As it turned out, all of the medical drama that Yarne had been forced to sit through over the course of a week had horrible consequences when it came to his mental state, and he wasn't able to make it to work the day after the one he'd called off for either. The Thursday had been spent almost entirely laying around in pajamas trying not to do anything that could potentially bring him harm, so when that evening rolled around and he realized he hadn't done a single thing to try and make himself feel like a normal person, he went ahead and called off the next day as well, citing the fact that he'd need to drive his girlfriend to an appointment in reaction to what had happened the day before.
Except…that wasn't the case at all, as he couldn't mentally handle even grabbing the keys to his car and trying to drive it anywhere. The moment he touched the car key he began to feel a tightness in his chest that he couldn't ignore, and if he came even within a few steps of the car itself he started hyperventilating and needed to get back inside. Since they still didn't know what had caused Kjelle's whole incident in the first place, she didn't feel comfortable with driving herself anywhere, and with Yarne not capable of driving in that moment, they had to call on someone outside of their little home to help them out; usually that would have been someone like Lucina, reliable and trustworthy, but because she'd officially left town and wasn't going to come back for something like that, it meant that a different source of transportation was needed.
Their choices on who they could ask for help were severely limited, due to varying circumstances that had their go-to people unavailable for reasons that they didn't even need to ask for. Then there were people they could ask and get help from, that they were choosing not to even address it with for their own reasons, and then there was the whole concept of paying a stranger to drive them wherever they needed, which simply was not going to vibe with the current events. So, when it boiled down to it, they were kind of in a nasty spot where any choice they made was going to feel like a bad choice. And that was how the car belonging to Effie (the very one that had done a large part in creating Yarne's current anxieties about driving) ended up outside the house that afternoon, with someone who certainly was not Effie behind the wheel.
It was another woman who worked at the fitness center, one that Yarne had gotten to meet a few times outside of that building when their paths had crossed running errands, and she seemed very eager to help out however she could. "Charlotte had more or less told me that she didn't want to do this for you, and since it was either me or her, I told her I was willing to do the job and do it well," the woman explained, flipping some of her messy, light hair out of her face as she stood at the front door, ready to complete her task. "I'm still getting paid for being here, which is nice."
"You're a supervisor, I'd figure you'd find some way to get paid while helping me out." Smiling while she spoke, Kjelle was clearly looking at the car with the fact that she knew who it belonged to fresh in her mind. "But I have to ask, why you and not, you know, Effie herself? Seems weird that she let someone borrow her car."
"She has clients this afternoon and didn't want to make them cancel for your sake. As I said, Charlotte and I discussed this and I'm getting paid to do it, and if Effie had come she wouldn't be getting paid. It just works out this way." The woman nodded, before looking behind Kjelle at Yarne, who was doing his best to not stare at her. "Do you have something you'd like to say to me? I can't help but notice how focused on me you've been."
"Uh, not really," he replied, feeling a bit of shame for having been caught looking at her how he'd been. "I was just thinking about something. You're…" He trailed off, raising a hand to shake it in front of him a little as he processed his thoughts further. "You mentioned it before, which year is it that you celebrate?"
"Yarne, is that even appropriate or necessary right now?" Kjelle sounded surprised at what she'd just heard, tilting her head back to look up at him and the serious expression on his face. "Nailah is literally here to help me because I can't drive and you can't bring yourself to, and you're going to start asking her about traditions?"
"The thought just hit me when I saw her walk up, sorry." His apology was less in Nailah's direction and more in Kjelle's, because between the two of them, one seemed much more offended by what had been asked than the other.
Even still, Nailah seemed to take the question in stride. "As a member of the Wolf Laguz Tribe, we celebrate during the year of the dog, as it's the closest connection we have. Is there a particular reason why you're asking me this now?"
"No, like I said, it hit me when you walked up."
"Okay, well…" Her face turned serious before she spun to head back down to the waiting car. "If memory serves, we have an appointment to get to here shortly, and I don't want to be responsible for the health of one of our employees not being taken care of. If you want to discuss this further, we'll have to speak another time." With that, Nailah started walking to the vehicle, leaving Kjelle to say her quick goodbyes and follow, so that Yarne could close the door and take some time for himself while she was gone.
He'd wanted to go, naturally, but the idea of riding with someone had gotten his heart rate up to dangerous levels and he couldn't bear the thought of pushing through the anxiety and panic at that time. Had it not been Nailah there to get Kjelle, he probably would have been a wreck as he waited to hear what was going on at the appointment; her provided ride had instead given him something else to think about and dwell on while his girlfriend was gone. Nailah was one of two people who worked at the fitness center that Yarne had any prior knowledge of before Kjelle had started working there, and they'd only known each other in passing at best, given that they met at one of the taguel information-centric events that his mother had put on years before. (The other was also someone he'd met at one of those events, but he wasn't sure if that guy even worked there anymore, so Nailah was pretty much it for those connections.)
As he sat in his oversized chair, feet curled up underneath him as he tried to focus on his game in his hands, all Yarne could think about was the kinds of conversation he could have been having with Nailah if he'd gone with them. He hadn't spoken too much to her about her tribal affiliations, but he did know that she'd been a relatively new person in Ylisse when they'd first met—she'd been interested in learning about one of the many cultures in the country and had stumbled upon the event on accident. She was older than him, and he was willing to guess that her tribe had a similar rule to the taguel about birthdays in specific years, but he wasn't going to be certain about that unless he asked. Other than that, and her distinct tattooed markings that she had across her exposed skin, there wasn't much that he could say he knew about her life and her identity. Just getting to spend time with someone like that would have been a dream, and would possibly have helped him with rebuilding a relationship with his mother someday, but the anxiety had ruined that entirely.
So instead, he got to sit there and shake as he tried to do some button-mashing and some platforming in a game well past its prime, and when he realized he just wasn't going to be getting anywhere, he set the game down and decided to do something else to pass the time. The house was a disaster to an obscene level, completely unlike anything they usually allowed, and that stemmed from his mental state being the worst it had ever been due to everything else going on in life. For obvious reasons, it wasn't like Kjelle had been doing much work around the house the past two days, which had put getting it done entirely on Yarne's back, and when he hadn't even had the chance to fully mentally recuperate from what had happened to his father and sister the previous week, the moment he was now responsible for doing all the work, he'd proceeded to do none at all. In just two days, things had gotten bad, and he shuddered to think about how much worse they could get.
"Well, I guess…" he started, shaking his head as he looked around at all of the mess he'd allowed to collect. "I probably should make some progress on this. Don't want Kjelle inviting Nailah in and her thinking we live this way."
He decided to start with hanging up some of the laundry that had collected in baskets, which would have been handled after washing originally but it was all his and he hadn't felt up to it when it had been cleaned. After pulling the baskets from where they sat in the living room, tucked up against the wall, and dragging them into the bedroom, Yarne tossed everything onto the unmade bed and started sorting what needed to go where. When it came time to grab hangers to put it away in the closet, he opened the closet door and was promptly smacked upside the head by a box tumbling from up above him. The shelf where he'd been shoving random things over time seemed to have gotten jostled in some way, and opening the door had been the final straw in getting it all to fall.
