One more day.
One more day of useless stagnation. One more day of smashing his fists pointlessly into the walls of the invisible cage that surrounded him. One more day of reaching and straining and trying so hard that at the end of it he ached with exhaustion.
It was all for naught.
In the end, everything had happened just as it had every day for the past month: Clarus had taken control, covering for the king's inefficacy, and had explained everything to him over and over again afterwards, with an air of forced calm. Then, in spite of the bone-deep weariness that haunted his every move, he prowled the halls at night, restless and unable to sleep.
It was no help that Weskham lurked in doorways, watching, with poorly concealed concern on his features. He wasn't the only one doing it, either. Weskham and Clarus held hushed conferences whenever they were left alone together, crownsguards shot each other looks behind his back, servants gazed at him with pity when they thought he wasn't looking, and every time he walked past, Cor's mouth tightened like he was preventing himself from saying something.
There was only one place he could go to get away from it all, one place where no one expected anything of him, no one was worried about him, no one hovered and offered to do anything or everything to make him feel better.
The sound of babies crying usually drew parents at a frantic pace; it was designed that way, he supposed, but it wasn't the traditional reason that led him to follow the sound. He wasn't worried that anything was wrong or that they were being mistreated; it drew him like a Siren drew a sailor. It should have been a grating sound and, indeed, he would have given most anything to make it stop, but it was also musical. It was pain and discomfort and sorrow, but it was simple. It was life at its most basic form.
If everything could have been so raw and elementary, the world would have been cleaner.
Regis stopped in the doorway. Crea was on her own in the nursery; sometimes she was and sometimes she wasn't, but he was lead to believe that whenever she was help was only a moment away, should it prove necessary. At that moment, it looked to be. She wrestled with one squalling baby—Noctis—while the other lay bawling in her crib. In spite of her preoccupation, she looked up when he entered.
He had expected her to look frazzled, perhaps frustrated, and certainly—if nothing else—weary. What he hadn't expected was to find her much as he usually did: quiet and composed, with a smile more on her eyes than her lips.
"Good, you're here," she said, pushing Noctis into his arms unceremoniously and bending down to pick up Reina. "There's a bottle in the fridge. See if you can't get him to take it."
That was it. No 'Your Majesty', no 'how are you feeling, Regis?', 'what are you doing up so late, Sire?', 'when was the last time you ate, Your Majesty?'. No pomp. No formality. No kingdom looking up to him. No difficult decisions to make. Just a little room full of chaos and screaming babies where the only thing he had to be was a father.
He gathered the little prince up into his arms and moved toward the other room. There wasn't anything else to be done; there was no space for conversation with two babies crying and, really, what did they need it for, anyway?
A quick search of the fridge revealed one bottle already prepared and ready to be warmed. Regis dropped it into the warmer as Crea had shown him a few weeks ago, and shuffled the squalling baby around.
"Noctis, hush, my son. It is coming," he murmured, shifting Noct so he faced outward. "See?"
At the sight of the bottle, Noctis' cried grew less pronounced. They settled into a low whine as his dark blue eyes fixed on the milk. For a moment, Regis thought that might placate him for long enough for the milk to warm up, but a baby's patience was finite and highly limited. In a few more moments, when the food remained out of his reach, Noctis began to cry once more.
With the milk still half-warmed, Regis did his best to distract the little prince through other measures. A month of nighttime visits hadn't eliminated his belief that Crea could have calmed a crying baby in a hurricane, but it had, at least, expanded his own arsenal of knowledge. He picked through the things that had worked in the past, one at a time. Each one fell short.
Regis showed the crying baby his own scrunched up face in the mirror, tried half a dozen different positions, attempted peek-a-boo distraction tactics, explored each of the toys that were sitting out on the table for precisely that purpose, and made countless weird faces and silly noises of his own. Still, Noctis cried.
