Chapter 82
This Life & Beyond

It was always the very worst way to wake up, he'd decided, when he didn't even know he'd fallen asleep. He would open his eyes, and everything would basically look the same as before, but there would be a definite sense like time had passed, and he couldn't remember it, like he'd simply stepped over the whole thing. Of course, now with two small boys in the house, and so much more to do with them and without them…

For instance, on this day. Lucas had been studying, looking back through his notes, and all the while he'd been looking after Elliott. Pappy Joe had convinced Maya to go and have a nap, letting 'the reserve' come into action to look after Noah, so Lucas had his brother. He sat on the living room couch, keeping a constant eye on his son as he sat on the floor and played with one of his toys, or stood up and looked around, or took some wobbly steps and made himself laugh with next to nothing.

It was already hard enough not to feel his attention pulled to his happy, curious boy on most days, but exhausted as he was, the words on the page in front of him, even written in his own hand, felt like gibberish to Lucas. This only helped to make Elliott that much more compelling. Whenever he'd realize this, Lucas would let out a breath, try to rub sleep from his face, blink a few times, resettle, start again, fresh.

He didn't exactly remember moving to sit on the floor, but suddenly that was where he was, sitting with his back against the couch, and… maybe he remembered? Vaguely? He was here, and Elliott sat on top of his legs, stretched out before him, and was kept there in the basket of his father's joined hands. Lucas was still trying to make sense of this displacement when he heard…

"Da? Dada? Da?"

He blinked, looking down to find Elliott staring up at him. He looked so much like the both of them, and right then he felt like such an extension of him but also like an echo of Maya, blooming from those blue eyes.

"Did you say…" Lucas felt a smile tug at the corners of his lips, lifting the boy into his arms. This seemed to be exactly what Elliott had wanted him to do. "Elliott, hey…" he laughed in tired disbelief. "Did I hear you right or is your dad finally starting to lose his mind? Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised by now," he sighed, rubbing at his eyes. When he let his hand down, it might have been that the boy of near on a year saw this like one half-hearted game of peekaboo, and upon seeing his father's face reappear, he could only react with renewed excitement.

"Dada!" he pointed, and Lucas just started to laugh, hugging him close and letting his mind forget how tired he was, just for this moment, that small word feeling like a boost in his heart.

Lucas stood up and carried the boy with him, heading up the stairs. Peering into their room, he could see Maya was asleep. He wasn't going to wake her, not even for this. Turning around, there was no one in the nursery, so he continued on down the hall until he reached the third bedroom, Pappy Joe's room. There he found his grandfather, watching some old movie on the television on his dresser, the volume kept very low. He sat on his recliner, with Noah against his chest, the blanket over the baby as he appeared to sleep as well. Pappy Joe confirmed this as he held a finger to his lips, urging for quiet. This might be easier said than done with Elliott there, too small to grasp that his mother and baby brother were sleeping nearby, but Lucas did his best to keep everything working in their favor.

"Time for a swap?" Pappy Joe asked, with a smile that suggested he could do with keeping hold of the baby a while longer, though at the same time felt pulled to his other great grandson, his original television buddy.

"He said it, Pappy Joe," Lucas whispered. "He said… d-a-d-a," he spelled after a brief hesitation, feeling that if he said the word it would compel Elliott to say it again, loudly. His grandfather gave the quiet version of his great laugh.

"Just knocks you out, doesn't it? With your father, never got more than a 'Da' out of him, and then suddenly it was Daddy, practically overnight," he went on with this laugh. When he grew quiet again, it felt as though the tale was continuing in his head, and Lucas felt a pinch as he knew he'd be thinking of his Annabeth, and when she had first spoken the illuminating word. With his own young son in his arms, it only got to be that more and more the thought of this aunt he'd never gotten to meet, who had not been much bigger than Elliott when the sickness had carried her away… It spread through his limbs like a chill, like all his warmth had gone into his son, that it might guard him.

"Here, yeah, let's swap," he approached his grandfather, putting Elliott on his feet in front of him. Once Lucas had Noah, Pappy Joe reached down and pulled the older boy on to his knee, with a renewed energy as Elliott reacted with matching delight to be with him again.

"Shut the door on your way, will you? Don't want to wake her," he nodded in the direction of the other room. "How's the studying?"

"It's going," was all Lucas could say.

