Morning
Title: Morning
Author: Cesare
EDITED TO ADD: Petty larceny inspired by list discussions of The Wood-Monaghans by Salogel and Bailey.
Pairing: DM/EW
Rating: PG-13
Warning: Domesticity.
Disclaimer: Not true. No infringement intended.
Excerpt: After the rest of his coffee, Dom grins a peppy, "How's my littlest, hm? How's my baby girl?" and pets the top of Jesse's silky head. He's no longer novel and she ignores him in favor of digging holes in her buttered toast.
"She's not eating," Elijah says. "Again."
It's morning-- not that the concept of 'morning' means much to Elijah after staying up most of the night. He never imagined he'd ever be sorry to see a New Zealand sunrise.
The first two times he puts Jesse in her high chair, she wails so hard that he's terrified that somehow he caught her finger under the tray. This has never ever happened, and in fact after the fifth time he thought it had, he went out and bought a different high chair whose contruction makes it guaranteed-impossible for any part of a child to be caught or jammed anywhere within or even near it. He still worries; just another of the little things that makes him wonder if he's gradually going insane.
The third time he lowers her in, Jesse pats her hands on the high chair's little table and beams at him, wide-blue-eyed, her smile edged with new white. He'd be happier about those fresh little tooth-slivers if they weren't so hard-won. Nothing seems to soothe her lately; he feels as though he hasn't slept in decades.
People used to tease him that he could sleep anywhere, through anything, but Jesse's howls can yank him out of the deepest dreams in seconds. Privately he wonders how much biology has to do with that. He doesn't remember snapping to attention quite so fast during Seren's fitful nights. Just another guilty thought to drub himself with; add it to the fucking list.
He spends half an hour failing to convince Jesse to eat a bowl of cereal and toast. Eventually he scrapes the first round of disintegrating O's down the garbage disposal and pours a fresh batch for her scorn. A heavy tread thumps down the stairs and Jesse says, "Da da da," as Dom appears in the doorway, dressed but still damp-headed and pre-coffee laconic. He tips the carafe over a cup that Elijah set out for him, already equipped with milk and sweetener, and tosses back half of it in a few smooth swallows.
"Hiya, baby girl," Dom says, unglazing.
Jesse waggles her fingers at him and gurgles, "Da." Elijah could've sworn she'd just been about to finally swallow some cereal at that very moment, but now she's all nonsense and "Da" and nothing goes in; the milk bubbles on her lips.
With Seren, they'd tried being modern, so she'd grow up calling them each by name, no confusion over what to call either of her fathers. But as the months went by, Elijah became "Eee", Dom became "Da", and well-meaning people kept asking Seren if she wanted her daddy until one day "E" turned into "Daaa-eee" and Dom's mouth quirked unhappily and they settled on Daddy and Da. It was easier for the kids to say anyway; Dom couldn't get used to calling him "Eli", and "Lij" seemed to be a tricky syllable for them; maybe the unfamiliar "zh" sound is confusing.
They should've started the girls out bilingual, but with Seren, Elijah fretted that it might be too much on top of the multiplicity of accents already surrounding her daily. Dom only started her on German once she had a functioning English vocabulary. She stumbles on some of the glottals still; Elijah regrets making them wait, and adds it to the drubbing pile.
After the rest of his coffee, Dom grins a peppy, "How's my littlest, hm? How's my baby girl?" and pets the top of Jesse's silky head. He's no longer novel and she ignores him in favor of digging holes in her buttered toast.
"She's not eating," Elijah says. "Again."
Dom considers this. "How long've you been trying? Could give her a cinnamon biscuit."
"You said we shouldn't use sweets to get her to eat."
"Since when do you listen to me?" Dom shrugs. Elijah contemplates throwing the spit-gooey spoon at his head.
Jesse plunges her fist into her bowl and then sucks on her knuckles. Elijah extracts them and offers her a spoonful of cereal instead. She slurps it and spits it out again.
"Could call your mum for advice," offers Dom.
"We always call my mom. Why don't we ever call your mother?"
"Well? You know her number," Dom sidesteps, and Elijah's too tired to call him on the evasion.
And anyway, now Dom's peering into the sink. Elijah sighs. It's been a couple of days since he did any dishes, and Dom does the cooking and hates a messy kitchen and it's been niggling at Elijah that he really should be cleaning up, but it just keeps slipping down the list of things to do, somewhere under hunting for Seren's Barbie clothes under her bed and watching Sesame Street to learn the number of the day with Jesse.
