A shrill scream woke both of them. Rogue more so, because Sting yanked his pillow out from under him to cover his ears.

"No," Rogue said, grabbing the pillow back. "Your turn."

"It's been my turn all night."

"It was my turn all month."

"I was in the hospital!"

"And I was at home juggling three small children who can't wake up and cry in sync."

Groaning, Sting sat up and listened to the crying child a few seconds. "It's Yue this time."

He had been home for only two days, and somehow he could already tell whose shriek was whose. Rogue, who couldn't even catch a difference in the sounds, and he'd been looking after the twins since their birth.

"C'mon, Rogue. It's Yue," Sting repeated. "Yue's yours."

Rogue refrained from smacking Sting just long enough to get the pillow comfortably beneath his head. "Both of them are ours. We are not assigning twins to individual parents."

"Okay. Then how about we give it five minutes?"

"Sting."

"It would take me three to feed her. You know Sol will wake up the second I've got her back in bed. And Sol's going to wake Alex."

"Sting."

"Fine." Lector rolled off the bed. "I'll feed the baby."

"Fro can help too!"

"I'm getting up!" Sting cried, leaping out of bed and bolting down the hall before Frosch had the chance to try and help.

Rogue regarded the scene with almost enough interest to open his eyes all the way to observe it. Almost. He made a mental note of Sting's reaction to Frosch, got himself comfortable in bed, and shut his eyes. Training Frosch to always volunteer during night could wait until later.

-o-

Despite Sting's grumbling that getting up at all hours meant he had it worse, neither of the twin slayers felt well rested come morning.

They woke at the same time, again because one of the twins required attention. The sun was up this time, so Rogue accepted without argument that it was finally his turn, forced himself to sit up, and promptly caught his foot on the sheets and fell out of bed. The resulting crash was enough to draw Sting out of bed as well.

"I miss being pregnant."

"Seriously?"

"There was something nice about fretting over how I couldn't help. I didn't realize how useless you were."

"Useless my ass. Someone had to keep you functional."

Sting grinned and stuck his tongue out, then ducked from a swipe Rogue took at him before bolting out of the room.

Rogue made a show of cursing as he untangled himself from the sheets and picked himself up off the floor, but had Sting stayed in the room, he'd have seen that Rogue was grinning from ear to ear. It was good to have the old Sting back.

After extracting himself from the bed, Rogue found Sting in the twin's room, rocking Sol while watching Yue, who was bound to wake up any second.

Both twins, much to Sting's chagrin, still looked more like Rogue. Unlike Alex, at least, they had Sting's eye shape. Yue even had the right eye color. Neither were blond, and the one blond in the family had flipped his hospital table upon being informed that, due to the nature of dominant and recessive genes, they would likely never have a blond child, no matter how many times they tried.

Sting had even insisted, when both newborns were brought to his room for the first time, that they switch the names before the hospital finalized the paperwork. If Yue was named for his daddy and Sol for mommy, then it made sense that Sol be the one who looked more like mommy. Rogue, frazzled from having two nerborns, a toddler, Frosch, and a hospitalized lover to look after—even with Lector's help—told Sting that informing the nurses of his change was his job.

Rogue had known at the time that Sting would never remember anything that had to do with paperwork for more than three minutes. He hoped Sting never found out that this was the real reason he'd refused to personally see to it that they swap names and make the younger twin Yue.

"How are they?" Rogue asked

"Normal. I think. Did he wake Alex up?"

They both paused, listening for any noise from the adjacent room. Silence.

"Can you handle both of them?" Rogue asked. "I'll see if I can have breakfast made before all three are up."

"I can manage, but sooner or later I think you're going to have to make the switch to cereal."

Rogue, who had nothing good to say about dry, bland flakes and spheres that turned soggy when added to a bowl of milk, made a face at the thought, and went to the kitchen to continue living in denial of the fact that between three young children, the two of them didn't really have time for lengthy meal preparation.

Sting half suspected that Rogue exaggerated how much he hated cooking.

While Rogue was in the kitchen, Yue stirred. Sting scooped her up in his spare arm and by the time he was awake, he was rocking both twins. Conscious of the fact that both had gone several hours without food, Sting continued rocking them as subtly as he could while he made his way to the kitchen.

