May 24, 2017
- Rick -
Rick sends the last of the children off with a parent, doing a walk through of the two room schoolhouse to make sure nothing is out of place that can't wait until morning. Shifting off of patrol and security to teaching was not an easy decision, because having someone else at Shane's back was almost an anathema. But in the end, he had to admit that T-Dog might not have the years of youthful friendship to add to the partnership, but the man is a staunch partner for Shane.
He likes the enthusiasm of the youngest school children, when they're still so excited to be out of the daycare and admiring a desk. It's an easier contrast to the older children, who are starting to get anxious to be free of formal schooling.
Latching the schoolhouse door and gate behind him, he heads next door to the daycare. Rosita made a run to Terminus today to assist Axel and his grown foster daughter with a generator upgrade, so he's solo with the girls tonight. Miranda smiles as he enters the playroom she gathers children in toward the end of the workday. It seems he's the last to pick up today, which is unusual, except that he saw scavenger teams return earlier than usual.
"How was Nico today?" she asks, tucking a few things into Rachel's diaper bag even as Rick picks up his six-month-old. The baby grins at him, flashing her two tiny bottom teeth.
Her sister's not paying him any attention yet, but considering she's helping Miranda's youngest, Paloma, pick up toys, he isn't surprised. Victoria has a bit of a one-track mind at the moment, like many three-year-olds.
"He's still not entirely convinced that he should read for fun, but we've got enough non-fiction that might keep him interested. We really need to commission someone to start writing books for children that reflect this world. There's just so much that reads like a fairy tale to the kids born since the Outbreak that really was non-fiction for us."
Miranda looks thoughtful. "Have you thought of asking Carl? He always was so good with young children. I suspect he might have inherited that from somewhere."
Rick laughs softly as he kisses Rachel's silky fine dark hair when she snuggles close. "He is a good storyteller, and I'm sure Sophia would illustrate anything he came up with. I should probably ask before the baby comes though, because otherwise, it may be a few years before they're out of new parent fog and creative again."
"Very true, although I somehow doubt those two will lack for grandparent help when that baby comes."
"I'm not sure I feel old enough to be a grandfather yet." Granted, Carl's young, not yet twenty, but it still feels odd to be thinking of his son as a father-to-be. It seems like Carl was the baby in his arms not that long ago.
"I feel the same way about being a grandmother. Luckily, Eliza doesn't seem all that interested in the young men down on that island she's working on yet." Miranda calls out to the two little girls. "Thank you for being good helpers. It's time to go home, girls."
Now Rick is tackle-hugged around the knees by his older daughter. Her black hair is in two very puffy bunches on top of her head still, but he suspects that is only because Miranda or her assistants redid the girl's cute hairstyle. Victoria is too rough and tumble to let any hairstyle survive an entire day.
"Daddy, I was a good helper!"
"So I see. Do you want to help me with supper at home or eat at the center?" With Rosita not due back until tomorrow, he doesn't really want to tackle cooking with just him and the girls, but Victoria enjoys helping.
"Can we make grilled cheese?" she asks as Miranda helps her into her little backpack and offers Rick the diaper bag.
"We can. I bet we have some of Aunt Carol's tomato soup in the pantry, too."
Victoria dances happily through her goodbyes to Miranda and Paloma, jogging around him as they set down the path toward home.
It isn't until they're sitting at the table eating that Rick happens to notice the illustrated calendar near the fridge lists today's date as May 24th. Seven years ago today, he landed in the coma that nearly took him from his family.
Rick can only be grateful for waking in that desolate hospital room, because he can't imagine any other life for himself anymore.
- Ezekiel -
Ezekiel finishes reading over the latest search reports from Honey Dixon at Hilltop and comparing them to the reports Dianne's delivered for their own patrols. They've amped up patrols for weeks now, since the refugees came south looking for anywhere safe from pursuit they didn't know for sure was still coming. The other two communities are capable of self-defence, but neither Alexandria nor Solomons has the depth of training that the soldiers of the Kingdom and Hilltop have.