He paced up and down, rocking the little prince in his arms; he patted Noct's back and wrapped him up in a blanket; he held the infant upright on the table beside the bottle warmer and tried to reason with him. Yet still, Noctis cried.
He couldn't tell, anymore, if Reina was still crying in the other room. The only thing he seemed to be able to hear was Noctis and it seemed unlikely that Crea would have so much trouble. She never did, somehow. But Noctis cried and his nurse didn't come to rescue him from his bumbling father, so Regis made do.
It seemed a full hour before the warmer chimed and the king heaved a sigh of relief. Finally that was through with and he could at last do something. He shifted Noct in his arms, plucked the bottle from the warmer, and and held it in front of Noctis' mouth. The prince's cries subsided to humming whines once more and he latched onto the offered bottle.
Regis let out a breath. The sudden quiet seemed jarring. It was clear, now, that Reina wasn't crying, though he had already surmised as much.
The peace was destined not to last.
Noctis drank less than half the bottle before he turned his head away, breaking his connection with the bottle, and began to cry once more. Puzzled, Regis offered it once more to similar end.
"All that effort and you will not have it, after all?" Regis asked the bawling child. Predictably, Noctis gave no response. Leastways nothing that was intelligible.
Having used up every trick he had learned in the past month from Crea, he returned to the other room with the mostly-full bottle and the screaming infant to sheepishly admit he was out of his depth.
"He does not seem to want it," Regis said, holding the still-warm bottle in one hand while Noct, laid across his arm, flailed tiny fists and screamed.
Crea looked up when he entered. She was sitting in her usual chair, holding an apparently content Reina against her breast. Regis hesitated, suddenly uncertain what the proper protocol was for such a situation. Was he expected not to be there at all? Should he turn and go back to the other room? Avert his gaze? Apologize?
"Of course not," Crea sighed, taking no notice of his clear discomfort and the faint flush on his cheeks. "Trade me babies, then. I'll let you have the easy one."
She rose from her seat, pulling Reina away and her top back into place. The princess made a single sound of objection at being deprived of her midnight meal and being so carelessly handed off to someone else, but that was all. She didn't cry again.
"She'll take the bottle, I think. At least part of it," Crea said, once the babies were swapped.
"Is there… anything wrong with him?" Regis asked as he juggled baby and bottle so he could offer Reina the milk her brother had spurned.
Never before had Noctis—or, indeed, Reina—been so troublesome about falling asleep when he visited. For a few days, Regis had even thought he had become quite good at handling them. Now it seemed all that was turned on its head.
"He's tired—overtired, that is," Crea said as she coaxed fussing Noct to latch properly. "It seems he didn't have his fourth nap today, but no one thought to put him to bed early because of it. Now he can't fall asleep or else he keeps waking himself up—and that's waking Reina up."
She looked up at him as Noct was finally settled. There was some expression that he couldn't quite place on her features, something he had never seen there before. Exasperation? Annoyance?
Reina had taken hold of the bottle, apparently not in the least put off by the fact that it didn't meet her twin's expectations.
"Why did he not nap?" Regis asked.
"Why didn't you take four naps, today?" Crea asked by way of response.
Regis blinked, caught off-guard. "I—"
Crea laughed. "I'm only teasing, Your Majesty. Babies must grow out of their naps someday, no? This is about the time they drop the fourth one."
It made sense. And yet…
"But if he is overtired now, is that not the reason why?"
There it was again. That flash of something uncharacteristically sharp on her usually sweet face. She shook her head and looked down at Noctis as he began to fuss once more. "No. They're meant to grow out of the naps, but it's not an instantaneous process. They can't go from having four to three overnight and if they do it spells trouble. It's just possible to shuffle everything around and make it work; if done correctly they should drop the last nap and move their bedtime up to compensate." The annoyance in her expression was more pronounced when she looked up again; it was clearly annoyance and not anything else, now. "He should have been put to bed earlier tonight, but he wasn't. They let him up to the same time Reina was ready for bed, but she had four naps."