"Have you eaten yet?"
He has to think about it. "Uh... no."
"Yeah, I wonder where Jesse gets these terrible habits," Dom remarks, shaking his head, long fingers hooking around the handle of the fridge door and tugging.
Hearing her name, Jesse pounds her tray table and babbles happily. Elijah lifts the spoon to her open mouth. Her nose wrinkles.
"C'mon sweetie," he sighs, "eat just a little bit for Daddy, okay?"
Jesse brings up one small hand to bat the spoon away. "Nononononono."
Dom sets a pot on the element, leans against the counter and watches them. "Have you tried doing the airplane bit?"
"That never works on her."
"Rocket ship? Express train?"
Elijah grits his teeth. "No. Modes of transportation just don't impress her."
"Hm. Steam shovel? Bulldozer? Air guitar?" Dom suggests. Elijah gives him a pained look; Dom says, "Ooookay," and turns back to the stove.
"Daaa-y," Jesse says, grasping the bowl of the spoon. He lets her have it, hoping, but she begins dipping it into the cereal and carefully lifting droplets of milk out of the bowl to let them spill blotchily onto her toast.
"You have to eat something, Jesse," he says dully, "I can't let you down out of your chair til you do."
She kicks her tiny sock-clad feet restlessly, but then she goes back to painstakingly soaking the toast with milk, one dribble at a time.
Elijah gives up for now, stands and shuffles over to the stove. Sometimes he can bore her into eating, if he stops trying to coax her and just waits. Not often enough, but sometimes.
The pot Dom is minding bubbles and seethes, eggs bobbing in the boiling water. Elijah's disappointed; he was hoping for something slightly more elaborate. Dom himself is popping edamame into his mouth, one by green flavorless one. Elijah thought he was so lucky when he fell for a guy who could cook, who loved to cook, who could braise and encrust things and even had mysterious tools for crimping the edges of his homemade pasta. He should've known that the path that started with yoga would lead inevitably to crazy diets involving whole foods. If he hears the word 'antioxidants' again Elijah believes he might honestly scream.
"Just another minute or so," Dom says, and leans to press a kiss against Elijah's temple. Elijah's shoulders relax a little for the first time since dawn.
"You know what I always think when I see eggs boiling?" he says.
"'Who put that there?'" Dom guesses. "'Which came first...?'"
"Blade Runner," Elijah says. "Every time."
"Oh yeah. Though that always seemed a bit stupid to me. Proving he's a replicant by sticking his hand in boiling water. Cos normal people can do that." Dom twirls a spoon in the pot. "Can't hold it there as long as he did, granted. Still."
His shoulders ratchet tighter again. "Normal people can't put their hands in boiling water."
"Sure they can. You just have to psyche yourself up for it. Watch." Dom splays his hand over the steam and feints.
"Will you knock it off?"
"I was just joking, Lij. You know, trying to make you laugh?"
"Well, it's not funny."
Sullen silence. Elijah goes back to Jesse. Her toast is milk-sodden and shredded and there's no less food than there was two minutes ago. He checks the clock. "It's time to get Seren up."
"I'm sort of occupied here."
"I can boil water, Dom."
"Can you make hummus?"
"For breakfast?"
"Yeah. To replace the egg yolks."
"What's wrong with the egg yolks?"
"Bad for you. Cholesterol."
Elijah could point out that he only tested slightly high for cholesterol during one checkup, that it was only high because he'd been on a high-protein diet to lose the twenty pounds he'd packed on for a role, that he's twenty-nine and in excellent health and great shape and could he please, please, please be cut some slack just once, just one time, for something? But he already knows where that would lead: nowhere good. "Okay," he says. "You can do your one-man show for Jesse, I'll wake up Seren and get her dressed and, hey, why not, I'll drive her to daycare too."
"That'd be grand," Dom says, "since I have training this morning."
"What? I thought it wasn't until one--"
"It's Thursday, I told you it's all day on Thursdays and Fridays now, we're stepping up. It's only two weeks til shooting starts."
The hell of it is, he might've said; Elijah finds himself sometimes blurring out when Dom talks lately. It's like he's heard his quota of words from Dom and now he can't listen to new ones unless he forgets some of the old ones. He tries to imagine trading his memories of that previous, passionate, Parmesan-wielding beach philosopher version of Dom in exchange for listening to Dom's current incarnation drone about local elections, his career, the ozone layer and redox signaling.
