A/N: The new chapter of "We Three Hearts" is now available!

March 11th 2023

Chapter 70
We Grow So Fast

There might be a time, Lucas knew... hoped... when the day of his youngest child's birthday would not remind him so immediately of his wife's near death. But it hadn't been the case on her first birthday, and as he woke up on the morning of her second birthday, there was still that flash of panic, of memory. Now to top it off, this year, he had the very real memories of the loved one he had lost, and the effect it had on his father, to make that moment feel that much more potent. There was a fix to it though, and it might have been that much more powerful...

The moment his thoughts began to align with the waking world, he started to hear two voices, quiet in the morning stillness. Somewhere not far behind him, he could hear Maya, half humming and half singing her way through the Happy Birthday song, while all throughout, at varying degrees of confidence, he heard their Lucky girl singing through the whole song. Some of the words came off not quite right, but the intent was there. The only difference would be that Maya would sing Happy Birthday Aubrey, while Aubrey would sing...

"Happy Birthday Me, Me!"

... and every time she'd hear it, Maya's singing would be derailed by a chuckle, which in turn made the new two-year-old giggle.

"Good job, baby girl," Maya complimented her when the song was done.

It astounded him sometimes, or maybe it just impressed the hell out of him, the way Maya had coped with her own near death experience. She was the one who had almost lost her life. By all rights, she could have been the one that was more freaked out by the whole thing. It wasn't that it had left her completely indifferent, not at all. She still thought about it, and she'd mention it to Lucas when she'd find herself thinking about it. But more powerful in the aftermath was her resilience. She'd come out on the other side being very aware of how things could have gone and deciding to make sure that she would embrace the fact that they had not. That included things like this, singing with her baby girl on her birthday.

He wasn't sure who would see him first as he slowly turned to look over his shoulder. Aubrey had her arms and legs wrapped around her mother, who was supporting her as she was leaned back enough to look into her face, and just then Maya had her back turned to the bed, which meant that the first one to notice him was the birthday girl. She spotted his eyes turned on her and she brightened anew, gasping excitedly, and wriggling about until Maya didn't have to look back in order to figure out what had gotten her this way. Instead, she just turned and took the two or three steps over to the bed, already holding out the giddy girl toward the object of her excitement.

"Daddy! Hi!" Aubrey squeaked and locked on to him good as he took her and hugged her.

"Hey, hello," Lucas chuckled. She pulled back to look at him.

"Daddy, Daddy, look," Aubrey held up two of her fingers, almost sending them into his nose in the process but Lucas had foreseen this and moved out of the way before they arrived.

"Oh, hold on, hold on... One, and one, how many is that?" he wondered. Aubrey frowned, baffled, and looked at her own fingers before pointing them at him again. 'This many, obviously,' they said. "Two?" he asked, and she nodded at once. "Right, that does make sense," he pondered, the better to be treated to more laughter.

It was inescapable, the more she grew, and in the last three months especially... He didn't know that he could ever look at her anymore and not see the ways in which she reminded him of his mother. The Sullivan was strong in her, and it showed most of all when she smiled, as she did now, and as she laughed, too. He could look at her and feel that some part of his mother lived on beyond himself.

"Guess where you're going today?" Lucas asked his baby girl as she sat up and moved to touch at the details on the bed's headboard. She was fascinated by it, more and more, and she would trace her tiny fingers along the grooves and lines that had been carved in the wood by Dot Cassidy's father.

"Going to see horsies," her voice trailed with the swoops of her finger along a wooden curve.

"Sea horsies?" he intoned. "You want to go to the aquarium?" She turned to look at him now, puzzled. She seemed to review her words, like maybe he hadn't understood her.

"Horsies," she pressed. "Go see, Daddy." After a beat, she punctuated this with what he interpreted as an imitation of a horse trot.

"Oh, oh, yes, I see," he slowly nodded, and she smiled, satisfied, before returning to her tracing. "Well, we need to have breakfast first, yeah?