So that was the root of it. Annoyance at whomever had been in charge of putting the children to sleep that night.
Crea resettled Noct, who had broken away, and managed to get him to quiet once more. There was an endless patience about her when she was dealing with them; it eliminated any possibility that she was irked at Noct for being sleepless rather than those responsible.
"I see," Regis said. "Who was responsible for the misstep?"
"I'm not sure. Either the nurses who had the evening shift and put them to bed, or Mistress Dyana—who decides all the scheduling for the twins."
Regis tucked the information away without response, saving it for future reference. The fact was that he wasn't as well acquainted with most of his childrens' caretakers as he ought to have been. As guilty as it made him, there simply wasn't time. He had met most of the nurses and he had a passing familiarity with Mistress Dyana, the nanny, but mostly he visited at night, which meant mostly he saw Crea. So far, she had proven herself both reliable and competent. The others he couldn't definitively say the same for.
It was some time further before Crea convinced the finicky prince to fall asleep. Reina subsided much more easily, giving no complaint when Regis took a seat in the armchair near the door and held her against his shoulder. She was solidly out, only stirring when Noctis fussed, which he did frequently for nearly an hour before he finally fell asleep.
Crea didn't transfer him to the crib immediately, like she usually did. She continued to hold him, rocking steadily back and forth in her chair without pause.
Regis considered her for a few moments. It was difficult to believe that it was only a month ago he had walked in and surprised her in the middle of the night, looking for a bottle for Reina. These days she seemed to have little trouble forgetting who he was. There was nothing stiff or formal about their interactions. Indeed, sometimes he forgot who he was, until she threw in the occasional 'Your Majesty.'
She, doubtless, knew everything about him—all of the public things, in any case—whereas he knew next to nothing about her. He knew she was young and somehow still knew a great deal more about children than he ever could have hoped to learn. He knew that she was gentle and patient, and that when she looked at his children she looked like she was in love. He knew that she always found some reason to smile, somehow. That was something, perhaps, he should have learned from her.
"I believe you owe me a story," Regis said, hooking the nearby footstool with one foot and pulling it over so he could prop his legs up.
"You're never too old for a bedtime story, Your Majesty. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise," she said. Her eyes sparkled with amusement.
"Your story," he said, sidestepping her intentional misunderstanding and aiming straight for the point.
"Oh yes! I had quite forgotten." Crea smiled. "It's not as good as the other bedtime stories I know, though. Are you sure you wouldn't rather hear about Argo and the Anak?"
Regis fixed her with a stern expression. A month ago the look would have caused her to wilt and beg for forgiveness. Tonight she just sighed; she didn't even have the good grace to look contrite.
"Very well. You wanted to know, I believe, why I began working in childcare at sixteen, yes? The reason, I suppose, is because I was very foolish at fifteen. But no—it goes back further than that. My mother was a nanny. She was foolish at fifteen, as well, or perhaps a little older, and that was how I was born. She must have been a little older, I think, because she finished school. In any case, I always remember her being a nanny. I was always juggled along with other people's children, so even though I was an only child, I wasn't, really. Certainly I was never at a loss for friends, and I don't think I was really jealous, because at night we went home and it was just me and Ma and a nice cup of cocoa.
"In any case, I grew up around children and babies. As soon as I was old enough to hold a bottle that wasn't my own I was helping, so that's where my education comes from—it's the three years of working, of course, but a lot more before that, too. Eventually I had to go off to school and there was a little less time, with homework and activities, for me to help out, but by that time she was well established and we weren't struggling. We were never well-off like the people she worked for, but we got a little two bedroom condo that suited us just fine.
"So. That sets the stage. The story, then, begins with—as I said—a very foolish fifteen-year-old me. I was in my second year of high school when I met a boy and fell in love. Or I thought I was in love. Most fifteen-year-old girls will tell you they know what love is, but most of them are probably wrong. I was certainly wrong. He was sweet and he was charming and he was absolutely the wrong sort. But he swept me off my feet and I did a stupid thing and got pregnant.