Instead of just moving past things to get his initial task done, Yarne crouched down and picked up the box that had fallen, not sure what it contained because he had so many boxes that looked just like it. He knew it wasn't video games, and it wasn't a mystery gift he'd forgotten all about; when he opened it, he wished he'd just let it remain a surprise what was on the inside. Stuck to the candles in the box was that rabbit's foot his mother had gifted them, and the mere sight of the fur being lodged in melted wax made his skin begin to crawl. But, despite knowing that he needed to just move on and not dwell on the sight, he took that box over to the bed and opened it fully, pulling the candles and foot out and slowly separating them. Once that was done, he got as far as returning the candles to the box before having a change of heart and picking them back out. There were three of them, just like there had been on the first night of the year of the rabbit, and he hadn't thought anything of it until he was holding them there in one hand. A cold sweat was beginning to form on the back of his neck, and with his mostly-free hand he reached back to brush his hair away, the rabbit foot touching his skin and nearly making him yelp at the shock he'd caused himself.
There had always been three candles there at their house. He remembered seeing all three of them lit when he'd come home that night, he remembered being surprised that they were there and he remembered Kjelle telling him she'd done the honors of lighting them. And he never remembered a time where there had only been three candles on the mantle at his parents' house on a night they were lit, as that year there had been five, and he remembered that the first time he'd seen them lit up there had been four. Yarne let his fingers close around the wax rabbits a little, them solid in his grasp, as he inhaled deeply before voicing the realization that had hit him. "Mom always said the extra candle was for the blessings of the year, I'm thinking far too much into this."
Still, he didn't return any of the little rabbit-related trinkets to the box, instead taking them out and putting them over the TV so that he could see them whenever he wanted. He was most hesitant on keeping the rabbit's foot out there, but it was a "good luck" charm and…he chuckled, putting the keychain end of it around the neck of the smallest rabbit candle. "Something tells me these two things should be connected," he remarked, before going back into the bedroom to try and fix everything else that had fallen out of the closet before putting his clothes away.
Once again, instead of getting his new plans settled, he ended up on a completely different task because he found what was responsible for everything in the closet falling in the first place. It had gotten caught on a piece of drywall that was loose and sticking out, but there was a bag hanging precariously up at the top of the closet, which he was able to reach up and grab without even needing to stretch a little. The bag was from a store that had long ceased existing, which surprised him to see, and when he peered inside of it, he was met with the sight of things transported from another time. Inside of the bag was some tiny clothing, faded with age, with a handwritten note on top that was so old, the paper it was on had begun to yellow in places.
While he was incredibly curious about what was going on with that bag, he saw that the name on the paper wasn't his or Kjelle's (or, at least, not explicitly hers) and he didn't want to stumble into another grand conspiracy related to what he assumed was a family heirloom she'd snagged from her parents' house, so he put it into the now-empty candle box and got it safely up in the top of the closet. Once everything else was back up there as well, he finished taking care of his laundry and felt a little better about having stayed home from work for two days and being so mentally incapable of being near cars that he'd failed the love of his life when she'd needed him.
Actually, with that memory striking him, he wasn't feeling better about things at all. There was a certain sense of failure that he was used to experiencing on a daily basis, but the past two days had been going well above that tolerable threshold, and he knew that he was struggling to keep himself together. The long list of things that Yarne knew he had wrong with him hadn't gotten any longer than before, but it definitely had been shuffled around in terms of which of his personal problems was causing the most strife to him. On a typical day, the worst thing he had to handle was his obsessive need to make sure that things were safe and secure, and while that had not gone away in the slightest, he was now struggling to keep his head above the choppy waters of other anxieties. This was not the kind of person he needed to be right then, but there seemed to be nothing he could to do change how he felt while he was still stuck at home.
Once again in his chair, he slumped over one of the arms and let his hands brush against the floor underneath him. "If I can't get over this, how am I going to handle literally anything going wrong later?" he asked himself, tracing shapes into the floor with his fingers. "I'm being stupid about all of this. I'm being unreasonable. I'm being…"
His voice disappeared as the word that came to mind hit his tongue, him unable to say it in regards to himself when he was already at one of his lowest points. His mother had always been right about things, he truly was hopeless in every single way, and this situation was merely proving her point. But he couldn't let that realization win and allow it to dictate how he went forward in his life, because he had too much to live for. He couldn't fail now, not when there were multiple people relying on him to actually have his life together and be the person he was meant to be.
"This isn't going to work." He sat up in the chair, bringing his feet underneath him again as he looked around the room, his eyes landing on the rabbit candles where he'd put them earlier. His mother's explanation of what they were for rang in his mind again—the largest one was meant as a symbol of the blessings the year of the rabbit provided, then each smaller one was meant for each member of the family—and knowing that, he let his gaze linger on the one that he'd hung the rabbit's foot on. It was the largest candle, its head slightly melted from the night it had been burned, and it stood in a stance up on its rear legs, front paws tucked under its chin as it looked up at something. For the first time, Yarne found himself looking at the candle and seeing past what it was meant to represent, instead seeing it for what it was: a tool that had been used to manipulate his entire life.
He was staring at the candle for a long time, his mind racing with all of the ways that his mother's insistence on following outdated traditions only she knew had altered him to his core, and he could have easily spent all day locked in a staring contest with a wax rabbit, had he not heard his phone beginning to ring from across the room. Pulling himself out of that position was hard, but it was even harder seeing that his phone had gone off because of his father sending him a message; while it wasn't as poetic as it would have been had his mother been trying to contact him, it was still a bit oddly timed. The message just asked him if he was okay and if needed anything that his parents could provide, which Yarne had plenty of responses to.
Choosing to ignore being snarky or sassy with his father, who had merely been an accomplice in his mother's manipulation of his life, Yarne instead asked about the status of the bike rebuild, making it clear that he was curious because driving a car currently wasn't something he could handle. The response didn't come immediately, meaning that Ricken was doing some checking of his own, but when he did reply it was to say that things were still in the middle of getting repaired and that it would get done as soon as possible. Not the answer Yarne wanted, but the answer he expected.
His thanks read as genuine, but he sent it with a hint of spite in his screen tapping, and with that having gone nowhere he cast his phone aside and hoped that things would somehow turn around for him soon. He needed transportation that didn't involve asking others for rides, or he'd need a new job that he could do from home in the limited space that he had access to. He needed to find a way to combat the mental demons that he was in conflict with, whether it was through outside forces or internal ones. And, most of all, he needed to figure out how to be the exact person that he was meant to be, given everything else going on around him.
Naturally none of those problems found any sort of resolution that day, but admitting that they were problems in his mind was a rather large step for Yarne, and even though he felt like he was a massive failure, he could say that he'd at least done something that day while home alone. That still didn't stop him from bursting into tears when Kjelle came home later, immediately clueing her in to something being wrong. "You did some cleaning," she remarked when she saw past her sobbing boyfriend and could see the fact that some laundry had been moved appropriately. Then she turned and saw the candles above the TV and the rabbit's foot hanging off of one of them and her face turned to a scowl. "Did you really have to tolerate your mother over here while I was gone?"
"N-no, I put those there myself," he admitted, sniffling. "It's a long story, but I'll tell you after you tell me how things went at your appointment. Did they figure out what's wrong with you or not?"
Her eyes narrowing as she glanced from side to side, Kjelle ended up shaking her head. "Nope, as far as they can tell, it was just a freak accident sort of thing. Nothing's wrong, I just need to be careful when standing up for now. I know that's not the answer you wanted to hear, but it's all I've got for you."
"It's more of an answer than I expected, honestly." That wasn't true, and Yarne knew that Kjelle knew that, but he didn't want to admit that he'd been anticipating her coming home and breaking down over everything being wrong. "I'm glad you're home and that you're okay, even if we don't know why any of this happened."
