“Commanders, thank you for coming,” Callida welcomed Rapax, Baca, and Arum into the house personally and invited them into the parlor where Rogue was playing with the five-month-old triplets. Manasik laughed — a tight, guttural sound — with Rogue’s fingers teasing the neck beneath his chubby chin. Despite being tickled, the black haired baby was absolutely determined to pull his toes into his mouth.

Probus had rolled halfway across the room simply because he could and because pushing up on his hands and knees had yet to result in any meaningful forward motion. The little lion host was very proud of himself when another series of rolls draped him across the top of Callida’s boot. He looked up at his mom and squirmed happily until Callida picked him up, and then he shoved a fat fist into his mouth, immediately flirting with the commanders entering the room behind her.

Meanwhile, Tiaki was swimming slowly but more intentionally towards the bookcases in the opposite direction, his arms managing an uncoordinated army crawl advanced by the inefficient but eager kicking of his pudgy feet. He squawked in protest when Rogue grabbed his ankle and tugged him backwards across the carpet.

“They’ve gotten so big!” Baca exclaimed, giving Probus one of his fingers to gnaw on.

“I haven’t seen them since they were born,” Rapax noted.

“Me neither,” Arum added.

“Nor I,” Baca said, resisting laughing as drool slowly pooled in his palm.

“Which one was the first baby?” Rapax asked, his eyes skipping between the three of them.

“This one. This is Probus,” Callida introduced the child on her shoulder and offered him to Rapax. “He’s the one you held right after he was born, right?”

“Yeah,” Rapax confirmed with a grin and accepted the blonde baby now sliming his face with tiny, saliva-soaked fingers.

“And this one….” Callida scooped the still swimming shark host up off the floor to much protest. “This is Tiaki. Baca, he’s the baby you held.”

Baca happily reached out to take Tiaki from her, despite the baby’s continued complaints. Tiaki took a moment to scowl at this new stranger before resuming his struggle for freedom. Baca merely laughed and assisted Tiaki to the other end of the room before setting him loose to continue his exploring.

“Arum, this is Manasik.” Callida collected the last baby and passed him to a very uncertain Arum. She had to fight laughter for the look of terrified bewilderment on Arum’s face. While Arum awkwardly adjusted Manasik’s position in his arms, Manasik curiously looked Arum over and eventually reached out to grab Arum’s ear in an effort to bring it to his mouth for a more thorough investigation.

“Erm, Animo? A little help?” Arum floundered. Callida snorted and helped Arum to dislodge Manasik’s grip on his cartilage. After that, Arum and Manasik simply stared each other down… until Manasik lost interest and resumed looking for new things to explore with the “third eye” in his mouth. The nearest gold-colored button on Arum’s doublet was a most interesting find.

While her commanders giggled, gamboled, and gawked, Callida sank into the couch behind her husband and leaned forward to hug him around his shoulders, her swelling belly filling the space between her thighs. “What do you think?” she whispered in Rogue’s ear. He smiled and turned to peck her cheek. Callida nodded and sat up straight again, waiting for the right moment.

“Pardon me for asking, General,” Rapax said after a while, “but why are we here?”

Baca and Arum looked up from the little ones they were playing with, and Callida smiled. “Rogue and I invited you here to ask you if you’d be interested in being their donum nobilises.”

“Oh,” Rapax said, a hint of surprise raising his brow. The next moment, Probus squeaked and writhed excitedly in Rapax’s arms for no apparent reason, and the latter couldn’t help but chuckle.

“You don’t have to answer right away,” Callida qualified. “Feel free to sleep on it, but we wanted to extend the invitation.”

“Aw, who could say no to that face!” Baca exclaimed on his hands and knees from somewhere behind a chair. “I’m in!”

“Yeah…” Rapax seemed to share that sentiment. “I’ll claim this one.”

All eyes turned expectantly to Arum. “A-Animo… Rogue… I don’t know the first thing about babies.”

“There’s no pressure, Arum,” Callida assured him, “but they won’t be babies forever.”

“Oh, yeah,” Arum snorted. “Yeah, I guess, in that case… sure. Yeah! I’m willing.”