"My mother was furious. She told me she never wanted me to make the same mistake she did, but there I was, anyway. The apple and the tree. She loved me too much to kick me out, at least—and she wasn't enough of a hypocrite to try, anyway—which was just as well because he up and fled as soon as he got wind of things. I don't think I ever saw him again. Broke my little fifteen-year-old heart, but I was going to have the baby, anyway. The purest things in Eos. How could I destroy one for my own foolishness?
"Well, that was the plan, anyway. I dropped out of school and we were ready for it; my mother was prepared to support me and the baby, both, but it never came down to it... Ma died in a car accident. She left everything to me, so I had the condo, but there had never been much by way of savings. I spent the next month frantically doing sums, trying to think how I could support myself and a baby. I'd already been out of school for a full grade and I knew I couldn't go back. Not because of the system, but because of me. I wouldn't have been able to focus. After everything else it just seemed so… inane.
"At the end of that month, whatever Gods were watching decided to lighten my load…. She was stillborn. That was worse than finding out I had no idea what being in love meant. So much love and care and preparation and I never even had the chance to meet her." She rocked steadily in her chair, her tone never changing. It seemed extraordinary—impossible, even—that she could speak about losing the two most important people in her life in the course of a month and sound so calm. She didn't sound happy, certainly. In fact, it was one of the few times he had ever seen her not smiling. But she wasn't broken, either.
"One less mouth to feed, but I still had no money, and the bills were starting to come in. There are only a few things that a young woman in the outer city can do to support herself when she hasn't even finished high school. Don't look at me like that—you already know how this story ends. My body and brain were already prepared to take care of a child, so I put myself out, as a wet nurse, at sixteen. And the rest, as they say, is history."
Whatever he had been expecting, between all of her teasing about bedtime stories, after a month of endless smiles and the tender care she gave to his children, that was not it. She had lost her mother and her child in practically the same breath, and she had only just been sixteen.
"But you…" Regis paused, trying to find the words. He didn't sit up, for fear of disturbing Reina, but he shifted in his chair. "You smile so much."
She looked so young. Once he might even have called her naive, but it seemed an inapt description, now.
"Of course," she said simply. "I'd go crazy if I didn't smile."
Regis considered. He rested his head against the back of his chair and tried to remember the last time he had smiled. It was for Noctis, surely, or Reina. The only things he enjoyed now were them. Everything else was broken glass and crushed dreams.
"When does it become easier?" He asked, looking at the wall behind her more than Crea herself.
Crea fixed him with a calculating gaze. She didn't respond immediately. The silence stretched long enough that he actually looked at her and caught the expression on her face.
"It takes more than a month," she said at last, her voice soft.
Regis dropped his gaze. His eyes were burning, suddenly. He shut them, hoping it would abate, but it did very little good.
He heard Crea stand and put Noctis back in his bed, then cross the room to throw a blanket over Reina and his shoulders before returning to her chair. Regis didn't move. He had no intention of putting Reina to bed. If she had no objections to staying right where she was then he wasn't going to change a thing.
"It doesn't happen all at once." Crea spoke again, at length. "There are good days and there are bad days, and it never stops hurting but eventually the good ones outnumber the bad."
"How do you survive the bad ones?" Regis asked, not opening his eyes.
"However you can," Crea said. "By staying in bed and drinking your favorite tea, or… coming to the nursery and holding your children for as long as you need to."
He was only half-conscious of shifting and putting his free hand on Reina's back beneath the blanket. He didn't say anything else and neither did Crea; it was just understood. She knew why he was there and she didn't object when he didn't leave. She didn't even comment when he woke the following morning, still sitting in the chair by the door with his daughter in his arms.
All she said was, "Good morning, Your Majesty."
A/N: Thanks for reading!