# Welcomings

Title: Welcomings
Status: Complete
Characters: Anon, Fang, Amber, Naser, Samantha, Ripley, Trish, Reed, Naomi
Rating: SFW
Classification: One Shot
Author: Anonymous
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Twenty-one was the number that had managed to register within the frenzied visual processing of the man as the hurried medical entourage entered the facility's delivery room along with the stretcher that carried his urgently expectant spouse and the precious passenger that lay within her. The sprawling medical complex would have confounded him with its enormity in comparison to the modestly-sized coastal city of Volcadera, had there not been several dozen other causes of much more critical alarm that forced themselves to the forefront of his immediate attention.
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The halls were a uniform marble white, homogenous and sterile, and the utilitarian fluorescent lights affixed to the ceilings hummed together in a dull and consistent chorus that pacified errant sounds into a grounding equilibrium. Aromas of cleaner and disinfectant mingled to exude their distinct scents, providing testimony to their work in maintaining the pristineness of the glossy floors, not easily sullied by the commotion that had briefly disturbed the hallways' tranquil stasis. Evening summer sunlight leaked through the building's windows, yellow and orange rays streaming forth in an auroral procession that cast the whole hospital in a faint haze of luminous gold. Outside and further still, above the horizon where the crystal clear water of the coast sparkled in the midst of darker clouds, the descending sun had began to give way to looming indigo sky. The vibrant complimentary colors of this vast firmament set themselves around the building's walls as a persistent backdrop which isolated it from the settlements beyond.
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Inside the delivery room on the bed lay the woman, presided over closely by her husband. He, a younger and taller man, matured but still in possession of his youth's last vestiges, dressed in a green jacket thrown over a plain white shirt and weathered denim jeans all fastened in obvious haste, and thoroughly human. She, nearly the same age has him, a long-snouted pterodon woman, coated in pale whitish-blue feathers with a head of brilliant opaline hair, both now fairly tousled from recent stresses. She wore only a white gown which hung loosely over her lithe reptilian form, and from her back hung two feathered silver wings of majestic span. The gleaming amber jewels of her eyes resonated with the setting sun's pervading rays when they were not screwed shut from the mounting pain of her body's immanent labor.
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Surrounding the pair were several medical staff members, all of them various forms of bipedal ancient reptilian, conformed to the general body plan of their anthropoid counterparts. Their scales and feathers alike were naturally decorated with an array of vibrant colors, a measured contrast with the more restrained shades of their patient. Towards the upper right corner of the room's far wall was emblazoned an ornate painting of the Eternal Son's twin incarnations, the green-scaled upright raptor and the bearded Galilean carpenter, accompanied by their respective crucifixes of stone and wood, a massive golden halo in the background encompassing both heads to emphasize the unity of their Person. The author of life had grown from this Earth two races of rational creatures fit to partake in the spiritual reality, and had paid the price of carrying His cross along two separate Golgothas to ensure their reconciliation to Himself.
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The only person of primate descent within the room scanned his eyes anxiously across the walls of the bustling room and along the ceiling's bright white lights, whose stark glow pierced his vision with mild discoloration. Rapid motion and the muttered medical terminology of the staff clouded around the edges of his awareness as competing streams of thought collided against one another within the frantic landscape of his mind.
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His cone of vision fell once again upon the pterodon woman to which he was wed, her elongated face darkened by the mounting pain which heralded the initiation of the birthing process, feathered limbs and slender torso now made to look disproportionate in light of her strained and bulging abdomen. The woman's body gave off the appearance of unmistakable strain. The man's heart pounded with growing tension, his limbs jittering against the edges of the metal edges of the bed which his fingers grasped with a desperate tightness.
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Joy and buzzing excitement had dominated the months leading up to the expected time when his spouse's pregnancy would finally come to term, a flurry of exorbitant purchases and preparations for their approaching new lives as parents about which they fondly speculated with an almost ceaseless elation. That had changed for the man as the appointed time drew nearer.
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In recent weeks there arose first as soft murmuring shadows and then as increasingly more insistent intrusive patterns a spectre of dread that loomed silently above the celebratory atmosphere which otherwise monopolized the time spent with the mother of his unborn child. The body of their offspring which developed within the woman's guarded womb had been carefully monitored since a short time after its conception, various medical experts tirelessly checking for any harmful irregularities. So far, they had found none. The siring of hybrid children by human and dinosaur couplings was rare, but hardly unheard of; the doctors had not been fumbling blindly in their evaluations.
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Such assurances in regular checkups and months of additional training had, for most of the man's experience of awaiting his first child, done their part in assuaging potential anxieties about any threats posed to the two most important people in his life who for the time being physically bound to one another in the inescapably vicarious nature of the prenatal process - but now they had started to falter under churning black tendrils of worry and doubt.
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The latter stages of the woman's parturiency had left him with pressing images of her body's fragility. Her feathers had more often grown slick with sweat, and exhaustion reigned over her for long hours of each day. Numerous varying pains rose to increasing prominence as her body's biological systems were pushed to their highest limits, and the frequency of her discomfort often caused her to become irritable and sensitive. Pregnancy was difficult, and childbirth was dangerous. The sights of his partner's straining form ignited within him unwanted notions of bodily danger befalling her or the tiny child within her, which had recently taken to tormenting him in moments where he allowed his thoughts to wander, as they currently were. Worst-case scenarios of mortal terror instantaneously simulated themselves without invitation in his mind's eye, forcefully dragging him into the contemplation of possibilities too awful to name.
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So engrossed was the man in his own spiraling and panicked preoccupations that he failed entirely to hear the first several instances of the soft feminine voice calling his name until their gradually rising volume culminated in a forceful exclamation:
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"Hey! Earth to you! Anybody home?"
