Chapter 39
The Late Late Show

The first day and subsequent night had been fairly easy, all things considered, and the day after that, with the dogs returning, and the Sandersons meeting the baby, and Zay and Nadine coming by, it had continued to be that way. The night that followed though… That was the first one where it really got to feel like their brief sort of grace period had given way to more of what they'd been anticipating and trying to prepare for over the past few months. By the end of it, they couldn't say that they suddenly felt less prepared than they'd believed themselves to be, but it definitely left them feeling like there were just some part they couldn't have been prepared for, not until they actually experienced them, with their sprout, and with a fast increasing sense of sleeplessness. For Maya, it also meant factoring what her recovery from delivery would really feel like.

Still, for all that, it was hard to feel anything but a determination to keep moving forward whenever they'd look to Elliott. He still felt just… a billion degrees of miraculous, just for existing.

Their third night at home came around, and by the end of it neither Maya nor Lucas could say that they had slept more than minutes at a time, and this mostly from drifting off only to be startled awake again, sometimes not even by the baby and more for a sort of reflex like something in them believed they were supposed to be awake again.

"I'll take him into the nursery to feed him, try and sleep a little," Maya breathed, walking slowly with Elliott fussing in her arms, heading out of their room.

"Okay, but we swap after…" Lucas mumbled, already halfway asleep.

"Okay…" she yawned, shutting the door on her way out, doing the same after walking into the nursery across the hall. With any luck, those two barriers would allow Lucas to get some rest. "Alright, you, it's that time again, you ready?" she hummed, settling into the rocking chair. She wasn't worried by any means here. Their baby boy was proving himself to be a champion feeder. She only had to hold him close and soon they were off. "So, yeah, where were we?" she spoke softly, trying to blink sleep out of her eyes. She would keep talking to him a lot of the time as she'd hold him. It didn't have to be anything in particular, the sound of her voice was all he really needed… "Your dad's getting kind of scruffy these days. I haven't decided if I want him to keep going, like what would he look like with more facial hair? I've never seen him with it, but then your grandpa and Pappy Joe, they've been rocking those beards as long as I've known them and they look great. Of course, I'm not kissing them like… Well, you get the idea," she looked back down, smiling as she brushed at the hair on his head with the back of her fingers.

When Lucas came into the nursery an hour after she'd left him, the baby was sleeping as Maya handed him over and stood.

"Fed him, changed him, see you in a bit," she hummed, reaching her hand to stroke that scratchy cheek of her fiancé's, laughing to herself.

"What?" he asked, curious.

"It's nothing, inside joke between Elliott and I."

She'd fallen asleep right about the moment when her head hit the pillow. When she'd wake again, Lucas would be sitting next to her on the bed, Elliott in his arms.

"About that time again?" she guessed.

"Looking that way," he confirmed.

"Right, give him here," she sighed, sitting up and receiving the baby. As repetitive as it could get to feel, it hadn't taken long for her to get attached to those moments with him. "Any chance you could rustle up some… Hey…" she blinked, finally looking to Lucas and realizing something was different. "You shaved…"

"Yeah," he nodded, absently feeling at his now hairless face. "It was getting about time…"

"I don't know, I was starting to wonder what you'd look like," she told him, sounding just mildly disappointed.

"Sorry," Lucas laughed. "I'll let it grow back if you want me to."

"Mm…" she pondered, reaching her free hand to touch his face. "Let me get back to you on that one."

"Right, well, while you think about that, I think you were about to ask me for some food?"

"Yes, so much," she hummed, looking back down to Elliott. "I don't know about you, but watching people eat makes me hungry, and that's almost all I do these days…"

"Also we didn't have breakfast yet," he smiled.

"Also that," she agreed.

"On it," he pressed a kiss to the side of her head before heading downstairs.

"Okay, kid, forget everything I said about the beard," Maya whispered, closing her eyes for a moment and almost immediately thinking better of it. She was not going to fall asleep with her son stuck to her chest, no way. She sighed, leaning her head to the bed board. "Hey, I know you're a little busy right now, and please, by all means, don't let me interrupt you. You're still working out the kinks on this whole being alive thing, so you don't know what's up or down yet, and none of this is going to make sense to you for a little while, but do you see this? The way everything is bright, and there's the sun shining through the windows? We call that daytime. That's when we're awake. Not you, because you need a lot of sleep, and that's good, you'll get there eventually. The other one, where it's all dark, and quiet, and there's the moon, that's called nighttime. That's when we sleep… or at least we do, usually. Right now, me and your dad, we're kind of on your time, and we're not used to it, so we're a bit… different than usual. Please don't let that be your first impression of us, okay?" Elliott kept on quietly feeding. "Yeah, okay, good talk. Good talk."