"Yeah, same." Her response was short and snappy, as she seemed to be thinking about something else entirely. Whatever was on her mind, she didn't address it until she'd gone into the bedroom and changed out of the clothes she'd gone out in, coming back into the main room and explaining that it was far too warm to have been wearing that same thing all day. As she sat herself down in the chair, Yarne getting up and moving out of her way so that she had all the space she wanted, she started staring at the candles just like he'd been doing before she'd gotten home. "They're…kind of unsettling there, don't you think? Especially with that creepy-ass rabbit foot thing hanging off the one."
"I get that, but it felt right to put them there."
She kept looking at them for a moment, then sighed and hung her head. "There were always three of them, weren't there? Everything happens in threes."
Unsure of how to respond to that, specifically because of the second statement, Yarne gave a rather noncommittal noise before walking over and picking the smallest one of the candles up off of where he'd placed it. As far as the tradition his mother had told him went, the candle he held technically represented himself, given that he was the younger one between the two of them. "There were in fact three of them this whole time. One for you, one for me, and one for—"
"She knew this was going to happen, didn't she?" Kjelle interrupted, sounding like she'd just unraveled some grand conspiracy with the conviction she spoke with, as she raised her head back up to stare over at Yarne. "It was some whole prediction or manifestation or something like that, wasn't it?"
"—what, of course not! The third one is meant to represent the blessings the year delivers. Which…" Fiddling with the one candle in his hand, Yarne couldn't bring himself to even glance in Kjelle's direction as he kept talking. "I know it seems like it's just a fancy way of predicting any babies being born that year, but there's no way Mom predicted this one. There just isn't. It wasn't possible, remember?"
"I mean, duh, of course I remember, we both lived through that whole shock." Her face scrunching, Kjelle seemed to take a moment to let the truth of the matter permeate her mind, and when she spoke again she'd moved on past her accusations. "The doctor said that the baby's fine, by the way. Completely normal in every way she could examine."
A sense of relief came over Yarne as he set the candle back down, very much aware that what he'd just held would belong to that very baby the next time the year of the rabbit rolled around, exactly like it had worked with the candles at his parents' house. "That's good to hear. Sorry that I wasn't there to hear it myself. I…I'm going to work on being better about that from here on out."
"No, it's fine, it actually worked out pretty well."
"What do you mean by that?" Immediately Yarne's good feelings washed away, as the thought that there was something that Kjelle wasn't telling him clouded his mind. "You…you didn't find anything out that you don't want me knowing, did you?"
She laughed. "Of course not, I mean it worked out in that I was able to talk to Nailah about you. She told me a lot about how you two know each other and some things about her tribe's traditions when their year comes around and all that. Things that I'd have to talk to your mom to learn about when it comes to the taguel."
"Ah, that makes sense. Did she have anything interesting to share?" Given that Nailah was from a completely different continent and had traditions that stemmed from her homeland that she probably still celebrated even in a different country, she definitely had to have had some good insight on things. But as Yarne waited to get a response, he began to understand that perhaps what Kjelle had been looking for in her answers wasn't anything interesting so much as it was informative as to how they'd gotten where they were currently.
That seemed to be the case, as he watched her mouth move from side to side as she thought about how to say what he was expecting from her. "She said that your mom's insistence on following all of the traditions despite being the last person who was immersed in that culture is honorable, but…" Kjelle paused, one of her hands moving through the air as she tried stringing more words together. "Nailah is convinced that your mom's gone too far on pushing one specific taguel tradition, and she thinks that we never should have been put into the position she tried putting us in. You know, independently of us actually getting into that exact same position."
"You're talking about the whole 'having babies in the year of the rabbit' thing, aren't you?" When she gave a tiny smirk at him, he knew that was exactly the case. "Well, we've said it before, us having one is a miracle, that goes far beyond what she wanted from us this year. I get it though, this tradition does seem a bit…strict."
"Oh, but Nailah did mention that members of her specific tribe are encouraged to start their families in the year of the dog, but they are not expected to maintain that same pattern in future years." Kjelle's hand dropped to her side, then slowly came to rest in front of her stomach, where her fingers visibly tensed up. "I mean, that's how it's going to be for us, whether your mother likes it or not, but it was nice to know that other cultures aren't as stupid about this as the taguel apparently were."
"You mean apparently are, since Mom's still a taguel, even if it's just her, and me, and Ribbon, and…well, the two we haven't gotten to meet yet." Giving a soft laugh at that statement, Yarne felt like he was learning new things about his world from a source he wouldn't have expected it from. "But okay, good to know that it isn't every culture like mine that does this stuff. Although, it does make me curious…"
He trailed off, before grabbing his phone and swiping through contacts to find one person in particular, hovering his finger over her name before pressing it and typing out a message. While he did that, Kjelle watched him, her eyes clearly searching for something to talk about now. "Who are you texting?" she asked, not wanting to make any assumptions about who it could have been. "It's not your mom, is it?"
"Nope, I'm going to see what another culture native to this area does when their favorite year comes around. You wouldn't mind if someone came over, would you?" He was still typing out his message, but he did look up from his phone to see how she was shaking her head at him, a wave of confusion sweeping across her face. "Neat, then we'll see when this can happen. I know, I know, how unusual that I'm the one asking for someone to come by, but I don't know if I can bring myself to go meet her somewhere else, and—wait, damn it, we'll have to actually clean this place up before anyone comes over, won't we?"
"I suppose you should've thought of that before you thought up your new plan," she replied with a laugh. "You're a mess like always, Yarne, but I wouldn't want it any other way."
Yarne's new plan came to fruition a few days later, after the weekend spent cleaning everything he possibly could while Kjelle helped with starting the process of getting rid of things they no longer needed so that they could make some extra space in the house. When Monday morning rolled around and both of them were faced with needing to get to work, he'd managed to pull himself together long enough to get behind the wheel of the car, then promptly had a breakdown long enough that he had to call to let his bosses know he'd be late, having to go wake Kjelle up so that she could drive him instead. It was progress, however small, and it was met with her being thankful she'd been cleared to do most of her normal activities and him being grateful that the people employing him were used to his particular brand of sudden things coming up to prevent him from being there on time (or at all). He could barely stomach the thought of losing his job over things he couldn't control like that, especially at a time where he needed it more than ever.
Tuesday morning was slightly better, if only just. He got in the car, turned it on, and made it as far as the end of the street before the hyperventilation and the panic attacks started up, prompting him to turn back around and get home just to repeat the process from the day before. "You know, maybe tomorrow you should wake me up before you leave, just in case this happens again," Kjelle said dryly once they'd both gotten into her car, Yarne still visibly frazzled from what he'd experienced. "I'm not going to tell you no if you ask me to be prepared to drive you."
"I'll…keep that in mind," he replied, feeling the slightest bit of shame about how dependent he was being on his girlfriend, who should have been the one being dependent on him. "I'd really rather just be able to drive myself, but obviously that's not happening."
"You shouldn't push yourself to do what your brain's not ready for you to do. If one of my parents was hospitalized from getting in a car crash…" She trailed off, thinking over how that statement should end to make her point meaningful. "I mean, I would manage to get past it pretty quickly I think, but I'd be apprehensive of driving places too. I'm not saying you're wrong for not feeling up to driving right now."
"Okay, but what if I am wrong for this? What then?" There was no point in continuing the argument, because Yarne was never going to accept that his way of dealing with the trauma was perfectly acceptable, and so Kjelle refused to respond and merely drove him to work exactly like he needed. She did tell him that he'd need to get his own ride home because she wasn't going to be off in time to get him, and that was when the one flaw in his plan, combined with what he currently wasn't capable of, became evident.