It's painful to even consider it, and a bad idea to think about early days, but too late, he's already there, probing for sore spots and finding an easy one: at the beginning they had sex every single day, multiple times daily, they had to make up other things to do just to pry themselves out of the bedroom and keep from rubbing each other raw. Lately he's been too exhausted at night to do anything but fall into bed; in the scant aching minutes before sleep sometimes he considers flat-out begging for a blowjob, but he knows for a fact he'd collapse afterward without reciprocating, and Elijah's always been too polite for his own good.
"Getting late," Dom says, jerking his chin toward the clock, hands busy mashing beans and oil.
"Right," Elijah answers leadenly, and heads up the stairs.
Seren wakes up sweetly, without complaint, trundles into the bathroom with her school clothes and comes out in a few minutes dressed and damp-headed. She holds still while Elijah pins back her hair with barrettes, and giggles when he chants, "One, two, buckle my shoe" as he helps her put on her Mary Janes.
His mother used to tell him that Seren was a good baby. "As opposed to what?" Elijah asked her. "A bad baby?"
"A difficult baby," his mom said, eyeing him significantly.
At the time he thought she was just needling him. Now he knows what she meant. Seren's colicky weeping always dwindled within an hour; Seren toilet-trained virtually overnight; Seren could keep herself entertained with a couple of weebles for hours on end; he could count Seren's bad nights on one hand. Seren was a good baby, and now she's a remarkably well-behaved and self-sufficient toddler. Jesse came into their lives squalling at the top of her lungs and hasn't given them an easy day yet. Jesse is a difficult baby, and Seren had left them disarmed and completely unprepared for the havoc Jesse wrought. There are times Elijah can almost hear Dom thinking that they should've stopped with one. Sometimes he itches for Dom to say it out loud, just so the knock-down drag-out fight will finally, at long last, commence.
"She takes after you," his mom said once, dryly, as Dom rocked Jesse and cooed to her while she fussed and whimpered at him. It's true in good ways as well as bad, though. Jesse's a charming baby; she catches attention; strangers exclaim over her on the street. She's inherited his wide-set blue eyes, and he can't help but be pleased, though he suspects that also means she'll have his faulty eyesight.
Seren holds out her wrist patiently while Elijah fumbles with the tiny catch of her charm bracelet, which requires fingernails that he still doesn't really have. His fingers slip and he frowns, "Oh honey, I'm sorry, did I pinch you?"
"No, Daddy, I'm all right," she says tranquilly; he hugs her and kisses the tip of her turned-up button nose and tries again, holding his breath until the little gold loops join together.
He carries her down the stairs and lets her pretend to slide down the banister. Back in the kitchen, he finds Dom well into pleading with Jesse to eat.
"Come on, duck," Dom coaxes. "Try some, it's magic. One side makes you taller, the other side makes you smaller."
"Da," Seren says, "I want one. Taller!"
Elijah tunes out the explanation that follows, as Seren doggedly insists on knowing exactly how Da making up stories about Jesse's cereal, which fiction Dom presents as fun and good, is different from lying, which of course is bad.
"Just see to your breakfast," Dom says, "show your sister how it's done."
Elijah turns around to see Dom and Seren both facing Jesse and eating with deliberate motions. Jesse screws up her face and kicks at her chair.
"See, Jesse?" Dom says to her, words jumbling with the food in his mouth. "It's not so hard to get this right."
"Daaa-y," Jesse whines, and Elijah goes to her and trades her soggy food for an egg and a fresh piece of toast. She doesn't eat that either, but at least she drinks most of a new cup of juice.
"D'you need help getting her into her carseat?" Dom asks, looking at his watch.
"I hate to move her when she still hasn't eaten anything."
"She'll be all right. Ghandi went without eating loads of times, didn't hurt him, and he was fasting twenty-odd days in a row."
"Not at fifteen months," Elijah says.
Dom chuckles, grabs his hand and squeezes it carelessly.
Jesse nudges her egg and stuffs her hand into her mouth.
"If we could just find baby food that tastes like her fingers," Dom says.
When Elijah smiles it feels so unfamiliar that he practically expects to hear his lips crack.
The eggs taste weird, but they're good, and Elijah feels so much better after he eats two of them with a slice of mealy twelve-grain toast that he marches over and insinuates himself onto Dom's lap and kisses him.
"Good morning," Dom says.
"Good morning, good morning, to you," Seren sings softly and tunelessly into her orange juice. Jesse squeals and shoves her toast onto the floor.
Elijah watches it fall and decides to let it lie. "Good morning."