Much as she would have liked to stay up in bed with the baby all day, Maya had taken him downstairs so they could all sit around the table for breakfast. Lucas pointed out that he'd need to go to the store to pick up a few things afterward, and she could see that he hesitated on leaving her on her own with no backup. She was more concerned with whether or not he could drive there and back and stay awake, but he told her he would be fine, and if there was one thing she knew it was that Lucas was and had always been a careful driver. He wouldn't go unless he was absolutely sure.

"We'll be alright," Maya assured him. "This right here is the face of a boy who's looking to put in a good couple hours' sleep," she pointed back to the baby in his seat on the table. He was indeed giving them good sleepy eyes.

"Yeah, okay, but I'll be quick," Lucas insisted, smiling as he grasped their son's little foot in his hand.

"Still not over those tiny toes either, huh?" Maya hummed.

"Toes or fingers," he nodded. She laughed.

"Everything about him is very small to the point of being cute, it's kind of a lot to take in. Take, for example, his whole head. The ears, the nose, the itty bitty tongue…" she cooed at the owner of those small features.

"For a second there, you sounded like me when I used to give tours at the museum," Lucas pointed out.

"Masterpiece," she whispered, gesturing to the baby, who was now well off in sleepytown.

After Lucas took off on his errands, Maya debated what to do next. She knew she could have taken the opportunity to nap, which would make sense, but now that it was just the two of them, she found that it became difficult for her to think of going to lie down and shut her eyes. What if something went wrong with Elliott? She also knew that she was meant to be taking it easy still, that her body was still recovering, but if she just sat there, she would fall asleep… Finally, she picked up the phone and called to her parents' house. She didn't even know what day of the week it was anymore, and if they'd be home…

"Hey, mama," she was greeted by the cheerful sound of Shawn Hunter's voice, which made her smile.

"So I've officially graduated out of you calling me 'kid?'"

"Looks that way."

"I think I might miss it," she confessed. "Although… I have taken to calling Elliott that sometimes… Can't imagine where I picked that up."

"I don't know…"

"You're smiling right now, aren't you?" she guessed.

"Yeah, let's leave it at that, sure," Shawn told her and she laughed. "So, how's it going over there?"

"About as well as can be expected with a human in the house that's less than a week old. Bet you can guess what the main activities look like right about now."

"Eating, pooping, sleeping, crying?" her father counted off.

"And most of that's the baby," she joked.

"What about you?" Shawn laughed.

"Oh, you know, trying to keep my eyes open, mostly. I'm going to look back on this in a few weeks like it was the easy time, aren't I?"

"Where's your buddy?"

"Is that what we're calling him these days?" she chuckled. "He went out to the store to grab a few things. Baby's sleeping now, so here I am."

"If he's sleeping, you should do the same," her father advised.

"No, I know, I just…" she sighed, rubbing the sleep from her face. "I want to make sure he's alright," she told her father as she looked to her son in his seat. She knew what the response would be before it was said, before she'd said a word at all.

"You're not going to sit there and watch him night and day, and you won't be any good to him if you're dead on your feet."

"Not disagreeing with you there, I'm really not, but I think I'm going to need a few more days before I can just… step back. Maybe a couple weeks…"

It was so different when he was in her belly, he was always there with her, but then he didn't need much more than what she'd be doing for herself, did he? If she took care of herself, she was taking care of him. Now… Now he was his own person, and whenever he'd start to cry or show some kind of distress, it would just feel like… she didn't know what to do anymore, not really.

"Do you want me to come over?" Shawn asked.

"No, no, really, it's fine, I just need to wake myself up a bit. Talk to me, how's it going for you guys?"

"Oh, well, Gracie was running after Nellie this morning and she tripped and took a tumble," her father informed her.

"Is she okay?" Maya asked, guessing to some extent that, if she hadn't been okay, he would have led with that.