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Briskly, the man was jarringly reinstated back into the present moment. Doctors around the room still strode quickly from place to place, retrieving arrays of medical apparel, solutions of unknown chemicals, and various tools of which he could only reliably name a scant few. His eyes locked with his wife's glittering orange counterparts, and he saw that she was awaiting an acknowledgment.
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"Sorry, Fang," he responded, as soon as words returned to him, calling his beloved by the embarrassing nickname which she had taken up in their senior year of high school. She preferred to go by her real name, which was Lucy, but they had both long since accepted the sentimental value that frivolous alias held for both of them. "I'm just getting nervous," he confessed, and his voice cracked slightly in spite of himself as he continued, "I'm just shaking a little. I'm okay."
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"Listen, I'M the one who's about to give birth here, not you," she teased with her familiar abrasive form of levity. Seeing the tension that coursed through him and the stress plainly apparent on his face, her tone softened and she added more earnestly, "One of us has to stay calm in this, and we both know I'm not-"
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"FUCK!"
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The profane squawk caused the man's ears to ring as Lucy's face contorted into its tightest expression of pain yet seen, eyes screwed shut and lengthy snout hanging open as a much fainter whine of discomfort emitted from it. The surrounding medical staff clearly took this as an urgent call to begin their work, and they drew closer to the sprawled out woman on the bed as she went into labor.
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The next sequence of events came to the man in a barrage, loud and bright and rapid and overwhelming to all his senses. Struggling to heed his wife's instruction, he steeled himself against the haywire panic seething in the background noise of his mental environment and recalled with his best efforts the training which he and his spouse had undertaken to prepare for this very moment. He held Lucy's clawed hand tightly, and she grasped his even tighter, first only strong and then escalating into a sharp vice grip that dug into his skin as the contractions began and intensified.
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Between the screeching tapestry of obscenity that was involuntarily woven by Lucy in the throes of physical agony, her husband attempted to remind her to breathe as they had rehearsed; an especially difficult task when she was preoccupied with the act of gracing all present with the ear - or bodily equivalent thereof - shattering cries of combinations of profanities which may have been yet unheard until that day. How much time had elapsed from when the delivery began was currently impossible to gauge, for any proper sense of duration was buried beneath the chaotic volume each solitary contraction.
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Only in the vaguest sense was the man aware of the blood which his wife's claws had inadvertently drawn as her nerves were bathed in searing fire by the incomparable pains of childbirth, and even then the miniscule realization was quickly dispelled from his direct focus by another shrieking scream of such high and piercing intensity that it bounced around inside of his head, dizzying him by proxy from its sheer amplitude. How he had managed to hear and comprehend the voice of the doctor announcing that the baby was crowning, he had no explanation.
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The man was not quite able to hear his own words as he encouraged Lucy to keep pushing, that it was almost there, but he knew that something must have left his mouth because the doctor followed suit, smiling in excitement in spite of his visible physical weariness. Lucy's spouse watched as her exhausted body tightened like a corkscrew, and she flooded the delivery room with a final skull-rattling scream, the loudest din of the entire affair, before she pushed once more with all of her body's remaining strength and strained herself to her absolute limit until the wail of their infant daughter graced all present in the room. The doctor held the crying baby in his arms to the accompaniment of gently elated cooing and laughter. The girl was clearly far more pterodon than simian, and her mother's outward traits were even now apparent as having taken precedence over those of her father. Tiny feathered wings twitched gently as the child's crying continued, her long snout opened widely.
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As the doctor cut the umbilical cord, a frail Lucy collapsed limp back onto the medical bed's cushioning, a soft smile on her exhausted snouted face. Hair frayed and drenched in sweat, she looked back to her husband, her grip loosened and then finally broken as her hand returned to her side. Her husband came close to smiling, but it dawned on him that something was wrong. Lucy was pale and drained, barely able to keep her eyes open, her face pallid. Her voice airy and thin - too thin, too quiet - she weakly raised shaking feathered arms and one bloodstained hand while asking to hold her baby girl. Whispers of dread prowled just beyond the boundary of her husband's conscious mind, poised to lunge like an anticipating predatory beast.
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She held the child in her arms, her now-ragged orange gems of eyes looking upon the wailing long-snouted infant with all the love in the world even as her weakening arms shook with greater and greater intensity. Her voice coming now only as a fading whisper, she paused for only a moment of consideration before breathing the name she would give to the girl she had just brought forth.
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"Amber..."
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It was one of the nurses present in the room that had first noticed Lucy's dangerously weakened grip on the infant and she darted forward to take the wailing child into her own grasp just as its mother's arms finally fell completely limp against the edges of the bed. The pale pterodon woman's head dropped listlessly against the pillow as her eyes finally lost their power to remain open, and before the rapid succession of events could even be processed by her husband the horrible and harsh beeping of a hospital alarm descended upon the delivery room in a cacophony more unwelcome than the most deafening scream.
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The apparent realness of the unreal situation unfolding before him finally managed to reconcile itself within the man's psyche as the medical staff shouted about rupture and scrambled to wheel his wife into surgery, and without semblance of proper cognition he exclaimed in terror the affectionate name he used for his beloved. As his wife's motionless form was taken away from the room a nurse gripped him in order to prevent the advance towards the receding procession to the surgery wing that he had not even been consciously aware his legs were making, and while he was pulled back the fear and horror that had lingered for weeks finally also pounced upon his mind with all its paralyzing might.
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All of the worries and anxieties that had for weeks up until now been festering within him now looked to be actualizing themselves in front of him, and he himself was helpless to affect anything as everything splintered apart. That which he feared most out of anything and which he considered above all the unimaginable worst case scenario was playing itself out in front of him beyond the confines of the hypothetical, and he could not will it away. The nurse was attempting to speak to him now, but he could not make out any words; reality right now was nothing but a prison of light and noise from which he desperately wanted to escape.