When she noticed him staring blankly at him before he got out of the passenger's seat of the car, Kjelle tilted her head slightly and asked, "Is something wrong now, Yarne? I drove over here as carefully as I could, I don't know if there's a damn thing I could've done different."
"Uh, no, nothing's wrong, I just think I might need to reach out to some people for rides, since there's no way I'm asking anyone here." That was true, he didn't want to be driven home by someone old enough that they could've been in school with his mother, but he wasn't sure where to start. "I'll come up with something, though, don't worry."
"I'll believe you on that," she told him, scrunching her nose and one eye as she gave him a cutesy expression that showed perhaps she didn't believe him as much. "Now get out so I can go home and sleep for a bit before I have to go to work too. I'm exhausted right now, feels like I didn't even sleep last night even though I totally did."
"Don't fall asleep on the way home, please!" Those were the last words he said to her before getting out of the car, and he wished he'd tacked on a reminder to let him know she'd made it home safe before he'd shut the door and headed toward the building. Yarne did trust that Kjelle could be safe even when she was tired, but with his currently high anxiety levels toward driving in general, he didn't feel like he wanted to trust it in the slightest.
Once he'd gotten started on his mundane work and was able to get into his rhythm, the task between working on orders on the computer became looking for someone to give him that ride home. There was no way he was going to ask his mother for it, even though he knew she could provide one with relative ease as long as she wasn't scheduled for an engagement that afternoon. His father was completely off the table, no doubt about that. There was asking the very guest he'd arranged to come over that night to swing by and pick him up first, but he didn't want to make it seem like he was using her for transportation in addition to all of the stuff he wanted to talk to her about; however, after mentally exhausting all other options, she was the one he went with.
And that was how, after a day of doing the bare minimum and yet doing more than the old ladies at desks around his, Yarne ended up getting driven home in a car so small that his knees felt like they were getting crushed into his chest when he sat in the only seat provided for him. "Sorry that it's so cramped in here, I can't exactly help it when the car's so small to begin with," Nah apologized as she looked at Yarne's precarious positioning with wide eyes. "I probably should have asked someone if I could've borrowed their car for this, but it didn't occur to me that someone as tall as you might not be comfortable in here."
"It's…fine, as long as you drive super carefully," he assured her through teeth gritted so hard that he felt like they might start breaking. He'd been in the car with Nah once before, back when she'd recently gotten her license to drive and he was still working on getting his, even though she was a full year younger than him. That was one of the times that Yarne was certain he was going to meet his death in a fiery car crash, given that Nah was so small and the car they'd been in was so big that she couldn't adequately control it. But now, with her tiny little vehicle, it seemed that the biggest problem from that day had been erased.
She still drove like she had little regard for the rules of the road, though, and by the time they'd pulled up outside the house Yarne felt like he'd expended several different lives that he shouldn't have had access to. "Remind me to never get over here that way again," Nah said as cheerfully as she could as she got out of the car, Yarne scrambling to get out so that he could stretch and catch his breath at the same time. "I didn't realize how many 'apparently' super dangerous intersections there are coming that way."
"You didn't even stop to make sure no one was coming every time," he grumbled, leaning against the car that he easily dwarfed in height. "We could have gotten hit because of that!"
Her cheerfulness not waning even slightly, Nah replied, "But we didn't get hit, because I did make sure that cars weren't coming fast enough to hit us. Do you seriously expect people to sit there and wait until both directions are completely clear?"
"Yes, actually!" He hit his hand on the top of the car, the resounding thud enough to get Nah to look up over at him with an expression of complete shock. "I'm sorry, I just don't do…well at all when there's any chance of danger. It's a problem."
"Then let me change my previous statement." Nah walked around the car and came to stand beside Yarne, still looking at him shocked. "Remind me to never get over here that way again with you as my passenger, because that wasn't that scary at all."
Yarne sputtered for several seconds, before grabbing part of his hair and tugging on it. "You're just being mean for the sake of being mean now, aren't you?" he asked her, watching as she laughed and started walking up toward the front door of the house. He started to follow, but then froze when he realized that he hadn't heard her car lock; rather than ask her to lock it, he ran back down to the car and grabbed the handle, trying to discreetly check if it was locked.
He was met with the sound of the alarm going off immediately. "Silent lock, it's a pretty neat feature we rigged on the car," Nah explained, turning the alarm off and watching Yarne come back up behind her. "Did you really feel the need to check if it was locked, though?"
"Look, I can't help it sometimes. I just…" Patting down his pockets until he found the key he had to get inside the house, Yarne forgot where he was going in explaining his need to make sure things were locked and secure at about the same time he found the single key he was carrying. Why he'd taken the key off of his keyring instead of bringing his whole keyring with him, he wasn't sure, but he was thankful that he still had the single, nondescript key in his possession as he stood there at the door to unlock it. With Nah standing beside him watching, it felt like he was under pressure to unlock the door correctly, and therefore he took a lot of extra time making sure that he wasn't breaking the key or the knob as he put it in and twisted it.
"I don't remember you ever being this bad about these kinds of things," Nah commented, breaking his focus slightly and causing him to turn the key even faster to get the door unlocked. "Like, don't get me wrong, you've always been weird about this stuff, I remember the lockers at school being locked and unlocked again and again, but it never seemed like it was this…bad."
The floor was open for Yarne to just start spilling out all of the assorted stressors and traumas that he'd experienced in recent months that had piled onto his already weakened mental state, but he didn't say anything in specific at all. "It's gotten worse, but I'm working on it," he replied, knowing that his manner of working on things was to ignore them and hope that they would get back to normal on their own. At that, he got the lock opened and he pushed the door open for Nah to enter, him following and locking the door behind them three times before going any further into the house.
He found her staring at the rabbit candle display over the TV, the unintentional eye-catch he'd created that kept getting people's attention. "My mom has a collection of candles like that, she doesn't light them almost ever, but they sit on the shelf by the stairs to the upper floor of the house." Stepping closer to the candles, Nah seemed to be doing some deep thinking about them as she continued to look at them. "I remember her lighting them once, the year I turned twelve. So I'm going to assume that she'll light them again next year."
"Sounds just like what my mom does with her candles just like mine, and what we're apparently going to be doing with those candles going forward." This felt like a perfect way to get into what Yarne had asked Nah to come over for in the first place, and he hadn't even planned for it to happen that way. "I wonder if there are any other similarities between the taguel culture and your culture."
"Manakete culture is basically taguel culture, but for dragons instead of rabbits. I'm sure that your mom has done a lot of work on figuring out all of her traditions by speaking to people familiar with the manakete culture." Nah reached out and touched the smallest of the candles with the very tip of her finger, then pulled back and started looking around elsewhere in the house. "Not saying that she's copying what the manaketes do to the letter, because I can tell you that's definitely not the case."
"That's good that she's not just passing someone else's traditions off as her own." That wasn't even a thought Yarne had ever had, but now that Nah had brought it up, it seemed surprising he hadn't once considered it to be a possibility. "But what other similarities are there, beyond the candles?"
"I don't know, I'm not the one who's familiar with taguel culture. Why don't you tell me the different things your mom does and I can tell you if they're things my mom or any of the other manaketes I know do." Bypassing the oversized chair, Nah walked all the way over to the kitchen table and sat down in the only empty seat there, the rest full of things that had been displaced during cleaning. "I'm all ears for everything you've got."