"Not even a mark on her, not that you'd know it for how loud she was crying, for a second I was sure it was Nellie who got hurt."

"Oh, no," Maya laughed sympathetically.

"When I came and found them there, Nellie was trying to console her, had that look in her eyes like she was going to seriously mess up whoever or whatever tried to hurt her sister like that."

"The Hunter Hart combo," Maya smiled.

"Seriously," Shawn agreed.

"How's she doing now?"

"Oh, well, she's been clinging to me like a little monkey ever since. Wanna say hi to your big sister?" A moment later, a little voice came on the line.

"Hi…"

"Hey, Mouse Mouse, you fell down?" Maya asked, her voice like a hug.

"Yeah."

"Where does it hurt?" There was a brief moment of consideration on this question, which suggested to Maya that it didn't in fact hurt, not anymore, and Gracie was left to figure out what she might say. Finally, she simply made a noise, which Maya interpreted as 'I don't know.' The feeling it left her with was quick to override a couple of things, mostly the answer she'd given her father a minute ago. "Hey, would you like to come out here and see the baby?"

"Yes!" Gracie replied, suddenly upbeat, like someone had flipped a switch.

"Okay," May laughed, "Give the phone back to Dad?"

"What did you say to her?" Shawn asked.

"I asked if she wanted to see her nephew… So…"

"We'll be there in twenty."

When Lucas returned from the store and spotted Shawn's car parked out front, his immediate assumption was that something had gone wrong and Maya had called them over. Rational thought would have pointed out that, if that had been the case, someone would have called him, but rational thought took a few seconds more to kick in here, precisely until he'd made it into the house and Katy Hart told him why they were there, which was in fact to soothe a three-year-old's phantom booboo.

Shawn was sitting on the couch, holding his grandson as he slept soundly. Meanwhile, Elliott's nearly one and a half-year-old uncle was also sleeping, curled up next to his father.

"Where's Maya?" Lucas asked.

"Upstairs, napping with the girls," Katy nodded. "Feel free to go and join them."

"I'm alright, I…" he shook his head.

"Hey, don't worry about it," Katy insisted. "Think of it as us returning the favor for when the twins were born." She had him there. He and Maya had spent a lot of time looking after the two of them as babies, which had enabled the new parents to catch up on some sleep more than once.

"Okay, but uh…" he looked at his watch. Elliott would need to be fed again before long.

"We already had to promise and sign in triplicates that we'd wake her when the time came before Maya went upstairs," Shawn informed him. There was no more for him to argue here, so he thanked his future in-laws and climbed up to his and Maya's room.

He cracked the door open, finding the curtains had been drawn, the lamp on the nightstand kept low. On the bed, the Hunter twins slept in a near huddle with their big sister, Maya's arm covering them like a wing. Very carefully, so not to wake any of them, he sat on his side of the bed and stretched out with a sigh. He had been okay to go run that errand, but he really was glad to be back, and that Maya's parents were here to watch over Elliott, allowing them some time to rest up. And as would usually be the case, back when they would be spending the night in Maya's old room at her parents' house, when the twins would sneak in to join them, he had his own clinging twin before long. As though she'd sensed the presence in sleep, Nellie had detached from the end of the huddle and rolled around to face him, burrowing herself at his side. Lucas just smiled and put his arm around her, falling asleep in no time.

When he woke up again, it was to the sound of whispering toddlers. He opened his eyes and saw that Maya was gone – probably downstairs with the baby – while the twins remained next to him, talking to one another. It was too easy, and he could barely contain his smirk as he 'roared' and yanked the small girls into a hug that had them squealing and then giggling madly.

"Who do we have here?" he asked, in his best Pappy Joe impersonation. "Miss Penelope and Miss Grace… Afternoon, ladies," he nodded, with a voice like a tipped hat. Whatever distress had been felt by Gracie Hunter, it was a thing of the past, as she and her twin went climbing down the stairs ahead of Lucas, who followed them all the way into the living room. There they found their older sister sat on the couch with MJ locked in her arms, happily so, and chatting with Katy, while Shawn would wake the length of the room with baby Elliott in his arms. He just managed to catch Maya and her mother talking about dinner. By the sound of it, Maya had offered for them to stick around until then, and Katy wanted to ensure that this would only be if the two of them really wanted it, and that she and Shawn would understand if they wanted to just be the two of them and the baby.