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His chest was heavy and his heart pounded painfully against his chest with uncanny rapidity, his legs unmoving as stone and his arms numb. He could not quite seem to tell if he was breathing at all right now, or if he was currently on the path to hyperventilation. The wailing of his neonate daughter which had been a persistent audial presence since its emergence into the room finally registered within his sphere of comprehension simultaneously with the complete realization of the situation into which life had trapped him:
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He was losing Lucy.
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The woman he loved, the only woman who he had ever loved, his wife, his life partner, his best friend, who he had spent countless hours and countless nights with, and who he had made love with, and who he had wanted to spend the rest of his life with, who was the light of his life, the one who would be the mother of his child. And the potential was now starkly real that he might never see her again.
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Lucy, who he had met in his senior year of high school when they were both foolish and confused outcasts, when she was lost and directionless and scared and trying harder than anything to pretend she wasn't, when he was lonely and weary and unfamiliar and trying to shut the world out, and they had found each other, and taught each other to grow, and taught each other to love. Lucy, who had carried his battered humiliated self across entire blocks during the most embarrassing day of his life after someone threw an empty can at him and he had clumsily tripped down the school's stairs trying to catch it in mid-air. Lucy, who had stunned him the first time he saw her in her prom dress and stunned him every day afterwards too no matter what she wore. Lucy, who still always wrote her name on every bag of dino-nuggies. Lucy, who loved music with her heart and soul, whose tail was always tapping away to some imagined beat in that wonderful mind of hers, who had taught him how to play guitar, and who would always volunteer to play at church whenever she was needed because a happy audience was more than enough payment. Lucy, whose eyes he would gladly be lost in for an eternity.
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He turned, slowly, to the child, his child. Lucy's child. The child who might now have to grow up without ever meeting her mother. Whose family would be forever incomplete and broken. Lucy had wanted so much to be a mother, and this child she had loved with her whole being before it had even exited her womb. And now they were at the precipice of being separated forever. Looking now upon the infant who was attended to by the nurses remaining in the room, the man saw that the strength to bring up this child alone was not something he possessed. Should his wife on this day be taken from him, he did not foresee any possible way of returning to the empty house he and his beloved had bought for their life together with his soul intact. He knew in fact that it would kill him.
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The countless moments of his life with his lover sustained the integrity of his whole person, and now all those moments lay before the approaching swing of the axe that lowered itself with destructive intent. Lucy's husband realized now more clearly than at any other previous instance in his life that he loved his wife with all his soul, and all his soul would be carried off with her wherever she went. He would die with her, and he could not change that fact even if he wished to, which he did not. That love he had surrendered himself wholly to until there was no distinction between it and him, and to him this was truly what love was: to surrender one's self completely to another.
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His eyes had not left the child. If her mother would here perish, there would be only a shell left to raise her. The family that she would have had would never be available to her as it was, and she would have no other option but to find unsullied joy elsewhere. Without Lucy, he could never be the father to his child that he knew he needed to be.
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How little had anything mattered to him here and now than his family, than his Lucy. How unfathomably stupid it had been for him to have ever fretted over material concerns or daily inconveniences or meandering social squabbles when all that he had ever needed was this love. How could there ever be the slightest possibility of a so-called "bad day" or be any "bad luck" when his family was there? All the world's riches were rags compared with having Lucy and her baby girl in front of him. God how he wanted to live.
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God almighty, he thought as his eyes drifted over to the painting on the wall of the Savior, I'll give anything for them. Take everything else away if you must but just let my Lucy live and hold her baby girl in her arms and be the mother I know you made her to be. Jesus Christ please just take me instead if you have to but I just want to live and being with her is the only way I can. Didn't you have a mother? You have to understand. Please. Please Lord.
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The child was silent now under the care of the nurses and the male voice of the doctor calling its father's name cut through the dread quiet like a diamond bullet. The father's legs ached from standing and his arms were frozen at his sides like metal rods. His chest to his gut felt like a gaping pit and his breath was uneven. He faced away from the doctor, and there was an acute pause before he began his slow turn towards the medical professional.
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Here in this moment was the bridge between life and death, and the man did not yet know on which side he stood.
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Tersely, the doctor requested the man to follow him, and they stepped out of the delivery room's doorway just as the child within began again to softly wail. Several steps down the hallway were taken to begin the journey to the surgery wing before the man was once again able to form and enunciate words, and he managed to haltingly choke out the necessary phrase that would communicate his inquiry to the doctor.
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"Is she alright?"
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The instant between his question and the doctor's answer was a harrowing chasm, a darkened valley of anticipation, anxiety, dread, suspense, and most painfully of all, hope. This quarter second of time was traversed by the man with all the struggle of climbing a mountain, and when he had reached the other side of the miniscule temporal gap he was in a state of even greater emotional exhaustion.
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"Yes. She's stable."
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There were other words spoken after that; there must have been, at least, since the doctor's mouth was moving and sound was certainly coming out, but those words did not come to the man. As soon as he was able to grasp what had been said to him, and for the briefest possible fragment of time rejoice and praise God, there was only one other word that he had been able to wheeze in his ecstatic shock:
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"W-where?!"
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Without listening to the doctor's response, he half-sprinted towards the destination whose exact location he did not currently know, and the older white-coated stegosaurus man struggled to catch up ahead of him to guide him to his wife's room, sputtering a few halfhearted admonitions to slow down and remain calm. Eventually the doctor was able to show the man to the proper room, by which point he had been given quite a bit more exercise than his profession usually entailed, huffing profusely. He gestured wordlessly to the door frame as he caught his breath, and inside the man saw again the love of his life lying in bed, alive. Alive.