Author: Cesare
EDITED TO ADD: Petty larceny inspired by list discussions of The Wood-Monaghans by Salogel and Bailey.
Pairing: DM/EW
Rating: PG-13
Warning: Domesticity.
Disclaimer: Not true. No infringement intended.
Excerpt: After the rest of his coffee, Dom grins a peppy, "How's my littlest, hm? How's my baby girl?" and pets the top of Jesse's silky head. He's no longer novel and she ignores him in favor of digging holes in her buttered toast.
"She's not eating," Elijah says. "Again."
It's morning-- not that the concept of 'morning' means much to Elijah after staying up most of the night. He never imagined he'd ever be sorry to see a New Zealand sunrise.
The first two times he puts Jesse in her high chair, she wails so hard that he's terrified that somehow he caught her finger under the tray. This has never ever happened, and in fact after the fifth time he thought it had, he went out and bought a different high chair whose contruction makes it guaranteed-impossible for any part of a child to be caught or jammed anywhere within or even near it. He still worries; just another of the little things that makes him wonder if he's gradually going insane.
The third time he lowers her in, Jesse pats her hands on the high chair's little table and beams at him, wide-blue-eyed, her smile edged with new white. He'd be happier about those fresh little tooth-slivers if they weren't so hard-won. Nothing seems to soothe her lately; he feels as though he hasn't slept in decades.
People used to tease him that he could sleep anywhere, through anything, but Jesse's howls can yank him out of the deepest dreams in seconds. Privately he wonders how much biology has to do with that. He doesn't remember snapping to attention quite so fast during Seren's fitful nights. Just another guilty thought to drub himself with; add it to the fucking list.
He spends half an hour failing to convince Jesse to eat a bowl of cereal and toast. Eventually he scrapes the first round of disintegrating O's down the garbage disposal and pours a fresh batch for her scorn. A heavy tread thumps down the stairs and Jesse says, "Da da da," as Dom appears in the doorway, dressed but still damp-headed and pre-coffee laconic. He tips the carafe over a cup that Elijah set out for him, already equipped with milk and sweetener, and tosses back half of it in a few smooth swallows.
"Hiya, baby girl," Dom says, unglazing.
Jesse waggles her fingers at him and gurgles, "Da." Elijah could've sworn she'd just been about to finally swallow some cereal at that very moment, but now she's all nonsense and "Da" and nothing goes in; the milk bubbles on her lips.
With Seren, they'd tried being modern, so she'd grow up calling them each by name, no confusion over what to call either of her fathers. But as the months went by, Elijah became "Eee", Dom became "Da", and well-meaning people kept asking Seren if she wanted her daddy until one day "E" turned into "Daaa-eee" and Dom's mouth quirked unhappily and they settled on Daddy and Da. It was easier for the kids to say anyway; Dom couldn't get used to calling him "Eli", and "Lij" seemed to be a tricky syllable for them; maybe the unfamiliar "zh" sound is confusing.
They should've started the girls out bilingual, but with Seren, Elijah fretted that it might be too much on top of the multiplicity of accents already surrounding her daily. Dom only started her on German once she had a functioning English vocabulary. She stumbles on some of the glottals still; Elijah regrets making them wait, and adds it to the drubbing pile.
After the rest of his coffee, Dom grins a peppy, "How's my littlest, hm? How's my baby girl?" and pets the top of Jesse's silky head. He's no longer novel and she ignores him in favor of digging holes in her buttered toast.
"She's not eating," Elijah says. "Again."
Dom considers this. "How long've you been trying? Could give her a cinnamon biscuit."
"You said we shouldn't use sweets to get her to eat."
"Since when do you listen to me?" Dom shrugs. Elijah contemplates throwing the spit-gooey spoon at his head.
Jesse plunges her fist into her bowl and then sucks on her knuckles. Elijah extracts them and offers her a spoonful of cereal instead. She slurps it and spits it out again.
"Could call your mum for advice," offers Dom.
"We always call my mom. Why don't we ever call your mother?"
"Well? You know her number," Dom sidesteps, and Elijah's too tired to call him on the evasion.
And anyway, now Dom's peering into the sink. Elijah sighs. It's been a couple of days since he did any dishes, and Dom does the cooking and hates a messy kitchen and it's been niggling at Elijah that he really should be cleaning up, but it just keeps slipping down the list of things to do, somewhere under hunting for Seren's Barbie clothes under her bed and watching Sesame Street to learn the number of the day with Jesse.
