Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

While he’s barely sleeping these days, he does find himself jolting awake when he feels a leg kicking at his body. His one free hand reaches up towards his chest, to where she is laying. He palms the back of her warm head, smoothing his palm over her soft curls. 

He momentarily ignores her wriggling, because sometimes it’s just a dream and she will drift back to sleep. He keeps his eyes shut and pretends he hasn’t woken up.

And then he feels soft punching — right into the side of his ribcage. He hears her soft and plaintive whining. She’s softly saying, “Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy.” Over and over. On repeat. 

“Okay, okay, okay,” he says quickly, opening his eyes, yawning widely. “What’s up, baby?” he mutters, patting the back of her head some more. “You bored?”

She hesitates, which he catches — it makes him more alert and awake. “Daddy,” she whispers kind of shamefully. “I went.”

His body goes slightly rigid as he generally freezes. He slowly repeats. “You went — just now?”

“I woke up,” she says vaguely. “And I went.”

“Okay,” he says, as he drops his hand from her little warm body and starts feeling around on the bedding, behind her. It takes him a bit to touch it — so for a moment he is kind of confused and a little hopeful — but then his fingers land on the wetness. It has fully soaked into the sheets. It must not have been too recent. “Okay,” he repeats, now grabbing her and holding her to his chest as he pushes himself up into a sitting position, taking her with him. With the movement, the dog, which had also been cradled in the hollow between his shins, becomes alert and starts moving around. “Guess we’re getting up,” he says to his youngest, trying to smile at her so she knows that she’s not in trouble. He presses a quick kiss into the side of her face, as her little hands scrunch into his shirt from the movement. 

His other arm is still partially wedged underneath the sleeping head of his other kid, who has amazingly been sleeping well throughout all of this. Reluctantly, he extracts himself, squeezes the numbness out of hand a few times, and gently shakes her by the shoulder. He says, “Maddy, we gotta get up now. Sorry. C’mon baby. Sorry.”

He gives his groggy eight-year-old the task of supervising the five-year-old as she changes into clean and dry clothes in her own bedroom. Under normal circumstances, his oldest would have protested and asserted some sort of defiance or resentment over this. He and she would’ve had some sort of protracted discussion about familial responsibility. Under normal circumstances, she would’ve tried to kill a lot of time debating with him about how it’s not fair that she has to do more just because she’s older. Under normal circumstances, he would’ve sarcastically and jokingly agreed with her, that he also thinks it’s unfair that he has to do more, just because he’s older. And then she’d laugh, because she understands these kinds of jokes now — and she’s becoming more and more like him in personality every damn day — and they’d seamlessly ease out of her very chill rebellion. And he’d mentally pat himself on the back for killing this shit so hard even though Missandei sometimes used to tell him he treats an eight-year-old too much like an adult sometimes. 

Today though, he gets no protest. Maddy hasn’t been in the mood — or she’s been displaying her compassion and her confused pain with a kind of empathy that he doesn’t even expect from adults. She can sense that her little sister is embarrassed, and Grey is so fucking grateful when he sees his oldest daughter grab his youngest daughter by the hand and calmly walks her into their shared bathroom.

He starts stripping the bed after he is alone. He feels really exhausted and like he’s fucking up left and right constantly.

In the middle of it, he remembers the dog. It makes him frown as he looks down at her. She is a good dog, and she rarely has accidents in the house. She also can’t talk back to him. Nevertheless, he says to her, “I’m sorry to you, too, bear-bear. I’ll take you out after I load the washing machine.” 

He isn’t a person that believes in breakfast, or breakfast foods, or fun breakfast foods. Usually, when his kids don’t want to eat in the morning, he doesn’t make them — also another thing that Missandei used to sometimes give him a bit of shit over. And usually, when he makes his kids food in the morning, he never makes them the shit they get at their white friends’ houses. He doesn’t do cereal. He doesn’t do waffles. He doesn’t do bacon. He will do eggs, though. And that’s because eggs are a staple in both of their cultures.

This morning, he throws a wrapped cheeseburger into the microwave — leftovers from their dinner because he hasn’t been able to cook and they are in an in-between stage where the meal drop-offs have dried up somewhat. Burgers only take a few moments to warm up. 

He thinks that he isn’t totally shitting the bed, as he watches his two girls obediently chomp down on apples, because he told them that if they will eat most of an apple, they can also have half of a cheeseburger for breakfast.

This kind of negotiation with the kids — around food — is also something Missandei isn’t super crazy about. He thinks she sometimes worries too much, but he also has never been a girl before in his entire life. She tells him that she doesn’t want their girls to have hang-ups with food, and to not qualify certain foods as bad food and certain foods as good foods. Of course he holds the belief that she’s kind of wrong and there are good and bad foods and in general, they should not eat so much fucking bad food like the stuff white people love to eat — but for the most part, he typically goes along with what she wants for the kids in this respect. He usually actually agrees with her most of the time. Psychologically molding the young and flexible brains of their kids is complex and sometimes taxing.

This morning, he doesn’t have the energy to be nuanced and careful. He just makes them show him their apple cores before he hands each of them half of a burger. 

He’s been walking his kids to their bus stop lately. Usually, he lets them walk themselves — the whopping block away from the house. Usually, he is the one constantly trying to convince Missandei that it will be good for their girls if they are not constantly hovering over the girls. Usually, he’s the one trying to convince Missandei that it’s totally cool to let the eight-year-old use the stove by herself.

But lately he’s been so paranoid and so irrationally scared about letting them out of his sight. He’s been irrationally scared that something bad will happen to them — and it’s a pervasive fear that he’s been trying to keep to himself, in order not to fucking wreck more of their lives. 

So he pretends that he wants the exercise and the fresh air, as he tightly holds onto Emmy’s hand and listens to her chitter on about how she’s going to finish her drawing at school today and how she’s going to give it to Mommy when they visit Mommy later. Emmy tells the both of them — and the dog — that she might add in a horse to the drawing.

He ignores the sympathetic looks from other parents once they arrive at the bus stop. He has been finding other people’s sympathy to be aggravating. This has always been a thing about him. 

He picks Emmy up in his arms and lets her bury her face into his neck, because she has suddenly realized that she has to leave him now — and she’s a bit sad about it. She starts crying a little bit over it — and it generally kills his heart. She tells him that she wants him to go to school with her.

“Oh, baby,” he says, as he hikes her up higher. “I know you are sad, but you will feel better when you see your friends, right? And how many grownups do you see in your class?”

“Ms. Basik. Mr. Elliot. Ted.”

“Oh, good points,” he says, patting her on her back as she squeezes his neck in her arms. “Touche.” 

As the bus arrives, he puts Emmy back down on the ground. He reaches out to nudge Maddy, who seems maybe slightly embarrassed that they are always the sad sack spectacles at the bus stop. And at school. And sometimes even at home. He says, “Give me a hug, c’mon.” 

While he and Missandei had decided that they will never make their kids hug and kiss other people, they will still retain the right to make their kids hug and kiss them. 

Maddy goes through the motions. She acts like she is doing this for him — and in actuality, she is probably seriously doing this just for him. He bends down to get closer to her height. He holds his arms out. And she walks into the hug without looking him in his eyes.

He hugs her tightly — partly to exacerbate her embarrassment, but also because he just really, really needs this. He gives her a bracing kiss on her cheek, and he just holds on.

“Dad,” she says, letting her arms dramatically go limp to make fun of him. 

“Okay, sorry I love you so much,” he tells her, sarcastically, as he lets her go.

“It’s okay,” she says back to him, looking appropriately somber and serious.

And this is one of the many, many reasons why he loves her so fucking much. 

“Watch your sister.”

“Dad, I know.”

He and the dog clean up around the house for a little bit after he arrives back home. He transfers the bedding from the washing machine to the dryer. He vacuums the stairs. He handwashes a couple of plates and glasses.

And he realizes that he hasn’t eaten yet. He remembers that he’s been bad at eating because he’s been bad at remembering hunger. 

He nukes another burger in the microwave. He thinks that in another life, he would be so disdainful that he is doing this. And then he crams a still too-hot burger into his face and quickly washes it down with water, just to get the empty calories in. 

And then he palms his car keys from the tray in the nook and heads to the garage.

When he arrives at the hospital, the first person he sees is his dad — at a vending machine that dispenses hot coffee in the waiting area. His dad is fiddling with the machine and trying to get a mocha going. 

“Are you working right now?” Grey says, as he walks up to the man and starts wordlessly helping by pressing the right buttons, in the right order. He’s saying this in response to the white coat his dad is wearing. He’s also saying this because this is entirely the wrong wing of the hospital. His dad’s lab is clear on the other side of campus.

“I’m kind of working,” his dad says vaguely, as the machine fills his cup with frothy, overly sweet, brown liquid. “Don’t I look like I’m working?”

Grey pats his dad on the shoulder. He tiredly says, “Thanks, Pops.” 

He walks into her room at a pretty inopportune time. The door to the adjoining bathroom is slightly cracked and he can hear their voices from inside. The walking aid is in the way, next to the wall. A nurse is helping her use the toilet.

He briefly considers backing away and taking maybe another lap around the waiting area, pretending like he didn’t just come in at this moment, but he quickly decides that is chickenshit and instead, he makes a beeline to the other side of her room, by the window, far away from the bathroom.

She spots him, right away, as they exit the bathroom. He senses that she knew he was there from the moment he came in. As she carefully grasps onto her walker, and the nurse — Cidney, having become familiar with him over the past few months — makes quiet small talk with him. She asks him how he’s doing. She asks him about the kids. She talks to him about the weather. She proudly tells him that Missandei is getting stronger and stronger every day. She tells him that Missandei walked all the way to the drinking fountain by herself just this morning.

He smiles with blandness, so that the conversation will just be over already. He answers her questions blandly. He’s doing alright. The kids are good — and excited to visit their mom after school. Sunshine has been nice. And wow, getting to the drinking fountain is pretty huge.

He tries to smile at her — Missandei — when he says this. And he’s not at all surprised when he sees her purposefully ignore his gesture.

“Well, I’ll leave you two to it,” Cidney says. To Missandei, she says, “I’ll be back in twenty minutes, to give you your next dose.”

They initially exchange a fair bit of silence. He thinks he’s being considerate, as she uncomfortably tries to get herself comfortable again in her hospital bed. She thinks that she’s continuing to be a burden on him — and he continues to be someone she doesn’t understand or know that well at all.

After the silence, after she rearranges the blankets over her thin and weak legs for the tenth time, he clears his throat. And because he finds that he has very little to say that doesn’t sound completely stupid and asinine, he says, “Have you eaten yet?”

“Yeah,” she says. “Twice already.” She looks like she resents him for asking this. “I had bean soup and a bun. And then I had some nuts and corn.” She looks like she’s kind of daring him to comment on the amount she ate or the nature of her eating — or any of it really. She looks like she generally resents the amount of say this person has over her shitty and pain-filled life.

“Cool,” he says softly, trying to be inoffensively bland again, in case it works this time around. “Um, the girls and I had burgers today. And I know that you —” He suddenly stops talking, because he caught himself in a bit of a slip up. He finds that it’s hard to not accidentally slip up all the time. 

He clears his throat again. He changes the subject — and finds that there’s not a whole hell of a lot to say. Talking about her recovery is fraught. Talking about her treatment is fraught. Talking about their family is fraught.

So he says, “Is the temperature in here okay? Does it feel too warm for you?”

Things get sort of easier when his dad arrives for a random visit, either blithely unaware of the tension or acutely aware of the tension but he doesn’t give a fuck either way about it. His dad shows up like a disruptive but still fairly quiet tornado of activity and hot takes and commentary that nobody asked for. His dad is not her doctor — completely different specialty — but his dad has constantly been keeping tabs on her, from the moment she was admitted into the hospital.

“Nudho, I need you to figure out why my phone keeps shutting down whenever I open my camera app,” his dad says, as he completely chucks his iPhone at Grey. 

“It’s probably all of the porn you’ve been downloading,” Grey automatically mutters — jokingly — as he flicks on his dad’s phone screen. “Dad, what’s your passcode again?”

“It’s face passcode,” his dad says, walking up to him, trying to stoop down so that Grey can point the camera at his dad’s face. 

“You don’t remember your actual passcode?”

His dad can sense judgment in his tone, so the man rolls his eyes as he stands back up to his full height. He says, “Why do I need to remember a passcode when I go everywhere with my fucking face?” And then swiveling around to Missandei, who has been watching this exchange silently, he winks at her — because it’s his habit — because he has always done this with her. And he says, “He’s always asking such dumb questions, huh?”

Grey kind of goes a bit tense at that — so does she, honestly. Her neurologist told them all that it would be helpful to her if they refrained from telling her things and to let her personality and her recollections come back in an organic way. 

She recovers faster than Grey does. She shrugs in response. She says, “Sometimes.”

He leaves her hospital room a little bit after that, after her nurse comes back to administer another dose of her meds. Missandei typically takes a nap after her mid-morning dose. And she also straight up asked him to go, stating that she wants some alone time.

Of course they have all noticed that she is much more blunt, lower on patience, and quicker to anger after she woke up from the coma. It continues to be something that her brothers and mom are having the hardest time with. It continues to be something that Grey doesn’t know how to navigate around. If he were just dealing with this by himself, he thinks he would have an easier time — he can be flexible and roll with it better. But they have kids. And he is constantly anxious about what every change in her — and every failure on his part to manage it — is doing to their kids.

He drives home in a bit of a daze. He has found that — as fucking shitty as the first few months of this was — with him a complete emotional wreck and her unconscious and him not even knowing if she was going to even make it or not — time retroactively moved by really quickly. Because every moment contained a blur of activity — stuff to do, doctors to talk to, people to relay information to. 

Now, there’s just so much time and space to fill up. He just wades from moment to moment, and day after day, it all bleeds together, and it all feels the same. 

He takes the kids out for a quick dinner, before they go to the hospital to visit their mom. He finds that Emmy has been a picky eater lately, and he doesn’t have the heart to fight her on it. She already almost lost her mom. Her mom is already in the hospital. So he lets her eat mac and cheese for dinner because she fell in love with it at one of her friends house and is currently enamored by shit from the blue box.

However, she complains about the mac and cheese at the restaurant because it’s grown-up mac and cheese. To her, the noodles are wrong. The cheese sauce tastes weird and wrong. It’s not like how she remembers mac and cheese being at all.

Her sister currently has little patience for her, maybe in part because Emmy has regressed a little bit since their mom’s accident. Emmy has been acting excessively like a baby at times, and Maddy finds it annoying and selfish and attention-hogging. 

Maddy is kind of a dick to her little sister over dinner, repeatedly telling Emmy that she is annoying, trying to figure out novel ways to hurt her little sister’s feelings.

Grey has been dealing with this by himself for what feels like fucking forever now. So he’s not at his best, as he tells his oldest to knock her shit off. He tells her, “You gotta stop picking on her. She’s younger than you. You are more mature than she is. You gotta —”

“You always take her side,” Maddy tells him.

“I do not,” he says in exasperation. “There are no sides. She’s just eating her dinner and not doing anything to you. And you’re being a punk to her. You gotta knock it off, Maddy.”

She doesn’t even know how to respond to him when he says these things to her. She just feels that it’s unfair, and he never agrees with her on this point. She just feels that he doesn’t listen to her. She just feels that he doesn’t even know what he’s talking about. And she especially misses Mom in these moments, because Mom always gets her and never makes her feel like this.

“Baby, I’m sorry,” he says quietly, when he notices that she’s trying not to cry in the middle of the restaurant, in public. “I’m sorry I’m hurting your feelings.”

Emmy is thankfully still too young to really grasp what is going on, so the way she behaves with Missandei is completely devoid of self-consciousness or carefulness. When they get to Missandei’s hospital room, she screeches in excitement upon seeing Missandei. She shouts out, “Mommy, guess what! I have something cool for you!” as she eagerly runs up to Missandei and peels her backpack off her back. She brought it so that she can show Missandei all of the things she has made in the last week.

“Hey, hey, be careful of your mom,” Grey says, as he reluctantly helps lift Emmy onto the hospital bed. They now know that this is okay to do and everyone is fine with Emmy hanging out with Missandei in the bed.

“Hi, you,” Missandei says, with a pretty good amount of familiarity and warmth, as Emmy snuggles into her side and starts commandeering all of Missandei’s attention by talking a mile a minute about school and her friends.

And here, Grey can see it pretty clearly — how fucked up this entire situation is — as Maddy generally shrinks and slowly walks over to sit in one of the guest chairs. 

So he says, “Maddy aced her math test this week. She’s multiplying like a fiend now.” 

“Oh,” Missandei says, pausing from looking at Emmy’s drawings for a bit, staring at Maddy in the chair. “That’s great. Good job.”

“Thanks,” Maddy mumbles, as she slouches in her chair and crosses her arms over her chest. 

They only visit for about an hour. He tells the kids that their mom is tired and needs to rest — that’s been the party line for a while. The truth is more that Missandei gets emotionally tired rather than physically tired, when she has to interact with their kids for much longer. Missandei made the decision herself, to basically go along with things and act like she knows what’s going on — for kids’ sake, but it takes its toll over longer periods of time. Emmy will ask hard but reasonable questions, such as when Missandei is coming home, and if Missandei will want to do any of the multitude of things that they used to do together all the time. 

Emmy understands that her mom was badly hurt and needs time with the doctors to feel better. She understands that after some time, their mom will be strong enough to come back home. 

Maddy is old enough to detect a lot of bullshit, so he never even tried to hide the truth from her. Sometimes he wonders if this was the way to go or if he’s just a fucking moron who is allowing his kid to be traumatized every day. Maddy knows her mom was in a car accident that caused a traumatic brain injury. She knows that her mom is different now. She also knows that her mom doesn’t really remember her. 

Grey has forcefully tried to push some optimism at them, even though he’s not prone to optimism himself. He tells them that it will take some time, but Mom will be okay. Mom is still Mom. Mom will always be Mom. 

His mom is at the house when he arrives home with the kids — something he’s surprised by, only because he hasn’t checked his phone in the last couple of hours. Her unexpected presence is also something that he’s utterly fucking grateful for. 

“I made dinner,” she tells him as she stands in his kitchen with a wet sponge in her hand. “It’s in the oven.”

“Oh God,” he mutters, as he holds up a paper bag full of leftovers. “We ate already. I’m sorry.”

He feels like all he’s been saying to people lately is how sorry he is for all of his shortcomings. 

“Gramma!” Emmy says, launching herself out of her dad’s grasp and running over to dispense out a hug. “I gave Mommy my drawing today and she said she liked it. I think tomorrow, I will draw another horse for her. Are you sleeping over?” 

Ever since the accident — ever since Missandei has been in the hospital — he’s never had a moment alone. The kids have been extra velcro with him, and he has been extra velcro with them. And while he loves them more than anything, he honestly hasn’t had a conversation with just an adult in a really long time. He’s reluctant to talk about Missandei for real, in front of them, even when he thinks they might be sleeping. He doesn’t want for them to know how fucking frustrated he is by what is happening — how fucking scared he is by what is happening — and how he’s so fucking sure that nothing is going to be like it was ever again.

The kids don’t want to sleep alone anymore, so they always sleep with him. But thankfully, they are also okay with sleeping with their grandma.

In the midst of bathroom preparations — which his mom is gamely in charge of — he stares at her like she doesn’t even know what she is doing for him. 

She smiles at him — sad and fond all at once. She cups his cheek, and she says, “It’s all good. Your dad’s working all night. I’m happy to be here.”

He calls his best friend, because he would like someone to bitch to, who will absorb all of his shit without too much judgment. He also calls his best friend because he knows that Drogo will put him on speakerphone, which will efficiently convey all of his shit to Daenerys at the same time.

Grey walks around his backyard in the dark, with the dog — who also has developed a habit of not being able to sleep without him. He whisper-talks to them, because he is so paranoid that one of his kids will overhear him saying this shit about their mom.

He’s saying, “She doesn’t even look at me like I’m a stranger — that would actually be a pleasant change of pace. She looks at me like I stole her entire life from her, like it's my fault that the person she sees in the mirror is much older than she expected, and like it’s my fault she has two fucking awesome kids who love her — that she apparently doesn’t want. Like, what the fuck is even that?”

He’s angry, too. He’s been really angry over this, too.

“And there are no fucking answers. Everything is fucking ambiguous in terms of when and if she’ll be able to walk, if she’ll ever get her memories back, if she will be able to be the person she used to be. Or if it’s just this now. Even if it were just this now, I could deal. I could deal if I just knew and can plan for it.” 

He sighs. 

And then he adds, “I know I’m being a fucking self-centered asshole. I know that this shit is a million times harder for her than it is for me. I know it’s totally fucked to wake up and not recognize your life or remember all the decisions that led up to your current life. I know she woke up and, all of a sudden, is trapped with some fucking antisocial weirdo who doesn’t smile that much. I know that shit is fucking crazy as shit.”

