The next week drags on interminably; Eponine is irritable and bored out of her mind from being in the hospital. Everyone has gone by to try and entertain her a little bit, but they can't stay forever, and there is only so much mindless television to watch. Even though Eponine loves getting lost in a book, she tells Enjolras that right now she can't seem to concentrate enough to read to save her life. She calls it pregnancy brain.
Absolutely nothing else goes wrong. She doesn't have a single contraction beyond the norm, the baby's heartbeat is strong, and Eponine even feels her move for the first time, though Enjolras is at work when it happens and the baby doesn't kick again that she can feel.
At the end of the week, Eponine's doctor gives the okay for her to go home, but cautions her to stay mostly off her feet and taking it easy for at least a month. Even though everything looks good, she says it's better to be safe than sorry, especially until Eponine is well past twenty-five weeks. That way if she goes into labor early and the baby is born pre-mature, at least there is a very good chance of survival, though she believes Eponine will have no problem carrying the baby to full term. Bed rest for a month means Eponine is out of work, too, and after a lot of discussions with her boss about what's best for her class, they decide she should just stay out the rest of the year so the kids can have one consistent teacher for their remaining months of school. Eponine is worried she's going to get extremely bored not working, but wants what's best not only for her baby, but her students, too.
She's been home for five days now, is in week twenty-three of her pregnancy, and is already stir crazy. She has never gone this long without doing something her entire life, and while Enjolras deeply sympathizes, he is also not about to let her take any chances with their unborn child, and threatens to tie her to the bed or the couch if he catches her up and moving around too much. He comes home one day to find her surrounded by books on the bed, all involving childbirth. She's so engrossed in one that she doesn't hear him come in or notice him standing in the bedroom doorway.
"Hey," he finally says quietly. "Keeping yourself busy?"
She looks up, startled. "Oh, hey. I didn't even hear you come in."
"I noticed. What's finally interesting enough to keep your attention?"
"All of these books about childbirth Cosette brought me. Do you realize we are not prepared in the slightest? We have nothing for the baby and I haven't actually spent any time at all really thinking about her actual birth. I have no plan. That's ludicrous. I need a fucking plan!"
Enjolras sits down on the bed and kisses her temple, rubbing her back soothingly. "Okay, we need a plan then. We've got time to make one. And maybe this is just me being ignorant, but isn't the plan usually something like, hey, lets go to the hospital?"
Eponine sighs and looks at him. "I thought so. But I've been reading all of these and now that seems like the worst possible option. I mean, just the whole, 'Hey, I'm in labor, let's go to the hospital and get drugs and pop her out,' thing. I want to be prepared. I want to enjoy it."
"Enjoy being in labor?" Enjolras asks skeptically.
"Yes! You need to read these, seriously. I think there's a better way to do this, I really do. Once you read them, then we can make a plan."
Enjolras sighs, but gives in easily. If this is going to keep her busy, then it's worth it. "Okay, I'll read them. Which one do you want me to start with?"
"These." Eponine hands him three books: The Thinking Woman's Guide to a Better Birth, Ina May's Guide to Childbirth, and another called The Birth Partner. "That last one you should find incredibly helpful."
"Yeah..." Enjolras eyes the books warily and rises to place them on the nightstand on his side of the bed. "I promise I'll start them tonight, okay? I'm gonna go do the laundry now, though."
Eponine smirks and leans back against her pillows. "Aw, look. You're so domesticated. I would totally reward you with sex after, but hey. No go there." Her smirk turns into a pout. Along with the bed rest came strict instructions for no sex for a few weeks, too, just in case. Everything seems to be 'just in case' at this point.
Enjolras groans and rubs his face. "Shut up. I don't want to hear about it." It is serious torture. Ever since their first time together, they haven't gone more than a few days, at most, without making love.
Eponine laughs. "It should be easy for you. You were practically celibate before us."
He glares at her as he starts gathering all the dirty laundry together. "Yeah, and then you happened and now I don't even remember what that's like, other than the fact that it sucked."
"Believe me, it's not easy for me, either. I wasn't kidding when I said I had the best orgasms of my life while pregnant."
"Seriously, shut up. We can't talk about you having orgasms for the foreseeable future." Enjolras grabs the basket of laundry and quickly leaves the room, ignoring Eponine's fake moans of pleasure from the bed. His cock is already growing hard in response to her merciless teasing. Great – her new form of bed rest entertainment seems to be torturing him. Not so surprising, really.