There was a time, maybe a year ago, where the Hilltop council wanted to roll back their military presence and concentrate more on the small-scale industry they have running thanks to Eugene Porter's engineering skills and a larger number of craftsmen than any of the other northern allies. It took Gregory's death after a massive heart attack to remove the primary proponent of that idea from leadership.
In his absence, followed by Paul resigning in favor of his husband taking his seat on the council, Hilltop kept their status as the largest security force north of Homestead. He worries that a test is coming. So many years of peace have allowed the communities to prosper in a way he never would have predicted in the first months after the Outbreak. They're generations away from the excess of the old world, but they've retained enough of the past through reverse engineering efforts that no one's gone back to pre-Industrial Revolution levels like some of Ezekiel's own people predicted originally.
"You got a minute, Dad?"
He turns to see his middle son in the doorway, holding a textbook. Adopting Benjamin and Henry when their mother died seemed almost selfish at the time, three years ago. He already had two children of his own, and there are still those without children in his community. But adding the older boys to the family is the best selfish decision he ever made, leading Gideon and Luna to hero worship in that way much younger children often do for older siblings.
"For you, Henry, of course."
The twelve-year-old smiles brightly and brings the textbook forward to offer it to his father. "Would it be wasteful to learn boat building so far inland?"
Ezekiel studies the chapter long enough to get an idea of what sort of materials Henry might need. "Well, we aren't exactly riverside here, but there are plenty that are close enough to test craft out on. Maybe not the Potomac, but the Rappahannock would provide a good testing ground."
While they keep the region south of the Potomac relatively clear of the dead now with regular patrols, no one has really tackled the northern side yet. The thought of a boat having to make a landing on the northern bank is the sort of thought that spawns nightmares for parents of adventurous near-teen boys.
"So it isn't really crazy to learn how to make canoes and small boats when there are still the old fiberglass ones around?"
"I think it is a very useful skill, especially considering that those our communities aren't using are starting to age in bad ways from weather exposure and improper storage." Ezekiel hands him the book back. "Fiberglass boats have a finite lifespan, and no one really wants to revive their manufacturing process. I suspect if you perfect your project, you'll find a lot of interest from the others who have more water to explore."
At twelve, Henry's still nominally a schoolchild, but his growing restlessness and need to work with his hands reminds Ezekiel a lot of the Hilltop engineering pair who just have to tinker with everything.
"Benjamin wasn't sure, but he told me I should ask."
"Son, even if all you ever do is build a single canoe to learn how to do it, I would consider it a wonderful use of resources. And you may find that you enjoy woodworking in general, and that is most certainly a craft that our people should encourage. Make a list of the materials and tools you think you need, and we'll get them gathered up."
It earns him an enthusiastic hug from the boy. "I'm going to go tell Benjamin."
Dianne chuckles from where she's leaning against the doorframe that adjoins his office to their bedroom. She's in casual wear, freshly showered and her tactical wear put away for the evening. He finds her Amazonian stance even in the soft flow of the cotton mid-thigh sleepshirt to be as attractive now as it was when he took the time to realize the leader of his guardsmen was a beautiful woman as well as a warrior.
"I strongly suspect that little foray was Benjamin being just as interested, but relying on Henry's cuteness to ensure they received a positive answer," she says.
"You are quite likely right. I just wish Benjamin didn't expect not to receive the same familial treatment for his requests." He sighs, stacking the reports to add to his map tomorrow. "Are the little ones waiting for me?"
"Tucked into their bunks and having a bit of a spat Gideon will swear is a debate over whether to ask for Alice in Wonderland next or another Paddington Bear book."
"Tell them I will be there in a minute. I want to check on Shiva first."
Dianne nods, but intercepts him for a kiss, her long fingers cupping his jaw to brush across his skin above his beard. "She is getting old, isn't she?"