“Perfect,” Callida smiled. There was something wonderful about this Lion Tribe tradition of inviting people to invest in your child. It felt like expanding her extended family, and for that, it was unexpectedly emotional. Happy tears pooled in her eyes as she leaned forward to hug Rogue again — happy tears accompanied by a new warmth settling in her chest.

***

“Did you get enough to eat?” Rogue asked pointedly. Callida sighed and picked at her plate a little more, forcing herself to swallow a handful of bites beyond what was comfortable in her stomach. It wasn’t the nausea so much; there just wasn’t enough room for her stomach to expand as she passed the midpoint in her pregnancy. “I want to do a check-up after dinner,” Rogue reminded her, and Callida acknowledged his fussing with little more than an eye roll of protest. His fastidiousness was something she merely tolerated, and not because she resented being a patient (though that was also true). Even though she’d frankly forgiven him, he was still doing self-mandated penance for his months of drunken abandonment. She didn’t question him anymore; she simply accepted it, because all efforts to talk Rogue out of his shame and guilt had wholly failed.

While Callida finished choking down her extra calories, Rogue cleaned up the triplets who had thoroughly enjoyed squishing their mushed vegetables through their fingers and then smearing the resulting goop across their faces and through their hair.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

“Give up, Rogue. They’re all going to need a bath.”

“Yeah, but until then, they don’t need to track it through the house.”

Callida grinned crookedly when, moments after his comment, Rogue threw in the towel and snatched Manasik out of his highchair to carry him into the kitchen for a sponge bath. He returned, plopping Manasik in Callida’s lap so he could do the same with Probus… and then again with Tiaki. Between her belly and the fact that all three boys were super wiggly these days, it was hard simply containing them in her lap. Rogue returned with Tiaki to find her struggling. Probus was squawking and pinned partially upside down beneath one arm because he’d tried to take a nosedive out of her lap while she was managing Manasik, and Manasik was now doing his best to climb on top of her protruding gut with her relatively free hand protecting him from accidentally tumbling backwards. “A little help?”

Rogue laughed and collected Probus by a flailing ankle, bringing the chubby baby up so he could right him. “M’lady, if you’re done eating, let’s get the boys up to their room.”

Callida nodded and led the way to the nursery where the boys were loosed to roam the rug sprinkled with the odd toy. They were officially crawling, climbing, sitting up on their own, pulling themselves up on things, and even taking the occasional, gutsy steps away from their supports.

While the boys roamed the room, Rogue directed Callida to the cot near the window. Despite having made up, the cot remained in the room for whomever found need for it while on night duty. “Lie down, Callida,” she was instructed. She sighed, complied, and then distractedly watched Tiaki hunt down Manasik and pull his silky black hair. Manasik tolerated the exploratory tugging much in the same way that Callida tolerated Rogue’s gentle probing of her stomach and the squirming of the baby within.

“Well, the good news is you’re progressively gaining some weight back.”

“I’m trying to,” she confirmed distractedly.

“I’m a little worried that you’re measuring big again.”

“You’ve been saying that for weeks. What does that mean?”

“You measured big last time. You were about this far along when I was able to identify two separate babies — obviously I missed the third. The odds of you carrying more than one again are…. Well, if you carry multiples once, the odds of doing it again are a lot higher, and it would be even higher if your mom was a twin, had twins, or had siblings who were twins.”

“She didn’t have any siblings, and obviously she didn’t have any twins. So….” A vague memory triggered in her head, so vague, she wasn’t even sure if it was real or not. “Actually, she might have been a twin.”

“And you didn’t think to tell me that?!”

“Well, if she was a twin, the twin didn’t survive long after birth. I’m not sure. I just feel like I heard once that she’d had a twin brother.”

“And you only thought of that now?”

“I’m sorry. Does that make a difference?”

“Well, it would certainly increase the likelihood of you carrying multiples,” Rogue said with an increasing frown. “Between that and the fact you’ve already had triplets…. That’s not great, Callida.”

Callida’s head flopped back into the pillow as Rogue’s probing lingered and became more intentional and uncomfortable. She returned to watching the triplets innocently harassing each other. Probus pulled himself up using a chair and made an attempt at walking, successfully taking two steps after letting go of the chair before losing his balance and landing against Tiaki, who startled and released Manasik’s hair.