Chapter Text

Her concept of herself does not align with the concept of her from those around her, and this continues to be the rage pill that she has to bitterly swallow, over and over every fucking day when she wakes up in pain, as consciousness hits. It is devastating to remember again and again, that none of this is a nightmare and that all of this is her life. 

Her brain and her memories continue to be foggy and undependable because of course this is what happens with a traumatic brain injury. 

When she woke up from the coma, she was strapped down because — she was later told — she tried to hit the nurses. This was one of many litanies of factoids about herself that she now has to be told and adopt as truth faithfully, even as everything in her body is screaming out that it didn’t happen. It didn’t happen because she doesn’t remember trying to hit the nurses at all.

When she realized that she had woken up, she was apparently told that her short-term memory was also shot, so her family had been repeating the same facts back to her for long hours already, with each retelling becoming more and more edited down like they didn’t understand that it was probably just as devastating for her each time, to be retold, over and over again, that she was in a car accident. A drunk driver cut through an intersection and slammed into her going top speed. Her head smashed into the driver’s side window. She has been in the hospital for three months. They told her, over and over again, that they thought they were going to lose her. They told her, over and over again, that they thought she was never going to wake up again. They apparently had to tell her this so much and so often, that when she was finally able to retain the information, she retained a version of the story that was told in a way that was stunningly emotionless and perfunctory. She remembers her mother being kind of annoyed she was asking so many follow-up questions about what happened to her.

Her concept of herself is that she is still a young woman with her entire life ahead of her. She’s still trying to save up enough money to take two weeks off and go to Naath to hang out on the beach in a bikini. She’s still gunning for a promotion by working long hours and staying at the office long past her boss. She still lives downtown in a high-rise apartment building that she loves. She’s still able to take an elevator down to the ground floor, to grab happy hour with Daenerys at a tequila bar.

She thinks that her family has been heart-breakingly insensitive to her, over the many times they have told that what she remembers is not who she is anymore. 

She supposes that by the time her short term memory came back and she was able to retain new information again, her family had introduced him to her many times already. Because when she was finally able to hold onto new information, what she recalls is her mother’s hurtful bluntness. 

Missandei remembers staring at him — this unfamiliar person wearing a suit, standing in the midst of her dad, brothers, sisters-in-law, and mother — and she remembers asking a pretty reasonable question. She had asked her mom who he is.  

She remembers her mom saying that he was Grey. 

Her relations have already spent nearly a quarter of the year haunting her hospital bed by the time she woke up enough to join the party. She woke up slow on the uptake and behind already — she was behind three months. And she was also behind maybe another twelve years.

Catching up was an impossibility, on both fronts. When she was still trying to understand what was even happening, her family was already itching for her to leave the hospital because they had months to get sick of her being in the hospital. They told her they were scared to death for her, but because she didn’t live through that crisis with them, their words have felt hollow to her. 

When her doctor tells her that she can be discharged from the hospital and start outpatient physical therapy if she can go one revolution, from her room to the drinking fountain, and back — she is told this with the man she doesn’t know present because he is apparently an important person to hear all about the conditions of her discharge . Her doctor even makes it a point to wait for him to arrive to the hospital, before her doctor breaks down her treatment options and frankly expresses to the both of them that it’s going to still be difficult for more months. 

Her mother has told her that this man, who looks too old for her, is her partner and the father of her two children. She is told that this stranger apparently has power of attorney over her entire body and life and existence, and that is why her doctors and nurses are always looking to him — and not her parents — for all of her medical directives and for questions. 

Her mother obliviously revealed this information to Missandei like it was not even a big deal. And in a way, Missandei feels that in this terrible waking nightmare, her mother has apparently gotten everything she has ever wanted for Missandei. 

She has another argument with her brother, which is honestly pretty nice because it means he won’t visit her for at least the next few days and she’ll get a reprieve from his unhelpful judgment and manipulative commentary about how he thinks she should start looking toward the future instead of fixating on the past — by taking it one day at a time. 

They argue over how much he perceives she is trying in her physical therapy. He doesn’t think it’s that hard to go to the drinking fountain and back. He vacillates between being both good and bad cop. For a week now, he’s been telling that he believes in her and he knows she can do it. For a week now, he has also been telling her that he perceives she is not trying hard enough. He is being condescending about it, by talking to her like she is an idiot and giving her helpful suggestions in his overly masculine bro-speak affectation. Like, he’s telling her that when she’s tired and thinks she’s done, she should try to go for another rep. He’s telling her that she will surprise herself, at what she is capable of, if she mentally digs down a little bit harder.

The argument happens because she doesn’t have it in her to do what she did for their entire childhood — to smile at him and act like his stupid advice is making her entire life and like she thinks he is so wise and so much smarter than she is. The argument happens because she kind of tells him she’s trying her best. It hurts. She didn’t ask to be unable to walk. 

She didn’t ask to not be able to pee or take a shit by herself. She didn’t ask to lose all of her autonomy and independence. She didn’t ask to be an old woman with half of her life gone. She didn’t ask to be a stay-at-home mom. She didn’t ask to have two kids with some man she doesn’t know. She didn’t ask to wake up one day in a broken body, with a life she never wanted for herself. 

The argument pretty much happens because she says, “Look at it from my perspective. What is really incentivizing me to get better? When I get better, you all are just going to leave me to play Susie Homemaker with some middle-aged man and his kids.”

“Uh, you shouldn’t talk about Grey — or your children — like that,” Mars swiftly corrects, looking incredulous that she just said what she just said. “What if they heard you say that, Missandei?” 

He’s shaking his head at his sister, because he cannot believe her complete shit attitude. He cannot believe that she doesn’t get what the entire family has gone through. He cannot believe that she isn’t even thinking about what her children have been going through. 

“And Grey is not that old!” Mars adds. “He’s actually younger than you are! Or don’t you remember?”

“Fuck you,” Missandei says, immediately. 

“Nah, man,” he says back to her, already picking up his jacket from the chair. “Fuck you.”

“Fuck you!” she shouts, as he starts walking out the door.

“Real mature, Missandei!” he calls out behind him, unable to let her have the last word. “Fuck you!”

Missy finds that in the decade that she has completely lost from her life, her stupid brother didn’t learn to stop being such a fucking narc at all. 

Her argument with Mars results in their mom swiftly coming to visit her in the hospital with the subtlety of a wrecking ball, on a Wednesday, which is not the usual day her mom comes to see her. 

Her mom does all of her classic mom things. She wastes their time talking around the topic. She thinks she’s easing into her lecture by talking about the weather for a little bit. She starts off being so freaking passive aggressive. She tells Missandei that her brother was really offended by the things she said to him. She tells Missandei that he had rearranged his busy schedule around her, so that he can see her during visiting hours. 

Missandei certainly remembers this shit. She remembers that her mom loves making a lot of excuses for men, over and over again.

This is why Missandei also basically tells her mom to also go away and leave her alone. 

She figures that if she offends enough of her family members, they will give her a fucking break already. She had evidently missed the part where they were emotionally destroyed over the possibility that they would lose her for good. She was unconscious for all of that. Instead, she gets to wade through the part where they are all impatient and annoyed that she is healing way too fucking slowly for them, that she continues to burden them by being so dependent on them. She knows they want her to get better so they can foist her back on some guy she doesn’t know, so that they can feel content she is what they have always wanted her to be.

“You’ve always wanted me to just get married and have babies and not have too strenuous of a job in case it repels men,” Missandei accuses. “But that’s not what I ever wanted for myself, Mom. Can you please understand why I’m having a hard time with this? I don’t even know him.”

“Oh my God!” her mom exclaims. “I can’t believe you are saying these things! Sorry you think I have been a terrible mother your entire life! Sorry I care about your happiness and fulfillment! Sorry I sat by your bedside every night for nearly three months. Sorry I prayed to the gods with every breath I had for you to come back to us. I’ll just leave you alone like you asked so that I don’t burden you with how much I care!” Then she huffs. Then she says, “You have a responsibility to your children to get better, Missandei! You are actually not a kid anymore.”

“Awesome,” Missandei says dully. Because she is not even sure how anyone is supposed to respond to such dramatics. 

She wishes he wouldn’t visit her as often as he does, because she finds the visits really awkward and uncomfortable and frankly fucking sad as hell. His daily visits only serve to remind her of how much she has lost. 

She pretty much feels like chattel. She feels like a breeding cow. He pretty much feels like someone who bought her. 

And he is so fucking boring, on top of it all. He’s so boringly conventional and ordinary. He looks like he cares a lot about his 401K. He looks like he is pretty okay with casual sexism. He looks like he has a billion pairs of pleated khakis in his closet. He looks like his mom still does his taxes for him. 

He also barely talks. He just stares at her a lot when he visits.

She has no idea what her previous self was thinking, with this man. She has no idea how she apparently became a person she doesn’t even recognize.

She finds that it’s hard to be around someone that keeps waiting for recognition to dawn in her eyes, who looks oh so mildly disappointed when it never does. 

She imagines that he’s pretty over this, too. She knows she must be a drain on him, too — on his life, on his family, on his finances, probably. She imagines that he probably wants her to get better soon so that she can go back to being the primary caregiver of their children and he can go back to doing — whatever the fuck it is that he does.

“Um, when is your next physical therapy session?” he politely asks, after an insane amount of protracted silence.

“In two hours,” she says.

“Oh. Cool. Um, I probably won’t hang around that long. Um, I gotta go home ‘cause the kids are, you know, out of school.”

She has to stop herself from snidely telling him that that’s a pretty cool fucking story.

She has learned that Dany — who vowed never to be shackled to a man — is completely shackled to a man. Missandei has learned that Dany is married to the most stereotypical manly man she has ever seen, some guy who doesn’t seem that smart, who seems obsessed with his muscles, who kinda ends up talking about himself a lot. 

And that’s apparently how Missandei met the man she had children with. She’s already been told that they met through Dany and her husband. The two of them apparently hit it off because men who don’t seem that engaging or have much social skills, men who seem obsessed with their muscles and their bank accounts apparently became her type in the last decade or so. 

She has asked Dany what the fuck has even happened in her life to make this happen, and Dany has been full of unsatisfying answers — in the sense that Dany has been answering, but it’s never the thing that Missandei really wants to hear.

“I really eat meat now?” Missandei asks, as she tucks into the drippy hummus and falafel sandwich that Dany snuck in for her. 

Dany shrugs. “You started eating meat again when you were pregnant with Maddy. You had cravings. Then you ate a burger. Then you never stopped.”

“That’s crazy,” Missandei says.

“I thought it was at the time, too, yeah,” Dany concedes. “But I mean, you can be a vegetarian again now, if you want.”

“No shit, Daenerys,” Missandei says impatiently. “I know the world is my oyster, now that I’m a forty-year-old mom of two with no job.” 

Dany rolls her eyes at that — but otherwise doesn’t comment or argue the point. And honestly, of all the people that Missandei is close with in her life, she would say that Dany is perhaps the only one that has taken her apparent ‘new personality’ in stride the most. Maybe because Dany was the only one who was privy to all of her secret rage and impatience and yearnings in young adulthood. 

“I gotta say, I’m pretty surprised that you ended up with a Dothraki beefcake,” Missandei says, squishing her sandwich down a little bit more. “And I’m surprised I ended up with a carnivorous Summer Islander day trader.”

“I mean, you don’t actually have to say any of these things,” Dany says mildly. “Who told you Grey is a day trader? He’s not.”  

Her dad is generally the only person that she can currently stand, and because she has pissed off her brother and her mom so badly, he comes to visit her in her hospital room alone. He comes with his reading glasses and the book. He flips pages until they get to the spot that they left off — marked by a folded crease. 

This is why she is generally fine with her dad. It’s because he’s intuitive enough to understand that she doesn’t want to get blazing hot takes on her current shitty life. She just wants to listen to his voice read a pretty bad supernatural thriller out loud, as she angrily stares off into space and thinks about the shitty state of her life, body, and brain.

Right before he has to leave because visiting hours are almost over, she reaches out to grab his hand — to grab his attention. She says, “Dad, give it to me straight. Are you guys sending me off to live with a dysfunctional, toxic, or abusive old man and his two children?” 

It’s kind of a joke. But it’s also kind of a test.

Her dad astutely answers the question seriously. He says, “I can’t say for sure, but I am about ninety-five percent confident that he is not toxic or abusive. I’m about eighty percent confident he’s not dysfunctional.”

She’s shaking her head — because her dad also has a hard-on for this guy! “God, why are you guys so in love with this dude?”

Her dad sighs tiredly. He says, “He’s a good man, Missandei.”

“Okay, sure,” she says. “Where does he live, anyway?” 

“You guys and your girls live on the north side, about twenty-five minutes away from me and your mom. Your mom and I downsized five years ago. The house was too big for just us.”

Her face falls. “Aw, you sold our family house?”

“Yeah, sorry, baby,” he says. “We were all sad about it. But property taxes were a pain in the ass.” 

“Okay. So what’s this guy’s job, anyway? What does he do for money that allows me to live a lavish Stepford wife life? Is he independently wealthy? He visits me like, every day. Does he work? I know his dad is a doctor. But doctors aren’t independently-wealthy- rich.”

“Okay, first off, his name is Grey — or Nudho. So maybe try to make an effort to say his name,” her dad says dryly. “He works. He’s basically an independent consultant for national security. I’m not sure of the details of his job, because he can’t tell us due to security clearance reasons —”

“What?” she says furrowing her brows. “He’s also in law enforcement?”

“Technically national security,” her dad mildly says.

“Oh God,” she says, curling her mouth into a mega frown. “No wonder Mars and the rest of you guys are so in love with this dude! He’s securing our borders so that immigrants and refugees can’t get in.”

“Okay, that’s not his job, Missandei,” her dad says impatiently. “And also, your brothers and I are not in favor of securing our borders from immigrants and refugees.” He pauses. “I understand why your mom came home ranting and raving about you now.”

She simultaneously hates how she feels about her own children — as she simultaneously kind of feels vindicated. In certain respects, she’s still just festering sore, always trying to rebel against her own mother. She knows that these intrinsic things about who she is as a person aren’t things she is making up. She knows that her understanding of herself has to be at least somewhat true and valid, because she honestly finds her own children exhausting. 

She especially finds the younger one to be pretty needy — needy for attention, needy for affection. 

At the very least, she never doubted that they were her kids — so maybe there is something primordial inside of her, that can still genetically retain information on the cellular level that isn’t affected by the last twelve or so years of her life getting wiped out. 

When she met the girls, she immediately saw herself in their faces, especially Emmy. She immediately knew that they were genetically hers. She didn’t need to see the many photographs as proof that they were hers. She just accepted that truth right away.

So she was very grateful for that. 

However, she finds that she doesn’t have an innate ability to be a mother. She finds that absolutely zero maternal instinct kicks in when she spends time with them. She feels like she is talking to someone else’s kids, when she talks to them. She feels like she’s very awkward with them, and she’s going to keep being very awkward with them. She imagines that she will one day be able to bond more with them, and maybe feel the love for them that she thinks she should want to feel for them and that she knows they deserve from her. 

She’s been telling herself that it is very hard to bond with them when she can’t remember them. She can’t remember birthing them. She doesn’t remember being pregnant with them. She doesn’t remember them as babies. 

And to top it all off, she only gets a supervised hour with them, once or twice a week. And while she has a rapport with Emmy, the younger one, Maddy, the older one, barely speaks to her. In that way, Missy supposes that Maddy is at least a little bit like the guy that got her pregnant. 

“Um, what did you learn in school today?” Missandei asks, orienting the words to the girl sitting in a chair, sticking close to Grey. “Anything cool or new?”

“No,” Maddy says. “Nothing cool or new.”

“Hey,” Grey cuts in softly, nudging the girl. “You learned about climate change and fossil fuels today. Tell your mom about that.”

“I didn’t learn that today,” Maddy says, kind of whispering it out just to her dad. “I already knew about that.”  

He nods. He says, “Okay, well, just tell your mom about it, all the same. She asked you a question.”

“She already knows about climate change, Dad,” Maddy says, putting her sole focus on her dad, as she flushes in mild embarrassment, because she is realizing that maybe her mom doesn’t know about climate change. Maybe that was something that got excised due to the car accident too.

“Yeah,” Missandei says, trying to sound open and curious, trying to do something that approximates mothering. “Tell me about climate change.”

“Mommy, Mommy, look,” Emmy says, interrupting as she waves a piece of paper in front of Missandei’s face. “I drew you a parrot!”

“Oh, wow,” Missandei says, as she picks up the kid’s really slap-dash drawing and tries to make sense of it. “Really pretty!” 

She does the little test alone, because she requested it and she doesn’t want her mother distracting her with empty cheerleading. She does it with her neurologist, her physical therapist, and Grey’s dad watching, because he works here and he is constantly dropping in on her as he does his rounds. 

She is sweating up a storm and her legs are shaking like crazy, but she does it. 

She fully expects her doctor to make good on some promises so that her family will finally get off her back. Also, Missandei is actually really fucking ready to get the hell out of a hospital bed. She is really fucking ready to embark on the next mind-bending series of challenges in life — such as reading for longer periods of time without getting a headache and living with people that she doesn’t know at all. 

Grey learns soon after that she’s gonna finally get discharged, possibly because the hospital called him — or possibly because his dad told him.

That afternoon, her discharge team sits down with Grey to talk to him about what discharge entails and what kind of care he should expect to give her in the initial weeks back at home.

“Hey,” he says to her, when they are alone in her hospital room again. “So I want to check in with you. What do you want — situationally — when you get home?”

Home is a word that has been triggering for her. But here, she does her best to ignore it.

“Like, I get this is really weird for you,” he continues. “I get that you probably feel like you’re getting turned over to a total stranger. I know that living with the kids again might be totally overwhelming for you. Would it help if your mom was there? Do you want me to ask your mom to come stay with us for at least the first few days? Or my mom? I know you don’t remember my mom. But she’s cool. You like her — or, um, you liked her a lot.” He sighs. “Okay, I know that was a weird suggestion. I just know how you and your mom can sometimes get with each other. But — whatever you need, Missandei.” 

Chapter Text

Missandei regrets her decision to be so honest with her mother, because her mother often misses the point and twists Missandei’s words around so much in her head that it ends up like a pile of crossed wires. At the end, it’s like a game of telephone, where what Missandei thought she was communicating ends up being not what her mom heard at all.

Missandei recalls telling her mother she didn’t love that she was being turned over to a man that she doesn’t remember and doesn’t know. She remembers expressing that she wishes her family would try and understand her perspective here.

Her mom has decided that her response to Missandei’s expression of wariness and apprehension is to be intrusively in everyone’s faces and to make things a bit more difficult than they have to be.

She butts into the conversation between Grey and Missandei’s neurologist, for instance, when they are talking about her medications. Her mom kind of has no clue about her medications. Her mom wastes her doctor’s time by asking embarrassing questions, like: “What is a muscle relaxer and why does Missandei need to relax her muscles?”

Missandei really regrets her decision to ask her mom for help, the moment the car gingerly pulls into the driveway and her mother springs right into super intrusive, super anxious action. Missandei doesn’t even get a chance to look around and have weird feelings about where she is going to live, because her mom is this flurry of activity, making it way hard for her to exit out of the car. 

“Uh, Mira,” Grey says calmly, reaching out to grasp her mother’s forearm. “Give her some breathing room.” 

This is not the first time Missandei has seen random proof that this is not some incredible prank on her — that this long con actually seems legit as hell. This is not the first time she has witnessed the fact that this guy apparently has great familiarity with her family members and isn’t shy around them and can casually grab her mom’s arm in her jitteriness and not have her freak out on him.

It’s probably partly because he’s a man. 

“Nudho, I know what my daughter needs, okay?” her mom says. “She’s uncomfortable with you right now, but she’s familiar with me. Let’s do this until she is more comfortable with you.”

“Oh my God, Mom,” Missandei says, as her face flushes in light embarrassment, as she grits her teeth and shakily grabs onto her walker, around her mom’s body. 

“I didn’t realize she was uncomfortable with me,” he says, as he takes a modest step back and away from her walker. “Sorry, Missandei. Thanks for letting me know.” 

The house is a little farther out in the suburbs than she expected. It’s also a little bigger than she expected. It’s also waaay nicer and more tastefully decorated than she expected. It smells different. There are a lot of automated lights, and that doesn’t seem like a thing that she did, so she guesses that it’s a thing that he’s into. 

There are also a lot of shiny and flat surfaces everywhere.

“How are the kids not constantly clobbering themselves on all of these hard edges?” Missandei blurts. 

“I honestly don’t know,” Grey says, as he generally walks slowly behind her, letting her mom get all of the space to be supportive and help her with her walker by kind of hindering her movements. “They just don’t.” 