To his relief, Rogue had thought to prepare baby formula on top of scrambling eggs, and there was something to feed the twins with all read for Sting to grab.

"Alex won't eat that," he mentioned as he set both children on the counter and grabbed both baby bottles.

"There are muffins in the fridge. Alex gets one if she eats her eggs."

"Just give her the muffin."

"In the private of our own home, she can throw as many fits as she wants, but I'm not giving in."

Which meant Rogue was willing to do things her way if it meant preventing her from throwing a fit in public, but then he never did like attention.

"Next time she throws a fit outside, walk away. I'll deal with it."

"That wouldn't be fair."

"It's fair enough. You handled everything the last couple months."

Rogue glanced sideways at the twins, who Sting was feeding simultaneously. It was a major fight for him to get a bottle into even one of their mouths.

"If you're interested in making up for lost work, you could take over the full night shift."

"Nice try, but no."

"Worth a shot." With a shrug, Rogue pulled breakfast off the stove and started scraping the eggs onto a plate. "Should I get Alex now?"

"Once I'm done with these two. See if we can keep the number of things kids need from us at any given time to a minimum."

"It almost sounds like you don't think you can handle all of our children."

"They have me outnumbered," Sting said.

"Well, that's your fault."

"Hey. I went into this expecting that we'd end up with two kids and two parents. It's not my fault your kids decided to multiply inside me."

Rogue highly doubted the twins were identical and, therefore, Sting's coming to have twins had almost certainly not been the result of anybody multiplying. Knowing that Sting would insist that if they were fraternal, one of them ought to have been blond, Rogue also highly doubted that there was any value in pointing this out.

"If you're about done with them, we do have a third child who needs feeding," Rogue said. "I'm going to go get Alex."

Sting braced himself for the moment they had three children screaming and crying over breakfast. Much to his relief, when Rogue came back carrying Alex, she was too drowsy to fuss over how her eggs needed to be blue and not yellow and Mommy cooked them all wrong again. She let Rogue seat her in her chair, rubbed her eyes, and made a face when she saw the color of her eggs but didn't cry. Instead, she simply shook her head when Rogue picked up a forkful of egg and held it to her mouth.

"No eggs?"

"No."

"How about a muffin? I made muffins with blueberries in them."

Alex being too young to tell the difference between fresh and week old blueberries, as well as too young to realize just how long about Rogue made those muffins, nodded eagerly.

"Let's make a deal. Three bites of egg, and then you can have a whole muffin."

"No."

"So you don't want a muffin?"

"I want a muffin!"

"Then you have to eat your egg."

Alex pouted, crossing both her arms and legs. When she'd picked that habit up, Sting didn't know. She hadn't done it before thing got too crazy for them to look after her. Rogue, familiar with the new pouting routine after the past month, stabbed the fork into the eggs and pressed them to Alex's lips.

She squirmed, opening her mouth to cry out in protest, and Rogue shoved the food in.

This always made Sting tense, because he was certain that Alex would spit the food right back out and start screaming. Instead, like always, Alex made a face, then grudgingly chewed her egg and swallowed.

"I still can't believe she lets you do that."

"Bisca trained it into her, and for that she forever has my gratitude."

Laughing, Sting leaned over beside Alex and said, "I bet Bisca was scary, huh?"

Alex preoccupied with chewing the gross thing currently in her mouth as slowly as possible, gave Sting an absentminded nod.

"Well, I'm glad we're all back together," Sting said. "Are you happy to be with Mommy and Daddy again."

Alex swallowed, then looked at Sting and vigorously shook her head.

"Really?"

"I want my sister back," Alex said.

"Asuka," Rogue said before Sting could ask.

"Oh. Sweeties, what about your brothers?" Sting asked.

"No! I want a sister! You said I could have a sister!"

Technically, when they explained to Alex that her daddy was having a baby, they said she could have a sister or a brother. Before Sting could correct her Alex threw her fork on the ground and said, "I want a sister! Daddy, you have to have a sister!"

Unsure how to respond to that, Sting looked to Rogue for help, and saw that his lover was trying his hardest not to burst out in laughter.

"No," Sting said. "Hell no. Not again. Never again. Not that I don't love the twins, but we should have stopped with one."