Chapter 21 Livia
LIVIA
If you had asked me to run a long-term projection on my life three years ago, the model would not have included a shared mortgage on an Orc-scaled townhouse, a marriage certificate, or an aggressively enforced ban on standard-sized ceramics.
The model definitely would not have included twins.
But the thing nobody tells you about being pregnant with half-Orc twins is that your centre of gravity relocates to approximately three feet in front of your actual body, and your previously reliable sense of spatial awareness becomes a complete fiction.
I find this out definitively on a Tuesday morning in March when I miscalculate the distance between my stomach and the kitchen counter and send a full mug of decaf sliding off the edge.
I watch it fall. I cannot bend fast enough to stop it.
It hits the tile and shatters with a sound like a small, disappointed gunshot.
From the bedroom, Narod's voice arrives immediately, low and alert.
"Are you hurt?"
"The mug is hurt," I call back.
A pause. Then the sound of his feet on the hardwood, which I feel before I hear because at thirty-seven weeks pregnant my entire lower body has become a seismic monitoring system.
He appears in the kitchen doorway wearing his glasses and nothing else, already scanning the floor with the intensity he normally reserves for quarterly risk projections.
"Don't move," he says. "There's ceramic."
"I'm aware. I watched it happen."
He crosses the kitchen in three steps, steering me sideways by the shoulders with extraordinary care, then crouches to collect the shards with his bare hands because apparently that is easier for him than finding a dustpan, which is a choice I have stopped commenting on.
I gaze at his head, the dark cropped hair, the broad green line of his shoulders.
My stomach shifts. One of the boys adjusts, pressing a knee or a fist or possibly an entire foot into my right side, and I press back with two fingers, a conversation we have been having for weeks.
"Done," Narod says. He straightens, deposits the ceramic fragments in the bin, washes his hands, and turns to look at me with the expression he has been wearing for approximately the last three months, which I have privately catalogued as Calculated Concern With Undertones of Absolute Terror. "You should sit."
"I've been sitting. I sat for nine hours yesterday."
"Livia."
"The doctor said movement is good."
"The doctor said moderate movement." He pulls out the tall stool at the kitchen island, the one he had delivered specifically because it lets me sit upright without the particular misery of trying to lower myself into a normal chair, and looks at it pointedly.
"Moderate. Not standing on tile floors in proximity to shatterable ceramics. "
I sit on the stool. He refills the kettle.
This is our life now, a constant, gentle negotiation between his need to wrap me in structural reinforcement and my need to maintain some functional dignity, conducted primarily through looks and counter-offers and the occasional pointed deployment of the phrase the doctor said.
He hands me a fresh mug, decaf, and stands across the island watching me with the warm amber eyes that still do something embarrassing to my pulse even now, even at thirty-seven weeks, even at seven in the morning when I am wearing his oversized shirt because nothing else fits and my hair hasn't been brushed yet.
"The nursery," I say.
"Finished."
"You finished the second shelf bracket last night?"
"At eleven forty. I also replaced the mobile batteries and cross-referenced the installation torque on the crib hardware with the manufacturer specifications." He pauses. "The manufacturer specifications were inadequate. I applied a fifteen percent safety margin."
I look at him over the rim of my mug. "You stress-tested the crib."
"I load-tested it. There is a distinction."
"Did it pass?"
"Comprehensively."
I take a sip of my decaf, which is not coffee but has become precious to me by sheer proximity to the concept, and let myself sit for a moment in the specific quality of this quiet.
His apartment, our apartment now, three months since I moved the last of my boxes and we reorganised the bookshelves to account for the combined weight of my complete collection of financial theory texts and his improbable stack of Orc cultural histories and the steadily expanding shelf of parenting books he has been cross-referencing with the focus of a man writing a doctoral thesis.
High ceilings. Furniture scaled for him, which means I currently perch on everything like a child visiting a grandparent's house.
