It would be worth it in the end. He just had to wait it out. Five more weeks of pure misery, and he would be done. Okay, five weeks or impure misery. He still had Rogue's love, no matter how much a screw up he felt like, and even if he couldn't look after Alex, he could see her. Five more weeks, and then he could work on recovering and return to how things were, with the addition of two little boys.

Just five weeks to go. That's what he'd been telling himself. So it came as a shock when, at his final scheduled checkup before his due date, the doctor asked, "Have you considered an early delivery?"

"Early…"

"Given the twins' positions, you should expect to deliver by c-section. Since the odds of a natural birth are already low, it might be in your best interest to schedule one before your expected due date. It's a little early for them still, but by this stage most children can survive outside the womb. Considering your health, it might be for the best to deliver them early. As it is, you've gone longer than we'd like without any corrective surgery, and with a spinal injury…" The doctor shook his head. "We could have you in by the end of the week, if you'd like."

"I…" Sting blinked, trying to process the idea. Be done with his pregnancy in only a few days? But at the risk of Sol and Yue's health…

Could he… could he really do that? He did have his own health to consider, but Sol and Yue…

Rogue placed a hand on Sting's shoulder, jolting him out of his thoughts.

"I hope you aren't asking us to decide that right this minute."

"Of course not. You two can sleep on it, if you'd like. Let us know when you've made your decision."

-o-

The plan was for the two of them to spend the evening discussing their options. They could send Frosch and Lector to the guild to play with Alex, Rogue was going to cook something fast and simple, and they would weigh out all the pros and cons of the situation over dinner. Maybe, if they decided by morning, they could contact the hospital with their answer.

This plan was dashed the second Rogue opened the door, and Alex flew out and jumped on him, wrapping her arms and legs around his knee.

"Surprise, Mommy!"

While Rogue wrestled to get Alex off of him and into his arms, Sting looked past them to the table where he and Rogue had planned to have their serious discussion. Natsu, Erza, Lucy, and, of all people, Jellal sat around it, with Kiseki bouncing up and down in his own mother's lap. To the best of Sting's knowledge, this was Kiseki's first time seeing Jellal in a building, rather than an outlaw camp.

"I'm pretty sure none of you have a spare key. What part of this was supposed to be the surprise? Alex. The break-in, or Blue being within twenty miles of civilization?"

"I usually camp within five, thank you," Jellal said. "And I have a name."

"Your name is Blue," said Sting, who had met Jellal back before Kiseki and Alex were born but not been informed of his identity until the two were a year old, and had thus needed a nickname to describe the only other man he'd known to have been pregnant. Apparently, he was supposed to recognize Jellal from the wanted posters or something. The ones that stopped circulating everywhere back when he was thirteen, when Jellal's prison break became old news. "In any case, how let you in?"

"You guys never think to lock your windows," Natsu told him. "Lucy used to make the same mistake all the time, but she learned."

"I shouldn't have had to learn. I live on the second flood. But you two don't, so it wouldn't be a bad security precaution."

Anyone who really wanted to break in and rob them could easily smash the window, in Sting's figuring, Still, it seemed that locking them would be a good way to keep friends, babysitters, and wanted criminals who were less interested in robbery and more in observing their son's play date out. That accounted for Lucy, Erza, and Jellal. Natsu, in Sting's experience, wasn't above breaking into places by means of smashing windows even when the front door was unlocked with a big sign proclaiming "Open" hanging from it.

"Rogue, can you kick them out?"

Rogue looked up from his struggle with Alex, who had managed to climb up to his waist, to survey the scene. "Natsu, did you make that with ingredients from our kitchen, or did you bring your own?"

"Brought my own. I wasn't sure you had all the right stuff."

Most of the sweets and baked goods Natsu had littered the table with, recalling that food bribes were effective on both of the twin slayers, had been cooked in his own house. Those things which did not need a proper time to cool having been kept warm with magic. Only the blueberry pie, still hot from the oven, had been baked upon reaching the twins' apartment.

Alex, who was now attempting to climb her way up to Rogue's shoulder, was clearly high on sugar. Sting wasn't as familiar with Kiseki and his mannerisms, but from the way the boy squirmed in Jellal's lap, he suspected that their child wasn't the only one who had a weakness for sweets. Erza too seemed more interested in digging away at a cake than she did with whatever intervention the gang had planned. Sting had always figured that Erza was the one who would pass on a sweet to her children. He'd taken that as some kinship he might have with her, as he didn't doubt for one second that Alex's being partial to sweets was in large part thanks to whatever genes she received from him. If Rogue wasn't boot everyone out, and Natsu's food along with them, then he figured he might as well get in on that cake before Erza consumed the entire thing by herself.