Carrying the sleeping babe on down the hall, he reflected on the fact that he'd been in their lives for a little over a week already. Was it the natural breakneck speed of time going by, playing tricks on them? Probably, but mostly it felt like this was just the sleeplessness playing tricks on them. The days just had a way of bleeding into one another, with pockets of sleep mixed in varying sizes and at varying intervals with the times when they'd be awake.

Even though there were three of them to look after these two little boys, even though one of them was at the point where he could be generally counted on to sleep his nights, the baby came along like an element of chaos. For one thing, Maya and Lucas didn't want Pappy Joe to get up at night unless it really became necessary. And then there were the boys themselves, acting like triggers to one another. If Noah woke up crying, it was almost guaranteed this would wake Elliott up, too, and make him cry, forcing not just one but both parents to get up, each seeing to one of the boys. Then, sometimes, it would be just the one crying, and they'd think, just a moment that it would stay that way, but whoever was still in bed would feel almost primed, waiting for that second call, which was almost worse. Then, they'd let their guard down and it would all be for nothing, as the other boy would get started. When they'd just had Elliott, they wouldn't call on Pappy Joe more than once, maybe twice a week in those early months, but now… It had been nine days, and they'd called on him twice, because they were so worn out.

And even as this was all happening, Lucas had started his finals. He'd had two so far, his classmates Kat and Wilson picking him up and dropping him off both days. He would sleep the whole way to and from the university, not even meaning to do it but then he'd be lulled into dreams, like a baby himself. They'd take him up there hours before each test, the better to put in one more review session in. They had been through all this with their daughter, of course, though they sympathized especially for it all happening right at the start of finals. Lucas didn't know that he would have made it through those tests without the pair of them. He didn't know if he'd given a hundred percent of his very best, but he felt confident enough that he would have passed and done well. Time would tell if he'd been right.

Meanwhile, Maya would be home with the boys, and Pappy Joe, and her daily visitors, always. This went from the grandparents to the young aunts and uncles. The Hart kids had been out of school since Kermit's passing, the remainder of their years being pushed off to late summer, at home, before they were sent back in again as September would roll around, which meant that they were very capable of dropping in. Cara continued to be a daily drop-in, more often than not accompanied by Eliza, or Sam, or both. Over the weekend, it had been the Cassidy kids, too, Dora especially. And their friends would be dropping in whenever they could, especially Nadine and Zay, but also the parent group. So, Lucas never worried that Maya would have too much on her hands at once, though it didn't mean he didn't struggle for leaving them for hours on end. He'd felt something like it last time, with Elliott, but now…

Now it was Elliott, and Noah, and the third little creature left to claim his wife's attention… her grief, her loss.

The first few days after the birth had almost made it so she had no time to feel any of that. They were too busy adjusting to the introduction of Noah into their daily lives and daily routines. Feedings, and diapers, and lullabies, that was the extent of their days, on the whole, with the occasional bit of studying for him, and sleep… when they could. They weren't so out of their depths though, especially now that they'd done this before, that they couldn't find their footing in time. And they'd done that, within days. It didn't mean they were suddenly bursting with energy or that everyone did everything when they were supposed to, the way they were supposed to. But the structure was taking hold, and that was great. It was also an opening for other things to discover a way in.

Between recovering from the delivery, and being so deeply exhausted, the grief felt like it could have been made for low impact, minimal damage, but now… now it had the ability to shred everything in its path. And it was cloaked, so you never saw it coming until it was too late. Those two times they'd had to call in Pappy Joe in the night, it hadn't been either of the boys' crying that started the other going. It was their mother's. Lucas would already be there, holding her, letting her hold on as the tears worked their way through her, and then it would get Noah started, and Maya wouldn't be able to move, so Lucas would go to him, trying to bring him back down, humming the lullaby for him. And then they'd hear Elliott… Mama! Mama! That would only feel like a new blow, because she'd realize she wasn't able to get to him… So, finally, Pappy Joe would come along, heading into the nursery to get the boy stood in his crib, and little by little, they'd all work to find peace again.

After the first time it had happened, when the second had come along, they'd tried to be smarter about it, which was easier said than done. But then, once he'd seen that Maya was starting to calm down, just enough, Pappy Joe had told Lucas to give her the baby. He was still crying, too, but then he was brought to rest against his mother, and she held him, and they calmed each other. Further along, Pappy Joe passed Elliott to his father, indicating for his grandson to bring him into the bed and join the others, until they were all there, a huddle of four, and they found they could breathe again.