"Breakfast," she mumbled and nodded. Then she paused, her eyes sparking with 'oh, food!' and then she forgot all about the headboard. "Let's go, Daddy!"

"Need a ride?" he lifted her up from the bed as he stood, and she squealed before clamping on to him.

They paused on the stairs to greet Granny's picture before continuing on into the kitchen, there to find that everyone else had gathered to start on breakfast ahead of her arrival. To look at her big sisters when they saw her, Lucas could guess that they had all resisted the urge to go straight to see her in favor of sneaking down to work on the meal.

Soon, Lucas would be caught up on how this initiative had begun strictly between the five of them in house, no intervention from the adults at first. Marianne, Mackenzie, and the triplets had gone in with a plan for their baby sister's birthday breakfast, and under the leadership of big sister Annie, they had gotten started. They couldn't all do certain things, depending on their ages and the things they had been shown and allowed to do. Marianne was the only one of them who could use 'hot things' on her own and she took that responsibility very seriously, especially when her little sisters were involved.

They had first been joined by their Uncle Wyatt, who had set himself before long to assist and help Marianne watch over the smaller girls, which sped things up a bit. Then it was Maya who'd come along, and she'd been so amused and touched to see them all at work that she had submitted herself at once to follow the directions of their young chef. Now though, the guest of honor was among them, and tasks were set aside as soon as they could, the better to go and give Aubrey many wishes of a happy birthday.

There were many arguments given toward allowing Marianne and the triplets to not have to go to school and instead follow Mackenzie and Aubrey to the ranch. It was Friday, it was almost the weekend, wasn't it? And even if they were going to have a party for her the next day, today was really Aubrey's birthday, so they needed to be with her. That made a lot more sense, didn't it?

Both Lucas and Maya were all for allowing their daughters to make memories together as often as they could, and it would have been very easy to get the triplets out of preschool for sure, and maybe Marianne, too. They didn't do it, didn't want to establish this idea like they could talk themselves right out of school at any turn. The best they could do was promise to come and collect them for group day with Mackenzie and Aubrey in their white bandannas as soon as possible. Marianne joked that maybe they'd get their wish a lot sooner like they'd done on that day with the Grand, when she and her friends had been sprung from school thanks to a prank gone wrong.

Whether they would or not, they were soon left where they were meant to be, and as Maya continued on to the high school after lodging her very own attempt at following her husband and their youngest two, Lucas drove on with the girls and made for Sullivan Stables. He put on the little sisters' favorite car playlist, knowing it would have them happily singing along even as they went on and drove through the arch. They were actually so into it by then that, once Lucas pulled into the lot and stopped the minivan, he allowed the music to go on a while longer. It was Aubrey's birthday, wasn't it? If she was having a good time, then who were they to get in the way?

The singing party was cut short very suddenly by an emerging need: the birthday girl needed to go, and in hearing this, her big sister found that she did, too. Without another word needed, Lucas went ahead and collected his girls, carried them, and hurried them over to the B&B, where Cristina got one look at them and knowingly pointed them to hers and Rafa's own bathroom before volunteering to take Mackenzie up to the next available one. Off they went together, and Lucas took Aubrey in, cutting it so close but landing right on time. Aubrey showed this by letting out a sigh of relief that only felt mildly as though she was copying something she'd seen someone else do.

"You feel better, huh?" Lucas asked as she looked at him. She nodded, giving his hand a squeeze. That was kind of her thing, whenever she had to go to the bathroom somewhere that wasn't her house or her grandparents' houses, even if it was somewhere else that was familiar. She'd want whoever was with her to hold her hand all throughout, and so they would. It was a hard bet to settle whether it was cuter or funnier. "All done?"

"Yeah, yeah!"