He already told her that the kids are with his parents for the weekend. He already told her that he thought it would be helpful to her to have a little bit of time to acclimate peacefully — because it will definitely be more chaotic come Sunday night. 

She has already looked at him warily over this — over his helpfulness and his anticipation of her wants and needs. 

She, this man she didn’t marry but had children with, and her mother have a really bizarre and awkward dinner together at the kitchen table. Missy listens and watches as her mom so very obviously gives his mother's food some shade when he pulls out a casserole dish from the freezer and indicates that he fully plans on defrosting it and reheating it. 

Her mom is kind of disturbed that there’s no “fresh food” ready for her to eat. Her mom kind of starts itching to run to the grocery store to buy ingredients for a “fresh meal.” 

Missandei, in a kind of amazement, watches as this man tells her mom, straight up, that he would prefer it if she didn’t do that, because it seems totally unnecessary. He then looks at Missy and directly asks her if she is okay with eating his mother’s casserole. He tells her it’s Summer Islander food — but with no meat.

It’s the first time she realizes that he has picked up on her avoidance of meat. 

She says, “Yeah, that’s fine.” And to her mother, who is kind of disturbed that her mothering is being thwarted, Missandei says, “Mom, I just want to have a chill rest of the day with you. I don’t need you to cook. I have been eating hospital food for the last month. I’m used to mush.” And then — blinking hard — Missandei glances at him and apologetically says, “I didn’t mean to call your mother’s food mush.”

He says, “It’s fine,” with his face completely blank, as he continues ahead with reheating the dish.

She lets her mom help her to the kitchen table — even though it hurts a bit to sit. Missandei is just so sick of lying down. Her physical therapist told her that it’s okay — good even — to push her body a little and to sit in the pain a little. It’s kind of like the same stuff her brother said to her, but her PT is way less annoying than Mars. 

Her mom then quickly puts down a glass of water, and also an entire pitcher — tempting Missandei to make some tame joke about just how much hydration her mom thinks she needs. Her mom takes the seat right next to her — like, closer than close — and starts giving her an impromptu back massage right at the table.

It’s this image that Grey encounters and takes in stride, as he lays down the hot dish of potatoes, beans, and stewed greens and dispenses out some plates. 

And as her mother starts portioning out the food, he walks over a couple of seats and sits a respectful distance away from them, probably because it’s been made abundantly clear to him that she is uncomfortable around him. 

“Honey, give me your glass.”

It takes Missandei a beat to realize that her mom isn’t talking to her. Her mom is talking to him. Her mom is holding her hand out expectantly, as he picks up his water glass and leans forward to give it to her to refill. 

Missandei feels pretty tired soon after dinner, but she forces herself to deal with it. She has her mom be a physical support for her, as she leaves Grey to put away the leftovers and wash the dishes, as she takes a stroll around the first floor of this super slippery house full of concrete and hardwood, to look at all of the stuff in it. 

There are actually sparse photos of their family on the walls. The room that has the most photos is a room that looks like a home office. 

“That’s Maddy,” her mom fills in, when she catches Missandei staring for a bit at the framed photo on the desk, of herself, in sunglasses, beaming a big smile, holding an infant in a red jumpsuit in her arms. “Wasn’t she the cutest thing?”

“That’s a funny outfit,” Missandei comments.

She can’t do stairs yet — they haven’t talked at all about how she’s going to traverse stairs — and she’s been a bit reluctant and avoidant about addressing it, which is why she wanted to tour the downstairs. She sees that there are two bathrooms — a powder room and a full bathroom. She also sees that the bathroom is connected to a bedroom — a guest bedroom? — her bedroom?

She realizes that her assumption was right, when she spots a thick rollout cushion on the floor — an extra place to sleep.

“We can sleep together on the bed, if you want,” her mom quickly says, reading her face. “But we didn’t want to assume. Maybe you want your space?”

“Oh, Mom,” Missy says, sighing and grasping her mom’s hand. “Of course we’re going to sleep together on the bed. You’re old now. I’m not going to make you sleep on the hardwood floor.” 

Missandei has occasionally been saying this — kind of as a joke — but also it’s not a joke at all. One of the shocks for her when she regained consciousness was seeing how much her parents have aged. 

She feels like she has lost precious years with them, too. She feels pissed that she went to sleep and then woke up to find that they are closer to death in a really stark and visceral way. 

She wants to go to bed early — even if not to sleep, she just wants to lie down and be in the quiet for a bit. It’s only seven o’clock, but he assumes that this will be the last he sees of her for the night — so he stands in the doorway of the bedroom, and he asks her if she’s got everything she needs.

She says, “Yeah, I think so. Thank you. I appreciate everything you’ve done so far.”

“Cool,” he says, cutting eye contact with her at the same time he reaches behind him, tucking his hand into his back pocket. He tells her, “I have something for you. And you don’t have to take it if you don’t want to yet.”

That piques her interest.

She doesn’t have to wonder that long, because he quickly shows her the black phone that he pulls from his back pocket, in a lavender case. 

“This is yours,” he says. “Um, I know it might be hard to use technology right now, but I think this will be intuitive and not too different from what you remember. But I figured that it might be helpful or interesting, if you, uh, had something like this. Um, and if you have any questions or get stumped on something, feel free to ask me. Uh, you unlock it by looking at it.”

He holds out the phone to her, refraining from telling her that the cop that gave it back to him made a random comment about how it was nuts that the phone was still in one piece. He also refrains from telling her that he squirreled it away and didn’t take it out to clean her blood off of it or charge it until he was positive she wasn’t going to die. 

She reaches out to take her phone from him, feeling the surprising weight of it in her hand. 

“Um, you can text me if you need anything,” he says quickly. “Even if I’m just in the other room.” He pauses awkwardly. “I think I’m in there under ‘Nudho.’ If not that, then probably ‘Grey.’” He grimaces, because he realizes he sounds like an idiot right now. He said, “I honestly am not sure what you saved me as, but uh, you’ll probably find me quick.”

“Okay, thanks,” she says, as she tucks the phone in her lap and then doesn’t look at it. “This will be handy.” 

“Okay, well, feel free to text or call or holler if you need anything,” he reiterates, patting the doorjamb. “I’ll be awake for a while.”

He kind of feels claustrophobically extraneous — and pretty unneeded in his own house — which is why he ends up walking out into the garden to sit in an adirondack chair that she used to really love and once had really strong opinions on. He briefly considers lighting a fire in the firepit, but he quickly decides against it. It would be too heartbreakingly reminiscent.

Sitting in the dark by himself, doing nothing besides thinking, is where Missandei’s mom finds him. She has a light shawl wrapped around her shoulders, an open bottle of wine in her hand, and two glasses as she trips her way toward him in the dark, being not as familiar with their yard. He can hear her grumbling about the lack of light — just as the lights come on.

He’s holding onto his phone. He looks at her and he says, “I turned off the lights because I didn’t want to disturb her with them —”

“But you also don’t want me to trip, fall, and break a hip either,” she finishes for him, taking the open chair across from him. “Thank you.”  

“I’m good on the wine,” he tells her, as he watches her pour heartily into one of the glasses.

“Just one,” she says to him, as she leans forward to give it to him anyway. “Here you are.” 

She knows he’s going to take it — she knows because she’s known him for years, and she knows that he likes to please her. Mostly by being good to her daughter and grandkids. Sometimes by having a glass of wine with her after dinner. 

“That wasn’t too bad, right?” she says lightly, filling up her own cup.

“No, not too bad at all,” he says, as he slouches in his seat and lightly tips his glass back. 

“I can stay longer you know,” she adds conversationally, as she sips from her own glass. “I can help you with her and the kids for as long as you both need.”

“Ah,” he says, smiling down at his hands kind of vacantly. “That will be up to her. I’ll ask her tomorrow, if she wants you to stay longer.” 

In response to that — to his diplomacy — he gets a look from Missandei’s mom. It’s a look he knows pretty well. It’s a look that states that she is currently not very impressed at all.

“Mira, you know you drive her nuts, sometimes,” he says frankly to her. “You know she drives you nuts, sometimes.”

“I know!” Missandei’s mom says defiantly. “But she told me she thinks I’m a bad mother and that I’m abandoning her with you. What am I supposed to do about that?”

“I think she probably just wanted you to hear her — to listen and acknowledge how she feels,” Grey says simply. “I don’t think she told you that so that you’d like, do stuff about it. Also, I have a hard time believing she called you a bad mother. That doesn’t sound like something she’d say.” 

She narrows her eyes at him in response. She also lightly shakes her head as she regally takes another sip from her glass. She sighs and says, “Oh, Nudho. Nudho, Nudho, Nudho.”

“What?”

“Honey, when Missandei first brought you home, I didn’t like you very much,” she announces. And then she takes another sip of wine. 

“Okay,” he says in a deadpan, staring back at her. “Cool trip down memory lane, Mira.”

“But I love you now,” she finishes. “I figured it out. And so will she. You won’t make her uncomfortable forever.”

“Ah,” he says, as he spins his glass around in his hands. “That doesn’t really bother me as much as you think it does. But I appreciate the reassurance.” 

“I know you are very strong,” she says, and it naturally sounds a little bit mocking — but also loving. “But it’s okay to not always be strong.”

He sighs audibly. He says, “I don’t really have the luxury of falling apart right now. I already did that. Four months ago. Now, I just need to keep things structured and routine — for the sake of the girls.”

“Well, you know, even if you need me to come over and watch the girls for a few hours so you can do some work or even if you just want some time to yourself —”

“I know,” he says. “I’ll call you. You guys have been amazing these last four months. I’m really grateful.” 

His phone rings in his pocket at that moment, breaking the lull. He quickly pulls it out, checks it, and sees that it’s his mom. He gives Missandei’s mom a quick look — she intuits what it means, and she waves him off and gestures for him to take the call. 

“Mom? What’s up?” he says, as he holds his phone to his ear, listening to the other line. And then he sighs and says, “Oh no. I’m sorry to hear that. How much did she throw up? Okay. Okay. Okay. Yeah, put her on.” At that, Grey pulls the phone from his face and dryly tells her, “Emmy threw a tantrum and made herself projectile vomit all over the bed.” And before Missandei’s mom can respond to that, he pulls his phone back to his ear and says, “Hey, baby. I heard you had a night. What’s up, baby? What’s been happening?”

As he drives over to his parents’ house in the middle of the night, he finds himself in a new habit that he has developed over the last few months. He finds himself talking to his memory of her old self, in his head. He finds himself ruefully telling her that she must seriously be laughing at him right now, because he has given her so much shit over the years about being too lenient with the kids and not waiting long enough to let themselves work out their issues before swooping in to solve their problems for them — but look at him now. Right now he’s even worse than she ever was. He is so codependent with the girls, and they are definitely going to need some therapy later, because of him.

He also secretly and desperately admits to himself and to her that he just misses her so fucking much. He silently tells her that he’s kind of hopelessly lost without her. She made him so much better — happier, smarter, kinder, more patient, wiser, funner — and now she is just gone. And he has been failing so hard without her. 

He admits to himself that sometimes he’s not really even sure how he’s supposed to just go on pretending that she’s not gone. Because she is gone, and his heart feels like it has caved in and he is empty now. 

He wonders what grief is supposed to look like in this extraordinary circumstance. He wonders if he’s even allowed to grieve. He wonders what she would say to him right now, if she was still her — and sitting next to him — and actually looking at him in that way that he completely took for granted. He can’t fucking believe that they have each lost her love. He can’t believe that he is cowardly enough to subject his babies to this ongoing, drawn out heartbreak.  

He wonders what advice and what words of reassurance she would give to him, if she was still herself.

Grey feels like he’s taking forever getting to his folks’ house, because he refuses to speed and he refuses to do anything that might result in his kids losing both of their parents as they know them. 

He must not look super awesome when he gets there, because the first thing his dad says to him when he opens the door is, “Jesus, son, you look like shit.”  

He spends the night in his old bedroom at his parents’ house, with the girls. Emmy settles down and finally stops hysterically crying and screaming for him, when he arrives. She gloms onto him and cuddles against his chest, quietly still hiccupping because she cried so hard. Maddy looks upset with him — like she can’t believe he left her alone to deal with her sister like this — but her being upset with him doesn’t preclude her from bunking down with him and falling right to sleep next to him. 

He holds onto both of them as they sleep, even as they get too hot and start squirming around unconsciously to get more comfortable. 

He remembers how Missandei used to make jokes about how the kids are so little, yet they man-spread like total champs in their sleep all the time. She used to jokingly tell him that this quality in their girls made her pretty optimistic about the future. 

Grey doesn’t get that much sleep, so he’s not really well-rested when he hears his parents puttering around in the kitchen, getting breakfast ready. 

He gingerly extracts himself out from underneath Emmy, leaving her to continue drooling and sweating next to her sister, as he sneaks out of bed and makes his way into the kitchen.

“Oh, did we wake you?” his mom asks.

“Nah,” he says, as he walks to the coffee maker. “I was kinda already up.”

“Stop it, sit down,” his mom commands, as she swats his hand away from her machine. “I’ll bring it to you.”

“How was Missy’s first night at home?” his dad asks from his seat at the kitchen table, sounding frighteningly conversational, with his glasses tipped low on the bridge of his nose. 

Grey supposes that his dad has been super chill about the entire traumatic shitshow of their lives — relative to everyone else — because his dad is too used to seeing this rare, unbelievable, heartbreaking bullshit all the time in his job. 

His dad was the one who told him that Missandei’s neurologist is pretty much guessing, and that nobody in the world actually knows how her healing is going to progress — if her memories will start coming back or not. His dad told him that as doctors, sometimes they lightly lie to patients, to give them hope. Sometimes people need hope more than they need unadorned information. 

“It was fine,” Grey says, casting his eyes to the back of the house, where his old bedroom is, reminding his dad that he mostly always talks as if the girls are eavesdropping on them. “She looked around the house and got familiar with it. We had dinner — she ate some of your food, Mom. We chatted a little bit. She went to bed early because she was tired. And then you called me, and I came over. That’s basically it. Pretty uneventful.”  

“Okay,” his dad says softly, as his mom drops off a steaming cup of coffee right in front of him. “Uneventful is good.”

Grey supposes that this is one of those moments his dad was talking about, where doctors lightly lie in order to give people hope. 

Chapter Text

He used to be full of self-righteous scruples when it came to his children, but now he has none. He is now totally okay with bribing his kids with fun to get them out of his hair for a while. He is totally not above sacrificing his parents to babysitting duty in the process. 

He stands in his parents’ driveway, holding the leash to their dog because he has decided to take the dog back because he doesn’t want her to be stuck at his parents house by herself all day. He asks his mom if she has enough cash for snacks and rides and stuff, as he digs into his back pocket to pull at his wallet. And even though she tells him that she has plenty of money for waterpark day, he pulls out a few more bills and tries to give them to her. He reminds her that shit is so much more expensive these days.

When his mom refuses to take his money for the second and third times, he switches tactics. He turns to Maddy, and he holds out the money to her. She slowly makes a reach for it — very slowly. He tells her, “Help your grandma out and buy things.”

“Nudho,” his mom snaps, predictably cutting in and finally reaching out to snatch the money out of his hand, intercepting it from her grandchild. “You can’t give a child that much money to hold! She’s going to get robbed!” 

That makes him chuckle. It also makes Maddy smile, because she knew what her dad was doing the whole time. 

Grey says, “Mom, who is going to rob her at a waterpark? Other kids’ parents? Twelve year olds?” 

“I can’t with you right now,” she mutters, as she stuffs his money into her pocketbook.

“Daddy!” Emmy says, running up to him, wearing her frilly and fluffy swimsuit already, grabbing onto his hand in a vice-grip. “Are you and Momo and Mommy coming with us after all?”

“Nah, baby. I can’t swim, remember?”

“What!” she gasps, looking at him skeptically. “Yes, you can!” 

“No, I can’t.”

“Good Lord, Nudho,” his mom admonishes again. “You need to stop casually lying to your children.” To Emmy, she softens her voice and says, “Baby girl, your dad does know how to swim. He’s actually a very good swimmer.”

“I know!” she says cheerfully. “I’ve seen him swim loads of times!”

And then they all hear Grey’s dad randomly shout — and swear — from around the corner of the house. They hear him probably trip over something that he left lying around. They hear him shout, “Goddammit! Sanaa! Do you know where my fucking sunglasses are?”  

His mom sighs grandly. She rhetorically mutters, “How am I supposed to keep track of everything he loses?” And then she sucks in a bracing breath — filling up her lungs — before shouts back at him. She’s screaming, “Did you check the center console of YOUR CAR!”

She has another argument with her mother, because she wants to lie down and continue what she’s been doing for the last six hours, which is doom-scrolling and compulsively reading all of the terrible, heartbreaking news that she has missed in the last twelve years. 

But her mom wants her to get up and aimlessly walk around the house with her walker, so that she can go back to normal as fast as possible.

Her mom leaves in a huff, when she tells her mom for the hundredth time, that she just wants to do nothing for the rest of her life. She just wants to be a drain on the people around her, for the rest of her life. 

It is blessedly peaceful once her mom leaves to go grocery shopping. 

She goes back to her phone, back to avidly scrolling through it and skimming over all of these names in her messages from a bunch of people she doesn’t even recognize. She learns the most about herself through this phone, more than she has been able to get from her family. She learns about the mundane day-to-day of her current life, through her phone.

Her personal email is the same personal email she’s had since college, except that it’s now mostly a vehicle full of ads, spam, messages from the girls’ school and teachers, bills, and logistical forwards from him. She no longer sends long emails or writes her friends letters. 

She was nervous about looking at her photos, in case she finds something too undecipherable, too weird, or too unexpectedly intimate. Like a dick pic or a nude selfie.  

There are years and years of photos and she hasn’t even skimmed the tip of the iceberg — but she can glean that right before her accident, she took a lot of photos of the kids, her food, a dog, and of him. 

That totally makes sense to her. They are all very normal-looking pictures, with some of the kids being deliberate and posed, and many being quick and candid and sometimes blurry. She is glad she hasn’t seen a dick pic or a nude selfie. 

She starts to go through her text messages, and those only go back a few years. From her text messages — from the nature of them and from who she was talking to the most — she can tell she was certainly not doing anything salacious, like having an affair. She seemed straightforwardly very centered on her family and preoccupied with the kids. 

She finds her text thread with her mother, and what she reads there isn’t a surprise to her at all. She finds individual texts and also a group text with her brothers. They mostly joke around, sometimes about their parents, sometimes about something random, sometimes about Grey, and often, they are trying to sync their schedules to get together. From this, Missy gathers that they actually spend a lot of time together, meeting up frequently.

She skims through her messages with Dany and sees that they sort of had the same kind of conversations they used to have. Dany still isn't an avid texter. Their conversations together mostly consist of screencaps of other text convos with other people and some sort of short commentary like: This bitch is so annoying. 

From the short snippets she sees, Missy gathers that she and Dany are still assholes with no shame, who gossip behind their other friends’ backs all the time.

This is comforting. Dany is still her bestie forever.

She saves looking at her messages with him for last, because she suspects that whatever she finds will pack a wallop. 

She finds that they were texting each other constantly, multiple times a day usually. She scrolls through the week leading up to when her messages with him stop — on the date of the accident — and their conversations are mostly logistical, about where to take which kid to which activity, whether the car is charged enough or not, if the dog is pooping weird, which set of grandparents are free to watch the kids. 

She scrolls quickly further back, and it’s more and more of this, which she honestly finds a little strange. They don’t really joke around with each other. Or even say many words of affirmation. Or that they love each other. 

So she does a search on the entire text thread. She feels like she should feel a little more awkward about invading the privacy of her past self — but she does not. She’s down with this kind of creeping. And she’s sex-positive. 

She starts doing searches for dirty words. She tries to find an instance of them sexting. 

The word ‘fuck’ is a gold mine — a million fucks pop up. However, in mild amusement, she quickly sees that it’s mostly from him, just talking about something casually mundane. Like when she texted to ask him how many helium canisters he thinks they will need for the balloons, he responded with: Just fucking one pls. ty. 

She searches for words like cock and pussy and comes up totally blank. Zero results.

She searches for vagina, penis, dick, and boobs. And this turns up some results. But it’s mostly mundane. Like: OMG Emmy punched me in the dick this morning.

Then she thinks to search for the word sex. There are five results, and they are generally all about sex. For real.

The results are from one text exchange from eight months ago. 

It was her old self asking him to grab Maddy from Page’s house because she was having a hectic “shitshow” of a day and running behind. 

He responded by asking her if her day was a big shitshow or a little shitshow, because his day was a “dumpster fire.”

Her old self responded to that with just one word. Which was: Please.

He responded to that by telling her that she owed him sex for this later — because he was doing her a huge favor. 