He starts the laundry while thinking of the most unattractive and least arousing things he can think of and then wanders into the kitchen to try and figure out what to make for dinner. He's a horrible cook and hates doing it, however, and they haven't had take-out in a while, so he grabs the phone and just orders a pizza. As soon as he hangs up, Eponine screams his name. He jumps, the phone falling to the floor, and freezes, his heart in his throat. Something is wrong.
Enjolras makes it into the bedroom in record time, skidding to a stop next to the bed. His heart is pounding.
"What's wrong?"
"Nothing! Oh my God, sit down and give me your hand! Hurry!"
He obediently sits next to her, his heart rate slowly returning to normal, and holds his hand out. Eponine puts it low on her stomach and off to the side a bit, covering his hand with her own. "Oh, come on! She just kicked and it was hard and I know you would be able to feel it."
"Oh. Fuck, you scared me when you yelled." He sighs and looks at her stomach. He can't feel anything under his hand, but he's getting used to being disappointed in this department, and starts to pull his hand away.
"No, wait! I swear, Enj, she'll move again. That was the most I've ever felt her," Eponine pouts and puts his hand back, holding it securely against her. "Just be patient."
"Okay," he relents. "What did it feel like?"
"Exactly like being kicked, but from the inside. It's wild." Eponine glares at her stomach. "Come on, kid. I know she's your daughter since she won't do what I say."
"Hey, I always do what you say," Enjolras teases. "I'm completely whipped, remember?"
"Yeah, you are." Eponine smiles and pokes at her stomach, pressing lightly on the other side. "Maybe I can make her move."
"Well don't bug her. She's nice and comfortable in there and..." He trails off as he suddenly feels very light taps against his hand, just a little succession of quick movement underneath his palm. "Holy..."
Eponine laughs, watching his reaction. "I take it you felt that?"
"Yes...oh my God, make her do it again!"
"I thought you said to leave her alone."
"Screw that, I want to feel her." Enjolras puts both hands on Eponine's stomach now and leans forward. "Come on, baby, move around some more. Kick the shit out of mommy for me."
"Nice," Eponine comments, and puts her hand on the back of his neck, playing with his hair. "You can poke at her a little bit, it doesn't hurt. I think her head is up here somewhere," Eponine says as she gestures to the other side of her stomach.
Enjolras gently presses in different places until he feels the baby kick again, and he grins like an idiot. "I'm going to be doing this to you all the time now. That's so amazing. Wow."
"It is pretty great," Eponine admits. "It's nice and reassuring now that she's alright in there, anyway." She bites her lip and sighs, then says seriously, "And this is going to sound really cheesy, but I'll say it anyway. It's kind of nice never being alone, even in this weird capacity. I think I might actually miss that part of being pregnant once she's born, but remind me of this conversation when I'm as big as a whale and we'll see how I feel then. Although I'm already fucking huge."
Enjolras looks up at Eponine and frowns, studying her intently. Sometimes she says things that remind him of her scars, whether she means them to or not, and it makes him incredibly sad and awed by her.
"What?" she asks after he just stares.
"You're never alone, Eponine," Enjolras says quietly. "I hope you don't really feel that way..."
"You're taking that in the wrong way, Enj," she says gently. "It's hard to explain. And no offense, but I'm not sure a man could ever totally understand because you can't carry another person inside of you. It's just the strangest feeling in the world, and...I mean, it's incredible, how attached I am to her and how much I love her. She's constantly with me for these nine months and now I'm feeling her move and respond to noises and everything. It's just amazing. All I mean is that I'm going to miss that feeling once she's born."
Enjolras sits up and nods, leaning forward to kiss her forehead. "I'm sure it is incredible, and you're right – I won't ever completely get it."
"It also makes me so fucking sad, though," Eponine suddenly admits. "Maybe I've just had too much time to sit and think over the last week, but...I mean, seriously...how could my mother be so shitty? How could she do what she did, or allow my father to hurt us so badly? I know you never would, but I swear to God, if you or anyone else ever tried to lay a hand on her, I would fucking tear you limb from limb. That's what mothers are supposed to do, protect their babies. So why did mine not give two shits about what happened to us?" She sounds genuinely baffled and incredibly sad, and Enjolras wishes he had the answers to give her.
"I don't know, babe. I don't get it, either. I don't know how your father could ever hit you or even how mine could be so distant and disinterested with me my whole life. He never did anything but work and yell at me to keep my voice down inside the house. He never raised his hand to me, but he had absolutely no interest in being a father. And I can't wait to show her the world, and take her to get ice cream and go to the zoo and give her piggy back rides...I don't know how anyone could not want to be with their child. It doesn't make sense."