Ezekiel sighs. "She could live as many as twenty to twenty-five years before, in the luxuries the zoo could provide. But now? She isn't exactly in the wild, but I do not think I can estimate how many years she has left."
Shiva has been part of his life since he saved her life in that moat so many years ago. But she'll be fourteen this year, and her species in the wild rarely lives past fifteen or sixteen. He will continue to hope that the life she has here trends toward those of zoo tigers, because he isn't ready for old age to take away his oldest friend.
"Go. Settle your first love for the night." She lets him go with the barest hint of a smile.
Their residence is no longer in the large dormitory building so many lived in during the early days of the Kingdom's existence. Nowadays, they call the old headmaster's house home, and what was once a beautifully manicured, excessive backyard is securely fenced just beyond the back patio as the sort of enclosure that zoos could only dream of back when his title was zookeeper and not king.
Shiva's waiting, as used to the goodnight routine as the children are. She chuffs at the sight of him, rolling to her feet and butting her big head on the bars.
"How are you this evening, my fair lady?" he intones, reveling in the trust the massive predator still places in him.
Ezekiel isn't sure even twenty-five years will be enough of having her at his side.
- Denise -
Denise watches the girls splash in the tub with a fond expression. While not biologically siblings, there's nothing in the world that would convince Julianna and Regan that biology matters one single iota.
Denise's oldest daughter has the pale, nearly colorless blonde hair that Denise remembers from her own baby pictures, complete with almost invisible eyebrows, but her eyes are the crystalline pale blue of Christopher's. The four-year-old's only complaint about looking nothing like her sister is that she gets slathered in sunscreen much heavier than Regan does with her coppery complexion.
"They about done playing mermaids?" Rachel asks from the doorway, looking amused.
She's got Asher asleep on her shoulder, his little blond head still covered more in peach fuzz than actual hair. Christopher joked when he was born that maybe they should have seen if Tim's genetics would produce a newborn with hair. It made his husband roll his eyes. While Tim is a good father to the three children, the man stated from the beginning of their little family dynamic that he really had no concern in passing on his genetics from a personal standpoint.
"Yeah, probably." Denise spreads open a towel. "Regan? Want to go see if Daddy's found your PJs yet?"
The toddler makes a happy screech, trying to stand in the bathtub and offering her arms. "Bear PJs, Mama."
"Guess you better go make sure he doesn't confuse the bears with the ones with the baby chickens," she says, just to watch Regan wiggle impatiently as she's patted dry. She does hold still long enough to be coaxed into the reusable nighttime underpants some enterprising soul devised for toddlers once the vast supplies of disposable pull ups began to dwindle. Regan does stay long enough for goodnight kisses before she's off yelling for Daddy and bear pajamas.
Once her sister's out of the tub, Juli loses all interest in staying and pulls the plug. She's hit the independent stage of drying herself off, so Denise leaves her to it, instead stepping in close to her wife and stealing a kiss over their sleeping son's head. "Did you hear from Nick today or Loretta?"
"Nick sent an email. He'll be coming home on the train with Carol to visit for a month, but he's decided to take the offer to stay on as a researcher at Solomons. They've made good progress on recreating some of the vaccines that they think might be safe for kids."
The worry of parenting in the world after the Outbreak is that so many of the very necessary vaccines required refrigeration. While the Dixons had raided supplies before power failed in some areas, it was a finite amount. The girls received the more pertinent vaccines as babies, but the manufactured supplies were depleted before Asher was born. It's a problem that led to Rachel's nephew's request to apprentice at the one community with a full-scale research facility still intact.
"At least we'll get to celebrate his birthday with him. And he'll be here for Regan's birthday. That's something."
The fact that Loretta isn't mentioned bugs Denise a little, but she reminds herself that the girl was already a legal adult when Rachel and Tim scooped her up to bring her south to Georgia. While she nominally maintains ties with Rachel and Tim out of ties to Tim's former boyfriend, Loretta's still skittish about actually calling any of them family. Even Denise's training as a psychiatrist hasn't bridged the gap. But the young woman is happy enough with her job with the farming contingent, especially entertained by the fact that her birth family's once illegal occupation of marijuana growing is being encouraged nowadays.