In the end, they'd stuck around for a little while longer but they had left before dinner. Feeling somewhat more energized than they'd done in the last week, though not at full force at all, they had settled on to the couch with dinner, the baby going from one to the other as time went on. They'd ended up putting the news on the television, in some desire to catch up with the world after having been tuned to Baby World since the last day of May. Whether they actually paid it much attention was left to be seen.

"You know as soon as they find out my parents were here, yours are going to want to come over, too," Maya pointed out after having passed Elliott to Lucas.

"Yeah, I'm sure," he nodded, laying the baby against him instead of cradled against his arm. "We could invite them for the day after tomorrow, get a day to ourselves first."

"We can do that," she agreed, digging into her bowl now that her hands were free. "That'll give us another free day after that, before Pappy Joe moves in."

"That works, yeah. I'll call them in the morning." She gave a sigh now, like the prospect of this next night coming along was already filling her with something like dread, wondering how it would go. It really hadn't taken long for the routine to become a part of them, unpredictable at every turn.

"You know, I don't even remember that much what it was like, when the twins were just born… I mean, I helped where I could, we both did, but my parents mostly wanted me to let them handle it, which was probably a good thing, when I was still in high school…"

"And you had your own toe problems," Lucas pointed to his foot, propped up on the coffee table.

"Oh, yeah…" she laughed, remembering that night when she'd tried to run up and see to the crying babes, only to trip on her way from her room in the basement. "Babies, and basements, and bones… Bad business…"

"You did that on purpose," he smiled.

"Alliteration queen," she raised her chin with a smirk.

"Right…"

"After today, I'm fine admitting I'm kind of looking forward to Pappy Joe being out here with us. Not that I'm planning to turn him into Mr. Nanny or anything, but…"

"Strength in numbers," Lucas suggested.

"Yeah, exactly," Maya nodded.

"And not that we couldn't have done it without him here either," he added.

"Not at all," she promised, scooting herself closer to him, setting her head to his shoulder and holding her hand to Elliott's back. "How about it, Sprout? Feeling good tonight?" He'd just woken up again before she'd passed him on to his father. She held his gaze, his little eyes open and aimed at her.

She'd spent so much of her time staring into that face in the past few days, and it felt like the greatest untapped source of inspiration. Staring at their son was like gazing into a world of possibilities, a future wide open before them. It was the present, too, looking at him and wondering what could be going on inside his little baby brain, how much he understood just yet, about her and Lucas, and all the other people who'd been circling in his universe… But the future… What kind of person he would be, what he might be skilled for, what he might want to make of this life they had created for him…

"That's going to be your mom, isn't it?" Maya asked when the phone rang and she got up to answer, while Lucas tried to get Elliott to calm down again, startled by the ringtone. "Or not," she smiled, answering. "Hello?" She hadn't been able to say who exactly would be on the other end of the line, but it turned out to be her father, back in New York.

"Hey, I didn't wake you, did I?" Kermit asked.

"No, you caught me right on time," Maya promised, briefly relaying how Katy and Shawn had been here before, allowing them to get some rest. "What's up?"

"Well, I…" her father started before pausing again, sounding hesitant.

"Hey…" Maya blinked. Had something happened? Was he… Was his illness back again? Was he…

"Everything's good here," he spoke again, like he could tell where her mind had gone. "I just wanted to run something by you."

"Okay?" On the couch, Lucas looked back to her, naturally wondering what this was about. She signed D-A-D and N-Y. He still looked like he wanted to know more, but the best she could do was shrug, because she had no idea either.

"When we were flying back the other day, Abigail, my mother, and I got to talking. Mom's been very happy, being out here with us, with the kids. But then there's Luna, too, and her daughters, over in Tucson, and then you and Elliott… So we've been considering the possibility of just… bridging the gap." Maya blinked.

"Yeah?" she asked. Lucas gave her another look full of questions, but she held up her hand. Hang on, need to focus.

"We've started looking into everything, but before we do anything, I just… You and I have been making strides, these last few months, but I wouldn't want to overstep…"

"Dad…" she cut him off, as concise a way as there could be for her to assure him he wouldn't be overstepping anything. Already, she was starting to think she knew what he meant to say.

"Would you be alright with us relocating to Texas? To Austin?"

TO BE CONTINUED

See you next week! - mooners