As I was coming out of my growth period shortly after my nineteenth birthday and we were hunting for a long term apartment for when our lease at the new parenting complex ended shortly, Ilan had gone to The Wilds to fight in a tournament to win the rights to mate with a compatible sapien.
He won, but to his annoyance, the sapien he won in battle was a newborn.
The sapien he had intended to win the rights to had been hastily moved to Greater Lakes when it became apparent that Ilan, an outsider, was going to win, and so they followed through by giving him an abandoned newborn.
To say he was furious was an understatement.
Ilan was fifteen and would be dead in ten years, well before the newborn was anywhere close to being old enough to mate with, so it was an insult that he proclaimed he wouldn’t forget.
But he took the newborn anyway and handed it off to us in exchange for giving him a room in our new apartment so he could hunt down where his true prize was. The room was his for free, of course, but Trinity novus were trained to not accept gifts for free...and I wasn’t going to say no to a newborn baby.
That just wasn’t who I was.
Luckily, Gideon was more interested in parenting our newborn than he was with Colin, especially after the kittens and the series of cats we got all bonded with Ilan instead.
Every kitten and cat brought into our modest home all slept with Ilan in his room, waited for him at the door when he went out to search for the sapien he was offered, and when Gideon tried to play or cuddle with them, they’d scratch and hiss at him (Colin becoming very well trained to clean Gideon’s wounds and bandaging them).
So...that was pretty upsetting for him, even if he tried to put on a brave face for me, but he decided that baby humans were like upgraded cats that lived longer and could do more tricks, so….
He latched onto Percival pretty quickly, and settled into being a brother to Colin just as Colin settled into being a big brother to Percival.
It was a nice little family we were building. A little crazy, but so enjoyable and loving.
Every single week since arriving in Greater Lakes, no matter how exhausted I was or how ungodly cold it was, we got on the train and went to spend the weekend with my parents in my hometown, staying from Friday night until late Sunday.
Those were the days that the kids in the family were usually dropped off with my parents for a cousins weekend so Roy and Mabel – still teenagers and parents to a handful of children – could recharge or spend quality time together. They had Mabel’s parents to help out, but I knew it was important for Roy to get the weekend off so he could rest, but also take steps to manage his stress.
When Colin joined the family, my parents insisted that we follow with the tradition and bring him down to bond with his cousins, my parents and my sisters.
Because Colin had intense separation anxiety, Gideon and I would spend every weekend with my parents instead of just dropping him off like Roy and Mabel did with their kids. At first, Colin just sat on my lap while I was passed out, sitting up on my parents couch and going through my rapid growth period, but slowly Colin warmed up to the cousins and my parents and by the time Percival came around, we thought Colin was ready to be dropped off like the other kids.
Percival, unlike Colin, could not care less where he was as long as he was kept cuddled, which my parents and sisters were all to happy to do.
So finally, finally, finally, Gideon and I were able to have time alone, as Ilan had joined the Greater Lakes Peacekeepers and was now living in their dorms...with all six of Gideon’s cats. There was a lot of talk of him being MAN when GL’s own retired in a year, but there was still some struggles he had to iron out with the other males before that was locked in.
Not that that meant anything to his prized sapien, who Ilan was struggling to court.
And because he didn’t want my advice – or anyone’s advice – we could only watch from afar as they...did their strange courting dance or arguing, screaming, going back to casual conversations, and then almost being romantic before repeating the cycle.
But who was I to judge.
I tried to get my mate to date other people.
The first weekend Gideon and I had alone had been a big event for us and we had both been excited for it in the days leading up to it.
We took the train down with the kids, got them settled with my parents and then called a car to go down to Liliport to have dinner with Willow and his wife as well as walk the town with Claude before he departed for trinity, where his uncivilized betrothed – arranged by the clans – was waiting for him.
Before dawn, Gideon and I took the train back up to Greater Lakes and had planned to take a nap before we took a long shower together, something I couldn’t do with Colin around because it would trigger his anxiety, and then the plan was to spend the entire day fooling around, making love and just enjoying each other’s company.
But I had one shoe off before I got a teary video call on my comm from Colin asking where we were and why I wasn’t there with him. He cried that he had looked everywhere for me and he didn’t want to play hide and seek with me anymore, that I needed to come out and sit with him.
We had already explained that he would be spending the weekend with his cousins and my parents, but I guess he wasn’t ready for that big step and became hysterical when I told him we were back home without him, asking if I was going to leave him behind and what he had done wrong – what he could do better, and that he promised to be a good boy.
So we quickly put together a weekend bag and jumped on the next train down.
Which was completely okay.
Gideon was a bit disappointed, but he got that this was just part of the adjustment period.
Plus we had sex pretty much the entire five hour train ride down to my parents, so...that helped.
The next weekend, Gideon and I stayed the nights with my parents and the days at a hotel in my hometown so Colin could be occupied during the day while Gideon and I had private time and then we’d be there at night when he needed to sleep.
While my family was mostly novus, we were going to enroll Colin into a sapien school, so it was important to have him on a schedule where he was awake from noon until eleven p.m., which my parents worked around when he came to stay, my parents, both sapiens, spending some quality time with him then.
By the time spring came around, we finally were able to leave him and Percival at my parents house for the entire weekend and not have to worry about them, especially since Colin and I stuck to a very struck call schedule where we called when he had lunch and then before he went to bed so Gideon could say prayers for us, and then Gideon would send him a few pictures during the day.
And on the weekend, Gideon and I had our time alone to bond.
We were fully bonded by now, but I think we both sorely needed some time alone. We got it when we went to the hotel, yes, but being home alone gave us a chance to get caught up on all the things were weren’t able to when we had the factor in a toddler and a baby that needed near constant attention, since Sapien babies didn’t sleep like novus babies, who could sleep sometimes for more then twenty hours a day.
I was back in school so it gave me a couple hours to catch up on my assignments, but also help Gideon with his. Gideon wasn’t really sure what he wanted to do for a career, and while I assured him that he wouldn’t have to worry about that as I made enough money working as as record keeper for the city to support our little family and would make more than enough once I graduated school, he wanted to go to college so he could tag along with me when I had to go to school.
Which I admittedly found adorable.
It was highly unlikely he would ever getting into GLU, but I supported him studying and furthering his education. He and the kids would absolutely be taken care of by my family if anything were to happen to me, but I also wanted him to be able to do and become whatever it was that he wanted so he had some fulfillment outside our little family.
So far, he just wanted to be around me, which was wonderful, but I also wanted him to be able to do whatever he wanted once the boys were both in school, especially since we decided we wouldn’t be looking to adopt for at least the next ten years so we could focus on just the four of us.
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