Her old self reminded him that she already had to spend the evening helping Maddy with her “planets diagram” because Maddy had been predictably freaking out about it. Her old self apparently negotiated with him on the sex. Her old self asked him if five minutes of sex would be enough.

He — seriously — responded by telling her that it can be a five-minute blow job.

Her old self — seriously — freaking wrote: Okay. Deal.

And this particular exchange ends with him telling her: I’m actually going to fuck you badly tonight, in the closet, with a bag over your face.

Missy’s jaw totally drops. Her face totally shoots up a million degrees. She totally shuts off the phone screen in disgust — and she decides that she was right. She is always freaking right. 

She decides to take a break from going down memory lane for the time being. Because her mother wants her to be nice to this fucking man, and learning more of this shit about him is going to make it hard for her to be nice to him.

Grey thinks that this bout of normalcy at his parents’ house is probably good for him. It certainly feels nice to forget the seriousness of the state of things with Missandei for a brief moment. It is nice for him to be able to stand around trolling his mom a little bit, to listen to his dad bitch out the sun, casually using language that is probably inappropriate for his kids to adopt.

He spends a pretty indulgent amount of time saying bye to his kids. He knows that he’s acting like he is sending them off to go fight a war or something like that. He just hugs them for a long time, until their back cracks and they squeak, and he makes them jokingly promise him that they will have fun and not drink any of the pool water because other kids barf and pee and bleed in the pools all the time. He says it because he knows that drinking pool water is an inevitability.

When he arrives back home, he finds that Missandei’s mom has evidently already filled Missandei in on where he went in the middle of the night, because Missandei stares at him from where she is sitting — on their couch — and she lowers her book into her lap. She asks him, “How are they?”

The blandness and lack of specificity in all her questions regarding their children continues to irk him. It makes him think that he didn’t anticipate this as part of their future together at all — back when they were simply just in love with each other. He used to think that he could overcome anything — for her — out of his abundant love for her. 

But now he doesn’t think he can put up with this indefinitely. He knows it’s only been a month, but he doesn’t know how many more months he can put up with this — her general mild and polite interest when it comes to their kids. He doesn’t think his love for her will overcome that indefinitely. 

He supposes that his flaws are currently coming out full-force. He is always mentally planning for the worse. She used to always warmly get on his ass about this. She used to try to tease him into a better mood and a sunnier perspective.

“Better,” he tells her. “They haven’t really been apart from me — um, from both of us — since you’ve been in the hospital. So I think they were having a hard time dealing with that. Emmy especially.” 

“She’s a pretty emotional kid, huh?”

This kind of gets his hackles raised.

And honestly, he and Missandei actually used to talk about this all the time with each other — but in this context, feeling so disconnected from her — it makes him feel a certain way. 

He feels defensive for his child. 

His voice gets a bit tight, as he says, “She’s really young. And she’s had a difficult time understanding what’s been going on — she doesn’t get why —”

He stops himself from saying something true but kind of unfair.

Missandei can tell what he was going to say though, so she finishes the sentence for him. She says, “She doesn’t get why her mom can’t remember her anymore.”

He’s staring back at her — and in a way, he’s kind of remembering what it was like when they first met — when they were complete strangers to each other. He says, “Sort of. I don’t think she actually completely gets what it means, that you can’t remember the events that she remembers.” 

“But Maddy gets it,” Missandei says calmly.

He crosses his arms over his chest. He says, “Yeah.”

“You’re kind of upset with me right now,” she cooly observes, just stating it as a fact. 

“No, not really,” he says, correcting her. “I’m tired from last night, and this situation is difficult. But I know you can’t help any of this. And I know it’s hard for you, too.” 

“Okay,” she says. “You sure?” she adds — haughtily — skeptically.

“Maybe,” he says, shrugging. And then he suddenly jolts in stunned shock — his eyes going wide. 

And before she can get confused and ask him what just happened, he spins around and starts rushing out of the living room, back into the garage. He shouts, “I fucking forgot I left our dog in the car. Shit!”

As he holds the intense and thrashing body of Momo in his hands and walks her out of the warm car and into the cool house, he mentally kicks his own stupid ass for being so fucking brain dead lately. He had intended on leaving Mo in the car for just a little bit so that he could prime Missandei for the fact that not only does she have to live with a stranger and his two small children — she also has to live with a dog, too. 

She doesn’t look all that surprised when he walks in with the dog going nuts in his arms, because in the time that she’s spent snooping around the house, she’s seen plenty of dog toys, water bowls, and food bowls. She’s also seen probably hundreds of photos — like, a disturbing amount — of the dog on her phone.  

“Oh shit,” Grey says, as Momo just about loses her goddamn mind upon seeing Missandei, as she just about launches herself right out of his arms in her desire to greet Missandei for the first time in a really long time. “I guess she’s happy to see you.”

He watches Missandei’s face carefully — as no recognition dawns on it at all. He watches as Missandei stares at Momo like she thinks Momo is an animal. Or just a dog. 

He holds Momo tighter as Momo continues to try to get to Missandei in desperation. Momo doesn’t understand why she isn’t being allowed to greet her mom, who she hasn’t seen in months. 

Grey pretty much thinks that this whole thing sucks, for the millionth time, as he holds the dog to his chest. He can see that Missandei is not into this at all — based on her face. He tells her, “I won’t let her go, don’t worry. We can leave her tethered to a leash for a while. Until she calms the fuck down, I guess.”

“She’s a cute dog. Is she trained?”

“Um, yes,” Grey says, trying to flip the dog over so that she can’t see Missandei, trying to stroke the dog’s back. “Unless you want her to do stuff on command. Then no. Where’s your mom?”

“Oh,” Missandei says plainly, still staring at the wriggling dog. She actually doesn’t think it’s a great idea to let a dog — no matter how small — excitedly jump on her fragile body, either. “She went to the store. To restock the fridge and pantry. She has a lot she wants to say to you about both things.”

“Oh, awesome,” he says. “Sounds about right.” 

She decides to give him a break — from having to watch the dog constantly around her — so she retires back to her room and shuts the door behind her so that the dog can’t get in. However, she also notices belatedly that his really fancy guest bedroom in his fancy house has these floor to ceiling windows and doors that look out into the backyard. 

Her mother had pulled up the shades to get sunshine in earlier — so Missy ends up looking right at him and the dog again because they are in the yard, as she uses her walker to gingerly ease herself back onto the bed — with a shit ton of awkward struggling and pain.

She can see that he’s trying to catch her attention from outside — so that he can swoop in like a fucking hero and magnanimously offer her help. She is studiously ignoring that because she doesn’t need his help 

She cries out in pain as her midsection flexes — and spasms — as she clenches and tries to ease herself onto the bed. One of her many problems is that she has absolutely no core strength left. She has no muscles. Her body atrophied pretty badly, those three months she was unconscious and riddled with life threatening injuries from the car crash.  

“Hey,” he says, as he swings the door to the guest bedroom open. The dog is nowhere to be seen. “Will you let me help you?”

“No, thank you,” she says, grimacing. “I got this.”

“You really don’t, Missandei,” he says, starting to take a step forward. 

“Dude, I swear to God,” she says, firmly. She is suddenly very angry. “If you force your help onto me after I tell you that I don’t need it — if you touch me — I’m going to fucking lose it on you.” 

He freezes. He stares at her for a moment with his mouth in a tight, disapproving line and his eyes dispassionate. And then he says, “Okay,” before he leaves the guest room, shutting the door behind him.

She just drops herself on the bed, with the aid of gravity after he leaves. It’s a dicey and potentially dangerous thing to do — and it’s also really painful — which is why she ends up rage-crying in the bed for a few minutes after she collapses. 

She’s pissed at her mother for focusing on all of the wrong fucking things. Her mother never ever works that hard to understand who she fucking is, as a person. Her mother will prioritize going to the fucking grocery store to buy snacks because the thing that her mother is great at controlling is food. Her mother will go to the fucking grocery store and leave her own daughter behind to struggle moving from place to place, to be unable to even pee for hours because her daughter can’t even fucking get on and off the toilet without help. 

She is pissed at this man and his pretentious open concept house with a billion glass walls and no fucking privacy at all. She is pissed he keeps waiting for her to go back to the way she was. She is pissed he is so burdened by her broken body and brain. She is pissed that he is selfish and self-serving in bed. 

And she is pissed at herself, for not fucking accepting his stupid help. She could have really injured herself again, all because of her stupid fucking pride.   

For a fleeting second, Grey seriously considers noping out of this entire thing. He’s got his phone in his hand and he’s just about ready to call Missandei’s mom to tell her that he has actually changed his fucking mind. He can’t actually do this at all. Missandei should go. It’s what she wants, after all. She doesn’t even want to be here.

And he can’t subject his kids to this. He has to be fucking stupidly irresponsible to subject his children to this.

His own freakout is fleeting. 

Because he already knows what she would want for him to do. 

Missandei would want for him to try harder than this. She wouldn’t want him to deprive her of a relationship with her kids. She wouldn’t want him to deprive their kids of their mother — not on the first fucking day at least. She would tell him that he’s sometimes a touch too hot-headed and impulsive. She would tell him to just take a pause and really think about it, for a second. She would embrace him and hold him in her arms as she laughed at him, letting her body easily absorb and dissipate all of the coiled tension from his body. 

He now fucking feels like he never savored those moments enough — when he had them with her. 

After she calms down again, after she stops crying and slowly drags her body fully onto the bed, she lies back in the pillows in exhaustion.

She despondently does the exercise. She despondently does a realistic instead of a fatalistic inventory of her current life. It’s a task that she does on repeat, over and over again, because the psychiatrist told her that it will help with retention and new memory-making. She lists it all out. 

She tells herself she lives in a really pretty house that doesn’t seem like her vibe at all — like not her eclectic style at all. But that is fine. She finds it to be aesthetically pleasing. Everything looks new and nothing looks vintage though, and that is totally fine. 

She tells herself that her partner seems like he makes really good money, because he is the sole breadwinner and this is their house. And that is cool and she is lucky that he is so competent at his overly patriotic and xenophobic job. 

She tells herself that her parents — her mom especially — seem to like this guy a lot, which is good because it’s nice for her family to get along with this guy. She reminds herself that her mom has generally hated every guy she has ever brought home, because they were never manly enough or traditional enough, which was the very thing that Missandei used to seek out in the people she dated. She apparently ended up with someone her mom likes. And that is great. It is great that her mom probably likes that his dad is a doctor and that he apparently comes from a classy rich family. It is not classist at all. And she is totally cool with classist shit now. And that is totally fine with her. 

She tells herself that he honestly seems like a fine dad to their kids. He also seems completely nice and polite and does and says all of the right things in front of her and other people like a total two-faced psycho. And that is great, because he apparently has a talent. 

She tells herself there are very few photos of the two of them together that she’s seen — there are mostly photos of the kids and them as a family. 

She tells herself their kids seem like pretty normal, conscientious kids for the most part, so she and this guy must’ve co-parented in a somewhat predictable and normal way. 

She tells herself she apparently became an animal person — a dog person — at some point. And also a kids person. 

She reminds herself that everyone has told her that she was seemingly happy and she seemingly had a decent relationship and she seemingly loved her children a lot. 

She tells herself that it’s probably bad to kink shame. 

She tells herself that she is probably not trapped in a house with a man who is dysfunctional, toxic, or abusive. Probably. Probably. Because why would the people in her life that she actually remembers even allow this? 

She tells herself that he is probably just a normal and ordinary and boring dude with really cute kids and a cute dog, who apparently likes to have sex with her in a closet, with a bag over her head, one who likes to passive-aggressively wheedle out blow jobs from her by capitalizing on her motherly guilt. And that is all just fine and her older self probably found this shit charming due to years of hanging out with him, all day, every day. 

Grey knows that they’re here, before they even ring the doorbell — because the front door camera alerts him that they are at the door. When he sees them on the hub on the kitchen counter, he already freaking knows what happened. What happened is that he and Missandei’s mom decided on something together, and then she went and changed her mind about it — probably because she had a difficult morning with Missandei and is now extra anxious. 

In a way, he gets it. 

It is still annoying.

He’s already sighing and shaking his head as he undoes the door lock and slowly pulls the door open. He’s shaking his head at all of them.

Mossador starts negotiating right away. He walks into the foyer, presses both of his hands on Grey’s chest and slowly pushes the guy backwards into his own house. Moss says, “Okay, before you get mad, I feel like I need to express that our mom told us to get our asses over here for family dinner. She said it would be good for Missy. And look, it’s just us. We left the wives and the kids at home.”

“You gonna kick us outta your house, Nudho?” Mars asks challengingly, eyes flashing in aggression because he has now become trained to expect a fight with each thing that involves his sister. 

And then, seamlessly, he drops the act and quickly leans forward to give Grey a quick hug — one strong hand squeezing the back of Grey’s neck, his other hand clasping onto — for real — an entire raw chicken with the head still on. 

After Mars lets Grey go, he says, “You gotta tray for this?” as he dangles the chicken up in the air and blithely walks into the kitchen.

“I’m so sorry,” their dad finally says, when he makes his way to the front of the line where Grey is, in the house. “I did not agree with them,” he says, grasping Grey by the shoulder. “I do not think this is a great idea.” 

Her dad’s holding a bottle of wine in his other hand, so Grey honestly doesn’t think Missandei’s dad looks that contrite about this.  

Grey takes the chicken from Mars, who happily gives it over so that he frees up his hands to grab a beer. Grey walks the chicken over the fridge, scrambling to clear space for it so that it doesn’t just sit out and leak chicken juice all over the floor for Momo to later lick up. He also tries to remind them that Missandei isn’t currently eating meat, so what exactly is the plan for the chicken?

He doesn’t get answers, because he doesn’t really stick around for them. He just leaves the men in her family to entertain themselves in the kitchen as he quickly rushes over to the guest bedroom to alert her of this. He has seen how her interactions with her family have been dispiriting at times. He has seen how they have depleted her energy because her brothers keep trying to engage in their current dynamic with her, without realizing what it exactly means — that she doesn’t remember certain things about them and herself anymore.

He lightly knocks on her door, expecting her to be asleep again — but she is actually awake. She’s been listening to the sounds of all their voices echoing across the house the whole time.

“Hey,” he says, as he cracks the door open a little bit. “I’m sorry, but your family just showed up. Do you —”

“Will you help me up?” she says, as she slowly and gingerly raises her arms up. She’s ready to be repositioned, like she is a baby.

“Yeah, definitely,” he says softly, as he immediately walks over so that he’s right beside her. He copies what he has generally seen her nurses and mom do, with his hands lightly holding onto her arm and pressed into her back. “Is this okay?”

“Yeah,” she says, going a little rigid because he is touching her. “Thanks.”

The distance from the guest bedroom to the kitchen is kind of like the distance from her hospital bed to the drinking fountain, and she has theoretically mastered that. Nevertheless, she’s still using her walker to get her there. She’s still uncomfortable in this unfamiliar house. There are still zero railings and way too many hard surfaces for her to exacerbate her existing head injury with. 

“Hey, Lil’ Miss,” Moss says encouragingly from his position at the kitchen island. “Look at you go, speed demon!” He’s joking with her. Because that’s what they do. They give each other a little bit of shit sometimes.

“Oh my God, screw you,” she says in response, because she thinks he’s straightforwardly mocking her for how fast she’s not going. And she doesn’t look like she’s joking about it at all on her end. 

Chapter Text

When her mom gets back to the house, she comes with a butt load of groceries and snacks. It takes all of them — except Missandei — to grab everything in one trip, and it takes five minutes of hopelessly watching before Grey can confirm to himself that, for sure, Missandei’s mom is totally fucking up how they organize their pantry. 

In a different time, Missandei would have been all up in her mom’s face, telling her mom that she and Grey do not hoard food and store it for eons just to cope with food insecurity. In a different time, Missandei would’ve battled her mom over all of the discount stuff that her mom bought for the girls, just because it was on sale. In a different time, Missandei would’ve really aggravated her mom by reminding her mom that she prefers to shop at the bougie market and buy grass-fed beef and organic bananas. 

Grey thinks it’s kinda bullshit that her mom is basically capitalizing on her memory loss and taking advantage of the fact that Missandei does not remember that she has certain strong beliefs about what and how they feed their kids. He also realizes that he is a hypocrite. Because he’s been feeding the kids organic apples and fast food, out of convenience. 

He’s also pretty sure that it’s not going to be productive at all, to try and have a conversation with her mom right now, in front of her face, in front of everyone. Grey is pretty sure he just needs to get through this evening, and the next week, and the next month, and probably the next entire year — with no more crazy emotional shit in their faces to deal with.

It turns out that the chicken is for a soup that her mom is going to make for the girls, not for Missandei. He realizes this when her mom pulls out one of the stock pots, fills it with water, and starts ripping apart a box full of star-shaped pasta.

One of the many things Missy totally loves and is not pissed about at all, about her new life, is that even in the years that she has lost, one thing that she has apparently not gained in that lost time is proper boundaries — from her mom or from her brothers. 

They are still kind of cursed with a certain kind of obstinate optimism, a type of la-la land optimism, so they talk as if everything is back to normal, now that she’s out of the hospital and at home. Her brothers think they are being chill and friendly and normal, as they tell her about weekend get-togethers that are coming up that she can look forward to. And they don’t get — or they don’t acknowledge — that she is seething inside, just incensed because she still can’t even walk, so she doesn’t know how the fuck she’s supposed to sit around and talk to a bunch of people who probably pity her and will ask her a bunch of horrible questions about her traumatic experience that she will want to choke to death on. 

She’s convinced that her mom secretly loves that she can’t walk anymore. She is so totally sure that she is now the kind of daughter that her mom wanted all along — one that is completely dependent and obedient and compliant — because she can’t even fucking walk. She feels that her mom loves that she can’t even take a shit without help.

Because she is so mad, Missandei ends up being super quiet and non-responsive at dinner. She wonders if she had changed so much in the last decade that she became a person that was better at not internalizing this shit and just swallowing it. She wonders if anyone will even answer her truthfully, if she asks them. She wonders if anyone even knows her anymore at all.  

As he watches her from across the table, he can tell that she is pretty pissed and that having a chaotic family dinner together her first night back at home was a bad idea, just like he predicted. 

Because her mood feels really obvious to him, and because he knows how it can go for her, when she is around her family in this kind of dynamic, he’s been trying to catch her eyes, to kind of signal to her that it’s okay, and that he sees this too. He knows that sometimes it helps when they can communicate with each other silently — when she sees him acknowledging that she’s not alone in her interpretation of events. That this stuff is bananas. 

She never looks at him. She purposefully never looks at him to catch his sympathy.

And he feels like a real idiot for being so optimistic and hopeful for a moment there. He tells himself that he really needs to remember that she has completely lost over a fourth of her entire life. She is dealing with that. She is not looking to bond with a random man she doesn’t know — through eye contact alone. 

He still keeps trying to give her an out though — sometimes expressing out loud that she must be tired and it must be time for her to go rest again — but she seems not to really get what he’s doing, because she keeps saying that she’s fine. She even sounds annoyed about it, that he voiced this twice. 

So he lets it go, and just sits there and continues trying to talk about just a shit ton of nothing with her brothers. He tries to make the jokes and pretend things are normal. He sounds dumb and dull. He’s still too distracted by grief and loss to laugh and to make anyone laugh with the things he says. He’s still too heartbroken to be a great conversationalist. He tries to follow the threads of conversation. He is just utterly exhausted. So he is quiet too. 

He’s kind of incredibly glad when his phone buzzes in his pocket — because these days only one person ever calls him regularly — because he told everyone else in their life to leave them alone for a bit so that he can deal with this pain peacefully. 

He confirms that it’s his mom ringing him. He stands up right away and announces to the table that it’s the kids. He says, “I gotta take this.”

“Of course,” her dad says. “Tell them we said hi?”

“Nah,” Grey says absently as he walks out of the room. “They don’t need to know we are having a party without them.” 

Oh,” her dad says, chuckling a little bit. “That’s a good point.” 

The kitchen is a bit quiet after Grey leaves the room. They can hear his faded voice from somewhere else in the house, talking sweetly to one or both of the kids, switching from asking questions to responding with an appropriate amount of put-upon curiosity and enthusiasm, in response to whatever the kids are saying. 

“He’s a good dad,” Moss blurts — kind of intending to fill the awkward space — but also because he just feels so bad for Grey. He’s forcing himself to still keep it light. He’s forcing himself to smile, even though it is kind of tired — because he is a bit fatigued over navigating his sister’s mercurial moods. 

He’s been tired of it. He actually didn’t want to disrupt his plans with his family to suddenly go over to his sister’s house and have her be passive-aggressive with them some more — but he did it because he loves her, and he figured that if she’s just like this now, he just needs to get used to her new and super bitchy personality and just integrate it into his life and stuff. He needs to accept this, too. He’s so fucking glad she’s not dead. 

