glacial_queen | The Estate, Sidra, Glacia, Thursday Evening (Fandom Time)

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The Estate, Sidra, Glacia, Thursday Evening (Fandom Time)

Karla stood, hands on her stomach, admiring the wall of the nursery. Dujae had finished the mural several days ago, but had decreed that Karla was not to see it until the paint had fully dried and fumes had dissipated. This morning was the first time she'd been allowed to visit and she was blown away by how lovely it was. She knew the sky would make Warren happy and the snake...

"Look," she whispered. "There's your uncle Jono. See? He's always watching over you."

With the mural done, everything was in readiness. The mural was done, the nursery was done, everything was done--except for the baby. She was now four days overdue and there was no sign that the baby was doing anything but getting ready to enjoy sleeping in on day number five. Karla was more than a little aggravated by this development (she was supposed to be drinking coffee by now!), but it was hard to remember her grumpiness at her daughter while standing in the middle of the nursery devoted to her existence.

"Listen, munchkin, you have another day before I getting really ticked," she said. "I'm cutting you a bit of slack because I'm in a really good mood today. But tomorrow, I mean it, okay?"

But yeah. Everything was ready and waiting for the guest on honor to make her first appearance. Everything was--

Wait.

"Warren?" Karla called. "We're supposed to be able to open the closet door, right?"

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"... Last I checked, that's what closet doors were meant to do, yeah." Warren glanced over toward Karla, looking up from where he was poking through some of the gifts from the baby shower. Yeah, he was still attempting to decipher what a few of them were for. "Are you pulling, or pushing?"

Was it a pull door, or a push door?

"I'm not doing anything yet," Karla said, looking across the room to where the closet was. "But I'm pretty sure it opens out. And I'm equally sure the three inches of dresser over the front is going to make that difficult to accomplish."

Well...crap.

Warren blinked over toward the closet. And then at the dresser that was sitting in front of it. And then he frowned a little.

"Well, I'm glad somebody noticed that now," he noted. "That... could make things awkward after she's born."

Huh. Okay, there had to be a good solution for this.

"Didn't we plan for this?" Karla asked, making her way over to the rocking chair that Dinah had given them. What? She wasn't going to be moving furniture around any. "I thought we figured out on paper where everything was going to go."

"Someone must have gotten a measurement wrong somewhere," Warren sighed, walking over to the closet and attempting to give the dresser a shove out of the way.

It bumped solidly against the change table.

"This isn't a disaster, though. I mean... we can fix this, you know? It's just furniture. We aren't going to be bested by furniture."

"Exactly," Karla said, giving Warren a firm nod. "We can move stuff around, no problem."

And by 'we', Karla meant 'Warren.' Because he had all the proportional strength and Karla had a baby and no Craft.

"What if the crib changed places with the dresser?"

Both of which were made of solid hardwood and were incredibly heavy and unwieldy to move, yes.

"We... could try that," Warren mused. "But then we'd stand the risk of knocking the crib with the closet door every time we open it. Which I think is why we didn't put it over here to begin with."

He pursed his lips as he looked around the room.

"We're keeping the toy box," he intoned. "And the rocking chair, of course..."

"Oh, right. Dammit, I knew there'd been a reason." Karla kept frowning, trying to figure out which new configuration they could put everything in that would somehow make it work. "But it also can't be over against the mural. We didn't want her to be able to lick the paint or whatever."

"It should be lead-free paint," Warren pointed out, looking toward the mural. "But the snake is too low, the crib or the dresser would cover it, and that's the part you seem to like the most, isn't it?"

She had called it Jono, so...

Warren could take it or leave it, here.

"... Too bad the change table is there."

Though inspiration was on its way, now. This was maybe not a disaster.

"It's non-toxic, but that doesn't mean I want the baby to eat it," Karla said. Dujae had assured her that he'd used paints made from natural plants and flowers, all of which had been provided by Uncle Saetan. But even if it couldn't hurt there was no reason that they should be careless. "I like all of it," Karla said. "But it's like asking what part of the Rembrandt you'd like to cover up with furniture."

Dujae.