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An IV drip stuck out from her feathered arm and multiple monitors had been affixed to her chest. She wore a new gown, the one she had delivered in presumably being discarded during surgical complications, and a light blanket had been drawn up to about her waist. She was still pale, but the complexion was no longer deathly in its amount of lost pigment, and the strain that had marred her face before was now gone, replaced with an expression of calm serenity with only the mildest hint of annoyance courtesy of the tall conical translucent device that had been affixed around her long snout with a tube that fed down beneath the bed - what he quickly surmised was an oxygen mask, designed for the unique proportions of a pterodon's facial features. Her lulled eyes immediately widened somewhat when she caught sight of her husband.
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"Honey..." she cooed softly, and he was at her side in an instant. He could not say anything at first, and for a moment settled only on touching her, trying to assure himself that this was real. Slowly she raised one hand to cover his on her shoulder. He stared for a long moment into her shining citrine eyes and the sight was nothing short of beatific. Here lay his priceless feathered angel, and she was alive. Eventually, speech returned to him.
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"Lucy," he breathed, "Oh god, Lucy...", and the air leaving his lungs deflated the tension in his body in one rapid motion, and he fell to his knees beside her.
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"Are you okay?" he whispered. "Is everything alright?"
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"I just got a bit tired, honey, that's all. I'm okay now," she intoned softly, her voice still thin and hoarse but no longer the fading rattle that it had been when she had first fallen ill. Her clawed thumb traced itself gently along the rough skin of his hand.
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"She suffered some substantial blood loss, actually," interjected the still-winded doctor as he entered closer into the room behind them, "As well as internal bleeding, quite a bit of rupturing that had to be dealt with... your wife was in serious condition, Mr. Mous. She's a very lucky woman."
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"Luck's got nothing to do with it," murmured Lucy with a faint smirk. She turned her eyes back to her husband, expecting a small smile that matched her own, only to find her husband's face pallid and sullen.
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"I thought...", he began, before the words momentarily caught in his throat, "I thought I might've lost you, Lucy..."
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"You think you could get rid of me that easily?" she quipped hoarsely, in the briefest instant before she realized the full sincerity of her husband's words. Then her expression became tender and her eyes grew glassy, gazing with sympathy upon her husband's bloodshot ones. Without any further explanation she understood the extent of what had transpired within him during the past several hours, and she raised the other hand not holding his own up around his shoulder, squeezing the hand she held tightly.
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"Oh, baby..." she whispered, "Come here... come here, baby..."
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His head fell slowly into her chest, and she brought the hand that had been around his shoulder up to his head, stroking his hair gently as she brought her snout as close as possible to his cheek while encumbered by the oxygen mask.
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"It's okay," she repeated in hushed tones, "I'm here... I'm here... It's okay..."
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The emotional dam finally broke and she felt hot tears fall against her bosom as he began to weep heavily against her, squeezing her hand as hard as he could without risking her harm. She continued to hold him against her and they remained in such a position for a long, long time.
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When her husband had finally been able to let go of her, Lucy was already eager to see her baby girl; her usual energy was returning to her with astonishing rapidity, and color had already made its way back into her complexion. It did not take the medical staff particularly long to learn how quickly Lucy's temper could be aroused when she was denied something she favored, and it was not long at all before they were rushing to bring the woman her child. Her husband had already known the extent of her wrath that could be expended on stolen dino-nuggies alone, and her daughter was infinitely more valuable to her than dino-nuggies.
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Her oxygen mask had already been done away with against the insistence of the nurses as she received her swaddled baby girl, and she crooned with unfiltered delight at the precious child in her arms: already clearly the spitting image of her mother. Amber squeaked out a happy little noise entirely dissimilar to her previous cries, and Lucy looked upon her daughter's eyes - perfect replicas of her own - with the purest beaming radiance of maternal love. Her husband was brought into the fold of this practical madonna by her slowly outstretched wings, of which one came to pull him closer to her and another rested protectively over her offspring. He would truthfully have had no qualms staying like this for as long as she liked, but eventually he was compelled to suggest the inevitable.
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"We need to call your parents," he began, "and tell them about what happened."
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Lucy's eyes dilated into what her husband could have sworn were veritable pinpricks as the color in her face that had gradually replenished evacuated from it all over again.
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"No," she pleaded, "no way. You can tell them about Amber, but you CANNOT tell them about me. Mom will flip her shit. You've never seen my mom when she's upset."
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A momentary confusion struck the man as he pondered why she had mentioned her mother, and not her father. Surely, he assumed, there was far more of a terrifying reaction to fear from that hulking ex-cop than Lucy's saintly old waif of a mother. Regardless, he persisted.
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"Come on, Fang, they're your parents. They care about you," he reminded her, trying his hardest to ignore the latent sting of lacking such a luxury almost in its entirety from his own guardians.
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"I know!" she exclaimed, "that's exactly why we can't tell them!"
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"They're going to find out eventually even if we don't tell them," he chided, "and when they do, it'll just make them more upset that we hid it from them."
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"...Fine," Lucy relented, "but YOU'RE making the phone call."
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He could accept those terms. Stepping out of the room and navigating towards a suitably isolated area of the facility, he settled upon a small alcove with a single chair and small table, situated next to a large window which let in the full vista of the crystalline shore and the last reddish-orange rays of the setting sun which illuminated the whole area's interior with a gentle amber glow.
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The name Lucy had chosen for their daughter truly couldn't be more fitting.
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He waited patiently as the phone rung on the other end of the line, still immeasurably thankful that he had not been forced to make a much different call to his in-laws today. The signature click of a received call sounded and shortly after he was greeted with the voice of his mother-in-law.
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"Hello! You've reached the Aarons!" chirped the sugary sweet voice made slightly tinny by the modulation of the cell phone. Waves audibly crashed in the background, the phone's limited sound capacity rendering their rhythmic tidal comings and goings an indistinct and fuzzy ambience to the call. Mr. and Mrs. Aaron were currently across state lines on a scheduled vacation, but they had been waiting in eager anticipation for news on arrival of their granddaughter. He had managed very briefly to call them earlier on the trip to the hospital to inform them of Lucy's immanent labor, and so they had most certainly been expecting a swift followup.
