. If at all. Really.
Okay so… I lost it a little. And that was alright. If I wasn't allowed to cry when my son called me 'dadda' for the first time when was I allowed to cry? Genuine question and it deserved a genuine answer. But none was forthcoming. Instead I was surrounded by Weiss and Ruby and all they would do is coo and aw at my reaction to my son's first words so they weren't particularly helpful. I was trying to be emotional here.
My son was wandering and plopped down cross legged on the floor in an inelegant fashion. He crawled over to Garnet and patted her on the head with a rough hand but Garnet didn't seem to mind. Ruby bent down and scooped Garnet up into her arms.
"Be gentle with your sister…" Ruby gave him a stern finger but it was pretty meaningless on babies. There wasn't a real way to punish babies or reward them and the same went for toddlers of Nebel's age.
Ruby grunted and lifted Garnet up to her shoulder. She reached out a hand to Garnet's lip and flickered her finger up and down and Garnet let out a "blblblblb," as her lip got messed with. She squealed and laughed and Ruby laughed with her. Weiss gave the pair a gentle smile.
Nebel was left sitting without much to do. I bent down and picked up one of those shakers. What were they called? Seriously what was the name of the thing I was holding? It was plastic and had beads in it to rock around and make noise.
"Nebel, come to daddy," I encouraged. I shook the… the thing. The thing? The rattle. That what the fuck they were called. I shook the rattle at him and he pushed himself up off the ground. He waddled over to me and I handed him the rattle. He gave it a shake and gave me a disappointing look.
"What? I don't know what you were expecting," I informed him. "Toddlers get toddler toys. Don't act so surprised and dismayed." He stuck the end of the rattler in his mouth. He tried chewing on it and he plopped back onto the ground.
"How are you so smart and so dumb at the same time?" I asked him.
"I wonder the same thing about you, actually." Weiss snipped.
"Okay, first of all Weiss." I had nothing. "First of all, I'm brilliant. Second of all, yeah, you right."
"So is he. He's just a baby so he has that excuse. You don't."
"I'm… baby?" I hazarded. Weiss gave me a slow shake of her head.
"No…" Ruby hummed. "You don't actually think that do you?"
"Only when you two make me look foolish. So all the time, yeah."
"That's different," Ruby decided.
"And we don't even have to try that hard. You do most of the work for making you look like a lunatic. It's not often I think 'wow, my husband is schizophrenic.' But occasionally it sneaks up on me. It's like…" Weiss made a waving motion with her hand. "It sneaks up on me. It makes me double take. It's usually when you talk about your mother."
"Okay. Not quite what I meant about making me look foolish. I mostly meant you two run circles around me with your emotional intelligence and I'm left struggling and eating your dust."
"Granted."
"Okay," Ruby agreed. "But it's not like you're emotionally blind or limited. You're pretty good when it comes to our emotions."
"Yeah but then…" Weiss made that hand gesture like a stealthy wave again. "He's so smart and then it just like... " She maneuvered that hand gesture again. "It sneaks up on you. It makes you double take, like 'wow, you honestly believe that? What the frick?'"
"Like what?" Ruby wondered.
"How he wants to help us grow the babies and he feels so limited in his ability to help. So yes, that's true. But also what is he supposed to be doing to help us grow and give birth to the babies."
"Literally anything. Give me something. Let me fetch stuff for you. Please," I finished with a begging note.
"And it's sweet, but..."
"But it's sweet," Ruby said at the same time. "Oh."
"Why oh?" I wondered.
"Well you do your best but you still don't contribute like you want to and then you self deprecate," Ruby pointed out. "It undermines the sweetness. When you do stuff for us out of self hatred it isn't very nice."
"Oh…" I realized. "Well… oh… so what should I do?"
"The best you can," Weiss shrugged. "Look over us for stuff you can do and do it but don't do it because you feel guilty and you hate yourself. It's much sweeter when you do an errand for me out of love than it is when you do the same errand for me out of spite. And you do that a lot. You're… very spiteful."
"Spite keeps me going!" I defended. "Raw anger? To do better and resist my Mom. It helps. Being angry helps with the wall. It also helps me be a better husband and a better father."
"We know…" Ruby agreed. "But you'd be more of an emotionally mature honey if you found another source of resistance and rebellion. It would be sweeter if you didn't do everything you do for us and our children out of some sense of anger and retribution against yourself."
"It…" Weiss waved her hand in what was becoming a familiar motion. "It just sneaks up on us a little. Because you're sweet and then suddenly there's this well of rage directed at everyone and everything. That's not very emotionally mature. But then you go on and understand us so you do have some emotional maturity. Not everybody could be keeping up with us. So you do that. But I get a look inside you sometimes at this thing you've built up. And I'm like, oh well damn."
"Language!" Ruby hollered.
"My bad," Weiss apologized.
"But I see what you mean. At the bottom of who he is as a citizen and a hunter and a professor and an employee and a husband and a father… it's like… built on a negative. Like a refusal to lose rather than a desire to win. Does that make sense? You've built who you are as a person around this negative object. Like 'don't lose to Salem' rather than 'I want to beat Salem.' It's not a bad thing. Per se. It's just I get a peek sometimes under the hood. And I'm left saying 'huh.' Because it's not a bad thing or it's not always a bad thing. It's sort of the same way my uncle is a good guy under all that pessimism."
"But I thought I was a good guy… Like at the bottom of it all. I thought I did all right," I wondered.
"You do and are. You've just… you're motivated by this surge of negative emotions rather than positive ones. Your desire to protect me out in Mistral was about a refusal to see a repeat of Pyrrha rather than to see me blossom. It's sweet but it's like I said, it's built around a negative. A denial or a refusal to go that way. You want to go your own way. Which is brave. But you don't do it out of love. You do it out of responsibility and a refusal to go quietly. You do it because you're angry. You take care of us when we're pregnant because you're angry you can't do more, which is sweet, that you want to do more, but you don't do it because you love us. You do it because you're mad."
"Oh… and it would be better if I were happy?" I asked.
"It'd be different," Weiss cut in. "It wouldn't be very you of you. And maybe that's on us. We didn't marry a happy person. You're jaded and pessimistic and you have motivation to be. But maybe if you were joyful when it comes to us. It sneaks up on us sometimes. Your anger does."
"Huh…" I trailed. I wasn't sure what to think of that.
"Like I said, it's not a bad or evil thing. And I'm glad you balance me out when it comes to me being so upbeat. I feel like your realism matters to me."
"He's brutal. Call a spade a spade. He's brutal. In everything that he does he attacks it. He attacks us with his love. He brutalizes himself and everyone who will listen with how honest he is. And I'm glad he does. I might not love him if he didn't," Weiss agreed. "But he is brutal."
"Well… I don't… I don't want to be a brutal father…" I managed. "Is that… is that just off the table?"
"I don't know," Weiss rubbed her lip. "I dunno."
"I think you're a good father…" Ruby trailed.
"But I don't want to be brutal," I bemoaned. "I mean… maybe I have to be? But I don't want to be."
"I dunno. It's not evil or bad, like Ruby keeps saying. It just is. It's how you are."
"I see," I realized. And I did a little. I just wasn't sure how to change.
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-WG