“Crap,” Rogue muttered quietly. Callida didn’t ask; she didn’t want the answer to that question. But she was now watching Rogue’s face. There was something both anxious and resigned in his expression; his brow was pinched, his eyes closed, his hands pressing firmly against opposite sides of her tummy. Callida bit her lip, feeling her face drain. Now she watched the boys play unseeingly. “Callida?” She looked back at her husband and took his hand, allowing him to help her into a sitting position. He took a knee in front of her, his hands returning to her belly, his face clouded with concern.

“How many this time?”

“At least two,” he whispered darkly, head hanging in some undefined emotional burden. “I looked. If there is a third again, I couldn’t feel it, but I missed one the last time.”

How else was she supposed to react but to nod numbly and do her best to accept this news? “At least two.” She slouched into the cot, resting her head and shoulders against the wall as she processed.

“Callida, I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have–”

“Stop it, Rogue,” she cut him off, feeling angry. “Just… stop it. This is no more your fault than it is mine, and I’m tired of you blaming yourself for everything. What’s done is done. What matters is what we choose to do now. I’ve forgiven you, you’re doing everything you can to make amends… just stop this already! Alright?” Laboriously sitting up straight again, Callida sighed and collected Rogue’s chin in one hand, lifting his eyes to hers. “What was it you said last time? You were too excited to be sorry?”

“Something like that,” he whispered.

“At least one of us should try to be excited, Rogue. There’s no going back now, only forward, and if we think of them only as the product of our mistakes, what do you think that will do to them? I need your help finding the right perspective here, so please, no more regrets, no more blaming yourself, no more apologies. Instead, help me figure out how to love at least two more. Can you do that for me?” He swallowed and nodded solemnly, and Callida leaned down to kiss him once and then glanced at the boys on the rug. Probus was on his feet again, and Callida realized that he was several feet away from the chair he’d pulled himself up on. “Primordials, Rogue! Look!”

She got off the cot and knelt on the floor with her arms extended to the blonde baby very proudly grinning to himself, his own arms out in an effort to remain balanced. He managed three more steps towards his mother before he got too excited and toppled to the floor. Callida immediately cheered for him and scooped him up. She then helped him find his feet and pointed him towards Rogue. Probus squealed happily and managed several steps before he overbalanced, and Rogue caught him, drawing him into a brief hug before the determined child insisted on trying again. Probus was so delighted with his new skill discovery, Callida couldn’t help but smile as he toddled back, this time making it all the way to her before diving into her chest. She soaked up the squishy snuggles until Probus was ready to practice walking some more.

Meeting Rogue’s eyes across the way, Probus wobbling the distance between them, Callida smiled, and Rogue smiled back. As long as they were in this together, everything was going to be ok. Her smile faltered, her hand unconsciously cradling her burdened belly. What if these babies weren’t wolves either? She tried not to think about it. She tried to trust that Rogue wouldn’t abandon her again after these months of penance. She’d forgiven him — she was determined to never hold this over his head as he was doing a good enough job of that all on his own — but she couldn’t forget. Her trust had been broken, and her heart harbored the self-preserving fear that he might break her trust again, preparing contingencies for that possibility and bracing for the pain that would come with it.

Probus lost interest in walking for the moment and crawled away to play with a textured wooden block Callida had carved with rounded corners and edges, but Callida remained kneeling on the floor lost in thought.

“Callida? Are you alright?”

“Rogue, what if it happens again? What if… what if these babies aren’t wolves either?”

His lips became a thin line. Rogue stood up and Callida accepted an assist to her feet next to him. “If it happens again, we’ll take them to a temple, the triplets too.”

“What if… What if they’re lions again? Like Probus.”

Rogue sighed, his forehead meeting hers. “There’s no one else?”

“No one,” Callida confirmed yet again and bit into her lip as desperate tears beaded up.

“Then, even if they are all lions, we’ll take them to a temple.”

“You promise?”

He carefully and tenderly sealed his answer with a kiss. “Promise.”