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The older couple contrasted one another like the sun and moon. Mrs. Aaron was a tiny pterodon woman hardly standing over five-feet tall, her feathered form a near exact match to her daughter's pale whitish-blue with light golden hair an a gracefully-aged snouted face. Around the house she practically always wore an apron, and visits to the Aaron residence were more often than not punctuated by the scent of freshly-baked cookies on account of her culinary talents. A kinder-hearted lady of the house Volcadera had perhaps not seen in all its time. Mr. Aaron, on the other hand, towered in height over his wife, a titanic brown-scaled dragon of a man whose rugged form was testament to a robust physical strength which age had done little to temper. His living room was decorated with his hunting trophies and his son-in-law was half certain that he possessed enough firearms to be on some kind of government watchlist. He was curt and dignified, a respected member of his community and an honored former police officer, but God help anyone who would harm a feather on the head of his Lucy.
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They were quirky and they were a handful, but they loved their two children more than the world, and could not help but dote upon both even now when they were grown adults. Lucy and her slightly younger brother Naser were the subjects of an unconditional parental love that was an almost entirely alien concept to their daughter's husband. They had been family to him these past several years more than his own had parents had ever been, who had not deigned even to attend their own son's wedding. He found in them a network of genuine support that he had spent the majority of his life to that point unfamiliar with - a particularly impressive accomplishment when one recalled that Mr. Aaron had surreptitiously threatened to murder him with a golf club on their first meeting.
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"Hi, Samantha," he answered, and she immediately exclaimed his name over the other end of the line in excitement.
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"Is that you, dear?" Her tone grew even more cheerful as she recognized the voice of her son-in-law. She was audibly bubbling with elation. "Oh, oh! One moment sweetie, let me get Ripley on!"
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He heard fainter in the background Mrs. Aaron calling the name of her husband, and even over the digitized soundscape of the phone he could hear the massive man's heavy footsteps as he approached. The man briefly considered the best way to phrase his explanation of what had transpired over the past few hours, one which would not alarm his spouse's parents.
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"Okay, you're on speaker, dear!" rang Samantha's voice again, and a moment later it was followed up with the rough and deep voice of her husband addressing his son-in-law by name.
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"You there, son?" he inquired joyfully, "How are my baby girls doing?"
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"They're great. They're both... they're both doing great." Involuntarily the man grew choked up in a flurry of emotion for a brief moment before he was able to continue. How blessed was he, to be able to say those words right now. "The kid's beautiful. She has Lucy's eyes. I can't wait for you to see her."
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A high-pitched squeal of unabated joy sounded from Samantha, and she let out a short peel of ecstatic laughter. "Ahhh, I'm a grandmother! I can't believe it! We're grandparents, Ripley, my God, can you believe it?!"
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There was a pronounced pause from Ripley, who was evidently taking in the reality that he was a grandfather and required several seconds to square himself with that fact. Then he joined in his wife's infectious laughter, and his cheerful bark sounded in his son-in-law's ear.
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"Our little Lucy made us grandparents!"
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The sound of dainty feathery hands clapping together signified Samantha's giddy energy from audio alone, and she closed in on her phone, apparently forgetting momentarily that she had put it on speaker, and the sound of her next slightly-too-loud request reminded the man of the other important matter he had yet to address.
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"Can you put our little Lucy on, dear? I want to talk to her, she must be overjoyed! Oh, I can still remember when I held my little baby in my arms..."
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"Well," he began slowly, and he breathed in deeply before continuing, "She's doing fine, but I'm not in the room with her right now. There were, uh, some complications during delivery and we had a bit of an emergency, but-"
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His arm had reflexively jerked the phone away from his ear before he had even fully consciously processed the ear-piercing squawk that emitted from its speakers and which was still entirely audible from over a foot away. Samantha's unbroken stream of furious shrieks echoed into the hospital hallways from the device, earning more than a few curious glances from nearby staff and visitors as the man, in futility, attempted to calm the frenzying woman on the other end with assurances that her daughter was safe. Such high-pitched sound and fury blared from his cell phone's meager speakers that the audio had started to distort from the stress of such consistently thundering volume, and he could only vaguely make out the telltale vocalizations of Mr. Aaron practically cowering from his wife in the background.
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Before long there were noises through the device of some indecipherable physical commotion which resounded with a series of loud impacts heard against a host of surfaces, objects being tossed about as if he were listening to a recording of a hurricane. Trying to extrapolate coherent speech from such a cacophony was obviously a herculean task, though the man did manage to make out a few words from the persistently screeching matriarch which included such phrases as "MY LUCY", "RIPLEY", "BABY", and "AIRPORT". The frenetic auditory mayhem came to a crescendo before the phone abruptly hung up; whether this was because the option to end the call had been selected or the phone had been promptly smashed into countless fragments was impossible to discern.
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He re-entered the doorway of his wife's room with a low and heavy sigh, and she glanced at him quizzically for a moment before opening her mouth to ask the question which she already knew the answer to:
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"How did it go?"
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Her husband's eyes widened briefly before he took another prolonged breath inward and took another step towards the bed where his wife and child lay.
​
"It went... well, I think," he muttered unconvincingly, the room's ceiling conspicuously the immediate object of his visual attention. "On an, uh... unrelated note, I think we might be getting a visit from your parents soon."
​
​
​
The next scant few hours afforded them the time to situate Lucy out of the surgery wing and into the maternity ward, her insistence quickly wearing down the hesitation of medical staff as signature vitality returned to her in all its splendor. Wrenching Amber from the snugness of her mother's arms was a far greater ordeal, and the nurses trembled as they carefully lifted the precious infant away for a series of routine checkups, the protective maternal intent radiating off of the woman in almost palpable waves. Perhaps, noted her husband, Lucy took far more after her mother than he had yet realized.