The morning comes in gold through the east-facing windows.
My stomach tightens. Not a contraction, not yet, just the constant low-grade pressure of two small people who have absolutely run out of room and seem to be expressing their architectural frustration in real time.
"They're moving," I say.
Narod is around the island in under two seconds.
He is not subtle about this and has entirely stopped pretending otherwise.
He places one massive hand against the side of my stomach, flat and warm, with the practiced gentleness he has been refining since the first time he felt them move and went so still I thought for a moment he had stopped breathing.
His face does something quiet and enormous.
Under his palm, one of the boys pushes back.
"Ryle," he says softly. This is a game we play with no factual basis whatsoever, assigning movements to the name we've chosen for whichever twin the sonographer has been calling Twin A, the one who appears, from the available imaging, to have inherited Narod's broader bone structure and, already, his stubborn habit of taking up more space than the situation technically calls for.
The other, smaller, apparently more serene presence lower on my left side, we call Lyle, and he moves less but more deliberately, a distinction that has given both of us a disproportionate amount to discuss.
"Could be Lyle," I say.
"Lyle pushes like this." He shifts his hand, demonstrates a slow, even pressure. "Ryle pushes like he's filing a formal complaint."
I laugh, which makes both boys move, which makes Narod's entire face change into the expression I have no name for yet, the one that is too big to have a name, the one that started appearing about six months ago and has been getting progressively more visible ever since.
The contraction, when it finally arrives that evening, is not subtle about its intentions.
I am sitting on the sofa attempting to finish a quarterly reconciliation report that is due in two weeks and that I have been working on partly out of genuine professional commitment and partly because focusing on columns of numbers is the only reliable way to turn down the volume on my own anxiety.
The tightening starts low and spreads with an efficiency that makes it immediately clear this is different from the practice runs.
I put down my laptop. I look at the ceiling for four seconds.
Then I look toward the kitchen where Narod is doing something with dinner.
"Narod."
He comes to the doorway.
"Time it," I say.
He already has his phone out.
We are at the hospital by nine.
I will not recount the full duration because it is long and extremely physical and at several points I say things to Narod that I will not be apologising for because he is the reason I am in this situation and also because he takes every single one of them without flinching, holding my hand in both of his massive ones, letting me squeeze with my full strength, which he cannot feel but accepts with complete solemnity.
He stays beside me the entire time, a wall of solid green warmth that I can press against when the contractions peak, his voice low and steady at my ear, counting with me, breathing with me, occasionally providing me with statistical reassurances that I did not request but find, against all rational expectation, genuinely helpful.
Ryle arrives first, at two seventeen in the morning, and the sound he makes when he enters the world is exactly like his father's formal complaints, loud and immediate and absolutely certain of its own legitimacy.
The nurse places him on my chest and I look at him and every number I have ever calculated becomes irrelevant.
He is extraordinary. He is green, Narod's particular shade of sage, and he is enormous for a newborn in the way that makes the nurses exchange looks, and he has Narod's heavy brow and Narod's broad nose and Narod's amber eyes, already open and already furious at the available data, and he is the most perfect thing I have ever seen.
Narod makes a sound I have never heard from him before. Something below language.
"Ryle," I say, because it was always going to be Ryle, there was never a question.
Narod reaches out with one careful finger and Ryle immediately grabs it, which should not be possible at two minutes old but is completely consistent with everything we know about him already, and Narod goes completely still with the expression that still has no name.
Lyle arrives eleven minutes later. He takes his time. Of course he does. He is, from the first moment, exactly the kind of person who decides when he's ready.
He is smaller, my colouring more than Narod's, dark-haired and pink-skinned, and he has my nose and my grandmother's forehead and eyes that are amber at the centre but settle into something more mixed at the edges, some new colour that doesn't belong to either of us specifically.
He is quiet after his initial announcement, already serious, looking at everything with the attention of someone conducting a preliminary audit of his new environment.