Eponine smiles and traces the line of his jaw with her fingertips. "I really, really love you."
"I really, really love you, too."
Enjolras reads the books over the next week.
Oh, how thoroughly he reads them. And then he freaks out.
Giving birth is way, way more intense than he ever thought, which in retrospect is a ridiculous idea. Of course it's intense – Eponine is literally giving life to another human being, their human being, and that is pretty fucking miraculous. They have actually created a person, and he gets to watch that person leave his wife's body and take her first breaths on her own. That's the most incredible thing he's ever thought about, way more mind-blowing than Grantaire and Courfeyrac's drunken rants about the vastness of the universe and parallel universes and string theory and whatever else the two of them think about when they're intoxicated. He has absolutely no words for the feeling it gives him, the way his breath catches in his throat now when he looks at Eponine, when he feels their baby move, when he thinks about what a huge and life-altering moment in their lives their daughter's birth will be.
There are all of these different options, too, on how to give birth. And when he really thinks about it, it seems a bit wrong that this incredible event should be left in the hands of a doctor telling Eponine what to do and when to push and what position she needs to be in. That's so clinical, so unfeeling, so sterile. Eponine deserves way more than that and so does their child. So, after doing his research, he's totally on board with whatever plan she wants. He's always known Eponine is the strongest, kindest, craziest, most beautiful, most incredible, and most intuitive person on the planet, so there is absolutely no way she can get this wrong.
He snaps the last book shut one night and rolls over to tell her so.
She glances over at him and tosses her own book aside. "So?" she asks.
"Number one – you're fucking amazing. That" - he points to her stomach - "is fucking amazing. Men are wimps. I could never do it in a million years."
Eponine laughs and turns to face him. "Why thank you. I think I'm pretty awesome, too."
He kisses her, then pulls away to say seriously, "But in all honesty, Ep, I want to do whatever you do. And I'll be there to support you and help you in any way I can. So what have you been thinking?"
She screws up her face in concentration for a minute. "Well, I guess it all depends on how the rest of this goes, and if there are no more complications. But ideally, I'm pretty sure I'd like to do it naturally. No meds."
The thought scares Enjolras a little bit, he won't lie, but it's about what she wants. "Okay."
"And I guess the rest is just speculation, really, because it's going to depend on what the doctor says. I didn't ask her about any of this today at my appointment, but I will next week. But you know how I feel about hospitals. I hate them. They're horrible. Spending that week there was torture, even as nice as everyone was. So if it all works out, I think I'd maybe like to have her here? With a midwife and everything."
Enjolras is silent for a while. He had a feeling that was coming, because he knows Eponine, and even though it is terrifying to think about, he nods. "Okay. We can do that, if it's what you want. And if everything looks good and the doctor has no problems with it. I can handle that."
Eponine smirks and runs her hands through his hair. "Are you sure? You're not going to do that typical, cliché, movie-husband thing and pass out on me, are you?"
"Me?" He grins and moves closer, or as close as her swollen stomach will allow him to get. "I'm tough. I can handle a little bit of blood and gross stuff."
"Well, if I decide on a water birth, it won't be so gross. You should watch some on YouTube."
Enjolras makes a face and shakes his head. "No. I draw the line there. I have no problem watching you give birth, but I really don't want to see other people doing it."
"Okay," Eponine laughs. "I guess that's acceptable." She looks at him for a minute, then bites her lip and abruptly changes the subject. "Oh, by the way, I got some other news from the doctor today."
"What?"
"Since I've had absolutely zero contractions beyond the norm over the past three weeks, she said I can start moving around more starting on Monday. And..." Eponine grins wickedly and runs her hand down his chest, stopping at his waist. "...she said we can have sex. Now."
Enjolras freezes, looking at her hopefully. "If you're messing with me, I'm going to be incredibly, incredibly pissed at you."
Eponine laughs and abruptly reaches into his pants, squeezing him through his boxers. He swallows heavily and closes his eyes as she touches him, immediately beginning to grow hard as she pulls and strokes his manhood.
"At this point, I wouldn't joke about it. We're good to go, we just can't be rough. And I have to pay attention afterward and make sure nothing happens, but she thinks we're fine."
"Are you sure?"
Eponine pulls down his pants and boxers in answer and moves her hand back to his erection. "I'm sure."