Finally prying Alex off of himself, Rogue said, "This must have taken a long time to make. What's the occasion?"

"Baby shower," Lucy told him. "Did you forget?"

Sting looked back at Rogue, who's expression of blank surprise stated that he had.

"Really?" Lucy asked. "We'd planned this for months."

"Things came up," Rogue said, which was a very polite way of saying that there had been a month long stretch where he'd been too busy dealing with Sting's depression to keep track of anything else in his life. "No offense, Jellal, but why is Jellal here?"

"I don't give him my schedule months out," Erza said. "He was nearby and contacted me this morning about a meet up. I told him I had to be here, and that Kiseki was coming with me, since Alex obviously needed to come. He said he thought he could make it."

It wasn't exactly appropriate to crash a near stranger's baby shower just to see your kid, but Sting held his tongue. A few weeks without Alex had been unbearable for him. Jellal saw Kiseki only once every couple months. Besides, Crime Sorciere was an allied guild with Fairy Tail. He ought to know their members better.

Giving Jellal a hesitant smile, Sting wheeled himself over to the table. When Jellal gave a hesitant smile back and politely refrained from snickering at the way the wheelchair in motion made Sting turn green, Sting decided he could likely manage to be more genuinely polite.

"Erza tells me you're expecting twins," Jellal said when Sting reached the table.

"I bet I look like it."

He had a little over a month left. His stomach was large enough that it got in the way of virtually everything.

"You look a little overdue," was the tactful way Jellal chose to phrase it. There was no denying that Sting's stomach took up a considerable amount of space. Not without obviously lying, at least.

Lucy, in a far less tactful way, said, "I'm afraid I'd look like that if I was ever pregnant."

"Then don't get pregnant," Sting told her with a shrug. "You'd do a disservice to the baby to let Natsu be its father anyway."

Jellal, baffled, looked to Erza, who explained all the reasons that Natsu was absolutely forbidden from babysitting Kiseki, and only allowed to watch Alex under Sting or Rogue's supervision. With Lucy occasionally throwing in her own worry some observations and Natsu occasionally protesting one claim or another about his ineptitude for parenting, Sting took the opportunity to slice himself a piece of the freshly baked pie and cram a bite into his mouth.

In retrospect, while the timing was pretty terrible, it was a decent baby shower. He'd heard about Rogue's. A surprise party with all manner of pre-teen sleepover games put on by all the girls in the guild. Compared to that, a gathering of a few friends who bore relevancy to his parenthood—and Jellal—wasn't half bad. The abundance of sweets was also nice, but he wasn't exactly looking forward to any gifts they might have planned to give him.

Rogue pulled up a chair beside Sting, attempting briefly to hold Alex in his lap as well, then giving up and putting her on the floor to run around giggling. Kiseki, seeing his number one playmate's freedom, began fighting to escape Jellal's lap as well.

Sting watched Jellal's initial struggle to keep the usually docile boy under control before relinquishing him to the floor, munching on pie as he did. He'd encountered Jellal once, early on in his pregnancy, and not known who he was or even that he was pregnant until someone mentioned it to him. Neither he nor Rogue had seen him at all during the incident after that. Aside from Erza and possibly Natsu, who knew Jellal well and had a good nose, no one had even known that he was hiding in and around town for most of his pregnancy. The guild's general knowledge of the whole thing came from Erza's retelling of it, and Sting didn't have any firsthand information on how things were for Jellal late term, but...

"Jellal, you were late, weren't you?"

Looking surprised, Jellal asked, "How did you know? We all made it before you got home?"

"No. With Kiseki."

"Oh." Jellal glanced over at the boy. "By about a week, yes. Why?"

Sting hesitated before saying, "My doctor suggested—"

"Hold it." Natsu held a hand up. "Unless someone's dying, no doctor stuff yet. You need to see our gift."

"That's nice, Natsu, but Rogue and I have something kind of—"

"Is someone dying?"

"I am. On the inside."

Rogue smacked Sting in the back of the head. "Don't joke like that. Natsu, Sting and I really do have something important to go over, but we'd be happy to see your surprise."

"So long as you bring it out here," Sting added. The less wheeling himself around he had to do, the better.

The group exchanged uncomfortable looks, and Erza said, "Well, our gift involved some rearranging of rooms. You need to get up for that."

"You can stand," Rogue offered. "I'll help support you, so it won't be as much weight on your leg."

One round of haggling later, Rogue was instead carrying Sting princess style down the hall to look first at Alex's room, then the empty room they had planned to make into the new babies' nursery. Ideally, that would have been taken care of weeks ago, but between dark guild abductions and complete mental breakdowns, the twin slayers just hadn't managed to get around to it.

