Author's Note
A stupid idea I had. In no-way based on personal experiences.
And I was playing coy with "Oh, throw in enough to imply it's [REDACTED] without actually saying it" but fuck, I hate that annoying little "You forgot to put in any character tags!" warning and let's not kid ourselves here - I'm writing this.
edit: tee hee changed my mind
Running on empty
The Dad was awake before the sound of crying had even reached the baby monitor. He’d heard it in real time from down the hall and his eyes had snapped open immediately, then the echo had come through on the monitor - stereoscopic baby awakeness. It was still dark.
Casting his eyes to the screen sitting on the bedside table he saw the Baby sitting up in her bed, all in glorious monochrome nightvision. No cries followed the one that had woken him up but there was some sniffling and, again, she was sitting up, which wasn’t ideal. She was meant to be lying down, supine, prone, horizontal.
She was meant to be asleep. Everyone was meant to be asleep. It was sleepy time.
Slipping out of bed without disturbing the snoozing, snoring horse lady in the bed beside him (no mean feat given how widely she sprawled across the covers) he padded silently out of their room and down the corridor to where the Baby slept.
Or, rather, where the Baby should have been sleeping. Was meant to be sleeping.
Opening the gate and door with a practised economy of movement and the minimum of squeaking hinges the Dad let himself in through the crack he’d made and flitted like a ghost to the Baby’s bedside. It was dark but not so dark he couldn’t make out the blobby shapes that he needed to, the two most vital shapes at that moment: the Baby, and the Baby’s dropped dummy.
In the vast majority of cases reuniting these two components resulted in a keeling-over, re-snoozing baby and a return to sleep for himself. The key was being able to do it in the dark, but by now the Dad had what he felt was more than sufficient practise.
Stooping, he used one hand to gently ease the Baby back to lying and the other to feel around blindly for the dummy, for while he could sort of see it, he couldn’t see it exactly, so grabbing it was mostly done by touch. This part was never easy, as the thing was ever elusive and often seemed to have a mind of its own and a fierce desire to escape. He found it soon enough anyway, and was happy to know he remained above a dummy in the grand order of things.
This would draw a line under it. As said, nine times out of ten these little awakey episodes were the simple result of a lost dummy or, if not the result, could easily be solved by re-introducing the dummy. This the Dad had learnt. This he had observed numerous times.
In went the dummy. A split-second later out went the dummy. The Dad frowned in the darkness. He put the dummy back in. The Baby spat it out again, definitively.
He could see where this was going.
“Not a team player tonight, eh?” He said to himself.
The Baby responded by crying some more and sitting up again, clambering onto all-fours first before flipping over, making the whole thing seem a terrible effort and their lot a terrible lot indeed to have to suffer through. They wailed and raged, tiny fist lashing out to knock aside the dummy and make sure it stayed away. The Dad observed this with a mounting sense of resignation.
“Alright, alright, let’s be having you…” He said, reaching down and scooping her up.
A quick check of the nappy revealed that it wasn’t anything that was likely to be causing an issue, so that was another thing ruled out. The dad wasn’t sure what it left, in all honesty.
“What’s your boggle? Hungry? Thirsty? Sleepy? Unhappy at the state of the world? All of them all at once? Just feel like being awake right now?” He asked. The Baby whined and writhed in his grasp, trying to wriggle free and, presumably, go splat on the floor. The Dad did not allow this to happen, which frustrated the Baby no end, causing an increase in the volume and intensity of the whining.
“Oh dear oh dear,” said the Dad, trying to get a rocking rhythm going but not really managing it, what with all the wriggling.
By now the continued ruckus (which sounded considerably louder on the monitor than it actually did in real life) had roused the Missus who appeared in the doorway, blinking, bleary, and frizzed, backlit by the hallway light which she had turned on.
“What’s wrong?” She yawned.
“Your guess is as good as mine. I’ve run through the usual, nothing seems to be working.”
“Give her here,” the Missus said, extending a wing with more dexterity than was seemly for a wing. Those wings really could do just about anything. He’d know.
Almost immediately on being passed over and cradled by the Missus the Baby calmed down and stopped wriggling, settling happily into those soft feathers. The Dad, affronted, spread his arms.
“What am I, chopped liver?”
“Shh. Where’s her dummy?”
The dummy was retrieved from where the Baby had batted it and duly passed and accepted by the Baby without protest. The Dad continued to feel affronted, but this time he kept it to himself, just letting his expression convey how unfair he felt all this was.
The Missus got a little rocking going, even hummed a little lullaby, and all appeared to be well. The Dad got out the way so she could approach the bed, she approached the bed and - again demonstrating more of that frankly unsettling dexterity - she laid the Baby down and withdrew her wings. Once the wings were withdrawn, the adults withdrew, creeping from the room.