And at the very least, for him, she actually remembers who he is.  

“He’s a real good dad,” Mars echoes. “He’s really active and engaged with the kids. The girls really adore him.”

“He’s really great with our kids, too,” Moss adds, as he stares at his sister, who is staring at the table. “He’s a really good uncle.”

Missandei is thinking that they are focusing on all the wrong things — if their intention is to further try and ingratiate this man to her. She thinks that they should rewind their minds back at least a decade, and remember what she was into over a decade ago. She thinks that they should remember that she didn’t really go ga-ga over men who are apparently good fathers and good uncles and good providers and good patriarchs. She thinks that they really should know why she is so unhappy right now. 

“Is he running for political office or something?” Missy asks rhetorically, finally swinging her eyes up to look at her brothers. “Why does it always sound like you’re stumping for him?” She shrugs defensively, crossing her arms defensively over her chest. “Look, he’s nice, okay? I get it. He’s a really nice and dependable guy. I can see it.”

“Be patient with him, Bee,” her mom cuts in. “Give yourself a chance to get to know him again. Spend the time with him and —”

“Be patient with him?” Missandei repeats, as she shakes her head in disbelief. And then she laughs — loudly and humorlessly and bitterly. She’s sick of having this stupid argument. She’s fucking sick of telling these people who she is as a person and having then not fucking listen to her at all. She is not at all surprised that her mom wants her to be patient with a man while her fucking life was the one that was destroyed in an instant. 

She bites all of the rage-filled words that she wants to spill back. She doesn’t want to yell anymore.

And because she’s not releasing the word — and the feelings — she starts to cry in frustration. And she doesn’t even fucking care as her vision blurs and she sees her brothers stiffen anyway. 

It fucking hurts to sit in a chair, and she’s been trying so hard to have dinner with them and she needs to pee — but she’s been dealing with both things silently because she is fucking old now, but she still fucking sucks at expressing her needs to the people around her. So she cries over that, too. She’s also crying because she’s so mad at herself. 

Maybe she will cry enough that she won’t need to freaking pee anymore. Maybe what these people need is to see this profound grief come out of her, so they will finally cut her some slack and just accept that she is no longer the person that they think they know. 

“Baby,” their dad says softly, trying not to make this disastrous dinner worse. “We know you are deeply unhappy. We’ve been hearing you. It’s just — we’re really bad at this. I’m really bad at this. I don’t know how to help you feel better — and that kills me. I’m sorry. What do you want from us that we can provide, right now?” 

She lets out a shuddering sob at that. She also says, “I need to pee real bad.”

Her mom immediately stands up, violently smacking the table with her knees, making the dishes rattle and making everyone jump. “Oh my God, why didn’t you say something!” 

When Grey comes back to the table, based on everyone’s demeanor and Missandei’s red eyes, he can totally tell what had happened — without them having to tell him what happened. 

He rubs his face with his hand, in response, because it is a lot. And he is generally really bad at pretending everything is normal when all he wants to do is drag out the carcass of the reality of their situation and lay it out on the table in front of everyone. 

He thinks really hard about what she would want him to in this situation, and he is kind of coming up blank. Because the truth of it is that she wouldn’t have gotten in this situation. It’s been so long since it has been this hard with her family. It’s been forever since her mom and brothers told her that she’s irresponsible and dumb for having a baby with a guy she barely knows. 

Grey has no fucking clue what she would want for him to do and how she would like for him to help her here.

So he does this for him. He does this for himself because he’s fucking exhausted as hell and he really didn’t want to freaking to host a dinner party in his house tonight.

He says, “Okay, y’all, I don’t want to be impolite, but I think y’all need to go home.”

“I agree, Nudho,” their dad says quickly, standing up and already starting to help clear the dishes. “Let us get this shit off your table, and then we’ll show ourselves out.” 

After her dad and brothers leave, Missandei and her mom disappear into the guest bedroom, presumably to get Missandei somewhat more comfortable again, in the bed. 

He spends the time trying to put a dent in the disaster of his kitchen. Her mom likes stuff. Her mom likes to have jars of salt and sugar and seasonings and sauces and oils all over the counter as she cooks. He happens to be psychotically minimalist, so seeing all of the stuff on his kitchen counter has been difficult and aggravating for him. 

He can feel Missandei's voice taunting him, in his head. He can remember how she used to sound, when she messed with him by leaving stacks of their opened mail on the corner of the kitchen counter. He remembers how they used to bicker over how adorably anal retentive she thought he was, and how they negotiated it and decided that it’s actually just cool if he did most of the cleaning — because it matters so much more to him than it did to her.  

He starts dumping leftovers, from the pans, into glass food containers. Missandei’s family’s habit is just to put plastic wrap or foil over the cooking vessels, but that is crazy to him, so he would prefer to put everything in glass containers so that he has more dishes to wash.

“Nudho!” her mom exclaims in admonishment, when she walks into the kitchen and totally catches him cleaning. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Oh my God, Mira,” he mutters, as he clicks on a lid to a large glass dish. “Just let me have this.” 

“That’s enough,” she snaps, as she walks up to him and snatches the container out of his hands. “Go relax. Don’t worry. I will clean up. You look very tired, honey.”

Missandei’s mom sometimes has a hard time getting him, and she also thinks there’s just one way to rest and relax — and that is to go lie down somewhere and try to take a nap. She still doesn’t really get that that’s kind of one of his worst nightmares — to just lie down and do nothing.

“Seriously,” she tells him, putting her hands on his back and physically pushing him out of the kitchen now. “I will be very mad if you stay here.”

“Dude,” he says, as he reluctantly walks out of the room. 

“Go!”

He climbs the stairs and walks into their bedroom after that — the bedroom that they used to share pretty mundanely at one point. He walks by all of her stuff — her perfumes and lotions and hair stuff on their vanity because she got the whole habit of leaving stuff out from her mother — and he enters the walk-in closet.

That’s littered with all of her stuff, too. It’s oppressively filled with her clothes, shoes, bags, belts, sunglasses, blazers, sweaters, and jackets. Her clothes make up two-thirds of the entire closet. It fucking sucks.

He goes to where Momo is in her kennel, and he kind of shuts himself in the closet with her. So that she can’t run downstairs and try to get hugs and cuddles from someone who is supposed to love her. He retroactively is kind of glad that Missandei’s mom kicked him out of the kitchen, because he feels so bad that he has to lock up Momo. She can’t always be loose because she is an anxious dog and has scratched up doors or taken a wet shit in the middle of the room in her panic over being left behind. All she wants is to be with them.  

Grey lets his middle child out of her cage. He knows he needs to take her out on a walk soon, but for now he lies down on the ground, in the midst of all their clothes, with Missandei’s dresses hanging up above their heads like sentinels — to get some cuddles. 

“Hey, bear-bear, how are you doing?” he says, as he picks her up and holds her, forcing her to curl up in his arms like she’s a human child. “Sorry you had to be locked up.” 

It takes Momo a second to calm down enough to really settle down — and then it’s just the cutest fucking thing, and he thinks that maybe this will give him the littlest hit of endorphins that he is sorely needing. He presses his lips to her head — he smells her and she smells ripe. He has been falling behind on bathing her because usually he has Missandei’s help in all of these things — taking care of the dog, taking care of the kids, cleaning the house, cooking things — just everything really.

He shuts his eyes. He thinks that if he tries hard enough, he can almost feel the way things used to feel in this house.

Chapter Text

On the morning of their final day together, Missandei relents and lets her mom bathe her. Standing is comfortable enough for her, but her balance is shit and her legs are weak, so she quickly decides that sitting in the tub is the least dangerous course of action.

It’s an entirely awkward ordeal to get her all the way naked — not awkward in the embarrassing sense. Awkward in the physical sense because when she is trying to lift up her shirt, her mom is trying to help her by intercepting her grasp, letting their knuckles messily collide together before they both tug at her shirt in different directions.

Which goes nowhere. 

Her shirt is half off, cinched around her arms, and her tits are hanging out as she groans, as her mom sighs and says, “Missandei, let go.”

Getting her loose pants and underwear off is also another ordeal, because they short-sightedly are doing this in the bathroom and its hard surfaces instead of the bedroom with all of its soft surfaces. Missy has to grasp onto the counter to make sure she doesn’t just topple right over, as her mom pulls the rest of her clothes off of her feet.

Her mom doesn’t comment on how much weight Missandei has lost — today at least — and her mom doesn’t force her to look at herself in a mirror.

That’s honestly been one of the more distressing things for her — being reminded of how she looks now. Not just her tender and healing body — but also the evidence of her age. She has little muscle definition. She has a paunchy belly and no abs. Her boobs are longer .

Trying to get Missandei in a sitting position in the tub is an entire whole other thing, because it’s so low to the ground and her mom might not actually be strong enough to get her to the floor without dropping her. 

“Maybe we should ask Nudho —”

“No,” Missandei says right away, with a lot of firm seriousness. 

“Okay, okay, ” her mom says, quickly backing off of the idea, before she re-grips Missandei’s torso in an awkward hug and slowly, slowly tries to get her down to the ground. As she does it, she says, “Next time, we should put a small chair in here for you.”

Missy just doesn’t think her mother understands how body conscious she is right now, because how can her mother even understand this? Her mother is from the old country. Her mother will carry on entire conversations with any of her aunts, for hours, with all of their bits hanging out. 

Her mother decides that she wants a little stool for herself and so she leaves Missandei in the tub alone and naked, with the bathroom door all the fuck way open as she hollers out Grey’s name and tells him what she’s wanting from him.

Missandei angrily pulls up her knees and puts her hands on her breasts as she waits, just in case the both of them decide to barge right in as she’s naked and vulnerable and stranded in a lid-less porcelain coffin.

When her mom comes back — by herself — carrying a wooden stool and a little caddy full of even more products, her mom looks at Missandei quizzically. Her mom says, “Why are you covering yourself like that? Honestly, I’m your mother, Missandei.”  

Missy plucks up and flicks open the cap of the bottle of cowash from the caddy that her mother brought in. From the weight of it in her hands, Missandei can tell the cowash is half-full, so she guesses that it must be her bottle. The label is unfamiliar to her — it must be a new brand, at least new since the past fucking twelve years or so — and she smells it. It smells nice. Kind of floral and fruity. It looks expensive. 

“You want me to shave you?”

She looks at her mother. “What?”

“Your legs and armpits, Missandei,” her mom says dryly. She’s also shaking her head ruefully. “I don’t even want to know what you were thinking or what you do with your body when I’m not around.”

He has been procrastinating all morning, but he forces himself to intrude on her after she and her mother finish up with the bathroom stuff, after he’s positive she is dressed again. 

She likes smells, so she typically buys products that have distinctive scents. He never thought he was that into smells — not until she was lying unconscious in a hospital bed and they were waiting for swelling to go down, not until she started smelling medicinal. 

Lately, he’s been acutely remembering how he used to bury his nose into the back of her head on lazy Sunday mornings, as he grasped onto the last bit of sleep, as they leisurely chatted about nothing much at all. He remembers the smell of her sunblock, as he ran his hand up and down her slippery back on summer days at the beach, with the kids in Naath. He remembers the various scents of her perfumes — depending on her mood — when he softly kissed her neck as she sat at her vanity and applied her makeup. He remembers her quiet and amused knowing smile, all the times he patiently held his hand out for her to hold for balance, as she carefully stepped into her high heels.  

All of the memories feel very present and kind of sickening, as he nervously stands five feet away from her. Because he can smell her right now. She smells like her conditioner and her lotion. 

It’s so fucking weird, how hard and awkward it is to have a serious conversation with someone that he used to talk to all the fucking time, someone that he was really comfortable spilling all of his latent humiliations and secrets and shame to — someone he buried his true self in so deeply that he got himself all lost in her and got all fucking hopelessly emotional about it and made her fucking vow to love him forever and ever like he didn’t already know that death is fucking relentless and everywhere. 

He thinks it’s so fucking weird that it’s so hard for him to talk to a person that has already known the very best of him and also the very worse — and had accepted both. 

He feels like he is fucking dying and devastated all over again, as he smells freaking conditioner and looks into her achingly familiar face and gets hit with the reminder that she doesn’t even smile at him anymore.   

For the sake of their children, he forces himself to be braver than he feels like being. He makes himself have another mind-numbingly awkward conversation with her — about how he envisions the coming week going — her first week with just him and the kids, her first week without her mom as a buffer.

“Do you want your mom to stay longer?” he asks her, point-blank. “She can.”

“Uh, no,” Missandei says, frowning. “It’s okay. My mom can visit me though, right?”

“Of course your mom can visit,” he says, scrunching his face up in confusion — over why she thinks he wouldn’t let her mom visit. “Your mom — anybody — can come over whenever you want them to.” 

“Okay,” Missandei says, staring unblinkingly at his face. “Then I would like for her to go home, like today. Like today.”

This makes him shoot out a short, choked laugh — and it’s so unexpected and accidental that it’s surprising to the both of them. 

This feels so embarrassingly familiar to him — this exchange of words and the entire vibe of it — that he immediately kills the laugh on the spot and then ducks his face down, trying to hide it by pointing it at the floor. 

He can feel her staring at him. 

Once he gathers his bearings again, he says, “Yeah, the girls will be back this evening. They have school tomorrow. And for the rest of the week. Um, I’ll be around, doing all the normal stuff, um, with the kids. Um, I don’t want you to think that I’m expecting you to just, you know, jump right in and do any of the caregiving. You don’t. I’m planning on trying to keep it easy on you. Um, just a warning, they’re going to be a lot at first, probably. Emmy has really missed you a ton. Um, I guess we can play it by ear and I can, uh, do my best — if and when it gets overwhelming for you. Um, you need to let me know though. I need you to verbalize it to me, when it feels too much. Uh, and I really want us to be careful with the kids — they’re so young and, um — I want you to, you know, get to know them again.”  

She’s still staring at him — her face inquisitive and curious, but also frustratingly blank. 

“Is that cool?” he asks, in slight anxiousness. 

She raises her brows in surprise — because she is only just clocking that he is nervous and this is how he apparently exhibits nervousness . “Oh, yeah, of course. The girls are very sweet. And I’m looking forward to getting to know them better — erm — again.”

He looks inexplicably relieved, which makes her think that there was some extra contextual stuff in the conversation that they just had together — that she totally missed. And that kind of makes her nervous in turn. People’s unstated expectations for her make her nervous.  

Grey blessedly doesn’t have to go through the weirdness of also talking to Missandei about how he’s going to also take care of her, because her mom conveniently acts like she’s the expert on everything related to Missandei — even though she knows he has a really great memory and was trained by the nurses already, even though Missandei knows what she needs and can verbally direct him to do all of it. 

Her mom easily takes it upon herself to re-explain everything that he needs to do for Missandei, in front of Missandei.

“Okay, so when you lift her, you have to support her neck and her head,” her mom says, as she comically stoops down and tries to demo this for him, without actually picking Missandei up because in actuality, her mom has never had to lift her. Her mom probably can’t lift her, because even with as much weight as Missandei has lost, she is still too tall and generally too big for his mom to lift. But his mom does understand how to do it, theoretically.

And they also went through this same exact scenario, right after Maddy was born. He also remembers getting a lesson on how to support someone’s neck and head by Missandei’s mom when they were both insanely sleep-deprived and inches away from verbally biting her head off for constantly talking to them like they were stupid. 

“Wait, wait, Mira,” Grey interjects. “Can we go over this one more time? You said to support just the neck and not the head?”

“Nudho,” her mom says, gesturing at him urgently and seriously, as she pleasantly catches her daughter sneaking a smile, out of the corner of her eye. “I know you are messing with me. I am glad you are finding a sense of humor in all of this. But you need to listen to me. Both the head and the neck.” 

Grey assures Missandei that he told the kids to chill the fuck out when they get dropped off at home and not to be hysterical banshees with her — and he sincerely hopes that they listen and don’t bombard her with their crazed love of her. But he can’t make promises.

Missandei looks up at him. She wryly says, “Did you really say that to them? To chill the fuck out?”

“More or less,” he says dismissively, as he stoops down and starts digging underneath the sink for the garbage bag that Missandei’s mom requested from him. In her last stint at their house, she has decided to go around emptying all of the trash bins for him so that it’s one less thing that he has to worry about later.

“You’ve always been okay with how he communicates with the kids,” her mom tells her, as she grabs the stretchy and lavender-scented garbage bag from Grey. “But it’s never too late to change your mind.” 

“Mira,” Grey says, looking and sounding serious. “You’ve never told me that this bothered you before.”

Her mom points to him as she looks straight in Missandei’s face. Her mom says, “He’s lying. I tell him this all the time.” And then she violently fluffs out the garbage bag. Accusingly at Grey, she says, “What is this? This smells like flowers. I know you paid full-price for this.”

He refrains from telling the both of them that Missandei was the one who bought the lavender-scented bag, actually — at full price. 

While he is so fucking glad to see his babies again, he is probably overcompensating a little bit — or a lot — when they arrive back home. He finds himself compulsively acting out his pervasive and never-ending affection for them, because he’s acutely aware of the situation with their mom and how shit’s probably going to be a minefield from here on out.

Honestly, all he wants is for his kids to know how much they are loved — unconditionally, always, forever and ever. All he wants is for them to never doubt this.

“What!” Grey shouts, as the front door of the house opens and as he dramatically falls to his knees. “Look who’s back home!”

“Mommy!” Emmy shrieks, jumping up and down like she can’t even handle it, eyes going wide and ecstatic as she spots Missandei sitting on the couch. 

“Okay, slow your roll,” Grey says, immediately reaching for her in case she decides to totally book it over to the couch. “I meant you guys are home, not Mom. Though technically, yeah, Mom is also home. I see now I said that way ambiguously.” Emmy is barely listening to him — so he legit squeezes her shoulders and shakes her, so that she will look at him.

This works, and when he gets her full attention, he says, “Remember. You need to be calm. And come here. Give me a kiss.” 

They all watch as he fully grabs onto her and pretends to bite her. They all watch as she lets out another shriek — this time of delighted laughter. They watch as she continues to laugh uncontrollably, as he hugs her and kind of shakes her all over the place, planting a bunch of kisses over her face and telling her that he has missed her sooo much. 

It’s honestly the most unexpected and bewildering thing Missandei has seen from this guy, thus far. He usually showed up to her hospital room with the kids with a lot of gravity and austerity. Usually he talks to the kids in front of her like they are prompts for a bunch of context-giving that he constantly has to relay to her. 

“Where’s Momo?” Maddy asks, as she hesitantly steps out in front of her grandfather. 

“Oh, she’s upstairs in her kennel, baby,” Grey says, as he also makes a gentler, more considered reach for his oldest. He gives her a quick and bracing hug, as he still keeps a hand on Emmy’s head, because he’s still pretty sure that Emmy’s gonna try and escape his grasp at any second to run over to Missandei and bombard her. “I’ll bring her down in a bit. She’s been amped lately.”

“Well that’s because she’s in a cage all day, Dad.”

“Not all day,” Grey says. “Just sometimes.”

“She doesn’t like being in a cage, Dad.”

“Yeah, you and I actually agree on this,” Grey says, as he lightly pats his kid on the cheek and stands back up. “But she can be cool with it, for this special circumstance, yeah?”

“Yeah, I guess, Dad. If you think that’s the only solution.”

“Oh my God, I fucking love it when I hear you two have these kinds of conversations,” his dad says, cutting in and doing a pretty good job of lightening the tension, as is often his role in these situations. He looks down fondly at Maddy. “It makes me feel like all of the judgmental grief I got from your dad when he was a kid was worth it. Karma, Nudho.”

“But I’m not judgmental like my dad is, Grandpa.” 

“Baby girl, I believe that you believe that.”

“Pops!” Grey says, suddenly laughing, also suddenly shooting his hand out to lightly smack his dad in the arm. He visually checks in on Maddy, and sees that she is cracking a smile over this. 

“I’m joking! She knows I’m joking!” 

Missandei can totally see that Grey did his best to prepare the kids to see her at home again, but she also understands that Emmy is so little and is just straightforwardly excited for her mom to be back at home and for life to go back to normal again. Missy silently mouths to Grey that it’s okay, as Emmy carelessly climbs onto the couch. 

And then just plants her butt right in Missandei’s lap.

“Okay, baby,” Grey says, interrupting this when he does catch Missandei wincing. He picks up Emmy and then pulls her off of Missandei. He carefully places her down on the couch cushion. “You can’t sit on Mommy right now because it hurts her body when you sit on her. But you can sit next to her, okay? You get that? That okay with both you guys?”  

“Yeah,” Missandei says quickly, as she touches this child’s soft face — and then pats her on the back. “That’s cool with me. Is that cool with you?”

Emmy flips her face up, and then gives Missandei a really looney-scary-looking grin. She says, “Yesss.”