​
Golden tangerine sunlight which had bestowed upon Amber her name finally receded into the dark cobalt of a crisp night. Emerging from the expanse of the heavens was the moon, leading behind it all the distant shining spheres of the seven visible planets and the twinkling host of stars whose distant radiance journeyed light-years across vast spaces of creation to light the night sky with their cosmic brilliance. The night took hold of the hospital, and the quiet dark settled against the building's windows. Ethereal lunar light rested gently along the still and clear sea and resonated with the matching pale blue color of Lucy.
​
The night had only just begun to assert itself over Volcadera for its allotted time when the automatic doors of the hospital were wrenched open by the pint-sized feathered form of one Mrs. Aaron, two large bags in each hand, wings unfurled, and striding forth across the large lobby with untempered ferocity. To her left was Mr. Aaron, his long-scarred face withered in visible exhaustion, clearly struggling to keep pace with his manically determined spouse. On her right stood Lucy's brother Naser, his penchant for wearing gaudy jackets unchanged from his high school years, and looking rather disoriented, as if he were not quite sure of how exactly he had gotten here.
​
Rumblings of Samantha's relentless approach made their presence known far before she had reached the maternity ward proper, and various staff members scrambled to stall her hasty and unregulated entry into restricted areas of the hospital - all to no avail. The halls bustled with agitation as Mrs. Aaron squawked and strutted before sputtering doctors, and the image of trained medical professionals quivering in abject fear before a tiny old pterodon lady was a surreal sight which Lucy's husband would not soon forget.
​
Quite quickly did the meager blockades against Mrs. Aaron's advance cede to her fury, and she rushed to the room where her daughter and granddaughter were being held, with the two men of her house silently in tow. Before Lucy could even process the sight of her collected family members, Samantha was barreling towards her bed, bags dropped to the floor in a flash as a squealing cry of "LUCYLUCYLUCYLUCYLUCYLUCYLUCY" flooded from her mouth. Lucy's mother poked and pecked at her as her daughter struggled in vain to be heard over the endless stream of worried babbling that fired off from the frenetic Samantha at a hundred words per second.
​
Ripley approached cautiously from behind his wife, eyeing her and his daughter carefully before he made his move to speak between Samantha's chaotic rambling and Lucy's futile protestations.
​
"Darling, I think you might suffocate our daughter."
​
Samantha jerked her head back quickly to look at him, arms fully around her exasperated daughter and eyes narrowed, growling at him with her fangs bared like a rabid chihuahua. Ripley flinched and drew back with his open hands raised in a gesture of mock surrender, turning to Naser - who still seemed to be in the process of collecting his bearings - with a somewhat concerned expression. The medical staff appeared to have entirely evacuated from the room, save for a lone nurse who peered in trembling from the doorway, and Lucy's husband had backed cautiously away from his wife's bed in fear of provoking Samantha's wrath.
​
"MMMOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMM!!!" Lucy groaned in a pitch-perfect replication of her teenage plea to an overbearing mother. "I'm okay! SERIOUSLY!"
​
Mrs. Aaron finally seemed to let up - if only slightly - as she loosened her hold on her daughter and raised her eyes to meet Lucy's.
​
"Are you sure?" she asked, quieter now.
​
"Yes," her daughter replied.
​
"Are you absolutely sure?"
​
"Yes!"
​
"Are you completely sure?"
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"YES!"
​
Samantha sighed and closed her eyes, bringing her snout closer to her daughter's and hugging her a little tighter again.
​
"I'm sorry, honey," she mumbled, her tone now tender and gentle, "You're just... you're my little pirate princess. You know I can't ever stop worrying about my baby. I love you so much."
​
Lucy hugged her mother back, her eyes watery despite her previous teasing guise of annoyance and kissing her mom's cheek with her long snout. "I know. I love you too, mom."
​
"Just promise to bring me along next time you decide to give birth, okay?" her mother giggled softly.
​
Her daughter returned a soft smile in return, but sighed sadly. "Well, there won't be a next time, actually. They say I can't have another baby after what happened. This one was all I had."
​
"Oh..." her mother muttered quietly, "Lucy... I'm so sorry, honey..."
​
Lucy smiled a bit wider and shook her head, her voice coming to her more firmly. "Don't be. It was all worth it just for her. She's enough."
​
As if on cue, several doctors entered into the room, the single attendant that had been previously keeping watch over the family awkwardly positioning himself out of the way as one of the staff members hesitantly approached Samantha and beckoned her to move back, the primary doctor in the group holding in his arms the treasure to which the whole night belonged. Gingerly, the newly swaddled baby was placed back in her mother's arms.
​
Samantha let out a gasp of pure delight. The child's father approached closer to his wife's bed, smiling uncontrollably at the sight of his daughter. Naser followed suit, and after him Ripley, who upon laying his eyes on his infant granddaughter for the first time produced a high-pitched noise so drastically unlike anything he had made before that it left all present in a state of momentary shock, gazed in wonder at the child for a long while, motionless.
​
"My God," he finally breathed, "She's beautiful... look at her, Samantha, she's beautiful..."
​
Mrs. Aaron had already drawn her hands over her snout, tears gushing from her quivering eyes. She sounded off a wordless noise of acknowledgment that was something like a sob or a gasp, contemplating the sight of her granddaughter with reverent awe.
​
"She looks just like you, Lucy," Naser choked out, the first clear sentence he'd managed to interject with since his arrival. "What's her name?"
​
"Amber," his sister whispered, her eyes not leaving her progeny.
​
"It's perfect," Ripley said quietly. "That's perfect."
​
The family had been able to eventually speak more openly without the words catching in their throats, and they conversed in a splendid reverie about the child in Lucy's arms. The girl had woken up after a while without any tears, looking for the first time upon her grandparents and uncle with the clear and undifferentiated awareness that can only truly come from the newborn infant and the saint. Ripley's fawning and bubbly babytalk was a stranger event to experience than any of the previous hours' chaotic setpieces, and when Amber had eventually snapped her little beak down on his finger he had joyfully exclaimed that the child was a fighter like grandpa.