Alex's crib was gone. At least, that's what they initially thought. It had been replaced with a low sitting bed, pink with a drape over it, and the word Princess inscribed across the headboard. Pink wallpaper with a sparkle pattern had been pasted, and a new little dresser with a mirror sat against her wall. Why their three year old's room was updated for a baby shower, the two couldn't guess. Not until they saw the unfinished nursery.

Which their friends had completely finished for them.

Alex's old crib was there, with a new one placed on the exact opposite end of the room. Some of her old toys had been replaced with cleaner ones, and the diaper changing station had been scrubbed clean—not that it was likely to stay that way for long. Alex's old dresser, which was less a real dresser and more a stack of clear boxes, had been placed by the window and filled with new baby clothes.

"We figured that with all of the… complications, you two would probably prefer to recycle Alex's things, so originally we were going to help you get new furniture for her," Lucy explained. "But then Natsu said you were expecting twins, so we grabbed an extra crib, and someone thought you might not have enough to dress two babies at once."

"You thought right," Rogue admitted. "Thank you. This is… Thank you."

Sting bit his lip to keep from feeling guilty. Funds were something that had slipped his mind as of late, and Rogue tried not to mention any additional stressors to him. How tight a budget had they been working off of?

Seeing the look of guilt on Sting's face, Jellal said, "There was something important you wanted to ask me?"

Both boys jolted, remembering that there was indeed something important they needed to go over.

"It's not anything you need to concern yourself with, really," Rogue insisted.

Taking the not so subtle hint to keep the details between him and Rogue, Sting said, "I just wondered what you thought of having Kiseki so late. And nearly dying in the effort."

Casting Erza a weary glance, Jellal said, "I did not almost die."

"You seemed to think you were dying when I found you bleeding out on the floor."

"Well, you clearly did. I—"

"Jellal." Erza flashed her sweetest smile smiled. "You almost died."

Sting cleared his throat. "Anyway. I wondered what you would have thought of having him earlier."

"Tired of being pregnant?" Jellal asked with a good natured grin. While no one said anything in response to that, the looks of everyone around him, ranging from flat to shocked, declared quite loudly that this was not only common knowledge, but borderline offensive to ask. "W-well I suppose that whatever went wrong for me, if likely would have no matter when Kiseki came. It's possible that his size played a part, but I wouldn't know for sure. I certainly wouldn't have minded if he came on time, but I'm happy he wasn't premature."

"What if you'd known for sure that if he came a few weeks early, it wouldn't have been any harm to you."

"Then I'd still want him to come on time."

"Jellal," Erza muttered, grabbing his sleeve. There was nothing worse, for her, than for Jellal to reference his lack of self-worth so openly.

He ignored her. "I lived, in the end, and even if I hadn't, I'd feel it was worth it. There isn't much I've done in my life that I truly feel proud of, and nothing more I'm prouder of than that I was able to bring Kiseki into the world strong and healthy. I couldn't go to a hospital. If he was born premature and needed anything for it, we might not have been able to get him help fast enough. I'm much happier knowing that it was myself at risk, and not his own health that was jeopardized."

-o-

For the first time in a long time, Sting wasn't sad to think that Alex was staying with Erza indefinitely. They'd returned from inspecting the rooms to find that Alex had crawled on top and was helping herself, tiny fist after fist, to handfuls of cake. Kiseki, in contrast, sat patiently in the chair where Jellal had set him, with the addition of a pink frosting smear across his cheek. Jellal had offered to spend the night and help, although how exactly he'd snuck from their apartment to Erza's, Sting didn't know. Even with him there, however, he didn't envy Erza. One small child pumped full of sugar was already too much for him Rogue, and Lector to handle. Two sounded like a nightmare.

A nightmare he and Rogue would likely spend a fair deal of time living, once the twins were old enough to get into everything.

Their uninvited guests had stayed until it was nearly dinner, when Rogue shoed them out, insisting that he needed to feed Sting something with actual nutritional value, and that they really did have something that needed to be discussed between the two of them alone.

And so Sting found himself and Rogue sitting at the table, all of the sweets that Natsu had brought packed up and tucked away, picking half-heartedly at a skillet cooked hamburger and thinking about how wonderful it would be if there was enough room in his midsection for his stomach to have enough room for his food.

"It's your choice, ultimately," Rogue reminded him. "Whatever you want, I'll be with you for it."

"They're going to cut the twins out of me either way."

"That's what it sounded like."