She just hates that Rachel and Tim both worry over Loretta's ongoing antisocial behavior. She just has to remind herself that some people are just natural loners.
Juli wiggles past her mothers in the doorway, off to seek her own pajamas, but halts and circles back for kisses. She yells out a reminder that it's Pops turn to do the bedtime story.
That makes Rachel smile. "What do you say we get Asher tucked into his crib and let the boys handle bedtime?"
"Are we sure that Christopher will enforce bedtime and not let Tim take the girls on some nighttime training excursion?" Denise asks, purposely pitching her voice louder.
"I heard that, woman!" Tim calls out from the girls' bedroom. He sticks his head out of the door and points at her. "That was once, and it was a raid on Tara's stash of fabric markers. A successful one, I might add."
The memory of the two little girls dressed all in camo and face paint is still a fond one for Denise. Regan was still so little she was in a back carrier for the 'raid'. Tara's retaliatory raid with Meredith and Shannon was equally adorable. She suspects it is a tradition unlikely to stop, considering Tim and Tara's longtime partnership on scavenger patrols.
"So no raid plans tonight?"
Tim just flashes her a boyish grin as he shows her the title of the paperback in his hands. "None tonight, at least. Just reading Charlotte's Web."
Rachel giggles. "You know that Juli is going to want a pet pig after you read that to them."
"You should probably be more concerned about the fact that Regan will want a pet spider," Tim replies.
"Pops! That's our story, not the mamas!" Juli calls out.
"Well, it seems I'm being summoned." He comes down the hall and presses a kiss to Asher's little fuzzy head. "Wake me if he pulls one of his all-nighters again. I'm off duty tomorrow."
Denise follows Rachel down the hall to their bedroom. The four adults took over one of the larger houses in the Expansion once Denise was pregnant with Juli. It's spacious, with plenty of room should Denise or Rachel decide three isn't the final number of offspring for the family. This particular house is especially nice because it had a cottage out back where Christopher's mother could take up residence. Her best friend's mother is that mother-in-law of old jokes most days, but she's a devoted grandmother. Most days, Denise thinks half of the woman's cantankerous nature is loneliness, but put one of the grandchildren near her and she melts like butter.
It's a living arrangement that might have been odd before the Outbreak, but nowadays, she thinks it's even better than anything old world traditional will be. The kids definitely all benefit from having four parents instead of two. She suspects as more time passes, families like hers and the odd trio that Shane, Lori, and Rick and their partners have going will become more common, not less.
Rachel settles the four-month-old into the small crib in their room. It has a twin in Tim and Christopher's bedroom down the hall.
When Rachel turns to look over her shoulder, Denise smiles slyly and locks the bedroom door behind her.
- Jazz -
Jazz lets the warm shower water wash over him, wondering if falling asleep standing up is truly possible for humans. He's close to it, despite catching a nap mid-afternoon between a radio consult with the veterinarian at the Kingdom and the council meeting that finished off the rest of his afternoon all the way until supper time. He loves the rush of a lambing, all the new life entering life successfully if things go well, but the crash after two nights spent snatching sleep here and there in a hammock down at the sheep paddocks is about to knock him flat on his backside.
The shower door opens to allow his husband to join him, so Jazz moves back in the cubicle to give Paul room. His back contacts the cool tile, and he wishes when he designed the place three years ago that he put one of the handy benches in it like his parents have back home in Georgia. His tired mind skitters over a haphazard idea to convert the design, since the shower's already custom to allow for his height.
Paul tips his head and lets the water soak his long hair, darkening the sunstreaked brown locks to something closer to Jazz's dark hair. The pale band of skin on his left ring finger reminds Jazz that his own is still on his finger, since he forgot to drop it in the box on their dresser on his way through the bedroom.