​
Samantha reverted back to her usual self in no time, and after a little while of simply admiring the sight of her granddaughter, she was already itching for a round of photos with her newly expanded family. The predictable round of groans that accompanied her announcement of "picture time" was tempered only by the fact that she had been instructed on how to take photographs with a phone instead of an analog camera since her daughter's graduation, sparing all present from the need to brace their eyes for a barrage of flashing abuse. Only once she had accidentally exceeded the memory limit of the smartphone was there any reprieve from her ravenous snapshotting.
​
​
​
Excitement still flooded the room long after the arrival of the Aarons, and none of them could think of getting any sleep even as the early hours of the morning went by and the night's end was finally heralded by the shimmering glow of sunrise. Calls of waterside birds made themselves heard even past the filter of the hospital's insulated clinical hum. After breakfast, Naser had managed to get a hold of Trish and Reed, and later Uncle Moe. With his trademark organizational skills, he'd swiftly established a group videochat, the impressive smoothness of his feat only mitigated by Trish's incoherent ecstatic squealing nearly damaging the speakers of the expensive notebook tablet he carried upon her first glance at her best friend's newborn.
​
Reed - completely sober for now, thankfully - had taken to writing a whole list of gifts which he planned to send to the girl once she had grown older. Lucy's husband could not quite tell if he was joking with some of the baffling expensive suggestions he made, or if Reed really did have such an exorbitant amount of money which he apparently had no qualms with spending. Uncle Moe's miniscule arms reached towards the screen with such fervor that it almost did seem that he could scoop the infant girl up right there, and he had been the first to draw a true giggle from the baby out of anyone. Rosa and Stella entered into the call soon as well; Rosa frequently slipping into rapid Spanish as she gushed and cooed over the child, and Stella showing an admirable amount of restraint in not attempting to speculate on the girl's star sign. Somehow even Naomi had found her way into the group - how, Naser did not actually know - and had excitedly passed along congratulations from Spears and Farnsworth, which was greatly appreciated. The condescending, passive-aggressive attitude with which she had usually carried herself when they had known her years ago was almost entire absent, although Naser was still eventually forced to mute her audio when she lapsed into a particularly lengthy diatribe about the benefits of vegan diets for babies.
​
When the cusp of the late afternoon at least began its transition into a luminous evening sunset quite like the one in which the husband and his pregnant wife had first entered the hospital the previous day, Lucy showed little trace of having been through yesterday's ordeal, aside from a predictable exhaustion and frazzled hair that contrasted with her usually straight locks. After they had finally said goodbye to their friends and room was filled once again with the solar glow that had been Amber's namesake, Lucy was already anxious to take her daughter home. Color and strength replenished, with only a sleepless fatigue and the scars of surgery remaining as evidence of her medical emergency, the doctors had seen fit to discharge her before dark.
​
Naser brandished a clear plastic glass while behind him one of the attendants removed the IV from his sister's arm, and he poured from a can of the hospital's ginger ale into the cup the cheap carbonated nectar which bubbled and foamed gently as it settled against the transparent interior. He turned to where Lucy lay to see nurses and her husband slowly easing her out of the bed, first unsteady on her feet but then quickly finding her footing, a mild sway the only indication from her posture that she had given birth the evening prior. Samantha held Amber securely in her arms, Ripley keeping vigilant watch over the child while her mother steadied herself. When her husband finally let her go and she remained standing firm, Lucy walked slowly towards her mother, who smiled lovingly and offered the sleeping child to her daughter, who nodded and received the baby girl in her arms like a priceless gem. The child was safe and tight in her mother's firm hold.
​
Naser looked upon his gathered family and once they acknowledged his gaze lifted his glass slightly, pausing for a moment before the words came to him and he smiled gently.
​
"To Lucy and Amber," he began slowly, and then turned his eyes to his sister's husband as he continued, "And to the man I'm proud to call my brother."
​
Naser's brother-in-law blinked in mild shock before returning an earnest smile. Lucy then drew him closer to her with her wing, grinning and nuzzling his cheek with her snout. Samantha happily clasped her small hands together and leaned into her daughter as Ripley laid one of his gargantuan hands on the man's shoulder with another coming to rest on Lucy's. Here was a happiness that no money or gold or land or diamonds could buy and the man had received it even undeserving as he was.
​
Lucy and her husband strolled through the sunset-lit white halls, carefully guarded by the rest of the family as they carried their offspring into the outside world for the first time. Samantha was practically inseparable from her two little girls, and beside them Ripley quickly filled out assortments of paperwork with one of the staff members. When they had at least reached the building's exit, the task lay before them of removing Samantha from Lucy and Amber, which was eventually accomplished after a hundred admonitions and a hundred reminders for her daughter to call her if she ever needed anything at all. She kissed Lucy, Amber, and the child's father goodbye, and tears were streaming down her aged face all the while. Ripley had pulled his son-in-law into a hug and sincerely thanked him for keeping his baby girl safe, and there was a tear in his eye too, before he prepared to escort his bawling wife back home.
​
​
​
Naser insisted that he drive Lucy, her husband, and the baby home. They had assured him that it wasn't necessary, but he was adamant, and eventually their mutual exhaustion forced them to relent and they accepted that his appraisal of their current ability to drive was correct. He'd already had a carseat for the child on hand, much to their surprise, and his explanation that "Mom brought it" answered fewer questions still. Once they had ensured that the child was fastened safely, Lucy took her seat in the back next to where Amber lay and her husband slumped into the passenger seat. Naser started the ignition and the wave of physical tiredness that until now Lucy and her spouse had fought off began to take its toll on them.