Lucas knew it really only got so bad at night, that the days managed to be better, but it didn't leave Maya spared by any means. He knew it was bound to just sort of bear down on her existing worries and fears, about what this would do to the boys.

As he walked past their room, meaning to shut the door in case Elliott got excited back at the other end of the hall, Lucas found Maya was awake now, sitting up and staring out the window. He took one step toward the doorway and she turned her head to look at him.

"Does he need to eat?" she asked, turning to see the time.

"No, he's still good," Lucas promised, even as he quickly checked how he was doing as far as his diaper. "He's sleeping."

"You can leave him to me, shouldn't be long anyway," Maya held out her arms. "Anyway, you should be… well, you know," she breathed out. He didn't even mind that she reminded him about his studying so often. Frankly, he was so distracted that maybe he did need those reminders. But then it would bother her that she said it all the time.

Much as he could have been fine to keep Noah with him, especially while he slept, and gone back down to his books, Lucas went up and passed the baby into the waiting arms. She was so good with him, just as she had been and continued to be with Elliott, and it pained him to think how she might have been feeling in any way inadequate as a mother. Just now, she held him with so much love, and protection, but also peace… and Noah slept on.

"Hey, guess what," Lucas quietly spoke, sitting with her on the bed. "Elliott said 'dada,'" he revealed, and she smiled, nodding to herself. He'd been getting more and more at ease with saying mama, cementing his awareness of who this was to him, but his dada had been as yet unheard, until today.

"That's great," Maya told him, even as her eyes moved to ask where he was.

"I swapped with Pappy Joe," Lucas let her know, nodding forward, toward the other end of the hall.

"Okay," she nodded back, looking to their son in her arms. He was barely a week old, so there was very little of him for them to know so far beyond what they saw with their eyes. They could see he did look very much like Elliott when he'd been a newborn, though some things felt different, and for having stared at both those little faces for so long, with so much intent and love, they were best placed to notice. Lucas kept looking at her, looking at the baby, and he didn't know what to say, which was… hardly something that happened between the two of them. But then, she'd opened the door for them. "I think… Do you have the number for that woman your mom mentioned the other day? Yesterday?" she frowned, no longer certain when the conversation had happened.

Maya hadn't been part of it, not exactly, but after his parents had gone home she'd let him figure out, without saying a word, that she'd overheard them. She'd overheard his mother expressing concerns over her condition, her mental state, and she brought up the possibility of Maya meeting with an old school friend of hers who was a therapist. Lucas hadn't exactly turned down the idea outright, but he'd felt uncertain about bringing it up with Maya, concerned that maybe she'd take it the wrong way. He didn't want to add more problems when they were already struggling to handle the ones they had.

"Uh… I don't, but I can find it for you," he told her now. She looked up at him. "I won't need to ask my mother about it," he promised, so she nodded. "What about Pappy Joe?"

"If he has to watch the boys, I won't have much of a choice. And he's going to need someone there to help him, it's too much on his own."

"Okay," Lucas breathed. She looked at him again. Now that she'd expressed this need, she worried, but she didn't have to. If anything, he was relieved. He didn't know what it would do, if it would all work out in the end, but… surely it would be a step in the right direction, wouldn't it? "When I'm done with my finals, I can drive you there," he offered. "Or I can stay here with Noah and Elliott. Whatever you need." She reached over for his hand, and he grasped hers. She couldn't say anything here, but she nodded. Yes, that would work for her.

Noah woke up again now, not crying, just awake, eyes open and staring up at the faces overhead. Seeing this, Maya and Lucas both smiled. Maya gently brushed at the baby's hair.

"I think he might get curls," she remarked, making both their smiles expand.

"He does have more hair than Elliott did back then," Lucas nodded.

"How long before your mother starts calling him her little cherub… Cupid…" Maya pondered. She held Noah's little hand now, her thumb sliding along their son's baby fingers.

"Nine months, tops," Lucas replied after a moment, and now Maya quietly laughed. February, of course.

"Go on and get your books, okay? I can quiz you." It was her way of giving her usual study reminder, but also stated that she wanted to stay with him. The feeling went both ways. So, he leaned over and briefly kissed her before heading out to do as told.

"Be right back."

TO BE CONTINUED

See you next week! - mooners