While he had no idea where to start talking, Yarne decided that it would just be best to list everything he possibly could off and hope that Nah would be able to respond accordingly. That led to him sort of going around in circles and mentioning the same thing in different ways again and again, because he hadn't thought to write down all of the different aspects to the traditions he'd experienced. Nah didn't seem to mind hearing about the foods and the blessings over and over, but when she heard the one piece of it all that was heaviest on Yarne's mind, she commanded for him to stop. "Wh-what? Did I say something wrong?"
"No, actually. All taguel were born within specific years, right? That's what you just said, so I'm taking it as fact." Nah steepled her fingers in front of her face, tapping them together as she did some mental number crunching. "As far as I'm aware, it's more or less the same for manaketes, except the manaketes aren't actively forcing themselves to be child-bearing machines like the…rabbits are." Behind her fingers, the smug smile on Nah's face showed that her choice of words there was completely intentional. "My mother only has me, only ever wanted me, and waited until she'd found the right man before she had me. Not saying that your mother rushed things or anything, of course. Or that…well, I don't think I need to remind you of what's going on in your life."
Yarne winced at the comment, leaning against the fridge in the kitchen to try and block where they'd hung one of the many different pictures they'd already acquired of a certain unborn child. "Right, okay, so manaketes do this same thing, just on a smaller scale? All of the people in your culture are born in the same set of years?"
"Pretty much. It's not perfect, I'm sure there's a ton of manaketes who don't meet that standard but were born into the culture anyway, but we're a pretty big group that has existed for a long time. Kind of different than the taguel, where it's literally your mom and her offspring that are carrying the name." Nah paused, dropping her fingers so that they weren't obscuring quite as much of her face. "Also, it's different in that my mom isn't hounding me about having kids starting next year. She's fine if I wait another twelve years for that. None of the breathing down my neck that you clearly had to experience. She hasn't even tried to convince me to do anything by using my full name, that shows you how little she cares."
Seeing as he'd felt the pressure of continuing on the family bloodline as soon as the year of the rabbit had started, Yarne found himself a bit jealous of Nah in that regard. "That's really nice of her to not be pressuring you, but like you said, what the manaketes have going on is a lot different than what us taguel are going through. There's a lot more of you."
"Exactly. But, on that note, well, one of those notes, how are baby-related things going for you guys? I've noticed a distinct lack of baby anything here, and that's kind of surprising to me." Now Nah was looking around the room again, her eyes glossing over every exposed surface just to see if she wasn't making incorrect assumptions. "I would've figured that you guys would've been on top of that already."
"It's a work in progress," Yarne answered, knowing that a big part of why they hadn't done anything was the lack of space they had for storing things, but also that neither of them quite knew where to start on getting stuff to begin with. "There's a few things hidden in our bedroom, but that's really all we've gotten so far."
"Sounds like you're going to need some friends to help you out. Fortunately for you, I'm pretty sure that you've got the kind of friends who will help you out on this one." Nah looked at Yarne with a smile. "But you have to promise me something right now if you want me to get all that organized for you. You can't tell a word of what I'm planning to Kjelle."
"Oh, I'm not great at lying, I'm sure you know that."
Raising her eyebrows, Nah replied, "No one said a thing about needing to lie. Just don't tell her that I'm planning something. It's as easy as that."
"As…long as it doesn't come up in conversation, I think I can make that happen." Yarne knew that the second he was asked about buying things or starting to get things ready for the baby, he was going to spill that secret, but he was going to try his best to keep it under wraps. "I'm not even going to ask you for details about what you're planning, I'll just trust that you make it happen."
"Wise choice. I'll let you know when it's all ready for you guys, but it'll probably be a couple months from now." Nah paused, her eyes catching the glimpse of what Yarne was standing in front of. "That back there the most recent picture you've gotten?"
"Huh? Oh, uh, pretty much." He was looking over his shoulder at the particular picture he hadn't done a great job of hiding. "It's from the most recent normal appointment, I think? We're not supposed to get more for like a month, but every time Kjelle goes in she seems to come back with more to share."
"Could you step out of the way so I can see it better?" There was curiosity in Nah's voice as she began to lean forward to get a closer glimpse, but Yarne helped her out by moving to the side, taking it off the fridge, and handing it to her so she could see it up close. "Wow, this feels pretty legit, not going to lie. How are you handling knowing that you're responsible for this thing right here?"
While he was inwardly groaning at this being how the conversation had gone, Yarne didn't want to make it clear to his friend that he was still somewhat struggling with the concept of having a kid. "It gets realer almost every day, and since I was fairly content with never getting to have a child…it's a pretty interesting experience. But I don't think I'm the one you really should be asking about that."
"Trust me, when she gets here I'm hitting her with all the questions, I just wanted to know about your perspective of things." Nah's eyes were glued to the little picture, one of her fingers tracing over some of the information written on the edges. "So, when the time comes, are you guys planning on finding out what they are, or are you leaving that to be a surprise? Knowing you, I think you'd prefer finding out, but maybe you'll try to have something come as a shock to you."
Freezing up as he realized he hadn't even thought about the possibility of finding out ahead of time, Yarne had to take a moment to collect his thoughts before he said anything. "I'll just go along with whatever Kjelle wants on this one, I think? Surprises do worry me sometimes, but I think if this one's a surprise I'll manage."
"Did you mom find out with your sister or this new kid?" Still not even looking at Yarne, it seemed that Nah had quite the collection of questions stored in her mind for this exact scenario. "Maybe it's just something you inherited from her, wanting to be surprised about what sorts of baby things to have around."
"I definitely remember being told about having a baby sister ahead of time before Ribbon was born," Yarne recalled, thinking back to when he was younger and how excited he'd been to get to meet Ribbon. "Mom hasn't said a thing about this one, though, but I don't actually know if she knows."
That was when Nah's face raised from where she was looking, a sly grin appearing on her lips. "Ah, then I definitely won't tell you that your mom told my mom what she's having."
"Your mom knows? Why does she know?" Confusion evident in the tone he took, Yarne was just about to reach for his phone to text his mother to see if she could explain herself, but the way Nah shook her head told him to rethink that. "Okay, but don't tell me what they are, just tell me why your mom knows."
"Because she went over there after your dad's whole car accident thing and your mom told her, it's not some huge conspiracy. She was curious, she might've brought treats, your mom was willing to talk about it because of that. She also mentioned how…lucky? she was to be having that child, so there's that too." Nah shrugged, going back to looking at the sonogram in her hand. "I think you should address it with her next time you see her."
The lucky comment didn't faze Yarne, given some of the other comments he'd heard his mother make over the past several months. "I'll keep it in mind," he said, knowing that he was going to wait to talk to her about it for the next time he was forced to spend time with her. "Thanks for letting me know about this, Nah. Means a lot."
"Just like it means a lot for you to let me be in charge of getting you guys ready for your baby, I figure I should share what I know about the other baby in your life." There was a slight pause, before Nah's head shot up once again. "Hold on, have you ever thought about how weird that is, you having a kid at the same time as your mother?"
He slumped down against the fridge a little. "Trust me, it's all I can think about sometimes, and I'd really rather not think about it more than I have to."
As if right on cue to break up the awkward direction things were starting to go in, they heard the door unlock and open, the sound of music hitting them before footsteps coming inside did. "I'm guessing that small little car out there is yours, Nah?" Kjelle called into the house as she fumbled to get her music turned off. "How in the world did you manage to get Yarne here in that?"
