Cycles of Sun

Sometimes, Queenie wonders if it would be frowned upon if she slipped her daughter a sleeping draft to avoid the pre-nap tantrum. She is exhausted, and Aurie had been feeding off her mother’s discomfort, her father’s exhaustion and her aunt and uncle’s anxiety. Putting Aurie down had become nearly impossible, yet the girl needed to sleep. They all needed sleep. They all needed a moment of peace.

“She’s out for the count,” Jacob said quietly, slumping down on the sofa next to her as carefully as he could. He’d lost weight since they’d moved to England. Not huge amounts, enough to notice, but not enough that he was looking gaunt. It was wearing on them all. But for Jacob, he was having to balance the secrets of the Wizarding world while pretending he was just a regular guy just tryin’ ta make a livin’.

“We should move to a wizarding community,” Queenie hums absently, fingers tracing patterns on her stomach, “You could set up a bakery there. Show them how fantastic you are without magic. We could go to Godric’s Hollow. Or, Hetty was telling me about Ottery St Catchpole where she lives. It seems like a good community.”

“You don’t wanna leave Teen though,” Jacob summarised accurately. “She ent dealing too well.”

“Yeah,” Queenie sighed, snuggling down on the sofa and relaxing into her husband’s arms. She catches the tail end of his thought as he presses his nose into her golden hair. “I missed you too.”

Tina and Newt had been wonderful, desperate to make sure that the Kowalski family felt welcome and it had become home, but it was so busy. Teen was waddling around getting more and more frustrated by what she couldn’t do by the hour, let alone the day. Newt wasn’t much better, simultaneously wracked with guilt over his brother and fussing over Tina. They very rarely got any time to themselves, to just be Queenie and Jacob Kowalski, and not Newt and Tina Scamander’s sister and brother-in-law.

But this morning, Tina had announced, very pointedly that she and Newt were going out to visit Hetty and the Prewetts in Ottery St Catchpole, and that they would be gone all day. In her mind, Tina had followed this up with a promise that all the creatures had been fed, watered and checked, and wouldn’t need any sort of interaction.

Queenie had nearly cried with relief at the thought of a day spent only with her husband and child before the house was full of diapers and baby cries all over again. Only trebled, given how Tina was due a month after their own baby and that Helena Scamander was moving in any week between now and winter.

“You know,” Jacob said quietly into her hair, “We suddenly got this whole house to ourselves and Aurie’s asleep and I just wanna nap.”

Queenie huffed a laugh against his chest at the ironic truth of the statement.

“We have been busy recently,” She admitted, “I feel like I hardly see you since we got here. And, yeah, I don’t have to be Miss Goldstein here, people don’t generally have an issue with you bein’ a no-maj but Jacob, I do miss New York.”

“Yeah, me too Queen,” Jacob sighed, “me too. But, we’re here and we’re safe so how’s Junior doin’?”

“We ain’t callin’ him Junior!” Queenie protested in amusement, willing to name their child Jacob Kowalski the second if that’s what Jacob really wanted. “And we don’t even know if he’s even a he yet.”

“Well, we got enough girls outnumberin’ us guys,” Jacob chuckled, his hand resting atop Queenie’s, “We need a few boys to even the split, just a little.”

“You know what tickles me?” Queenie said suddlenly, her voice lighter than it had been in days, leaden with exhaustion as it was. “I can read minds but this here baby ain’t got a guys voice or a gals voice just yet, it’s just got a sense of it. Aurie didn’t either. Seems unfair for me to be able to read minds but not tell whether I’m having a boy or a girl!”

“It’s a good thing,” Jacob argued, his moustache tickling the skin behind Queenie’s ear, “Means it’s a surprise all round. Who’d want to know if theyse be having a boy or a girl? Takes the fun out of it.”

“Teen was tellin’ me the other day about a woman she knows through work,” Queenie reminded herself of how good she had it, a man she loved, a family that would break the law for her a million times over and a new family that welcomed her with wide open arms. “She had a girl and her husband went crazy cuz it was the third girl and he wanted a boy for the family name.”

“Well, I ain’t got much a care for that,” Jacob said firmly, disgust tinging the edge of his thoughts that a man would put so little weight on the health and happiness of his family. “S’long as baby here is healthy then I’ll be happy.”

Queenie twisted a little uncomfortably. She was significantly bigger in this pregnancy, and significantly more uncomfortable much earlier. At this point in her pregnancy with Aurie she’d been relatively uncomfortable but still mobile. With this one, she found that sitting with her feet resting on a stool was the only way she didn’t feel constantly off balance and nauseous.

“Hey, what we gonna call him,” Queenie tugged Jacob’s arm a little tighter around her, taking comfort from Jacob’s solid warmth, as she had done from the moment they’d met. Tina didn’t believe in fairytales and love at first sight, considered it nonsense. But Queenie felt her world had shifted slightly when she met Jacob, and without him it was off-kilter. It had been almost instantaneous. Tina and Newt had taken far longer to fall in love, but in doing so had become excessively co-dependant.