"You sure?" he asked, recalling a similar moment or two when she definitely wasn't as done as she'd thought. Her best way to 'check' at this point was to squeeze her eyes shut and sort of strain to see if anything would come out. When she released this and nothing happened, she nodded at him again. "Alright, then, let's get you out of here, so…"

"Daddy! Look!" Aubrey gasped, pointing to the floor.

"What is it? Where?" Lucas asked, not sure what it was she'd seen, what she thought she saw.

"Fairies, Daddy! Fairies!"

"What… fairies…" he trailed off, and then he laughed.

It was both a blessing and a curse that he didn't remember every last place he'd tried to leave his mark by tracing or carving his name or even just his initials. By now, he fully expected that years and years could pass, and he would rediscover new ones he had completely forgotten about, like this one, etched on the pipes underneath the sink. Aubrey might have been best placed to spot it, at her current height, even if he had definitely been older when he'd traced his initials – LTF – with a marker. It was faded, years having done their work, but it was still entirely legible if you looked in the right spot. He'd hidden it very well.

"Yeah, I… I kind of helped them with that one," he told her as he tried to think of the best way to share the story without ruining the whole mythos of the fairy marks… or making it so that his daughters started doing as he'd done. Aubrey was looking at him with so much curiosity and wonder that he had no regrets for what he told her, or for the idea that came ready in the same breath. "They weren't sure about going under there, see? But I could do it, I was small enough. So, they gave me some magic, just enough, and… it worked."

"Wow…" Aubrey breathed. "How?" she asked.

"Well, I reached out…" he reached past her, "And I put my finger against the pipe. I closed my eyes, and I thought about it really hard, and when I could really see the mark, I let go." He did just as he told her, pressing his finger next to the old mark in demonstration. Aubrey looked back at him, then the pipe, then him again, both in awe and wondering if that was all it took, and if a new mark was supposed to have appeared. Did her father have magic in him? She grabbed hold of his hand, and of the finger he'd touched to the pipe… "If I remember, it did take a little while before the mark appeared. We can check again later, yeah? Maybe something will be there…"

Did he tell Cristina of his intention to 'vandalize' her bathroom? Of course. Sure, technically speaking, he owned the house, where she lived rent free, but he very much considered this part of the house to belong to her and Rafa, so even for something so small as three letters, he wanted to run it by her. She was surprised to learn about the existing mark on the pipe, so she had not found it either, but now to hear the story – the true one, where a seven-year-old Lucas had spied the spot and found it impossible to resist – and what he wanted to do on his baby girl's birthday… She tracked down the implements of 'fairy marking' herself.

It was in this way that, a couple of hours later, after both Aubrey and Mackenzie had followed their father on his rounds, and been excellent assistants, and also joined him to do drawings in his office while he worked, they returned to the bed and breakfast for lunch. At one point, Lucas managed to remind ever his youngest ever so casually about their being in the bathroom earlier. Just as he'd hoped, it sparked a memory in her and with a gasp of 'fairies!' she took off at a run. Not knowing what was going on but always guaranteed to wonder, Mackenzie followed right behind, right as their father hurried in to follow, too. He wasn't going to miss the big discovery, was he? That had been a whole lot of magic he still had in his finger…

He'd set in to only put one set of initials at first. AJF. Aubrey Juliet Friar. But immediately he'd predicted that her big sister would go and see it, too, and she'd wonder why her name wasn't there. So, he'd added another: MAF. Mackenzie Abigail Friar. And then he'd thought of how far this could go, one daughter after another disappointed, one granddaughter, and – because she'd crank on that pouting lip with the best of them – one wife. That made it that, by the end, the pipe would be peppered with the initials of Lucas, Maya, all seven of their daughters, and their lone granddaughter. Whether or not Aubrey would go on and remember this second birthday of hers, Lucas felt sure that, if she didn't, many of them would point to this memory and it would go and come back to her again. And that made it all worthwhile.

TO BE CONTINUED

See you tomorrow! - mooners