"Lyle," Narod says softly, and his voice is completely destroyed, every careful professional layer of it stripped away to nothing but this.
We bring them home on a Thursday afternoon in brilliant spring light, a detail I notice and immediately file under things that will be significant in retrospect.
Narod carries both carriers simultaneously, one in each hand, because of course he does, and navigates the door with a precision that suggests he has been rehearsing this specific transit in his head for weeks, which I know for a fact he has because I found the handwritten diagram.
The apartment is quiet around us. The nursery is perfect, both cribs load-tested and mobile batteries fresh and the second shelf bracket installed at eleven forty on a Tuesday. Narod sets the carriers down and crouches between them, looking from one face to the other.
The first week is not peaceful. I want to be honest about this.
The first week is a sustained exercise in operating at negative sleep capacity, in learning two entirely different cries and two entirely different rhythms and two entirely different temperaments with a speed that the available parenting literature does not adequately prepare you for.
Ryle is loud and immediate about every need, hungry, uncomfortable, present, demanding acknowledgment in real time.
Lyle waits and then stares at you until you notice, which is somehow more devastating.
Narod functions on approximately ninety minutes of sleep a night with a composure that I find both impressive and faintly irritating, though it becomes less irritating when I understand that he is not actually unaffected, he is simply running on something that has temporarily overridden his need for rest, the same focused, locked-in presence he brings to any problem he considers genuinely important, and I understand that we are, at present, the most important problem he has ever worked on.
He keeps a log. Of course he keeps a log.
Feed times, sleep durations, diaper changes, developmental observations.
He shows it to me on day four with the slightly anxious expression of a man who is not sure whether the log will be received as helpful or excessive, and I take it from him and read three pages of meticulous, cross-referenced parental data and then look up at him and say,
"I love you so much it's genuinely alarming."
He ducks his head. Still. After everything, he still does that.
By the second week I can tell their cries apart in the dark.
By the third week Narod has calibrated his voice to a specific register that reliably settles Ryle mid-protest, a low, even rumble that the baby apparently finds structurally convincing, and I have established that Lyle responds best to being held chest-to-chest against Narod's massive sternum where, I suspect, he can feel his father's heartbeat, which is the most Lyle thing imaginable.
I am sitting in the nursing chair in the small hours of a morning six weeks in, Lyle half-asleep against my shoulder, when Narod appears in the nursery doorway.
He has Ryle in one arm, walking him in slow circuits because Ryle is not yet persuaded by the concept of night, and he stops when he sees me and we exist for a moment in the low amber lamp-light, four people in a room, two of us tired past the point of language and two of us deeply uncertain about the fundamental nature of their new world.
"How is he?" I ask quietly.
"Processing," Narod says. He looks down at Ryle, who is staring at the ceiling with the intense focus of someone calculating something. "He is very interested in the ceiling fan."
"It's not even on."
"He appears to be running preliminary assessments." He looks up at me, and his expression is everything, all of it at once. "How are you?"
I look at Lyle's dark hair against my shoulder, the small rise and fall of him.
I look at Narod across the dim room, enormous and careful and completely undone in the best possible way, holding our son against his chest with a hand that is nearly as big as baby's entire body, wearing a look on his face that is so far outside any model he ever tried to run about his own life that I can see him noticing it, surprised by it still.
"I ran the numbers," I say softly, because it is our thing and it will always be our thing.
He waits.
"It all balances," I say. "Everything balances."
He crosses the room and stands beside my chair, and I lean my head against his arm, and Lyle makes a small, satisfied sound against my shoulder, and Ryle, apparently having completed his structural assessment of the ceiling fan, closes his eyes with the decisive air of a person who has gathered sufficient data and is ready to file his conclusions.
The lamp burns low. The city moves outside the window. And in the particular quiet of the room, which is not the quiet of absence but the quiet of fullness, of a space occupied exactly to its correct capacity, we stay.