“Him?” Jacob asked in amusement.

“We can do girls names after,” Queenie nudged him slightly, enjoying the feeling of his answering chuckle against his back. “I can make a list!”

She pulled her wand out of pocket with some difficulty, the bump stretching the fabric making it harder to distort. Queenie gave it a seemingly careless wave, watching as a pad of parchment, a quill and ink leapt across to the coffee table and waited, poised on a tip, to record as bid.

“You’d think after bein’ married to youse for nearin’ four years now, I’d be used to all that,” Jacob chuckled in awe. Queenie smiled. His awe at things she took for granted were part of the reason she loved him. It meant she could never forget. “Alright then, should we start with boys?”

“Yeah,” The quill scrawled Boy! across the top of the page and waited.

“What was your pa called?” Jacob asked, “I mean, I know we talked about it a while back when we first got hitched, but, would it work?”

“I dunno if Teen wants to save it for her baby,” Queenie mused, “She remembers them more than I do. I just remember feelin’s, Teen actually remembers them.”

“They’re still your folks,” Jacob reminded her. “My Pa was called Josiah so we ent putting that down.”

“Why not, Josiah is a perfectly reasonable name,” Queenie argued, not wanting him to discount a name just because it was “too No-Maj” as he had tried with naming Aurie. Aurie had been easy to name in the end, by looking out of their window over a New York dawn.

“Pa took off when I was a kid,” Jacob reminded her. Queenie knew the story, knew how his Grandma Rachel had raised him while his Ma worked shifts. “We ent namin’ our kid Josiah.”

“Ok, not Josiah,” Queenie confirmed. “If it’s a girl we should call her Rachel Porpentina,” she added absently, watching as the quill drew a sharp line halfway down the page, scrawling the name down. “For your Grandma.”

“Yeah,” Jacob agreed quietly, “yeah, I like that name. Aurora and Rachel. They do sound pretty good.”

“They sound the best,” Queenie disagreed with him softly, turning to press a soft kiss to Jacob’s prickly cheek. “Well, picking a girl’s name was easy. Back to the boys I guess.”

Jacob fell silent for a moment, and Queenie had to actively resist the temptation to skim the top layer of his thoughts.

“We should talk to Teen about who has the rights to your Pa’s name,” he concluded quietly, “Your Ma and Pa mean a lot to the both of youse. Hey, we know what Newt and Teen are planning on callin’ magical creature 872?”

Queenie huffed a laugh at the accuracy of the statement. Newt certainly had experience naming creatures, and Tina had been naming them for nearly five years.

“Far as I can tell, they ain’t talking about it,” Queenie chuckled, “You do know they argue over naming every single creature in their case at least once? They have veto powers. Naming a kid is much bigger so I think they’re puttin’ it off.”

“They gonna call him Theseus ya think?” Jacob asked suddenly, his eyes a little distant. “Do wizards do that? Honourin’ the dead?”

“I’m not sure how it works in British wizarding families,” Queenie admits, privately thinking that Hippolyta wouldn’t take a child named Theseus well. “Maybe, maybe not.”

“Yeah,” he fell quiet. “Hey, why don’t we do some readin’? See if the little one likes any of the names in a book…”

“Ok,” Queenie smiled. “I like the sound of that.”

The rest of their evening was spend with Jacob reading aloud from a muggle book he’d picked up, about a murder mystery in the English countryside. Soon Aurie had joined them, sitting still for the first time in days, her little head resting against Queenie’s bump, thumb in her mouth. It was the closest thing Queenie had felt peace in a very, very long time.

“They look so sweet,” Queenie stirred when she heard the whisper, “Newt, you get Aurie and I’ll turn the couch into a bed so we don’t have to wake ‘em.”

Queenie relaxed at the sound of her sisters voice, releasing her grip on Aurie when she felt Newt’s calloused hands on her wrist.

“Night baby girl,” Queenie murmured, turning back into Jacob and drifting off to sleep again near instantly.

Newt laid Aurie carefully against his shoulder, glad he’d left his coat in the hall after helping Tina with his. She huffed a little before snuggling into his shoulder, one hand instantly finding his wool bow tie to hold. Newt smiled, pressing a kiss into her hair, and wondering if this was what he had to look forward to, if this was what they had coming. He was going to miss Aurie when they moved out.

“They been doin’ names,” Tina stage whispered across the room, lifting the parchment up for Newt to see. She read through the few names that had been scribbled down, smiled and then put the page down, reaching instead to unfold the patchwork quilt that had floated into the room at her command. She spread the quilt over the pair of them, pressing a gentle kiss to Queenie’s forehead.

“Night Queen,” she whispered, “Sweet dreams you two.”

Tina rejoined Newt in the doorway, deluminating the room and pulling the door closed behind them.