It quickly became apparent that it hadn’t taken, however, as no sooner were the two of them outside then from behind they heard the sounds of Baby displeasure and the unmistakable sounds of Baby standing up, accompanied by the (unmistakable) sound of the dummy hitting the floor.
Dad and Missus sighed.
“Think she’ll be alright for her playdate?” The Missus asked quietly, referring to the one that the Baby was meant to be having later that day when the niece of the Missus was coming around with her daughter.
The Dad wrinkled his nose. He hated the word ‘playdate’. Couldn’t say why, he just did. Something about it rubbed him up the wrong way. Could he think of a better alternative? No. But he still didn’t like it.
“She’ll be fine. It’s us I worry about,” he said.
And they went back into the room.
The mutual, unspoken decision was made to bring her into their bed. What else were they meant to do? The standing baby was hoisted up with a wingtip under each arm and carried, squirming and unhappy, to the grown up’s bedroom.
This didn’t solve the problem, obviously, it just moved it. The Baby seemed ecstatic at the change of scenery once she had noticed that there had been a change of scenery and spent a merry few minutes attempting to crawl off the end of her parent’s bed, getting annoyed when neither parent allowed this to happen.
Having been foiled in their efforts to face-plant, the Baby settled into a pattern of crawling from the Dad to the Missus, settling on them adorably, seeming to go to sleep, not actually being asleep and then swapping to the other one, sprinkled in amongst the occasional effort to hurl themselves off the bed again in some unexpected direction.
At length she settled on the Dad, and on even further length she conked out, somewhere in the middle between far-too-early and half-past far-too-early. Even though he could tell she was asleep from the subtle changes in her breathing, that she wasn’t burbling anymore, and wasn’t wriggling, he still stayed still a few minutes further, just to make sure. Once sure, he got up.
Slowly. Very slowly.
Still slowly he carried her - holding her aloft and flat in both hands, like a prize salmon - back to her bedroom, placing every step carefully so as to keep her perfectly flat and stable, pausing every time she snuffled.
He caught his elbow on the door of her room but made no sound and played through it, swearing up a storm internally. The Baby did not stir though, to his delight, and continued not to stir as he, delicately, like one handling a bomb (or a prize salmon, or a prize salmon resting on a bomb), laid her back down in her crib. Once she was down he stood back.
She was asleep. He dared not let out a relieved breath. He only barely dared to blink, in case this somehow woke her up.
Again slowly he made his exit, taking particular care on his way back to place his feet on all the spots on the floor that he now knew from experience didn’t creak. His joints might have cracked on every third step, but the floor was quiet, which was something.
His Missus had rolled over by the time he slid himself back into bed, though she had not stopped snoring. Laying his head on the pillow he briefly stared up at the ceiling in the dark before, to check the time, checking his phone.
He found he had an hour before he had to get up, or maybe just a hair less than an hour. By the time he’d got back to sleep he’d have to wake up again. There really wasn’t a whole lot of point.
Sighing, he got back up again and went to go and make himself a cup of tea and some toast.
Very quietly. Extremely fucking quietly.
-
“Oof. Tough night?” Simon asked. The Dad, eyes lidded, slowly transferred where he was looking from somewhere indeterminate and middle-distancey to Simon’s face. This took effort.
“Little bit,” he said, trying not to yawn. He had been at work perhaps an hour by this point and it felt like the longest hour of his life. He blinked and dropped a brace of teabags into his mug, only to then remember that he’d already filled his mug with coffee.
He stared downward, then shrugged and stirred.
“Child wasn’t a fan of sleep last night, and me and the Missus got to share in this. Running on not a whole lot of hours right now. Getting up and down, you know? To keep them from lunging off the bed. Kind of half-asleep most of the time, but not enough. Or something, whatever. Sleepy,” the Dad burbled, stirring and stirring and stirring.
“Oh, I know what that’s like,” Simon said.
Simon did not know. He was several years younger, single, and carefree. He did not know. He might have thought he knew, he might have been able to imagine - hell, he might even have got close to imagining - but he did not know.
But that was fine. He meant well, which was what counted.
“Hmm,” said the Dad, lacking the energy to put enough words together to say anything else.
A beat
“I’ve been meaning to ask…” Simon said, tactfully, spooning some sugar.
“Hmm?” The Dad said, modulating it this time to indicate it was a question, and not a response. He was still stirring.
“Well, you know, I was just wondering, since your missus is a horse princess and all-”
“She’s retired.”
A lot of people seemed to forget this.
“Right. Well. Since your missus is a horse and all and you’re, you know, not, ah, how is it that your kid is-”
The Dad could see where this was going. It wasn’t the first time this had been brought up. He raised a hand to cut Simon off. He really, really didn’t have the energy today.
“Don’t question the mechanics of my life, Simon, just take the facts as they are,” he said, sweeping up his mug and its dubious, steaming contents.
“But-” Simon persisted.
Not that his persistence mattered, the Dad was already heading back to his desk.
“I’m walking away Simon, I’m walking away.”