"Well, Rembrandt should have left some room for furniture in here," Warren sighed, shaking his head as he wandered over to the change table. "It isn't as though he didn't know we were going to want to furnish this room. He didn't need to go all the way to the floor, did he?"

It was a beautiful mural, but a little on the impractical side.

There was another moment's pause, and then Warren took the little changing table mattress thing up and sidestepped, setting it down on top of the dresser.

"... Huh."

It fit very neatly.

"Well, if someone had measured the furniture right, it all would have fit, even with the mural," Karla retorted, folding her arms above her stomach and resolutely staring staring at the mural.

Beat.

"...'Huh' what?" she asked, craning her head around to see what he'd done. Oh. "Huh."

"How's that look? We can lose the table entirely, put the little railing things on the dresser... It would actually free up a lot of space in here, you know? I mean, unless you had your heart set on putting something on top of the dresser."

Probably more stuffed animals. There were a lot of stuffed animals.

BABIES NEED LOTS OF STUFFED ANIMALS, WARREN. MOTHER NIGHT.

"I guess we could put the stuffed animals on top of the bookshelf?" Karla suggested, chewing on her lip. "Or maybe hang up some more shelving to hold them? Or make a little stuffed animal pyramid in the corner, near the rocking chair?"

Weird. She had no idea where that last idea came from.

"You are aware that these will hardly be the only stuffed animals she gets, right? Her birth--whenever, y'know, that happens--will likely leave us with a few dozen more."

"And we can even arrange them artfully along the baseboard under Dujae's mural, if it comes to that," Warren noted, "because Darkness knows nothing else is going to be going there. There'll be plenty of places for stuffed animals."

He pointed at the same corner that the toybox had been tucked into.

"We can put a little net up in the corner, so that we have somewhere to chuck all of the toys. I'd rather have them up and out of the way than somewhere that we'll be tripping over when we come in for a three in the morning diaper change or something."

"Fair enough," Karla said, with a nod. "I used to have one of those in my dorm, remember? I'm certain I still have it."

Sigh.

"It's vanished, though. So we'll need to wait another day. Just one more, you hear?"

Karla's daughter listened about as well as she did.

"I'll hang it up the moment you can call it back in," Warren promised, smiling faintly before stepping back to gesture to his handiwork. "So, little rails on the dresser instead of the change table, and we get rid of that table entirely? It frees up more space in here, and the closet door won't thump against anything it's not supposed to."

"I like it," Karla agreed. "We can maybe put the table in my room? Since the baby's going to be sleeping there for a few months anyway and it's not like it doesn't have the room."

There was no way the baby was going to be sleeping by herself for a number of months.

Not even a chance, no.

"That could work. It can't hurt to have a couple of places to change her, anyway. I mean, like, around the estate. Babies kind of just poop wherever, right? And... it's a big estate."

Yes, he was fretting about this. Don't judge him.

"Well, yes, but we're hardly going to let her wander around in the whole thing," Karla said. "And we'll be good anywhere flat we can lay down a blanket. Though having some place you can get nappies and wipes from will be useful."

Because by then, Karla would have her Craft back and could just summon any number of nappies at will.

YESSSSSS.

"You know, we still haven't really settled on...on a name." If she wasn't Kayla.

"Well, yeah, I mean... some of us still have to get our diapers the boring way," Warren replied, smiling wryly.

And then that smile faltered slightly, and he was right back to looking like the nervous, fretting dad-to-be that he sometimes lapsed into, here and there.

"We... haven't, have we? Um, I mean... if..." That hand that he was waving there was sure pretty darn eloquent, right? "... You're trying not to think it too, aren't you?"

"Thinking? No. Worrying? Kinda." She looked away from Warren, unable to meet his eyes. "I don't want to be the kind of mother who is disappointed that her daughter isn't the girl she hoped for."

She figured Warren would understand that fear very well.

The corner of Warren's mouth twitched a little. Yeah. He got that fear.

"Damn it, Fandom," he murmured, nodding and making his way over to her, reaching for her hand. "But... here's the thing. Whoever she is... we already love her, don't we? I mean, we had Doctor Lecter show us her perfect little nose and everything. She has a heartbeat, and it's the single most beautiful thing I've heard in my entire life."