“Oh, whoa,” Missy says, a little caught off guard. “Okay.”

To Missandei’s surprise — and to everyone else’s relief — Emmy promptly falls asleep once she comfortably is ensconced in the familiar warmth and feel of her mother’s body. Emmy kind of smashes her face to the side of Missandei’s boob and just starts quietly snoring with her mouth open. 

Missandei initially has an awkward time figuring out just where to put her arm so that she doesn’t disturb Emmy, as Emmy snores against her — and she can hear Grey’s dad laughing softly over this as he watches her — before she decides that it’s probably fine for her to just drape her arm over this kid’s back.

Because of this — and also because her mobility is seriously limited — she is stuck on the couch for the time being, as Grey’s dad drifts to the fridge, opens it, and visually looks around for something to drink, as he continues telling them about the waterpark and how he’s now too old to be at a waterpark full of screaming kids with ADHD and young-ass parents that just don’t give a shit, who are still children themselves. 

“Okay, so we understand how you felt about it, Dad,” Grey says. “But how did your grandkids like the waterpark?”

That makes his dad laugh loudly — an echoing cackle in this house with few soft surfaces — as he pulls out a coconut water and tries to offer it around to Grey’s mom and Missandei’s mom — getting a few nos before he slams the fridge closed again. 

Grey’s dad slyly says, “I don’t know. Maddy, how did you enjoy the waterpark?”

“It was awesome, Grandpa,” Maddy says faithfully, smiling shyly because she feels her mom looking at her. “We had a blast with you and Grandma.”

“Damn right you did.” 

“It was funny when you almost got into a fight with that kid — and that kid’s mom.”

“Do I even want to know?” Grey says dully, having quietly drifted over to stand right next to Maddy, who is swirling herself back and forth on one of the kitchen stools, to dispel some of the nervous energy she is feeling in herself, over this strangeness of her injured mom being back at home. He presses another kiss to the top of her head as he gives her another hug from behind.

Maddy looks up at her dad’s face after he pulls away. She says, “The kid and his friends tried to cut in line in front of us.” 

“Ah,” Grey says. “So I know the rest of this story already.” He’s shaking his head ruefully. “That shit used to be so embarrassing for me, so I’m glad you think your grandpa is funny, at the very least.” He touches her face. He says, “Are you hungry? Do you want a snack before bed?” 

“No.” She’s shaking her head. “Thanks though.”

“Did you hop in a real shower, afterward?”

“Not yet.” 

“Ah, okay. Do you want to say goodnight to everyone — and then go do that?”

“Okay. Can I shower with Momo?”

Grey grimaces. “Ah, it’s late. She’s not gonna be dry in time and will get the bed all wet. So maybe not today, Mad. Maybe next time.” 

Missandei feels pretty anxious as she watches Maddy slide off of her stool to go around the room doling out hugs and goodbyes to everyone. She already has picked up on the fact that Maddy has a good relationship with Grey’s parents and a good rapport — and since she doesn’t know Grey’s parents at all, it doesn’t feel or look that odd to her, to see Maddy wish them a good night. 

It is odd and striking to Missandei though, to see Maddy wish Missandei’s mom — her other grandmother — goodnight, because her mother is someone that Missandei does know very well. Her mother is someone that she has direct experience with, in how she approaches child-rearing and children.

Missandei watches as her mother embraces and holds the girl with this affection, this immense warmth, this vast open-heartedness, and this great familiarity. She watches as her mother tenderly runs her hand across Maddy’s hair and teasingly says to her, “We’re overdue for a tea time, yes?”

Missandei watches as Maddy lightly laughs in response to that — because it must be an inside joke of some sort. She watches as Maddy says, “Yes. I’ll ask Dad to text you, Grammy.”

Then Missandei is hyper aware that she is not currently what this girl needs to her to be, when her daughter hesitantly stares at her and pauses.

“Give your mom a hug,” Missandei’s mom prompts. “She’s been missing you all day and waiting for a hug.” 

Because Missandei’s facing him, because he is standing a ways off in the kitchen, behind Maddy, Missandei can clearly see Grey cast this look of tension and disbelief — to his own mother. Missy can see him about to spring into action and say something to her mother, because he sees that Maddy is really hesitating now. 

Missandei sees Grey’s mom automatically reaching out to grab his forearm, to try and stop him from reacting. 

In this space, Missandei does her very best to smile at this girl — hopefully in a way that looks and feels like how it used to. She lifts up her arms. She says, “Yeah, give me a hug goodnight.” 

She accidentally-deliberately makes direct eye contact with him, as their daughter stoops down a little bit and carefully wraps her arms around Missandei’s shoulders, in a very loose hug. Missandei sees Grey give her a short nod. She also sees him mouth out ‘thank you,’ past his frown.

As he continues unpacking and pulling some of the contents of the girls’ backpacks out on the floor of the living room, so that he can separate the wet clothes from the damp toiletries and wet-ass books — what the fuck — Grey waits until they can all hear the shower running upstairs, before he straight up says to Missandei’s mom, “Mira, you can’t do that again. You can’t push her to do things she’s uncomfortable with.” 

“I did no such thing,” Missandei’s mom says immediately. “I just told her that her mother is happy to see her — because she needed to hear that. And it’s true! What’s the big deal?” 

Grey’s dad softly clears his throat at that — and he wisely drifts himself out of the room, so that they can have a little privacy, so that he doesn’t have to directly be watching this awkward shit, so that he doesn’t accidentally make this shit worse by supporting his son too vocally.  

“Yo,” Grey says, peeling a swimsuit off of a book cover. “You don’t need to fully understand or agree with my logic — if you don’t want to or can’t. You just need to please go along with what I’m asking from you.”

Here, Missandei is doing quite the double-take. She cannot believe what she is even witnessing. She has a zonked out child plastered to her side, and she’s looking around the room — at the one other person besides Grey and her mother. That other person in the room is his mother, standing at the kitchen island still, who looks shockingly blase and nonplussed about this crazy shit that is happening right in front of their faces.

“Nudho, I think you’re overreacting,” Missandei mom says to him.

“Uh, probably,” Grey says, as he turns the backpack he’s been manipulating inside out, so that it can dry. “I know she probably was fine about it and happy even — in this instance. But you can’t do that again.” He pauses, appearing to think about his next words. And then he just comes out and says, “Just let me have this, Mira. Just let me have this one thing, goddamn.”  

And in response to this, Missandei is expecting her mom to flip out. 

But instead, her mom is sighing. 

Instead, her mom is like, “Okay. I apologize. I honestly didn’t mean to go against what you had asked of me.” 

“I know,” he says frankly. “I appreciate you saying that.” 

Chapter Text

Missandei doesn’t really know how to internalize it quite yet, as she watches the grandparents gather up their coats and jackets to leave. They all stop off where she is on the couch to say goodnight to her — and to lightly touch Emmy as she continues sleeping. Grey’s dad tells her that she looks comfy, and it takes her a little bit to realize that he’s joking — because she actually isn’t comfortable at all and he has picked up on that. 

She has to shift a little bit to free a hand — in order to grasp onto his. She thinks it’s so deliberate that he’s not trying to hug her. And she’s kind of grateful that he is apparently a perceptive and observant guy.

Grey’s mom doesn’t touch Missandei at all. Grey’s mom just touches Emmy’s head briefly, as she tells Missandei that it is good to see her, and that she hopes Missandei has a good rest of the night. 

Obviously, her own mother is all over her before she leaves. Her mom gives her plenty of last chances to change her mind, to express that she actually wants her mom to continue staying with her and caring for her, forever. 

Missy doesn’t take the bait. But she does give her mom a kiss on the cheek and makes promises to call in the morning and give this woman all the minute-to-minute updates that she wants. 

Missy is still trapped on the couch with Emmy, as Grey walks the grandparents to the front door. She has an unobstructed view of them saying goodbye to each other, because this house has no real walls. She sees his parents embracing him. She actually sees his dad kiss him on his cheek and she observes to herself that dads kissing their sons isn’t something she was anticipating from this family. 

And she also sees her mom holding onto him. She catches her mom saying, “Love you,” to him, as she lets him go, as he holds open the door for her. “You can also call me to talk with me for hours, if you want,” she says, teasingly, as she reaches up to fondly pat his cheek again.

“Love you, too,” he says back to her. “I really won’t be doing that.”  

Missy doesn’t really get much of a chance to have another fraught and awkward conversation with him, because he becomes really mission-oriented after the grandparents leave. 

It’s because it is getting late, and he is behind getting his kids to bed. If they don’t sleep enough, it’s a little hard on all of them — just moodiness and crankiness. The girls tend to bicker more with each other, when they are sleep-deprived.

“Sorry I left you with her,” Grey says, as bends down and plucks Emmy’s unconscious body from Missandei’s side. He notices that she’s damp from Emmy’s sweat. “She’s a hot sleeper, huh?”

“She’s really cute,” Missandei says, as she watches him adjust Emmy in his arms, with this practiced ease from doing it maybe hundreds, if not thousands of times. 

“I’m gonna drop her off upstairs, and then I’ll come back to help you get ready for bed. Is that okay?”

“You’re always asking if things are okay,” Missandei observes. “Is that something you came up with — or did I come up with that?”

“Um, honestly I don’t remember,” he says, frowning. “We’ve been talking like that with each other for forever it seems.” 

She tries to get herself as far as possible with her walker and her puny arms, mostly to prove something to herself — but also maybe as a paranoid safeguard against soliciting too great of a favor from him. She doesn’t want to have to weakly try and punch him in the face with her puny arms — for telling her that she owes him a short blowjob because he helped get her from standing position to sitting position.

One of her many current issues is that she cannot do anything akin to a sit-up to save her life. She also can’t do anything akin to a squat to save her life. Any movement requiring her to curl and hold her torso or hold any weight on bent knees is liable to send her tumbling to the floor.

Another one of her current issues is that this house she is living in is minimalist as hell, devoid of the traditional ledges, rails, and banisters that might be more common in a more mass produced home. The toilet is not even a regular toilet with a tank that she can hold onto, to help herself sit down and stand up . It is a fancy tankless toilet that is attached to the wall.

She’s standing in front of the toilet, turned around so she’s facing the opposite wall, and patiently waiting when he comes back downstairs and into her room. He finds where she is quickly and figures out what she needs.

Her face feels a little bit hot — because it’s embarrassing to need help to use the toilet. It’s especially embarrassing to need help from someone she doesn’t know that well. 

She expects maybe a clarifying question or two, but he’s actually largely silent, as he firmly but carefully grabs onto her bicep and presses his other hand into the middle of her back, over her spine. 

He quietly says, “Ready?”

And she bends her knees, letting herself fall back a little.

She immediately can feel that he’s stronger and steadier than her mom. It is shockingly easy and seamless for her to sit down on the toilet with his help. 

After that, he lets her go and rises back to his full height. He asks, “You good?”

She says, “Yeah.”

He says, “Cool. I’m going to take the dog out for a pee. I’ll be back in a few. I’ll knock before I enter. Is that enough time? Is it number one or number two?”

She blinks in surprise at that. And then the words kind of tumble out of her mouth. She says, “It’s a number one.” 

“Okay,” he says.

After she finishes peeing, pulls her underwear and pants back up, she has to wait for him a little bit before he returns to the bathroom to help her stand back up. With the aid of her walker, she shuffles over to the sink and starts to wash her hands. As she’s doing that, she watches out of the corner of her eye as he pulls out a wet wipe from her toiletries caddy and starts wiping down her walker, especially where she had touched it with her pee hand.

She feels like she needs to rush so that she can get out of his way, so she brushes her teeth fast, opts not to wash her face, and ignores her hair for the most part, besides tying it up. All the things she used to care about — her superficiality about her looks — have not been relevant to her since she woke up. She generally is appalled by the way she looks. She would rather not stare that much at herself in the mirror, if she can help it. She doesn’t need to care about that patch of hair on her head that is much shorter than the rest, because she was shaved for surgery. 

He slowly follows and watches as she shuffles her way back into her bedroom. He wordlessly waits patiently as she gingerly does a full revolution with her walker, turning in place so that she is in position to sit down on the bed.

Her mom’s impatience with her has been aggravating her and bumming her out over the last couple of days. Missandei mom’s energy during these preparations is to try to help Missandei physically along, by inserting herself in these efforts and trying to act as a human cane.

He just waits and watches as she takes fucking forever turning around. 

She feels pretty pathetic and kind of humiliated over this shit, but she pretends that she’s not affected by it at all, as he helps her down into a sitting position. 

He quietly asks her if she wants to lie down already.

And because she feels pressure to not loiter, she tells him she is ready to lie down.

They make pretty quick work of that. And she is shimmying her blankets and sheets around as he grabs her phone from the corner of the side table next to the bed — her heart clenches in anxiety because she momentarily wonders if the new phones these days just freeze on the last thing they were on at or what — and he breezily bypasses her internal freakout. He plugs in her phone, so that it’s charging. It momentarily lights up. She peeks at it and all she sees is her locked screen. Which is made up of a photo of him and the girls — a closeup of their smiling faces.   

He quickly leaves the room and comes back with a glass of water that he puts on her table. He tells her it’s there, just in case. He tells her that she can text him or call him, if she happens to need anything in the middle of the night. 

Grey is finding that he definitely needs to start his usual bedtime routine a lot earlier from here on out, because the addition of Missandei’s stuff puts him pretty behind. He can hear Maddy’s restlessness from downstairs — he can hear her lightly and occasionally calling out to him. And he occasionally lets himself be completely annoying and disruptive because he’s so tired. He risks waking up Emmy — because Maddy is yelling anyway. He carefully shouts back up at her. He tells her he’s almost done.

He moves all the stuff in the washing machine to the dryer. He feels he needs to do this right now, otherwise their clothes are going to smell like mildew come morning, and he will have to start laundry all over again. It’s probably worth it to just spend the extra few minutes doing it right now. Probably. 

He sighs when he finally reaches his bedroom and finds his girls and Momo lying in bed. He sees that Emmy is now wide awake — and he understands this is probably why Maddy had been yelling for him.

“Oh my God, you need to be asleep,” he says to them, as he walks through the bathroom and into the closet to quickly change.

“Daddy, I’m thirsty! Can I have some water?”

She’s lying. He knows she isn’t thirsty at all. She just wants to freaking send him on a fool’s errand so that he won’t force her to go back to sleep right away.

He starts filling a cup at the bathroom sink.

“Real water, Daddy,” she prompts.

She means filtered water from the fridge. She likes to pretend she can actually tell the difference. 

The one time he called her on her bluff backfired in his face. He once set up a test for Emmy and made her do a blind taste test of unfiltered water versus filtered water — and she had guessed right. And Missandei had been pretty smug and obnoxious about that. She really didn’t let him live that one down for a long while. 

He doesn’t even have the emotional energy to fight her on this right now. So he says, “Okay, fine. I’ll get you real water. And then you have to go back to sleep.”  

He has another terrible sleep, but it doesn’t matter to him because maybe this will be the first day he’s not on the verge of an anxiety attack. 

He gets up with the sun, letting the kids sleep in for a little bit longer. He wants to try to fucking pack their lunch with the tons of food that Missandei’s mom packed the cabinets with. He wants to try and be better than a C-minus parent. 

He wakes up super early because he’s not really even sleeping. He wakes up early because he hasn’t benchmarked Missandei’s schedule at home yet like he has with their girls and dog. He has no idea when Missandei consistently goes to sleep, when she consistently wakes up, when she generally needs his help with bathroom stuff. He has no idea if she has been in agony all night because she needed to pee and had no easy way to get herself to the bathroom without tripping herself in an unfamiliar house and busting her broken bones right open again on the concrete floors.  

He also gets up early so that he can actually take Momo on an actual walk. For the first time in days. 

He’s the only one outside right now, because the sun is not even up yet.

He tiredly wanders the manicured streets of his neighborhood like a zombie, with his dog going apeshit because she’s so excited to taste the sweet nectar of fresh air again.

When he arrives back at home, he unclips her leash and silently has a conversation with her. He tells her to please fucking chill out and not try to jump on Missandei when she sees Missandei again. He pours some of her kibble into a bowl. He squats down on his haunches and tries to spend some quality time with her in these sparse minutes, because Momo is seriously getting the most shaftest in his constant overextension of himself.

And then he hears a sudden loud thump, like the body of one of his kids hitting the floor, right above his head. 

After relief hits him because he learns that neither of his kids are hurt, Grey suddenly shifts from being worried to being way over it. He has to work really hard not to immediately swear at his kids and ask them what the fuck is even going on, as they both start screaming their respective sides of the story at him, both trying to win at this ongoing argument they have apparently been having. 

He just knows that he doesn’t even fucking care. And there is a house plant in the middle of the hallway, pot shattered and broken, wet dirt just fucking everywhere. 

“Daddy, she pushed me!”

“Dad, I did not! She was in my way!”

“I was not! I was minding my own business, dude!”

“Stop freaking acting all innocent and trying to get me in trouble all the time, Emmy!”

“I’m not!”

“Dad, she’s lying!”

“I’m not lying, Daddy!”

“Jesus fuck!” Grey says loudly, staring at the mess, feeling himself be bad at parenting. “It doesn’t matter!” he shouts. “It doesn’t matter!” He’s trying to shout it at the dead plant and not directly at his children, so that they at least know that he is not screaming at them specifically . “It doesn’t matter how this happened! Can we just move on from it! Fuck!”

Emmy definitely starts to bawl — in response to his reaction. 

Grey honestly doesn’t even have the bandwidth nor the inclination to comfort his kid right now — he doesn’t have the time to sit her down and talk to her about what just happened and how he made her feel, because he needs to get her the fuck to school. And he still needs to make sure Missandei didn’t piss herself because he is taking forever to go check in on her. 

“Mad, can you get your shit and your sister’s shit together for me? I need to check on your mom.”

“Dad, I really wasn’t the one who broke it,” she presses.

“Madilah, now is really not the time to keep arguing this point,” he says, continuing to ignore Emmy’s blood-curdling wails. “I heard you. I don’t care that it broke. Can you please help me with your sister?”

“I care that you understand that I didn’t break it.”

“Maddy,” Grey says, finding himself raising his voice again. “I get your fixation on this, I really do. We can talk about this later. Can you put a pin in it now? And help me get your sister dressed and ready for school? I don’t want you to miss your bus.” 

Missandei is awake and greets him awkwardly, because obviously she heard him screaming at the kids and being bad at parenting. 

And he does not even give a shit. At a previous point in life, she was well aware that he is sometimes pretty bad at parenting. She might as well fucking rediscover this fact about him, again, on her first morning alone with all of them.

“I’m sorry,” she says to him, as he waits for her to slowly make her way to the toilet with her walker. She means she’s sorry that she’s the slowest person on earth. She was apprehensive about meeting him at the toilet, because she didn’t know when he was going to come down and if she was going to be stranded in the bathroom, get tired, and then fall right over. 

She awkwardly adds, “You seem like you have your hands full.” 

“Yeah, they are kind of full,” he says darkly, as he waits for her to slowly spin around so that he can help her sit. 

Shit gets kind of worse for him after that. Maddy is pissed at him. And Emmy’s new thing, besides screaming bloody murder, is physically fighting him because she refuses to put on clothes. She’s screaming at him that she doesn’t want to go school. She tells him she’s sick, and she wants to spend the day with him and Mommy.

He knows that he is fucking this way up, and this is not at all how Missandei would want for him to deal with this — as he wrestles a random shirt over Emmy’s head and holds her fists down with his hands. He might not actually send her to school in this state, but whatever he does with her, she probably needs to be fucking dressed for it.

She’s crying so much that he’s pretty sure she’s going to make herself barf again, and he wants to be around to catch her barf, so he picks her up and carries her loud-as-shit thrashing body downstairs, so that he can at least get Maddy to school.

Maddy is acting all betrayed. She is saying, “You’re just going to let her stay home from school because she throws another tantrum?”

“Yeah!” Grey says, with false enthusiasm. “That’s exactly what I’m gonna do! Sorry!”

“I never do this!” Maddy shouts at him, also starting to angrily cry now. “I do everything right! And all she does is cry — and you give her everything she wants!” 

He’s not really not sure what he’s supposed to do here — besides strangle the shit out of his youngest child so she will finally shut the fuck up and be super sarcastic and caustic with his oldest child so that she will know that he’s currently older and smarter and wittier than she is.  

He stops himself from doing either of those things. And instead, he tries to give Maddy a peace offering by telling her that she can stay home from school, too, if she wants. But she throws that shit in his face pretty brutally and sarcastically tells him that school is apparently super important to him, so she will go to school.

He tries to give her money for food because they don’t have time for her to eat something at home, but she’s such a crafty, brilliant little thing. Because she refuses his money, just to make it really hurt for him. 

She is pissed as hell, as she leaves the house and walks herself to the bus stop alone.  