"Have you eaten yet?"
He has to think about it. "Uh... no."
"Yeah, I wonder where Jesse gets these terrible habits," Dom remarks, shaking his head, long fingers hooking around the handle of the fridge door and tugging.
Hearing her name, Jesse pounds her tray table and babbles happily. Elijah lifts the spoon to her open mouth. Her nose wrinkles.
"C'mon sweetie," he sighs, "eat just a little bit for Daddy, okay?"
Jesse brings up one small hand to bat the spoon away. "Nononononono."
Dom sets a pot on the element, leans against the counter and watches them. "Have you tried doing the airplane bit?"
"That never works on her."
"Rocket ship? Express train?"
Elijah grits his teeth. "No. Modes of transportation just don't impress her."
"Hm. Steam shovel? Bulldozer? Air guitar?" Dom suggests. Elijah gives him a pained look; Dom says, "Ooookay," and turns back to the stove.
"Daaa-y," Jesse says, grasping the bowl of the spoon. He lets her have it, hoping, but she begins dipping it into the cereal and carefully lifting droplets of milk out of the bowl to let them spill blotchily onto her toast.
"You have to eat something, Jesse," he says dully, "I can't let you down out of your chair til you do."
She kicks her tiny sock-clad feet restlessly, but then she goes back to painstakingly soaking the toast with milk, one dribble at a time.
Elijah gives up for now, stands and shuffles over to the stove. Sometimes he can bore her into eating, if he stops trying to coax her and just waits. Not often enough, but sometimes.
The pot Dom is minding bubbles and seethes, eggs bobbing in the boiling water. Elijah's disappointed; he was hoping for something slightly more elaborate. Dom himself is popping edamame into his mouth, one by green flavorless one. Elijah thought he was so lucky when he fell for a guy who could cook, who loved to cook, who could braise and encrust things and even had mysterious tools for crimping the edges of his homemade pasta. He should've known that the path that started with yoga would lead inevitably to crazy diets involving whole foods. If he hears the word 'antioxidants' again Elijah believes he might honestly scream.
"Just another minute or so," Dom says, and leans to press a kiss against Elijah's temple. Elijah's shoulders relax a little for the first time since dawn.
"You know what I always think when I see eggs boiling?" he says.
"'Who put that there?'" Dom guesses. "'Which came first...?'"
"Blade Runner," Elijah says. "Every time."
"Oh yeah. Though that always seemed a bit stupid to me. Proving he's a replicant by sticking his hand in boiling water. Cos normal people can do that." Dom twirls a spoon in the pot. "Can't hold it there as long as he did, granted. Still."
His shoulders ratchet tighter again. "Normal people can't put their hands in boiling water."
"Sure they can. You just have to psyche yourself up for it. Watch." Dom splays his hand over the steam and feints.
"Will you knock it off?"
"I was just joking, Lij. You know, trying to make you laugh?"
"Well, it's not funny."
Sullen silence. Elijah goes back to Jesse. Her toast is milk-sodden and shredded and there's no less food than there was two minutes ago. He checks the clock. "It's time to get Seren up."
"I'm sort of occupied here."
"I can boil water, Dom."
"Can you make hummus?"
"For breakfast?"
"Yeah. To replace the egg yolks."
"What's wrong with the egg yolks?"
"Bad for you. Cholesterol."
Elijah could point out that he only tested slightly high for cholesterol during one checkup, that it was only high because he'd been on a high-protein diet to lose the twenty pounds he'd packed on for a role, that he's twenty-nine and in excellent health and great shape and could he please, please, please be cut some slack just once, just one time, for something? But he already knows where that would lead: nowhere good. "Okay," he says. "You can do your one-man show for Jesse, I'll wake up Seren and get her dressed and, hey, why not, I'll drive her to daycare too."
"That'd be grand," Dom says, "since I have training this morning."
"What? I thought it wasn't until one--"
"It's Thursday, I told you it's all day on Thursdays and Fridays now, we're stepping up. It's only two weeks til shooting starts."
The hell of it is, he might've said; Elijah finds himself sometimes blurring out when Dom talks lately. It's like he's heard his quota of words from Dom and now he can't listen to new ones unless he forgets some of the old ones. He tries to imagine trading his memories of that previous, passionate, Parmesan-wielding beach philosopher version of Dom in exchange for listening to Dom's current incarnation drone about local elections, his career, the ozone layer and redox signaling.
