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Pale moonlight filters freely into the room. The gentle glow of night time. Rolling towards the middle of the bed, a hand reaches out for a familiar sense of comfort. Something that had been near consistent once everything had died down and all of them had decided to make whatever they had work.
Alte lets out a muffled sleepy groan into the cold pillow, the hand patting lazily over the sheets, searching for Jugend. With one side of his face pressed into the pillow, he winces as he blinks his eyes open despite the muted light coming from the windows.
Empty.
Again.
And judging by the absence of warmth, he’s been alone for a good while.
Leveraging himself up on his elbow he reaches to the bedside table blindly, searching for the baby monitor. After two or three attempts he finally located the little white handheld and toggles through the cameras set up in Calliope’s room.
She’d been doing well, sleeping in her big girl bed, before. Well before everything went to shit again.
Regression, her doctors had explained during their most recent checkup. “Her brain doesn’t understand and is under stress so it’s trying to revert back in order to protect itself.” They’d explain in simple terms.
They knew.
It didn’t take a diagnosis from a licensed pediatric doctor for them to know what it was.
She missed him.
They all missed him.
There had hardly been a handful of nights where one or both of them had to be in the same room to put her to sleep. They’d halfway considered putting the crib back in after one night Jugend had checked the monitor and found her sleeping up against the closed door, clutching one of Kanin’s shirts.
He’d gone quiet after that. Well, quieter, if that was even possible.
The whole house was eerily quiet. Bereft of life even though there were at least three bodies occupying space within its walls.
Even the air felt heavy, ladened with unspoken sadness and unanswered questions.
Except when Calli was distracted enough to giggle and babble for them. A small glimpse of sunshine through the ever present gloom.
It makes sense why Kanin started calling her Songbird. Calliope’s brightness greets them like the birds greet the morning. Every morning she’d wake up and smile so big, reaching out for whoever’s privilege it was to get her morning started. And now that they had been doing it for months, without Kanin, both men understood better of their fortune to be on this side of the barrier of metal and concrete.
But as it seems, even their little girl wasn’t immune to suffering, much as they’ve done to shield her away from the evil lurking around every corner.
It didn’t escape them that when the three of them would visit Kanin, Calli would babble even more, just for him. Trying her very best to talk with him. Like she knew that their time spent together was meant for making up lost time. Shoving all those missed moments into 60 minutes or less. A less depending on the mood of the CO overseeing their visitation time.
Alte sighed, finding that their little dear was still sleeping soundly in her bed. Even in the night vision he could see Kanin’s shirt pressed close to her face. But no Jugend.
Extracting himself from the bed with sleep heavy limbs took more effort than he would’ve like to admit. Nobody sleeps enough lately. Lately, it’s been a miracle for any one of them to actually sleep for a whole night.
Sooner or later something was going to give.
A breaking point was looming closer than either Jugend or Alte wanted to acknowledge. So they didn’t. They just kept pressing forward. Even if they weren’t any closer to a decent solution to their problem.
Baby monitor in one hand, Alte pads out to the main living space of the house. Just like his first night in the penthouse he finds Jugend in his preferred workspace, hunched over his computer at the kitchen island. From his perspective, in the threshold between the two rooms he can already tell that Jugend is dressed back in slacks and a button up.
So not only did he come out here with the intention of working through the night hours but also with the intention of not coming back to bed.
Some sort of awareness cracked and settled haphazardly within his chest, out of place, intrusively taking up space where other feelings ought to be. Feelings that he had only found within their presence. Ones that were solidified in the sterile confines of Alte’s hospital room, surrounded by beeping machines and half empty cardboard coffee cups.
Being close with Jugend as of late has felt like a more dangerous game of chicken. Partially because he wants to keep things away from Calli and partially to keep things from Alte. One he can agree with, the other not so much. His attitude becoming more unpredictable than the midwest weather. One moment it's as if nothing had changed between them, business as usual. The next? Jugend disappearing for hours on end on the phone coming back slightly dead behind the eyes and on the verge of snapping.
Shuffling himself across the room, Alte observed that the closer he got to Jugend the more defined his features became. Dark bags hang proudly under his eyes while his brows pinch impossibly closer in frustration. Despite the hour he body was tense, poised to move at any sign of a threat.
Alte set the little monitor beside the half drunk coffee mug, caging in Jugend between his arms that were keeping him upright. Chin resting over one shoulder, Alte squinted at the brightness of the screen. The current page pulled up of Senator Fieke, not that he needed to read the words on the screen to figure that much, doesn’t take much knowing when there is a picture of her in the upper left corner of the article.
He’d been getting better at reading, somewhat.
Still couldn’t read most of what was on the screen. Picking out words like ‘the,’ ‘and,’ ‘also’ was easy. But the longer words? It was like his brain completely dismissed them, glossing over them like they didn’t even exist. Fuzzy little squiggles in between the words he already knew or a string of letters that formed a word that he couldn’t actually pronounce. Which still left him pretty useless in actually comprehending what he was able to read.