And when Emmy eventually vomits right on him, just like he knew she was gonna, he almost just about cries over it too.

Instead, he leaves the vomit on the kitchen counter — and the floor — and he gives her what she wants. He takes both of their fucking shirts off. And he just puts her on the floor in the living room to keep crying it out — as he goes back to the guest room to finally fucking help get Missandei off the toilet. 

“Yeah, sorry I smell like barf,” he says stormily, as he uncomfortably ignores the splash of vomit that is smeared on the front of his pants and keeps that part of his body far away from Missandei, as he leans over to help her stand back up. “Sorry this morning is a total shitshow. It’s not always like this.”

“Are you okay?” she asks him. “Is there something I can do to help?”

This innocuous question almost makes him fucking lose his shit so hard. It almost makes him totally fucking lose his mind. Because it is insane to him that the mother of his children is asking him what fun little task he can assign her to do, to help him with their fucking insane-ass child who ejected her dinner all over him — after she fucking terrorized her sister and created a fucking mess all over the floor upstairs.

It is crazy to him that this is his fucking life. 

“Nah, it’s all good,” he says to her. “I’m good.”

Because her screaming is disruptive, he has to go outside to call the school and tell them that Emmy isn’t going to be there today. After he finishes that call, he goes back inside and walks into the laundry room, where he fully strips down and throws his barf pants in with his and Emmy’s barf shirts, into the washing machine. He quickly pulls some clothes on the dryer and dresses himself with whatever he can find — his college sweatshirt, a pair of running shorts — and then he goes back into the living room to sit on one of the chairs at the kitchen table. He despondently watches and waits for her to slowly tire herself out. 

Missandei was generally more prone to empathizing and engaging in these moments. In contrast, he has an awful tendency of shutting down internally and going a little cold. Missandei used to tell him that he wasn’t awful, by any stretch. He always used to argue the point and tell her that sometimes he is awful. Sometimes, he just doesn’t think he is normal. 

It takes maybe another twenty minutes, until Emmy is finally silent. 

This is when he gets out of the chair and crawls the short distance over to her. He reaches out to her, slowly, just in case she is going to reignite. He touches her shoulder, and she is awake, her eyes are red, but she is fairly non-responsive to that.

So he fully picks her up and drags her into his lap. 

She immediately curls into him and buries her face in his chest. She releases another shuddering whimper, as she grabs onto him and holds on tightly. She burrows her snotty face into his armpit.

This shit really gets to him, though. When she’s sweet and quiet and vulnerable like this, he just wants to die over it all the time because it just hurts his heart so badly. 

He sits like that with her for a while — holding her closely — until she eventually starts dozing off.

He carries her to the couch after that. He wipes her face a little bit with a napkin, and then he throws a heavy blanket over her shirtless body and prays to the fucking gods that she continues sleeping. So that he can actually do some shit. 

“I can sit with her,” Missandei says softly, as she slowly edges her way out from the guest room. It took her forever to get up into standing position by herself, but she felt like it was worth the extended effort and pain — to avoid having to add more stuff on Grey’s current plate. “So that you can get cleaned up . . . and stuff.”

He doesn’t let himself shower before he cleans up all of the dirt and all of the barf — because it just makes sense to. He makes quick work of both things, as Missandei silently watches him go back with a bucket of soapy water and a caddy of cleaning materials. 

He actually kind of wants to tell her that their kid is not really a fucking psycho, because he thinks that their kid being a psycho might impair Missandei’s ability to bond with the kid again. But Grey refrains from talking too much about it. He doesn’t want to tell Missandei that their kid started being a bit psycho in the past few months. It could be normal developmental stuff. Or it could be because her mom almost died.

After he finishes cleaning and goes back downstairs to check on Missandei, he is mildly surprised to see that Emmy has woken up again, and she’s happily lying on the couch chatting in quiet tones, with Missandei.

He sincerely hopes this isn’t the start of a series of epic disappointments for his kid.

Chapter Text

He doesn’t even know who he has left anymore, that he can talk to about his children, with an insane amount of specificity. That person used to be her, but now that person is not currently her.

He wants to talk to someone about how he is probably definitely treating Maddy too much like she’s an adult, and how that is probably going to fuck up her head and make her feel like she has to always be inordinately responsible for people. It’s probably going to make her develop perfectionist tendencies, and it’s going to hit her hard when she’s in her twenties and realizes that she can’t out-manage all of the tragedies and happiness of life. And then she’s going to flip out and probably drop out of school and fuck up her entire future because sometimes being too smart is a burden that other people just don’t get. 

He really feels like he needs Missandei to figuratively slap him in the face with her words and tell him that he’s catastrophizing again — and that they are actually doing a kickass job at parenting these two individuals, and that neither of their girls are going to grow up to be reality TV stars on a dating show. At worst, maybe only TV reality contestants on some show that requires them to display some sort of talent. 

Instead of figuratively slapping him in the face with her words, Missy actually awkwardly tries to physically move out of the way so that Grey can easily grab their kid, but Emmy is thoroughly snuggled up with her arms wrapped all around Missy’s right thigh. 

There’s a light squeak as Grey uses his strength to pull Emmy off of Missandei, which Emmy whines and protests over, holding her arms out toward Missandei and saying, “But I was telling Mommy a story.”

“You need a bath, dude,” Grey says to her. “We both need a bath. You can hang out with her after you get clean.” 

It’s sort of a bribe. In the sense that this kid freaking loves hanging out with him in the shower. 

“Oh! Okay,” she says, as she immediately sits up in his arms and clasps onto him. 

To Missandei, he looks down and says, “Are you cool hanging here for like, twenty minutes?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, thank you. We’ll try to be fast.”

“No, please take your time.”

“Cool. Thanks.”

Missandei watches and kind of waves at Emmy, as Emmy drops her head and rests her cheek on her dad’s shoulder as he turns around and starts carrying her up the stairs.

Grey decides to also bring Momo into the shower, to shoot for the stars and kill three birds with one stone. He gets them all naked and shuts the glass door to the walk-in and blasts both shower heads — a splurge that Missandei pushed for, that ended up being really handy and smart. Momo’s presence is both a distraction for Emmy and also a source of entertainment. She keeps dropping herself to the floor of the shower to brush fur out of Momo’s eyes and to mimic something she’s heard her mom say a lot. She’s cooing and kind of sounds like a 1950s starlet, as she says, “Why Momo! You are so keee-yoot! Aw! There there. Let me get that out of your eyes so we can see your booty-full face.”   

He’s largely trying to be efficient about this, he starts vigorously lathering a moisturizing shampoo in his hands before he starts clawing it into Emmy’s hair, yanking her around a little bit because she’s so squirmy. He’s not altogether proud of himself but he is efficient, as he tells her, “Stand over Mo so you can drip soap onto her.” 

He doesn’t rinse her right away, because she likes to play with bubbles in her hair for a bit, so he uses the time to haphazardly run a little bit more of the people shampoo into Momo’s fur, because he forgot to pull her dog shampoo from the vanity and he doesn’t have it within himself to get out of the shower to grab it.

“Okay, get over here,” Grey says to Emmy, as he bends down to quickly scoop up the dog. He gives Momo to Emmy, to have Emmy hold Momo propped over her shoulder, like how he sometimes holds Emmy. He says, “Be careful and don’t drop her.” Then he directs Emmy to go stand underneath the spray.

As the showerheads pelts his kid and his dog with warm water, he quickly runs bar soap all over himself, including his head. This is something Missandei used to dislike — him being so utilitarian and efficient that he wouldn’t always use the high maintenance products she bought for him, Rather, he kept using bar soap for everything. She used to get on his butt for not moisturizing. He used to tell her that he didn’t get the point. He feels moist enough. She used to decry his naturally moist skin and tell him that he was going to get old and it was all going to catch up to him one day. She had to buy him nice bar soap made out of goat milk to make herself feel better about it. 

The bar is down to a stubby little nub now. He will probably replace it soon with a cheap generic grocery store brand since she’s not gonna stop him this time around. 

When all of the soap is off of all of them, he shuts the water off and prioritizes toweling down Momo first, because she’s about to lose her shit with the zoomies once he lets her out. He then roughly dries off Emmy as she giggles and spins around in place like she’s playing a game with him. He picks her up after and gives her a firm kiss on her cheek as he wraps the wet towel around his waist and then carries her and Momo nakedly to her bedroom for the sake of efficiency. It’s easier if they have their fight about what she’s going to wear, amid her clothes.

Through the massive windows, Missandei watches as Grey, dressed from head to toe in gray sweats, stands watch barefoot in the backyard. Emmy and the dog are frantically running all around the grass, chasing each other in the sunshine. Emmy is pantless and kind of wearing an NWA adult-sized shirt as a dress, booking it back and forth across the lawn with the dog.

Missy honestly wonders if he even realizes how funny they both look. 

As she watches them, Missandei has decided that she was kind of right in her initial assessment of this entire situation. Her family really did leave her to hang out by herself in the dysfunction of a man she doesn’t know — and their two children. 

The one thing that she got kinda wrong about is that, thus far, his dysfunction generally feels non-threatening and benign.

She also didn’t expect to feel so bad for him, either. She didn’t expect for it to be so easy for her to feel empathy for him.

“Eat this,” Grey says, as he drops a small plate down onto the coffee table right in front of them — and it makes Missandei pause in confusion for a second — before she sees him put down a larger plate of the same food with a glass of water. 

She belatedly realizes that he was talking to their kid.

“What is this?” Emmy asks, as she starts dragging her spoon through the tofu bake that Missandei’s mom made.  

Grey looks ragged. He’s tired of this child challenging him on every fucking thing. He looks like his soul has been crushed, as he takes his own plate over to the living room, collapses into the armchair across from them, and starts digging into the food. He’s still preoccupied with his terrible morning and how he had left things with Maddy. He is still in the middle of feeling like utter shit, that his kid went to school hungry.

To Emmy, he says, “It’s food, baby.”

“What kind?”

“You don’t care,” he says. “But it’s called tofu. It’s made of soybeans.”

“What are soybeans?”

“They are plants.” 

“What kind of plants?”

“A legume.”

“What’s a leg-goom?”

“Uh, give me a second.” He’s dropped his fork down on his plate, temporarily abandoning it. He is miserably pulling out his phone to look this shit up, because he probably shouldn’t do what he wants — which is to blow off his kid in order to get some time to himself, in order to get a bite in. 

“I think it’s a bean, sweetie,” Missandei supplies, trying to redirect this conversation for Grey’s sake. “Do you like beans?”

“I don’t know, Mommy,” she says, still mashing up her food with her fork instead of eating it. “Do I like beans?”

“Why don’t you try it? And then tell me if you like it.”

“It looks weird,” Emmy says skeptically. “Can I have mac and cheese instead?”

“No, man,” Grey says. “We don’t have mac and cheese. We just have pounds and pounds of tofu and vegetables to eat.” 

He tells Emmy that she’s going to go upstairs and take a nap after lunch, at which point she starts to whine and skirt the edge of escalation again. She pouts and tells him that she wants to stay with her mommy, at which point, Grey — now more clear-headed and not as much a sleep-deprived festering sore — says, “Okay, you can stay with Mommy until I’m done cleaning up. But after I’m done, it’s nap time. Deal?”

“Daddy, can I nap with Mommy?”

“Em,” he says. “I know that you love Mommy and want to spend time with her. You can continue to do that — after you take a nap.”

“But I don’t want to take a nap!” she says, groaning and and dropping herself to the floor now, swishing her legs around like she’s swimming. “I already took a nap, Daddy! I’m not sleepy!”

Missandei is staring at their kid like she doesn’t even know what she’s supposed to be doing in this situation — and that’s because she has no freaking clue what she should be doing or how they typically parent their children together. She just knows that the last time she was in charge of watching Emmy while she napped — just scant hours ago — Emmy woke up right away and started chatting with her. Missy kind of feels like it’s her fault this kid didn’t get a solid nap in already. 

So she’s opting to say nothing and do nothing. She has decided to just let him handle it and not get in his way. 

On his end, typically Grey’s inclination is to push his kids into doing what he’s wanting them to do, in the manner he wants them to do things. He honestly believes that so much sloppy leniency is going to let his kids know that it’s okay not to even give a fuck, that it’s okay to miss school and prioritize fun over important tasks and responsibilities, that it’s okay to be a hot mess.

Whenever he catches himself thinking that Maddy certainly wasn’t this difficult when she was five, he forces himself to remember that Maddy’s mom also had her memories and was co-parenting with him when Maddy was five. He forces himself to remember that he was a complete wreck in the early days of Missandei’s hospitalization and wasn’t a reliable source of strength and calmness for his kids during that time. He forces himself to remember that his kids have waded through a significant chunk of their lives with that hospitalization, with the threat of almost losing their mom hanging over their heads.

So this is why he doesn’t try and make Emmy go take a nap in her room by herself. This is why he says, “I really want you to take a nap, babe. But if you really aren’t sleepy, then instead of taking a nap, we can all sit here and have a quiet and relaxing time — and we can’t talk for three songs on my phone, cool?”

Emmy situates herself in his lap, squirming around a little bit before she gets comfortable. And then she pops her head onto his chest — he slouches a lot on the couch so that it’s comfortable for her but not so much for him and his neck. He starts rubbing her back, and she seriously zonks out, pretty immediately, during the first instrumental that he plays from the nap playlist. 

“Oh my God,” Grey mutters to Missandei after about a minute, after he’s sure she’s passed out, as he continues to rub her back. “Thank, God.”

“I’m sorry I can’t help you,” Missandei says softly, and she means physically — because at the moment, she is attributing her inability to help him to her limited mobility.

“Sure,” he says, because it’s all he’s currently capable of saying about this. “I know. I get it.”

Grey is coming to the realization that his four-month nightmare is actually not done. It’s probably going to turn into at least a five-month nightmare of fights with his children and his general continuing failure at being a competent parent. Or a six-month nightmare. Or a year-long nightmare. Or for the fucking rest of his life, whatever. 

Underneath Emmy, he’s pretty trapped for her entire nap. He can’t do shit about cleaning the house, brushing the dog’s hair, or trying to sneak in a little bit of work. 

He is also kind of bewildered by Missandei’s general lack of initiative and interest in their kids. He honestly doesn’t remember her ever being like this with the kids — not even when they were both new at this parenting thing. If anything, she used to be overly prepared and overly involved in the kids’ emotions and their issues. She used to have a hard time making Emmy go take a nap by herself because she used to love cuddle time with Emmy. He used to jokingly tell her that she was fostering codependency and she’s going to kick her own ass hard when the girls are still living in their basement when they are old. 

He’s still not sure how much patience he can exercise with her bewilderment, but he reminds himself that it’s literally the first fucking day. She’s became a mother again for the first time — and this is seriously her first fucking day. He reminds himself he needs to cut her some slack.

He’s fully expecting Maddy to still be pissed at him when she gets off the bus — and sure enough, he catches Maddy clamming up mid-conversation, right away, when she spots him. He also clearly sees her friend quickly whisper something into her ear, before her friend waves at him and shouts, “Hi, Mr. Torgo!”

“Hey, Cami,” he says, waving back.

As Maddy slowly walks up to him, as she does so with her hands clutching the straps of her backpack, she asks him, “Can I sleepover at Cami’s house next weekend?”

She is so fucking smart that he cannot even believe it sometimes. 

He doesn’t even care that she is astutely capitalizing on his wrecked guilt over their fight this morning. He just pats her on her shoulder and he says, “Yeah. Let me talk to Cami’s parents, and we can figure something out.” 

In many ways, he finds parenting to be prophetic. Sometimes he feels like he can read the future, because everything he does with his kids feels deeply familiar, like things that he has done already, with his own parents. So sometimes he wonders if Maddy will eventually take a dehumanizing and traumatic job that causes her to constantly be out of the country and far away — just to rebel against him and all the things that he is doing to her right now. 

Once again, he just wishes that he could talk to Missandei about this. That’s what he would usually do. He really, really wants to be able to talk to her about what went down, how he felt about it, what his regrets are. He really wants to hear her tell him that it’s totally fine and that nothing he said or did was actually that bad. He really needs for her to tell him that he’s still a good dad.

Maddy is completely polite and obedient when they arrive back home. She goes and puts her stuff away without him having to ask her to. She washes her hands before her after school snack, just automatically. She interacts with her sister normally, listening attentively and impassively as her little sister talks her ear off about her day and all the things she did with their mom. She knows that her sister is too young to hold onto things very deeply. She knows that her sister has already gotten over their fight from the morning — maybe even forgotten it — and has moved onto a whole host of other things.

Grey tries to ask her about her day, as she quietly takes bites from the plate of tofu that he puts in front of her, without asking him what it is at all. She answers his inquiries with short phrases and words.

She is definitely still really pissed at him.

Even Missandei has noticed the lingering tension. Missandei tries to dispel it by cheerfully saying, “Hey, do you wanna show me what you made in art class?”

“Not really,” Maddy says bluntly.

Both Grey and Missandei are taken aback by this. 

In that time, Maddy immediately catches herself — she heard her own tone. So she expertly tries to smooth it over. She says, “It’s not done. I left it at school. There’s nothing to show.”   

Maddy asks if she can be excused after she cleans the plate. She knows that her dad can’t get on her for anything else if she doesn’t do anything wrong. 

When he tells her that she can be excused, she takes her plate to her sink and carefully places it on the counter, next to the sink. Just like how he likes it because he doesn’t like when they throw dishes in the sink without stacking things in a certain way.

She goes upstairs after that, to hang out and maybe talk some more with Cami on the iPad for a bit, until dinner time. She takes a detour into her parents’ closet though, to release Momo, because her dad locked Momo in the cage all day again.

When Maddy unlatches the cage, the dog launches right on her and starts assaulting her with a bunch of smelly kisses, which makes her giggle and feel honestly happy for the first time all day. 

Maddy perhaps loves Momo in a more comprehensive and complex way than Emmy does. Momo was already around when Emmy was born, so in some ways, Emmy takes the dog’s presence for granted. But Maddy has these memories of teaming up with her dad and begging her mom for a pet. She has these memories of picking out Momo from a litter, waiting for agonizing weeks, and then making another special trip out to go pick up her new best friend.

So it is kind of heartbreaking to her that Momo gets locked up in a cage. She thinks it’s unfair, that they are not even considering what it is like for Momo to be alone and not understanding why she is suddenly alone all the time.

“Mad, can we talk?”

She looks up and is not surprised at all, to see her dad standing in the doorway, watching her.

Chapter Text

Missandei should really do some of her physical therapy exercises, but this dude seriously randomly leaves her alone with Emmy to go talk to Maddy — something that Missy feels a deep, completely freaked out sense of responsibility over. 

It is still completely insane to her, that this little girl is her daughter — that she is this little girl’s mom.

She just stares really hard, as Emmy quietly plays by herself on the floor, crawling around, babbling, and making up a story with . . . something that is honestly probably a dog toy. 

While Maddy looks exactly like Grey, Emmy looks a lot like Missandei did when she was Emmy’s age. Emmy maybe also has the same difficulties processing frustrated and angry emotions that she does. Maybe she cursed Emmy with her melodramatic genetics. 

Missy suspects that her daughter is playing with a dog toy because the plushie is totally shaped like a roasted chicken drumstick. 

“Whatcha doing? You wanna tell me about it?”

Grey tries to constantly assess and edit himself. He tries to always remember to take the best parts of his parents and to leave behind the parts of them that were kind of hurtful to him, when he was younger. He tries to excise all of his irrational fears and paranoia from his mind when he talks to his kids. 

He tells her that he wants for her to talk first, for instance, because he remembers that his dad always used to love to talk first — and talk the most. In a way, maybe that’s partly why Grey became so internal and so quiet in adulthood. He thinks that he would actually like for her daughters to be less like him and more like his brother. He wants them to be more open to other people and believe in other people’s goodness more than he does. 

It pretty much sucks, for him to listen to the various ways he has hurt her feelings and made her feel minimized. She’s crying, because she always cries when she has to express these things — and to him, it starkly actually reminds him of her mom. 

“I’m your good kid, Dad!” she boldly tells him. “I’m the best you’ve got!”

“You kinda are,” he concedes quietly. 

“I feel like I’m always getting punished for being the good kid!” she tells him. “You said that it’s important to be fair and to treat people fairly, but I feel like you don’t treat me and Emmy the same. So that’s unfair.”

“Okay,” he says. “I understand why you feel like getting more responsibility is punishment. But she’s five years old. And you’re three years older than she is.” 

“It’s not my fault I’m older than her , Dad,” Maddy says, leveling him with a look that she probably picked up from him. “It’s not my fault you and Mommy had me first.”