It's painful to even consider it, and a bad idea to think about early days, but too late, he's already there, probing for sore spots and finding an easy one: at the beginning they had sex every single day, multiple times daily, they had to make up other things to do just to pry themselves out of the bedroom and keep from rubbing each other raw. Lately he's been too exhausted at night to do anything but fall into bed; in the scant aching minutes before sleep sometimes he considers flat-out begging for a blowjob, but he knows for a fact he'd collapse afterward without reciprocating, and Elijah's always been too polite for his own good.
"Getting late," Dom says, jerking his chin toward the clock, hands busy mashing beans and oil.
"Right," Elijah answers leadenly, and heads up the stairs.
Seren wakes up sweetly, without complaint, trundles into the bathroom with her school clothes and comes out in a few minutes dressed and damp-headed. She holds still while Elijah pins back her hair with barrettes, and giggles when he chants, "One, two, buckle my shoe" as he helps her put on her Mary Janes.
His mother used to tell him that Seren was a good baby. "As opposed to what?" Elijah asked her. "A bad baby?"
"A difficult baby," his mom said, eyeing him significantly.
At the time he thought she was just needling him. Now he knows what she meant. Seren's colicky weeping always dwindled within an hour; Seren toilet-trained virtually overnight; Seren could keep herself entertained with a couple of weebles for hours on end; he could count Seren's bad nights on one hand. Seren was a good baby, and now she's a remarkably well-behaved and self-sufficient toddler. Jesse came into their lives squalling at the top of her lungs and hasn't given them an easy day yet. Jesse is a difficult baby, and Seren had left them disarmed and completely unprepared for the havoc Jesse wrought. There are times Elijah can almost hear Dom thinking that they should've stopped with one. Sometimes he itches for Dom to say it out loud, just so the knock-down drag-out fight will finally, at long last, commence.
"She takes after you," his mom said once, dryly, as Dom rocked Jesse and cooed to her while she fussed and whimpered at him. It's true in good ways as well as bad, though. Jesse's a charming baby; she catches attention; strangers exclaim over her on the street. She's inherited his wide-set blue eyes, and he can't help but be pleased, though he suspects that also means she'll have his faulty eyesight.
Seren holds out her wrist patiently while Elijah fumbles with the tiny catch of her charm bracelet, which requires fingernails that he still doesn't really have. His fingers slip and he frowns, "Oh honey, I'm sorry, did I pinch you?"
"No, Daddy, I'm all right," she says tranquilly; he hugs her and kisses the tip of her turned-up button nose and tries again, holding his breath until the little gold loops join together.
He carries her down the stairs and lets her pretend to slide down the banister. Back in the kitchen, he finds Dom well into pleading with Jesse to eat.
"Come on, duck," Dom coaxes. "Try some, it's magic. One side makes you taller, the other side makes you smaller."
"Da," Seren says, "I want one. Taller!"
Elijah tunes out the explanation that follows, as Seren doggedly insists on knowing exactly how Da making up stories about Jesse's cereal, which fiction Dom presents as fun and good, is different from lying, which of course is bad.
"Just see to your breakfast," Dom says, "show your sister how it's done."
Elijah turns around to see Dom and Seren both facing Jesse and eating with deliberate motions. Jesse screws up her face and kicks at her chair.
"See, Jesse?" Dom says to her, words jumbling with the food in his mouth. "It's not so hard to get this right."
"Daaa-y," Jesse whines, and Elijah goes to her and trades her soggy food for an egg and a fresh piece of toast. She doesn't eat that either, but at least she drinks most of a new cup of juice.
"D'you need help getting her into her carseat?" Dom asks, looking at his watch.
"I hate to move her when she still hasn't eaten anything."
"She'll be all right. Ghandi went without eating loads of times, didn't hurt him, and he was fasting twenty-odd days in a row."
"Not at fifteen months," Elijah says.
Dom chuckles, grabs his hand and squeezes it carelessly.
Jesse nudges her egg and stuffs her hand into her mouth.
"If we could just find baby food that tastes like her fingers," Dom says.
When Elijah smiles it feels so unfamiliar that he practically expects to hear his lips crack.
The eggs taste weird, but they're good, and Elijah feels so much better after he eats two of them with a slice of mealy twelve-grain toast that he marches over and insinuates himself onto Dom's lap and kisses him.
"Good morning," Dom says.
"Good morning, good morning, to you," Seren sings softly and tunelessly into her orange juice. Jesse squeals and shoves her toast onto the floor.
Elijah watches it fall and decides to let it lie. "Good morning."