If he wasn’t careful Calli would be reading sooner than he would. Alte wouldn’t classify himself as competitive, especially not when it came to having an opponent that was over 20 years younger. But it was a sense of pride that he could also take part in helping teach her. He wanted to be better for himself but being better for Calli far outweighed his own sense of self preservation.
“Been up long?” He asks quietly while Jugend switches to a different tab and hastily starts typing, giving Alte a noncommittal sound. A response that would usually mean that he’s busy enough to not be disturbed, the only indication that he momentarily switched his focus was the slight head tilt to look past Alte to the baby monitor.
Sighing, Alte moved his hands from the counter to wrap around Jugend’s middle, pressing a kiss to his temple as he squeezed. The temporary connection chasing away the chill in the air. “Come back to bed?” His words still a bit roughed up from sleep.
“Not tired.” Jugend’s near monotone response gave little indication that he wanted or needed to do as Alte had asked.
“But I am.” Alte countered, not unkindly, but as a matter of fact. Planting a line of soft kisses from Jugend’s temple, down to the harsh cut of his jawbone. He could tell that he was pressing his luck by the way Jugend’s fingers clenched into fists, hovering over the keyboard.
“Then go back to bed.”
Alte wasn’t above begging but between the strain on their relationship, the issues with Calli, and watching Jugend run himself so ragged that he was losing himself out of desperation there was only so much more Alte could handle. “Baby, please come back to bed.” His voice slightly cracking with exhaustion, pressing his body even closer to Jugend’s, one of his hands firmly pressed to the place where he could feel a heartbeat.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Repeat.
They stayed like this, Alte curled around much of Jugend’s upper body in the dim light of the kitchen. Slowly one of Jugend’s hands pressed against Alte’s. “Not until we all can.” Spoken like a vow made between Jugend and the god he no longer believed in.
Where does that leave him? Sleeping in the bed alone? Waking up alone more often than not. Playing with Calli alone and placating her when things became even too much for her to cope with feelings bigger than her tiny body. As if it wasn’t bad enough that one of his partners was locked away in an unreachable place. Jugend was creating his own prison, out of his own guilt and inability to get Kanin back to them. Shutting out everyone and everything that might be a hindrance.
He was inflicting punishment on himself and in return all of them were suffering.
“You’ll be dead before he’s able to come back. You need sleep.” Alte tried to encourage.
“I already told you, m’not tired.”
“And what will you accomplish staying up and working through the day on what few hours you have slept?” Alte countered.
Alte could feel Jugend’s scowl even though he couldn’t see his face. “We could be one step closer to being a family again. Calli get’s her papa back, Alte. Fuck, if I don’t want him back as well but she needs him. Calli needs Kanin.” Jugend’s voice wavered as he spoke.
“But she also needs you, now, Jugend. Calli needs all of us, you and I especially, now.” Alte spoke softly, nuzzling their cheeks together. “She doesn’t understand that you being gone is to help bring Kanin back. All she understands is that two out of her three papas are busy. She misses you too.”
“The quicker-”
“I need you.” Alte interrupts. “I need you to be there, in bed, for me. I get it Jugend. Really, I do. I’m not asking you to choose between him, or me, or Calli. But you can’t keep going like this. There won’t be anything for Kanin to come back to if we keep this up. So please, just for tonight, can you come back to bed with me?” He’d learned early on to not expect Jugend to go out of his way to show interest in overly romantic notions, that his expressions of love worked differently than most. And he’d accepted that part of Jugend with ease because there had been Kanin there too, balancing them out, rounding out each other’s needs.
“I’m failing him Alte.”
Jugend’s shoulders shook under Alte’s hold. It was in this moment that Alte realized that perhaps the breaking point had already crept up upon them. Temporarily releasing his hold he swiveled the stool, slotting himself between Jugend’s legs, embracing his partner like his very life depended on it. “No you’re not. You’re giving everything you got and then some. But you can’t survive running off of fumes. You need to sleep, and make time to eat, time to take care of yourself Jugend.”
“Okay.” It had taken a while for Jugend to finally relent, his whole body going lax.
Alte readjusted his hold, hefting Jugend up as if he was Calli’s size and not a man that was taller and nearly all arms and legs compared to Alte himself. He carried him and the little monitor back to the bedroom where he placed him down at the edge of their bed. Taking his time he worked off Jugend’s clothes, stripping him down for comfort, placing kisses anywhere he could to show his approval and appreciation for Jugend being here, with him.
It had taken a while but soon enough Jugend’s breathing evened out, slow and rhythmic. The combination of their bodies warming up the bed again, holding Alte’s lonely feelings at bay for just a short reprieve. Their struggles were far from over with the elections still months out but for tonight and maybe in the morning Alte wouldn’t wake up in a cold empty bed.