​
The vehicle had not driven far from the hospital before Lucy nodded off, sleeping as peacefully as the baby beside her. Her husband felt his own eyelids grow heavy multiple times as the luminosity of the orange sunset faded into another clear night, the darkness illuminating Volcadera's various sources of light which glowed together in concert with the hum of the car's engine, evoking from the city's streets a dreamlike dance of colored lights that nearly succeeded in carrying the man off to sleep. Naser glanced briefly at the two of them with a smile, and then to his niece who still slept comfortably in the carseat. The car was finally felt to come to a stop and Lucy's husband glanced up to the sight of his house - their house - standing just as they left it, lights still on as they had scrambled to exit it a day prior.
​
Naser tenderly lifted the infant to himself, and Lucy's husband took his spouse up out of the back seat of the car, careful not to disturb her slumber. She was light in his arms and she felt her soft breath against his chest, eyes serenely closed and her face so blissfully free of the stresses which the last evening had subjected her to. His brother-in-law retrieved his keys from a pocket in his garish coat, Amber still firm in his grasp, and opened the house's ornate wooden door. Naser entered first, with Lucy's husband in tow carrying against his chest the sleeping light of his soul. They walked through the quiet house which awaited patiently the many future memories that would fill its walls, and soon came to the bedroom, its king-sized bed situated next to a crib which Amber's parents had picked out for her months before.
​
Lucy's sleeping form was placed gingerly down against the soft mattress, and her husband situated her head carefully on one of the bed's large pillows. With surgical precision, Naser lowered Amber into the crib and let go of her only when he was absolutely certain she was secure. He sighed long and deep as he rose back up, clearly having devoted great care into making sure the baby had been safe under his supervision. Scanning the room, his eyes happened upon an empty photo frame situated on top of a cabinet with imprinted text that read "I LOVE MOMMY". He scrutinized the object for several seconds before he was confident enough that its dimensions matched the ones of the picture which his mother had taken the previous night and had sent him to get printed, and which remained tucked away within his back pocket. He retrieved the photograph of his sister smiling for the camera and holding her newborn close, and carefully opened the frame to place it inside. It was a perfect fit. His brother-in-law glanced at him quizzically in an attempt to ascertain what he was doing, but his expression transitioned to one of happy approval when Naser gestured to the newly filled frame, now containing the first picture of Amber to grace the house.
​
Naser's brother-in-law followed him on his way down the hallway and out the door, and he thanked him profusely for his help, which Naser humbly downplayed in his characteristic manner. They had hugged tightly for a long moment there in the doorway before Naser set off, making clear before his departure that he would always be there to help with anything they required. Just has he returned to the bedroom, Amber had awakened, and she began to wail loudly. Lucy had stirred, and a single citrine eye half-opened looked towards the crib where her daughter lay in distress.
​
Her husband collapsed into bed next to his wife, the shrill sound of the infant's crying doing nothing to darken his mood. He stared wordlessly at the woman beside him, enamored with the mere fact of her presence. Eventually her gentle voice rose above the persistent cries of her daughter.
​
"I need to sing Amber a lullaby."
​
"Fang," he started, "You're exhausted, you can't-"
​
Lucy shot him a fierce and all too familiar scowl that cut his protests off without a word.
​
"She's my baby girl, I gave birth to her, and I'll sing her a damn lullaby if I want to," she snapped. To that declaration he could offer no resistance, and he watched as she raised herself from the bed and crept over to the crib containing their weeping daughter, rocking it ever so gently, spinning the mobile above that hung suspended. Her melodious dulcet tones washed over the room as she serenaded the girl, whose wails slowly faded in volume until they had devolved into soft whines and eventually the melody that Lucy crooned was the room's only sound. Her voice truly was hypnotic, and even her husband soon found his eyes growing heavy from the lullaby.
​
When Amber had finally fallen back into the dreaming realm, her mother bent down closer into the crib and whispered, "God bless, darling."
​
While her husband had expected her to return to the bed directly after she had finished pacifying their daughter, she instead took a small detour, making way to the far corner of room and stopping when she had reached her guitar which rested there. Bending down slightly and exerting herself for a moment, she lifted the instrument and carried it back to the bed where her husband was waiting, reassuming her position on the mattress next to him.
​
Holding the guitar in the reflexive manner with which she always had while playing, her clawed finger gently strummed its finely-tuned strings a few times to the audience of her curious spouse. Then his curiosity gave way to a profound sentimentality as she began to play the instrument proper, and he recognized the song instantly. Their song. The song they had composed and written together all those years ago which Lucy could still recall by heart. He closed his eyes and allowed her to play uninterrupted, immersing himself in the music, until the melodious vibrations finally ceased and he heard the sound of the guitar being placed down beside the bed.
​
Opening his eyes, he gazed upon the love of his life, whose eyes were a glittering orange ocean in which he was content to forever swim. She was the shining star which lit his whole world, and she was here, with him, alive and safe and happy and close.
​
"I'm so lucky to have you," he said.
​
Lucy hummed softly as her eyes grew lidded and her cheeks grew a gentle pink. "Glad to hear that, because you're stuck with me, dweeb," she smirked.
​
And she kissed him on the lips deeply with her long snout, before drawing near to him and taking hold of his torso with her feathery arms as her wings encircled him. Her touch alone instantly dissipated any and all visions of the miserable futures which might have befallen him without her. Their home was alight with radiance and life, a canvas ready to receive all the shared joy between their family which was to be.
​
Lucy snuggled against her lover and closed her eyes, relaxing into him as she at last allowed herself to rest from the physical and spiritual toll that the past twenty-four hours had taken on her, and her husband soon felt her body relax and her breathing become easy and even. He wrapped his arms protectively around his wife and kissed her forehead gently before following her into the most peaceful sleep either of them had ever had. His beloved and his baby girl would be there when he woke up, and they would be there every day for many, many happy years to come.
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-------THE END-------