He pulled in a deep breath.

"Whether it's her or not... Whether Kayla and Nommy are two children the island threw at us at random or not... She's ours too. We made this one. You've actually been putting in a lot of long hours, making this one, I mean."

"Well, one of us had to," Karla grumbled, resting her head on Warren's shoulder and twining her fingers with his. "Even if it was more hours that I was told up front."

And she did love her daughter, the little girl inside who kicked and spun and thought of her as the Everything. But she was just worried it wouldn't be enough.

How insanely selfish was that?

"Does that mean I get dibs on naming her?"

"Just so long as you're not naming her, 'Warren.'"

That was his one rule! See? He was being reasonable.

"Though... I think... I mean... I don't want to say it, I'm afraid of jinxing it somehow. But there's a part of me that's certain that the name that we already have is the only one we could possibly use."

"I'd still feel better if we had a few to pick from," Karla said. "Like...I don't know, unjinxing us maybe? You know, like when you prepare for a bunch of bad things and none of them actually happen? Kinda like that."

It felt foolish even to say aloud; the Darkness didn't actually work like that. But one of the reasons she loved Warren so much was because she could say foolish things in front of him and he loved her no less for them.

"And besides, this way we don't end up naming her Sophronia or Inga or Warrenina in a panic." Before he could say anything she added, "That's not technically Warren."

"... Sophronia?"

Well, that was definitely... a ... it had letters in it? Wow.

"I'm trying really hard to not be that guy who looks up baby names on the internet," Warren added, pursing his lips. "But not many girl names are really jumping to mind that don't already belong to people we know."

And he was vetoing 'Raven' right away because things would get confusing. And vetoing 'Emma' on principle.

"I know some excellent ones," Karla said, trying her best to keep a straight face. "Odile, like from the ballet with swans. Or Agda. That was a popular name in Glacia for a few years. Vasilia?"

"... Vasilia sounds a bit like some sort of female medicinal cream," Warren noted, making a face. "But I guess the names I know aren't much better. Like, um, Halle? And... Famke?"

So, actress names. Good job, Warren.

At least they wouldn't sound too out of place in Glacia, right? Next to names like Amalasuintha and Leutgard.

"Did you just--?" Karla asked, before realizing that yes, yes he did. He had just made a Vagisil joke. "You are ridiculous."

There went trying to keep a straight face.

"How about...Dagda?"

"One of the hearth witches is named Dagda," Warren noted. "I think she's actually been collecting my dropped feathers and using them in hats. She does amateur haberdashery in her spare time."

And that was weird as hell. Just saying.

"We could get really creative with this," he mused. "I hear people were actually naming their baby girls Yolo last year on Earth."

Never. Nope. And not even technically accurate with the Blood anyway.

"I was wondering where I got that name from," Karla said with a nod. "And Yolo is getting a hard nope. Just so we're clear."

"No Yolo. It's not really accurate for a Blood baby, anyway."

Because not all of them OLO'd anyway.

"Moonberry. Stardust. Serendipity..."

Since they were being ridiculous, here.

"Even if it were, it would still be a no, because it's stupid," Karla declared. "Oooh! Let's name her Serenity! After Captain Chiba's boat!"

"I'm sure our friend the good Captain would get a kick out of that," Warren laughed. "Sure, we can put Serenity on the list."

Poor child.

On a scale from one to Yolo, Serenity was an excellent name.

"Vasilia Serenity, I think that sounds good," Karla said, looking around. Warren had moved the changing table out and was lining the stuffed animals along the wall. The crib was situated properly and the closet could open and close without issue.

"Looks like we're done in here," she said. "I...I guess we're ready?"

She didn't sound entirely certain about that.

"I don't think we'll be ready for years," Warren replied, walking back over to her and reaching for her hand, "but the baby's room is, at least. That's going to have to do for now."

He leaned forward to give her a gentle kiss on the forehead.

"Come on, my love," he murmured. "Let's go get ready to be not ready in bed, instead."

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The Estate, Sidra, Glacia, Thursday Evening (Fandom Time)

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