"I'll go talk to her, if you'd like to take a moment to collect yourself," Nah whispered toward Yarne, handing him back the picture as she got out of the chair and went across the room to go speak with the newcomer. Yarne did take the picture and hang it once more in its rightful spot, looking at it with the same fearfulness he always did. So much in his life was changing because of that little blur right there, and while he was happy about it, there were a lot of other problems he had with the whole situation.
He knew he'd been offered a moment to collect himself, but right as he'd started to take in a deep breath he heard Nah screaming in excitement, followed by the sound of Kjelle definitely amused by something, and he had to go investigate. As he came around the corner he heard the front door slam closed, which he soon saw was because Kjelle had pushed herself up against it, her arms outstretched to keep Nah away from her, both of them laughing as Nah's arms flailed wildly out in front of her. "What are you two doing?" he asked over the sounds of their laughing. "Do you realize how funny it looks to see two short women trying to play keep-away like that?"
"She's trying to touch me, get in here and stop her!" Kjelle's answer was equal parts laughing and serious, and Yarne didn't want to disregard the half that meant business, so he came over and promptly pulled Nah back a few steps, her huffing as she was forcibly moved. "Look, in the past I know I've been fine with people touching my muscles but…"
"I literally just saw you, like, two weeks ago, wasn't it?" Squirming and trying to break free of Yarne's strong grasp, Nah was still reaching ahead of her, attempting to even get a fingertip on Kjelle's body. "I remember that you looked different that night, but you definitely didn't look like this."
"It's not that big of a deal, and if you lay a hand on me right now I'll gladly break your fingers one at a time." The seriousness was beginning to overtake the amusement in Kjelle's voice, to the point that Nah stopped trying to reach out rather abruptly. "I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but there's nothing to feel that you couldn't feel elsewhere. Maybe in the future when there's actually something going on, I'll let you touch. Once. Got that, Dinah?"
"Hey, once is better than never at all." Not even flinching at her proper name being used, Nah gave an understanding nod, before asking to be released from where she was being held, a request that was only granted after she promised she wouldn't go in for another attempt. After Yarne lifted his hands and took a step back, Nah looked at Kjelle and explained, "Sorry that I lost my cool there, I saw that you're starting to look a little rounder there and wanted to get a feel for myself."
The facial journey that Kjelle went on during the explanation spoke for itself, as she was thinking about how to take that information. "Again, sorry to burst your bubble, but this is mostly thanks to the fact that I'm wearing tight clothes due to work and also that I did actually eat lunch today. I'd really go so far as to say this is mostly food and not really much baby, but…you know, I guess it is a little bit baby."
Trying to tune out what was being discussed because he wasn't mentally prepared for hearing that conversation, Yarne found himself fixated on how the door hadn't been locked yet, and while the ladies kept talking, he was staring at the unlocked lock, wondering how easily he could sneak in and lock it. That came to an end when Kjelle realized where he was focused and reached over to lock the door, only once but enough to make him know that it wasn't going to come open with her standing there. "Heh, thanks for that," he said, feeling sheepish that he'd been noticed in that way. "It was going to bother me."
"I think it already was bothering you, since I've been trying to ask you something for a minute now and you haven't been listening." He looked at Kjelle's face and saw how serious she seemed about that, and before he could apologize for his one-track mind, she asked her question again. "What I was trying to know was if you'd gotten what you were looking for out of Nah being here, or if we're going to be here all night trying to figure that stuff out. She wasn't sure if you're satisfied with what you got or not."
Blinking, Yarne had to actively try recalling what all he'd wanted from Nah being in their house, and when he couldn't remember anything past what he knew they'd discussed, he shrugged. "I'd say I'm satisfied with it, it's been a great time talking to her today. Why do you ask?"
"Because I'm hungry and want to invite her out to dinner, but if we need to be here so you can talk about all your taguel stuff with her, I don't want to interrupt that." The bluntness was appreciated, and even elicited a laugh from Yarne as he looked at the absolutely stone-cold serious look Kjelle still wore. "Look, just tell me if we can go eat or not. I'll even give you as long as it takes for me to change to make your decision."
With that, she was walking into the bedroom and closing the door behind her, leaving Yarne to glance over at Nah. "If I come up with anything else to talk to you about manakete celebrations of the year of the dragon, I can just text you them, right?" he asked, watching Nah nod as a response. "Neat. So then I think we can just get on with dinner, because I think if we tried talking more about things tonight, we'd just irritate Kjelle more than you already did by trying to touch her."
"I'm holding her to that 'once' promise, by the way," Nah replied, her little smug smile showing Yarne that she meant business. "It's the only payment I think I'll need for…that thing that I told you I was going to do. Well, that and dinner tonight, but I'm using dinner tonight as a way to gauge what I want to do for you guys."
"You're making the most of what you're being given, aren't you?"
"What can I say, it's a good way to get things done for friends. Now remember, this is hush-hush, you're not making it obvious I'm gathering information, got it?" The way that Nah seemed to mean business told Yarne that it was in his best interest to keep neutral on the matter, and he assured her that he wouldn't ruin a thing. He wasn't actually sure what Nah was planning on doing, but if it was as big of a secret as she was making it out to be, then he knew he needed to do his part as well.
Had the day where Nah came over been even a week later, there would have been a much different scene by the front door, because it seemed that everything changed overnight a few nights after and only kept changing. In fact, exactly a week after that incident, when Kjelle came home from work that night, Yarne had a hard time wrapping his head around the fact that her trying to hide by getting against the door had only been a week before.
"Stop staring at me, I'm aware how bad it looks," she grumbled when she saw where his eyes were firmly fixed. "I'm already getting tired of being asked if I'm sure there's only one in there, which is one hundred percent your fault."
Grimacing at where the blame was being placed, Yarne did lift his eyes off of his girlfriend's stomach to meet her unimpressed and annoyed gaze. "Weren't you the one saying that me being tall wouldn't have any impact on the size of the baby?" he asked, fairly confident that they had indeed had that conversation a while back. "And now you're going back on that."
"Well, yeah, it's super obvious that the doctor was lying about it to make me not freak out or something." Rolling her eyes, Kjelle sighed as she headed for the bedroom to change out of her work clothes. "I'm just saying, it's completely stupid that in a week we've gone from me being able to pass it off as eating a big meal to…this. Absolutely stupid."
When she slammed the bedroom door so that Yarne wouldn't follow her inside, he felt that some of the happiness that finding out they were having a baby had worn off in a big way, and now it was beginning to become a problem. But then, as he waited on the outside of the room to respect her space, he heard her turning on music inside to drown out anything he could possibly say to her—and when he heard that the song she'd intentionally chosen was one specifically about how much a child was wanted, he knew that she was working through her changes the best way she could. "You really do want them," he said under his breath, leaning his head against the door so that he could hear her music a bit better. "And you love them even if you don't love what they're doing to you, I get it."
He stayed there as long as the song was playing, and when it ended the door opened and he nearly fell forward from the sudden change, but managed to stay upright and play it off as merely losing his balance. "I know you were listening," Kjelle said quietly, standing on the other side of the door in the same clothes she'd bought for going out to dinner that night to say goodbye to Lucina and Gerome, her body filling them out even more than it had the first time she'd worn them. "I'm struggling with these changes, Yarne, I really am. One moment I'm excited and the next I'm worried and it just goes back and forth and I don't know how much I'll be able to take."