Enjolras groans and lets her touch him for a few more minutes, letting his orgasm build. She's always had skilled hands. He stops her just before the point of no return and gently pushes her back against the mattress, beginning to kiss her neck. Eponine sits up after a few minutes and pulls her nightgown over her head, tossing it aside.
"Lay down," she says firmly, and Enjolras does as she says, lying flat on his back.
Eponine immediately climbs on top of him, slowly sinking down onto his erection. She gasps and leans back, resting her hands on his legs and slowly rotating her hips.
"Fuck," he grasps her hips and holds her tightly as he watches her. "I fucking missed you so much."
She doesn't answer, too busy finding a rhythm that works for her, and she moans when Enjolras reaches down and adds his fingers, slowly circling her clit with his thumb. She isn't taking all of him in, and Enjolras lets her be in control. She looks beautiful as she changes positions and leans forward, her hands on his chest. He leans up and kisses her, his hands finding her breasts and lightly ghosting over her nipples. He doesn't know what will be too much for her or what's changed in the last few weeks, and neither does she, really. She bites hard on his bottom lip as he squeezes her breast, however, and he takes that as a sign that she likes it.
After a few more minutes, Enjolras is having trouble controlling himself. His hips are thrusting up to meet hers of their own accord, though he's still trying to let her set the pace. "Eponine," he warns her quietly, "I'm..."
"Shut up," she mumbles, beginning to pick up the pace a bit. "I'm...oh, fuck." She takes his hand and puts it back on her clit. She throws her head back and moans his name, her breath ragged. The sight of her on top of him, so very pregnant and beautiful as she comes, is about all he can take. As her walls tighten around him in her own orgasm, Enjolras empties into her, all the while teasing her clit with his fingers. She screams as she comes, and Enjolras just curses. When they're both satisfied, Eponine stills and looks down at him, her cheeks red. "That was so good, oh my God."
Enjolras grins and reaches up to push her hair out of her face. "Pretty damn good. Are you okay?"
She nods and carefully moves off of him, laying back down on the bed and snuggling close with her back to his chest. "I feel fine. Great, really..."
He trails soft kisses from just underneath her ear to the curve of her shoulder, reaching around and resting one hand on her stomach. "I really, really missed you."
"Me, too." They lay there for a few more minutes in silence as their bodies calm down, and Enjolras continues to gently kiss her skin. He stops when he feels the baby moving underneath his hand and smiles against her neck. "She's moving."
"Yeah. It feels like she's doing somersaults," Eponine says softly.
"Do you still like the name Evangeline?" Enjolras asks.
"I do. I love it. I've started calling her that in my head and when I talk to her. I don't know about a middle name, though."
"Well...I kind of thought of one I like," Enjolras admits, and Eponine turns over to face him curiously.
"Really? What is it?"
"Thalia," Enjolras admits cautiously, and waits to see if Eponine realizes why. In addition to being one of the Greek Muses, Thalia is a street in New Orleans, the street where they first met their freshman year of college as they worked on rebuilding a house there for a volunteer project. Since then, it's been his favorite street in the city, even if it is in a dangerous, run-down area where they absolutely never go. He didn't realize he loved her until years later, but he's never forgotten the moment when he first saw her; she wore a ratty old ACDC t-shirt, tied at her waist, and tight black jeans streaked with dust. Her hair was pulled back in a messy pony-tail and she wore no make-up. Her right cheek was smeared with dirt and he remembered thinking she was much too petite to be able to do such hard work as build a house. She'd boldly held his gaze as he studied her and from that moment on had pretty much proved him wrong in everything he thought she could never do. Now, of course, he knew there was nothing she couldn't do.
Eponine frowns for a minute as she turns the name over in her head, and then her eyes light up as she realizes why he suggested it. "We met on Thalia Street," she says quietly. "And I never, ever, ever would have imagined what a romantic, sappy guy you'd turn out to be."
He shrugs. "Yeah, well. Just don't tell anyone."
"I'm pretty sure they know anyway. And yeah...Evangeline Thalia Enjolras. I really like it. Good job, daddy."
He grins. It's the first time she's called him that, and it feels really, really great.
I'm sorry it's been a while since I updated this one! Hope this really sappy chapter made up for it, lol. This whole thing is really just pure, mindless fluff, isn't it?
Oh, well.
BTW, Thalia is pronounced Th (th sound, not just /t/)-al (short a)-ee-uh. I know people pronounce it in lots of different ways, but here in New Orleans, that's how we say it. Being natives, that's how Enjolras and Eponine would pronounce it.
Please let me know what you think! And Happy Thanksgiving! :)