"MJ finally go to sleep?" Bedtime, when he's home, is usually Jazz's domain, but even the toddler saw his exhaustion and handed his stack of books to Paul instead.
"After four stories, changing his mind twice about which of Grandma's stuffed animals were sleeping with him tonight, and a lecture that if he doesn't leave his night pants on, I'm finding the roll of duct tape."
Jazz can't help laughing softly. "He knows you're a pushover for reading stories. He never gets more than two out of me."
Paul's determination that MJ's childhood not resemble anything he remembers of his own lonely one in foster care is one of the things Jazz loves most about him. They originally intended to wait a while longer before having a child, but the opportunity presented itself when it did. Neither of them are so foolish as to turn down a surrogate offer that might not come again. Jazz's father became a father for the first time at nineteen, too, and Merle did a good job even amidst a lot of challenging circumstances.
"I suspect that is part of why he asked me tonight when you looked tired." Paul finishes washing his hair, before reaching for the wash cloth Jazz wet in the water but didn't actually follow through with soaping up. Washing his hair was about as far as he got. "Turn and I'll get your back."
The sensation of the soft cloth and warm water across his back and legs is almost enough to finish the job of sending Jazz to sleep and testing out if he can sleep upright like most of his patients. He's in a pliant half-doze when Paul manipulates him to turn so he can repeat the process starting with his chest. A kiss pressed to his left hip over the ink that flows across his skin there makes him crack his eyes open.
The tattoos began as an experiment to see if it would help tone down his sensory issues with touch. They do, and lying prone with his music on and Paul's hands gripped in his usually drops him into what Cricket dubs a trance state the second he hears the needle's buzz each time he gets work done. It led to a lot of ink on his body, like the red and blue stylized phoenix that covers his left side from shoulder to hip, turning his left obliques into a colorful canvas. The tail feathers are one of Paul's favorite things to trace on his skin.
The offer evident in his husband's face makes him almost say yes, because he hasn't managed more than distracted, chaste affection with Paul since before the lambing began due to claims on both their time.
"I'm not sure either of us are up to getting me to bed if you start that in here."
Paul smirks at him and rises for a kiss instead. It's brief, well-practiced to work within Jazz's limited enjoyment of the sensation of another mouth on his own. The sort of romanticized kissing most couples indulge in is almost always guaranteed to send Jazz into sensory overload simply from having Paul breathing across his face. Paul ducks his head to nuzzle at Jazz's throat, pressing kisses along the soft skin below his adam's apple where the combination of warm mouth and textured beard are infinitely more welcome.
Exhaustion recedes in a way he didn't expect five minutes ago. He reaches over Paul's shoulder, fumbling for the shower controls to shut off the water.
"Bedroom," he cajoles, voice rough. As Paul catches the change in tone, the shorter man smiles slowly, backing out of the shower and reaching for the towels.
Jazz will sleep even better after he's traded the scent of soap on his skin for his husband's instead.
A/N: In the end, I dropped Axel's scene. It was hard to come up with anything and the rest got fairly long. Since Axel, Oscar, and Tiny aren't likely to feature in ISO, just consider them happily settled with their families... Axel's the chief mechanic for Terminus with his horde of children (including the twin girls from RBM and a toddler son). Oscar's happily reconciled with his ex-wife at Homestead, and Tiny's still Hershel's primary veterinarian partner at Homestead and papa to an adorable son and daughter.
Out of this chapter, Jazz and Ezekiel are likely the only POVs that will be regularly used in ISO. Current plans are a concentration on Dixon POVs and those immediately adjacent, like Shane, Eugene, and Paul. Ezekiel's a bit of a given due to the Saviors.
Touch sensitivity trivia: People with sensory disorders can often handle inkwork even better than those without, especially if they lack a regular pain threshold like Jazz does. In Jazz's case, he is essentially reprogramming his brain to see the ink as protective as clothing normally would be. The phoenix isn't his only ink. ;)