"I'd say I understand, but I don't," he replied, feeling guilty that he couldn't relate to her in any way. "Sometimes I still think about how all of this has been a surprise from the start, and how none of it was planned for, and I…yeah. I can't wrap my head around this miracle most days, and I'm just watching it."
"They told me it was useless to want this," she continued, one of her hands grabbing at her stomach while the other was entangled in the front of her hair. "They said there's no way it'd happen, it just wasn't possible, and I believed them. I lost all hope that I'd ever have a child, and yet, here we are. I've loved them for all of my life, even when I was sure I'd never have them, and now that I have them…it's complicated." Looking down at herself, Kjelle seemed to crack a smile, as sad as it was. "All of what I worked for to fill the void of never needing my body to do this, gone, replaced with something I thought I'd never have. I hate what I've lost, but I really, truly love what I've gotten in return."
"That doesn't sound all that genuine." Yarne was watching her, seeing the way that she was looking so mindful and wistful. "I mean, you were just complaining about how stupid this was, why did that change?"
"The part that's stupid is how fast things seem to be happening, not that they're happening to begin with." Shaking her head as she let go of her hair and looked up at Yarne with those sad eyes, Kjelle's smile grew just a bit bigger. "It's really…an experience I'd never imagined I'd get to have, and it's honestly one of the most interesting things I've ever done. Plus, we're not even close to done yet, and that excites and scares me. Mostly excites, but the fact that I'm already, well, looking like this is a bit scary."
Without thinking too much about what he was going to do, Yarne came over and picked Kjelle right up off the floor, finding that she was just as easy to lift as she'd always been, even with his less-than-built muscles. "I don't think it's anything to be worried about, unless your doctor says it is. What did she say last time you saw her?"
"That everything is perfectly normal right now and there's no reason to be concerned. But…see? I'm doing it again!" In his arms, Kjelle laughed and rested her head against Yarne's shoulder. "Even talking to you about it, I can't decide if I want to be happy or upset about myself right now. It's honestly kind of pissing me off that I can't make up my mind."
"Whoa there, let's not get mad about things you can't control. I'm sure most women have this same exact struggle, just in different ways." Her forehead was right within his reach, and he gently kissed it a couple of times before setting her back on the floor, finding that his back ached slightly after having been holding her. "If you're worried, just bring it up with your doctor next time, but I'm sure she's going to say everything's just fine."
It was a wonderfully positive mindset to be sharing, but the words were falling on deaf ears as Kjelle felt powerless in her ability to stop the negative voices telling her that things were wrong, especially as they only seemed to get more pronounced over time. A little over a week later came the family dinner night, which marked the second time that they'd seen Yarne's parents since the accident had happened, but more importantly (somehow), it was the first time they'd seen them since it had become physically obvious that Kjelle was pregnant, and they both were aware that it was going to be difficult to handle that around his parents. "I don't think they'll make a big deal of it," Yarne said, hopeful in his words, "and if they do, I think Mom will back down if you start getting loud about it."
"Look, as long as none of them try touching me, I'm fine with whatever they come up with. I have all of the answers I need written down on my phone, I have ideas for how to respond if any of them try to start things, I'm ready for this." Taking in a deep breath and exhaling it confidently, Kjelle looked at Yarne with a reassuring smile. "I've been spending a lot of time mentally preparing myself for this, if you can't tell."
He could hear in her voice that her confidence was hanging on by a thread, silent cries for help all too evident, but he didn't want to knock her down and ruin what she was working on. "I can definitely tell, and I'm happy that you're ready for this, because I'm super not ready at all. Mom's going to do her thing like always and I'm just…not ready for that, really."
Kjelle's eyes crinkled slightly as she kept looking at Yarne, her smile only getting bigger. "Then you've got to fake it until you make it, because there's no getting out of this one."
They had the whole drive over to the house to finalize their game plans, although as he sat in the passenger's seat Yarne wasn't doing much in the way of thinking of what was to come. He was more occupied with thinking about the woman sitting next to him and how her whole life had been thrown around and turned upside down, and yet she was still facing every day with the same confidence she always had. None of this was anything she'd asked for, and it certainly wasn't anything she'd really been able to prepare for, but even when she was struggling she was doing it with a good attitude about things. He so badly wanted to tell her how proud he was, but the praise felt like it would have come off as forced, which wasn't the case. So, instead of saying anything that he was thinking, he merely kept the thoughts bottled up in his mind for the duration of the ride.
Their arrival at the house was met with Ribbon running outside to greet them, her arms flailing over her head as she waved them down. The arm that had been torn up with glass looked fairly healed overall, although some of the deeper cuts around her upper arm did remain as pale scars that stood out against her darker skin, something that Yarne noticed almost immediately upon seeing his sister. "You guys, you're here and Mom's ready for you to be here!" she yelled, watching as her brother got out of the car first, him standing and motioning for her to come nearer. "Did you bring something for me to carry in this time?"
"No, but get over here," he told her, pointing to the ground right in front of him, where she bounded with long, bouncy steps—she'd clearly gotten taller in the last month, which came as a surprise to Yarne, as he'd gotten so used to his sister being small that when she stood next to him and her head was nearly halfway up his chest, he was taken aback. "Gods, Ribbon, what are they feeding you? You're growing so fast!"
"Mom says that it's me making sure I'm as big as I'm gonna get before I meet the baby," Ribbon replied with a huge grin, "so I'm doing my best to get as tall as I can before then! Do you think I'm gonna get to be as tall as you?"
"Probably not, but we'll have to see." Yarne wrapped his sister in his arms, giving her the biggest hug he could manage, while Kjelle came around the car to meet them both, making a big deal about audibly locking the car several times just to appease her boyfriend. When he let go of the younger girl after that, Ribbon was first amused by how much closer in height she was to the grown woman next to them, not much shorter than her at all, then she noticed something about her that had her hands immediately reaching somewhere they shouldn't have been. Cue Yarne screeching and grabbing her into another hug, which she seemed shocked by. "H-hey, don't just touch people without permission!"
"You really don't want me breaking your fingers on both hands, do you?" Kjelle asked sweetly, looking at Ribbon with a fire in her eyes similar to the one she'd had the last time someone had tried touching her. "No one's allowed to even think about trying to touch me unless they ask, and even then I'm not allowing it, so don't even bother."
"But that's my…that's the…uh, Yarne, what's your baby going to be to me?" Her voice was small, now that she recognized that she had almost gotten herself in trouble, but Ribbon didn't squirm even a little while being held by her brother there outside the house. "Or what am I going to be to your baby, if you know that one too."
He hesitated on answering, not actually sure how to answer the first question and not wanting to answer the second without the first. "I mean, we don't know what they are, but they'll be your niece or nephew, and you'll be their aunt," he finally said, hoping that he hadn't just opened an entirely separate can of worms on that one. "Even still, Kjelle doesn't want anyone touching her and you're going to respect that. Don't respect her, and you're going to be the one explaining to Mom and Dad why your fingers are all snapped."
"I don't want to lose my fingers! I promise I won't try touching them again!" Ribbon's voice was loud, easily carrying down the street and into neighbors' houses if they were paying attention, and so Yarne let go of his sister as to not further cause a scene and let her run back to the house, returning to motioning for them to get up there with her.
"That's promising that we started out like that," Kjelle muttered, looking up at Yarne with an annoyed expression. "At least you're able to talk some sense into your sister, but if she's acting like that, I can only wonder what your mom's going to be like. They do act similarly about a lot of things."