No way in hell would they let Rogue stay in the operating room, but he could trust that his lover would be there beside him during the recovery. At least so long as Yue and Sol weren't discharged before he was. Which they might not be, if anything went wrong with one or the other of them because they didn't have enough time to develop before being brought into the world.

Sting set his fork down, folding his hands over his stomach and thinking about it. Realistically, it was likely that Yue and Sol would go home before him if he made it to term. They would only need a few days to make sure everything was alright, while he would have longer to recover from surgery. Maybe even multiple surgeries, considering his injuries. But for as long now as he'd been dealing with that while pregnant, surely whatever damage there was had already been done.

Then again, for most of his pregnancy, the twins had been… well… getting larger, but also not as large as they were now. His stomach was heavier now than ever, and he certainly noticed the strain on his back more than he had before, even when he wore his brace. If there was more damage to be done, now seemed like when it would happen.

"Do you think anything might happen that can't be reversed? To my spine, I mean."

"I'm not a doctor. I wouldn't know. Between Porlyusica and Wendy, I don't think there's much that can't be fixed, but it's possible. When you were still in a coma, they were worried the might need to place a metal rod up your spine to keep it straight, and no one's suggested that yet, so whatever the pregnancy is doing, I don't think it's as bad as being hit by an out of control car." Rogue paused. "Of course, they had complete x-rays to look at back then, and your doctor has been hesitant to do anything to thorough while you're pregnant."

"So it could be just as bad and we wouldn't know."

"Well, you're not flopping over when you sit up, brace or no. But we don't know how bad the damage is."

Sting rubbed his stomach, feeling one of the twins heads. Rogue had already picked out which would have what name—something Sting would need to make sure his surgeon knew. He was pretty sure it was Sol that he now felt.

"What about them?"

"Obviously."

"They're only a few weeks from their due date. Babies who are born about this premature live. But it's their lungs that don't finish developing when that happens, isn't it? What if something goes horribly wrong with their lungs because we pulled them out early."

"Could you risk that?"

Thinking of what Jellal said earlier, Sting bit his lip. He wasn't sure he would willingly die just so his children could be healthier, but at the same time…

"It's not like you have to have them operate on you tomorrow," Rogue pointed out. "If your doctor is open with it now and at your due date, I'd imagine any time between then and now would also work."

He wasn't wrong, but Sting shook his head. "What's the point in that? If I wait until they're only one or two weeks premature, they're still coming out before we know for sure they're ready, and I'm still pregnant longer than the doctor things I should be."

Rogue politely refrained from pointing out that he, the one who knew Sting's medical history before they had to track down a doctor who would work with a pregnant male patient, had thought Sting ought not to be pregnant for even a day. Instead, he said, "It's still a risk to all three of you, but it would be less so than working with either extreme."

A sharp metallic taste hit Sting's tongue, and he realized he'd bitten his lip so hard he drew blood.

Less risk than either extreme, but still a risk for everyone. For Sol and Yue, and himself as well. He didn't have Jellal's self-loathing. He didn't ever catch himself thinking he deserved to die, or that giving his life in the service of another was a good thing. He did, however, feel a tremendous amount of guilt as of late. Not enough to make him suicidal, as he'd heard Erza confess that she sometimes worried Jellal might be. Enough to paralyze him for weeks on end, though. The guilt over all the ways he failed everyone he'd loved since becoming pregnant was overwhelming.

For as awful as he'd feel if he spent the rest of his life with some disability burdening Rogue, or preventing him giving Alex all the care she needed, he imagined it would be nothing compared to the guilt he'd feel if Yue and Sol were endangered because he put himself first.

He'd already failed everyone else since becoming pregnant with the twins. And he'd failed the two children before that who he hadn't been able to keep alive long enough to give birth to. If he failed Sol and Yue to, then he would never feel like he was anything more than worthless.

"It's supposed to be thirty-eight weeks before the baby is considered on time?" Sting asked.

"Yes. I don't think the doctor will let you go past that point."

"That's only three weeks away," Sting said. "I don't think they can do too much more damage to me in that time. And the younger kids are, the faster their development. Three weeks would mean a lot for them. I can hold out that long."

-x-

STA: Of all the things that I never thought would happen in this series when I first started Cue The Storm, Rogue and Jellal sharing a page is literally the number one thing. I was more open to killing characters off than I was this, and yet it happened. It just... happened. Like, I was naming off everyone sitting around the table, and Jellal's name just came up. And that was it. They were sharing a page.

I mean, everyone remembers that time Rogue was nearly hit by a demolition derby truck, right? If you had to ask me "which is more likely, Rogue having been hit by that truck and dying on impact, or Rogue and Jellal sharing a page?" I'd have said the death on impact.