Although he didn't say it right then, Yarne was also wondering the same thing, to the point that during their walk up to the house all he could think about was how quickly things could go sour for them when they went inside. If Panne so felt like it, she could have chosen to do the exact same thing Ribbon tried, and there was no way that Yarne was going to be able to restrain his mother quite so easily. Not even considering the fact that she was his mother, because that was already a difficult thing to get past when justifying using restraint, but just thinking about how she'd been the last time he'd seen her. When they got to the doorway, Ribbon standing in between them and the inside, Yarne looked at his sister and as calmly as he could, asked her, "Is Mom really ready for us, or were you lying?"
"She's really ready for you, I promise! She told me to keep watch from the window so that when you got here, I could greet you right away!" The look on Ribbon's face was one of complete earnestness and Yarne couldn't bring himself to doubt what she was saying, so he kindly asked her to step aside so they could come in. She did it with enthusiasm, running into the house screaming that they were there, which brought further doubt to Yarne's mind about how ready his mother actually was.
"I wouldn't put it past your sister to have lied about all of that." Kjelle's stance on the matter mirrored Yarne's own, and as they came inside with her taking the lead and him following to lock the door behind them, there were no footsteps or even voices to greet them on entry. It wasn't until Yarne had locked the door, checked it a few times, and decided it was secured that he heard what sounded like anyone coming closer to them. Based entirely on the sound of the steps, it was Ricken who was coming to greet them, so when he came around from the kitchen and it was him and Ribbon, it came as a surprise.
"Where's Mom?" Yarne asked, not wanting to hold back any punches and get right to the meat of the evening. "Ribbon, you told me she's ready for us."
"She is ready," the girl snapped in return, pouting as she jabbed a finger into her father's shoulder. "Dad can tell you all about that, since you probably haven't heard."
Those words immediately brought a chill to Yarne's heart, as he looked to his father for clarification. "Er, yeah, there's been a bit of a…change of plans, starting earlier today, but since you were already coming over here we didn't want to cancel things and—" He cut himself off with a very weary sigh that folded into a laugh. "—everything's going to be fine, though, don't think that it's all going horribly wrong. I'll leave elaborating on that to your mother, though."
Before Yarne had a chance to say anything at all, his eyes starting to brim with tears, Kjelle grabbed his hand and squeezed it tightly. "We'll be looking forward to the explanation, then. As long as there's no fearmongering or being overdramatic about things, I think hearing it from her will be the best way to handle this."
"Right, well, she's at the table right now if you'd like to go sit down with her while Ribbon and I finish with making dinner." Ricken motioned for the younger girl to follow him, and together they headed back to the kitchen, while the other two stayed near the front door for a moment, giving Yarne the chance to collect himself a bit before they followed as well.
Exactly as they'd been told, Panne was at the table in the dining room, chairs rearranged so that she had the one she was sitting in as well as one next to her that she had her legs propped up in. "Would you look at that, you did show up after all," she remarked upon seeing her son come inside, before her eyes snapped right to Kjelle. "And you, you're here as well. Tell me, how are things going with our littlest taguel?"
"Please don't refer to them that way," Kjelle replied, her voice completely flat as she spoke. "And they're fine, which I'm going to guess isn't the same answer you'd give if we asked you about yours."
"I thought I'd told Ricken to say everything's fine." Grumbling something under her breath, Panne waved a hand at the two open chairs closest to her, almost like she was telling them to sit down; when they picked their seats and took them, she looked between them, before motioning for them to switch so that Yarne was the one right next to her, a huge red flag that something was amiss. "This is not a conversation I want to be having with the two of you, but it is one that has to happen nonetheless."
The waterworks already kicking into high gear, Yarne reached over to try and offer a hand to his mother, but she refused to accept it. "There are so, so many things you could be wanting to talk to us about," he whimpered, still trying to get his mother to take his hand and still getting rejected. "Please, it's not anything bad about the baby, is it?"
"If I answer that in a simple way, you won't be getting the whole story." Those words alone made Yarne's crying kick in even harder, and Kjelle next to him looked uncomfortable and worried about what they were about to hear. Seeing their reactions without knowing anything, Panne sighed deeply, closing her eyes and putting a palm to her forehead, which she seemed to hold tightly. "They'd previously found signs of abnormalities that, thank everything, aren't nearly as severe as they'd anticipated, but today when we were doing our routine visit they noticed that…" She trailed off, opening her eyes and seeing the two both watching her with teary eyes, one far more extreme than the other. "Yarne, I never told you that you're getting another sister, did I?"
"Why are you telling me that now?" he cried, choking out the words. "Now you're going to tell me she's dying and I'm going to have to live with knowing that!"
"Please, don't yell, she's not dying and I would never be so heartless as to drop that on you in this way. She is, however, in extreme distress and they are concerned that she'll need to be delivered much, much earlier than she should be." Pausing, Panne closed her eyes once more and curled down a little, so that her head was much closer to the top of her stomach. While she was curling herself up, she was taking in deep breaths with long exhales, gearing herself up for what else she needed to say. "Right now we are hopeful that by being on strict rest orders, this problem will resolve itself, because the moment they put me in a hospital things will get worse for everyone. Which, this does mean that effective earlier today, chairs and bed are where I'll be spending almost all of my time, unless I'm going in for an appointment in which case I am allowed to leave for longer than a few minutes."
As she uncurled herself, Yarne seemed to have rendered himself incapable of saying anything more than sputters, and Kjelle was trying her best to come up with something she could say in the moment. "I…really hope you're not saying this to try and scare me," she finally spat out, shrinking back into her seat a little. "I've already been through hell when it came to finding out I was pregnant, I don't need you making it worse by trying to tell me that things still can get ugly."
"My intentions here were never to make you scared for what could happen, they are merely to let you know what's going on in my particular case." While she tried to put on a smile, the exhaustion and worry in Panne's face became far more evident than it had ever been, which naturally made her son become more of a wreck. "I intend on being fully transparent with what is happening, given that this child is going to be Yarne's younger sister and the aunt of the baby you're carrying."
His whole face scrunching at those words, Yarne managed to garble something that sounded like he didn't like hearing that, which Kjelle reacted to by giving him a side-eye and then shaking her head. "I get it, you want us to be aware of what's going on, but you're doing it in a way that's so dramatic and so over-the-top that it feels like you're not being honest. Sorry, that's just how I'm taking it."
"Not being honest, hm?" Panne repeated, her head turning so that she wasn't facing the pair any longer. "Perhaps I am leaving out a few details, but those are mere speculation at this point. Nothing is certain, other than that right now, my little fighter is right where she needs to be, and I will keep battling to keep her there, no matter how many sacrifices I make."
Needless to say, dinner that night was a completely somber affair, to the point that Yarne didn't speak once to anyone other than to thank his dad and sister for the meal when they announced it was served. His heart was aching, knowing that he hadn't ever really been thrilled with the idea of being an older brother to another child, but now that something could very well be wrong with the kid, he wanted to protect her with all he could. But that was conflicting with his need to protect his own child, and he felt like he was beginning to be emotionally torn between his mother and his girlfriend and being there for both of them.
For being a year of blessings, the world seemed to be very content with throwing problem after problem at them, and he was looking forward to when he could bid the year of the rabbit a farewell for the next twelve years.
A/N: this was supposed to be posted two weeks ago but ffn was a bitch to me so I said fuck it, you can wait until I drop the bonus update. and then ffn decided that I can't upload the next chapter's doc so that was fun, but we'll roll with it.