“Okay, you’re right,” he says. “It’s not equal. Look, I get you’re all hyped on the idea of fair because your mom and I taught you that — but I’m gonna be honest with you, life is actually way more complex. Sometimes stuff isn’t fair and it pisses us off, but we still try and do the right things and uphold our responsibilities and stuff. Like, you’re Emmy’s big sister, babe. You’re always gonna be her big sister and have more things to do than she does — like sometimes me and your mom need you to watch her. But also, sometimes you have way more freedom than she does — like you get to have sleepovers at Cami’s and she doesn’t get to have sleepovers at her friends yet. That’s not really fair to her, but that’s just how it is, right?”

She is awkward with kids. She has generally always been awkward with kids. Even with her own niece and nephews, she had a hard time playing with them when they were little, something that she tended to attribute to her brothers and sisters-in-laws’ parenting styles. Her brothers are more traditional. Mars fostered princess tendencies in Mara. Her brothers also did all of the boy stuff with their sons. She never knew what to say or do — besides resent her brother — whenever she heard Hassan tell her things like how girls can’t be pilots because they are girls. Missy used to attribute her poor ability to connect with her nephews because little boys can’t really stay still long enough for their aunts to lecture them ad nauseam about sexism.

“Okay, Mommy,” Emmy says, pushing a little plushie cat at her. “So you be the kid and I’m the teacher. Let’s go to school to learn. Get in the car please. Vrroom.”

“Why would the teacher drive the student to school?” Missandei asks, as she picks up the cat and puts it next to Emmy’s bone, pretending they are in the same car.

“Because,” Emmy says. And then she says, “Okay, we’re in school. Sit at your desk Mommy. You need to learn your letters. Say it with me: A, B, C.”

“A, B, C,” Missy says faithfully.

“Now you say, ‘Teacher, teacher. Can I have lunch time.’”

“It’s lunch already? But didn’t we just get to school?”

“No, Mommy,” Emmy corrects, shaking her head kind of impatiently. “You say, ‘Teacher, teacher. Can I have lunch time.’ You need to say it.”

Missy’s jaw kind of drops at that.

He isn’t sure if it’s smart for him to always be justifying himself and his decisions to his kid. That’s very much stuff that his dad does. And while it has its perks and while he really enjoys his dad’s blazing hot takes now, he does remember times in his childhood when he felt that way that she does, right now.

He tries to explain this to her. He tries to explain that a lot of it isn’t intentional or deliberate, that he certainly doesn’t want to punish her for being awesome. He tells her that he knows she’s sick of hearing this, because she reasonably wants to be her own person, but she is seriously a lot like him. He also knows what it feels like to feel burdened with too much responsibility — from a young age. He knows what it feels like to be obsessive with having things just so and just right so that everything will work out. He understands that it’s hard to know too much and to be too intelligent that it’s obnoxious to other people and alienating. He tells her that he honestly doesn’t want her to be so much like him, because there are downsides. Like how she currently feels is a downside.

“I don’t think it’s going to get much easier for you,” he tells her. “If you don’t teach yourself to be able to let more stuff go. You don’t need to keep count of all the times something is your sister’s fault, versus your fault. You will always win when you keep count like that, because you guys are different people with different priorities. And do you really think your sister wants to make you this upset?”

“Oh, she doesn’t care,” Maddy says, petting the dog. “She doesn’t hold grudges and she gets over it right away.”

“She gets over it right away,” Grey emphasizes, reaching down to also touch Momo. “She’s not keeping a tally. She’s totally oblivious to the fact that you are ‘winning.’ And dude — trust me — I know how you feel. Like, have you met your uncle?”  

She smiles a little bit, as she continues stroking Momo’s back, as she thinks about her uncle, as she generally nods out her agreement here. She says, “Okay, okay! I understand. I will try to be better at letting things go — but I can’t guarantee I won’t get mad at Emmy if she’s really asking for it.”

“Sure, I guess that’s honest,” Grey says, grinning, as he briefly touches his hand down on her head. “We can only hope that your sister doesn’t ask for it in the near future.”

Missy has discovered that her daughter is real bossy. And while on paper that seems like everything she’d ever want for a daughter, in practice, Emmy’s bossy tone of voice just gets to her. She feels herself getting uppity and kind of traditional about it — as a part of her interprets this as disrespect.

And Missy wants to swiftly put a stop to this real quick.

Missy stops herself from snapping at her child — like a psycho. 

She mostly just goes along with what Emmy is wanting from her. She’s just reciting the lines of dialogue that Emmy is wanting her to say like an empty vessel. She is just letting Emmy use her as a human toy, because she’s not at all sure what else she’s supposed to be doing that is nurturing and nourishing and not hurtful or potentially traumatic to this child. 

She dislikes every moment of this.

It’s painfully clear to Missy that she is very handicapped here because she doesn’t remember the years of expertise and experience she has acquired with her children at all. She doesn’t know what is and isn’t okay to do and say to children. She doesn’t really know how to talk to children. She doesn’t know how to entertain children. She doesn’t know how to teach them. She doesn’t know how to connect with them. She doesn’t know what they are needing from her at all — besides the better version of her back. 

“Now, Mommy, you have to hold Tiger’s hand as you cross the street because of cars.” Emmy reaches down, grabs Missy’s wrist, and tries to pick it up and down in a bit of a trot. “Hold tightly, Mommy. You don’t want to get lost.”

“Sure,” Missandei says, trotting alongside Emmy’s toy, pretending there’s a crosswalk.

“No,” Emmy corrects again, reaching down to make Missy’s hand bounce a little higher. “Tiger jumps.”

“Okay, but you never told me about this character trait until just now,” Missandei says, as she reluctantly starts jumping her stuffed toy higher. “Like this?”

“Very good, Mommy.” 

He ends up pulling double-duty and folding some laundry in the closet with Maddy as they talk. Their conversation has naturally shifted off of their fight in the morning and more toward just general updates. He knows that Maddy feels that his focus tends to revolve around her little sister more than it does her. He knows that Maddy feels ignored because she’s a ‘good kid.’ He knows that she so very obviously misses how it used to be, back before Missandei’s accident, back when they had the time and the luxury of having regular one-on-one time together. They’d make a whole half day out of it. He’d drive her around town — to grab a bite, to go shopping, to wander around a park, to throw or kick a ball around. 

Hiding out in the closet together with the dog is paltry compared to how it used to be, but it’s just about as much as he has capacity for — currently. And he hopes that she will forgive him for this shortcoming later. 

He catches her touching the hem of one of Missandei’s long dresses. He watches as she runs the material in between her thumb and forefinger.

It makes him ask, “How are you feeling, with your mom?”

“Okay, I’m sorry I was rude to her earlier,” Maddy says immediately. “I didn’t mean it. I can apologize to her later.”

“Only if that’s what you want to do,” Grey says lightly. “I don’t think you were particularly rude, for what it’s worth. She asked you to show her what you made, and you didn’t feel like it. It’s okay to not feel like it. But maybe next time say full sentences like, ‘Maybe another time, Mommy. I don’t feel like it right now.’ Instead of retorting.” He chuckles over that and reaches out to lightly pinch her cheek. “I like your retorts sometimes though.”

“I wish she would remember us,” Maddy says mildly, frowning, sinking so much to the floor that she’s basically lying with her belly down, with Momo. “I wish she was the same as before,” she mutters.

“Me too,” he says, as he matches two of her socks and rolls them together right-side-out. 

“When do you think she will start to remember?” 

He hesitates. “I honestly don’t know.”

Missy feels like she wants to punch herself right in the face, when Emmy seriously makes them play pretend the exact same scene again. Emmy gives her the cat, adopts that voice that Missandei finds frankly pretty annoying, and Emmy makes her the student again. 

It makes Missy wonder, for the umpteenth time, just what kind of mother she was — whether she was a lenient pushover like how she sometimes is in her adult life, whether she was passive aggressive with her children and bad at releasing out frustration productively so she’d always do it unproductively. She can conjure up so many of her personality flaws, and she wonders if she had tended to them and worked them all out before she made the insane decision to become a mother and inflict her passiveness and passive-aggression onto two other human beings for life. She wonders how she ever even gathered up the nerve and the guts and the interest to become a mom.

When Missy tries to resist playing school again — when she offers up another idea, like maybe they can pretend to go to the grocery store and buy things for dinner — Emmy shuts that down real hard and says that she doesn’t want to do that. 

Emmy says, “I want to do school,” with her face frowning and her brows furrowing.

“But what if Mommy doesn’t want to do school again? What if we do something we both want? That sounds fun, right?”

“I don’t want that,” Emmy says firmly, crossing her arms over her chest — clearly getting mad now. “I want to do school.”

“So you don’t want to compromise with me, like at all?” Missandei asks, feeling the passive aggressiveness rising to the top. “Okay then.”

Grey and Maddy eventually come back downstairs again, presumably to get dinner going. It results in Missandei looking eagerly at them with kind of a mayday-mayday expression. 

Grey notices, and he reluctantly looks at Maddy and gives her a light pat on the back. He says, “Can you grab your sister and go watch as much TV as you want upstairs for like, an hour before dinner time?” He looks apologetic for this ask, especially in light of his entire conversation with Maddy about how he’s always giving her shit to do and how he will try to chill a little on it.

“Even R-rated stuff?” Maddy says, already walking over to lightly nudge her sister — through a light kick in the thigh. 

He knows she’s joking, and he generally loves that she sounds like him when she jokes — even though he knows he should at least be a little bit alarmed by her capacity for darkness, sarcasm, and age-inappropriateness. Sometimes parenting feels like an exercise that feeds the ego. This is why he says, “Yeah, go nuts. Go watch something violent and traumatic.”

“Emmy, come on, let’s go hang out with Momo together.”

Dinner is blessedly uneventful because he’s pretty much square with everyone in the house, and it’s kind of miraculous and feels pretty damn good. Emmy undereats just a little bit because she’s so sick of eating veggies and keeps harassing him for some chicken nuggets. While he will never buy his children chicken nuggets due to cultural and maybe racial reasons, he does make a mental note to find something a little more palatable to mix in with all of the veggies and tofu, to get his kids to help him get rid of all of the food Missandei’s mom left them. 

Missandei is largely quiet during dinner, but not exactly shy. She is just preferring to listen for the time being. She does talk when she has to answer his occasional polite inquiries, aimed at getting her to say a little more. He and the girls talk about shark teeth and how they regrow after they lose teeth — something Maddy learned from one of her friends at school recently. He asks Missandei what she thinks about that, and she honestly doesn’t know what to say. Because the truth is that she thinks nothing about that.

It makes her wonder if parenting mostly consists of constantly jumping from topic to topic, killing time to pass the time.

Grey takes the liberty of announcing that they all have one hour before bedtime, perhaps not intentionally meaning to also include Missandei — a full-grown adult — in his bedtime decree. But she kind of feels like his comment is also aimed at her.

He honestly just would like to avoid a repeat of this morning. He is pretty positive that if everyone is well-rested, no one is going to lose their shit and make it stressful for everyone else. He also means it’s bedtime soon in the sense that he will be doing Missandei’s bedtime routine in about an hour, after he finishes cleaning up the kitchen. To him, she doesn’t need to go to sleep right away — he doesn’t care — but he needs to be in bed with his girls at a certain time for their sake. His ability to aid Missandei is limited after eight p.m.

“Upsy-daisy,” Grey mutters absently, as he firmly helps her lift up from the toilet and get back to her feet. 

It’s obviously a little quirk he has picked up because of the kids.

She cautiously presses her hand to his shoulder, using him for balance, as she grasps onto the walker and gets steady on her feet again. She shuffles the short steps to the bathroom vanity and transfers herself from the walker to the sink basin, in order to wash her hands and brush her teeth. 

With her toothbrush still in her mouth, and with his hands pulling out another wet wipe to run against the handle of her walker, she says, “Can I ask you something?” before she bends over and spits into the sink.

He scrunches up the wipe. He steadily looks at her through the mirror, staying a cautious distance away from her because he doesn’t want to crowd her. He steps backwards into the doorway. He tells her, “You can ask me anything.”

“How should I be talking to them — the girls, I mean,” she says. “I feel awkward, and like I don’t know what to say to them. Do you have any pointers?”

He looks mildly surprised by the question. And he takes a quick moment to think about it, before he says, “I think you’re doing an okay job overall.”

The general implication of merely doing an okay job is totally not lost on her. She mentally files that away in her head for chewing on later. For now though, she returns his frankness with a bit of her own. She says, “Okay, but what if I want to do better than an okay job? Like, you have two very headstrong girls. Like, what do you say to Emmy when she gets stubborn and won’t budge on an idea?”

The fact that she just referred to their children as only his is also not lost on Grey. It’s a mild reinforcement of what he already knows and is already very anxious about — that she’s going to hurt their kids because she never remembers that she loves them. 

“I mean, you saw what I do,” Grey says quietly. “I fucking have a screaming match with her over it, until she barfs all over me.” 

He swings his eyes up to look at her face — he sees a whole lot of blankness, a whole lot of polite and mild patience. It’s exactly like she woke up one day and forgot what they mean to each other. She definitely forgot that she inexplicably thinks he’s kind of funny. Sometimes.

He’s staring too much. He blows past this awkwardness by saying, “Uh, did something happen? To inspire this question? Like, do you wanna give me some more context?”

“Oh, we were playing make believe together, and she kept wanting to do the same thing over and over,” Missandei says casually, having come to a natural end to her bathroom routine as she places her toothbrush back in its little dish. She carefully spins around in place to grab onto her walker again. “And she wasn’t very open to my ideas during play. So I just went along with what she wanted. She could tell I wasn’t into it though, and she didn’t have as much fun after that. Um, that didn’t seem like the thing to do. So — what do you do in these situations? Do you just fake it?”

He quickly gets out of the way — stepping from out of the doorway so that she’s not blocked from walking back into the bedroom. 

And this is actually an area where he and Missandei have differed a little in the past. She used to have a much higher tolerance for make-believe stuff — because she used to be so enamored with their girls and had a tendency to think that everything they did was so cute and so special. He was the one more prone to boredom.

“Ah,” he says. “Yeah, that’s rough. Her imagination is sometimes super basic as hell. It’s mind-numbing to play with her sometimes. Um, I actually don’t do a lot of role-playing stuff with her. I actually don’t think it does much for her, developmentally, to have me pretend to be a dog that she walks around the house. She always comes up with all sorts of triggering shit like that, what the hell. ” 

He laughs automatically at the memories, at the times Emmy pushed it and maybe challenged her own relative powerlessness and lack of autonomy by trying to make him —  her parent — act like the dog so she could order him around. Missandei used to explain it to him this way, to get him not to be so offended by their toddler. 

Predictably, the current version of Missandei is not laughing along with him, having none of the recollections and also maybe just not being amused over a person being treated like a dog.

“If she wants to pretend to be the dog, I will be myself, but interact with her as if she’s a dog though,” he continues, as he also carefully helps her sit back down on the bed. “Sometimes Maddy plays with her, but they are kinda butting heads more often lately — I think the age difference is too much for them to play really well like that. We honestly just pawn her off on other kids her own age so she can get her fill. Like, we go over the Moss’ house a lot to throw her at Rani, so they can go do that shit with each other. We sometimes have play dates with some of her friends from school.” 

He catches her gaze going off somewhere — looking cloudier and further away. 

Missandei explains this by saying, “It’s pretty weird for me that my brother has a kid I never met.” She has previously been told that Moss and Safi had an oops-baby six years ago, one year before she had Emmy. She has previously been told that the two are besties. “Anyway, so you don’t play with her a lot?”

“Uh, I play with her all the time,” he corrects quickly, as he watches her swing her legs up — with effort — and refrains from helping her out too much with it because it’s probably good for her body to just struggle through it. And he knows she hates extra help in these kinds of situations. “I just don’t do a lot of pretending with her. My imagination is limited.”

“Sorry,” she says, as she grimaces. “I didn’t mean to offend. I’m so blunt now, what the hell. I think the car accident erased my filter. I meant to ask, how did I used to feel about playing with Emmy?” 

He shrugs. “You used to go along with it — and you enjoyed it, I think. You played that way with Maddy, too.”

“So I used to like it,” she says slowly.

“Yeah, you used to think everything they did was magical.”

“And I don’t as much anymore,” she says, completing what she thinks his internal thought is. 

He shrugs again. “I imagine it feels different with the memory loss,” he says diplomatically, even though this is the very thing that kills him. “I imagine it feels like you’re just babysitting someone’s kids.”

“It actually does feel that way,” she admits. “But they are both super cute.”

While it feels like she’s just giving him crumbs now, he also imagines that she doesn’t even mean how he’s interpreting this shit at all. So he says, “Thanks. So you good? It’s cool for me to leave you for the rest of the night?”

He has been completely aware that he needs to get upstairs to bed so that his kids will stop waiting for him and will go to sleep. 

In a very small way, co-parenting with her used to feel kind of like this. They were always pretty crunched on the time they had together to just chat.  But at the very least, they used to sleep in the same bed and the girls used to sleep in their own rooms. They used to have some sparse time together at the end of the day to reconnect.

“Sorry, I have one more question,” she says to him, when she catches him glancing at the door. “Is that chicken toy Emmy’s toy or the dog’s?”

“Oh, they share,” Grey says casually, starting to take steps backwards and out of the room. “Those two share a lot of their toys. They are kind of the same age, developmentally. Except it’s often way funner for me to play with Momo.”

Chapter Text

When he texts Cami’s mom to quickly talk to her about the girls having a sleepover — and for them to please do it at her house — Cami’s mother does him one better and tells him that she can walk his girls to the bus stop every day, since they pass their house anyway, since they are headed to the same bus stop anyway. She sells her help by telling him that Cami and Maddy would like this and have kind of been hinting at it anyway. She has the good grace to refrain from mentioning that Maddy talks about him and their situation at home a lot with Cami. Cami’s mother has also refrained from rubbing his need for help in his face. And in this way, she is very different from his family and Missandei’s family, who are both prone to yelling at him for working too hard and not sleeping enough. 

For this reason, Grey agrees to the help — getting back at least an hour each morning is honestly kind of a godsend. He can definitely use that hour so that he doesn’t continue to fuck his business into the ground — and also so he can be less rushed with Missandei’s morning routine. 

He says goodbye to his girls on the front stoop, with Cami and her mom patiently waiting in their driveway. 

He tries to be quick and not completely maudlin and melodramatic about this. 

“Okay, kids, you know the drill,” he tells his girls. “Hug me hard enough to make up for all of the times your grandpa didn’t hug me enough.”

“Daddy!” Maddy says, giggling as she grabs onto him. “You’re so sad sometimes.”

“I’m real sad a lot of the times.” 

After he finishes Missandei’s morning routine with her, he tries and hops really quickly on a call with his business partner, mostly to profusely kiss her ass and let her bitch at him a bit for continuing to leave her hanging with work. He tries to be efficient with his groveling by putting in his earbuds and simultaneously cleaning the bedroom and doing a load of laundry as his business partner repeatedly comes up with new and novels ways to tell him she’s the hero of his life and she’s really fucking drowning without him. 

Missandei doesn’t initially realize he’s on a call, because he’s pretty quiet — on account of his active listening. This is why she calls out to him when she hears him puttering around in the kitchen. She decided that today can be the day that she asks him for help with her clothes — and putting on socks and shoes.

Grey is in the midst of saying, “Yeah, I know I’m as useless as a bag of dicks, man,” as he walks into the guest room and stares expectantly at Missandei. He looks alert and ready to help her onto the toilet. He’s holding a hand out toward her to grasp onto as he says, “Yeah, I reviewed the proposal, man. Dude, I sent you back notes. Nah. Check your spam. Check your spam. Check your spam, man. No? Well, call IT. I don’t know what to tell you. No, I’m not gaslighting you, man. I sent them!” 

Once she realizes that he is on a call — and that she was right and he totally talks like a bro at work — she starts making stuff real hard for him to understand — because she starts just miming her needs, instead of just verbalizing them to him. She is pointing at her feet. She is also touching and gesturing to the shirt she is wearing.

He is totally confused as he stares at her. And then she hears him say, “Yo, hang on. Missandei is trying to tell me something. I need to give her my full attention for a sec.” And then he says, “What’s up, Missandei? What do you need?”

Missandei can feel herself blushing a little bit. She feels silly for interrupting his work call with a bunch of straight white dudes for this. She tells him, “Can you help me change for my physical therapy appointment?”

“Oh,” he says, as he flips his wrist over to look at his watch. “Oh, dude, sorry. I didn’t realize what time it was. Yeah, definitely.” And then, apparently switching back to his call without changing his tone of voice at all, he says, “Hey, man, I gotta bounce. I’ll resend you my notes in a bit. Jesus, quit your bitching. I’m sorry I’m worse than a bag of dicks, okay?”

He’s shaking his head after he apparently hangs up — or is hung up on. He’s staring down at Missandei’s reclined body on the bed. And then he says, “Okay, ready?”

Missandei supposes that part of her reluctance in asking him for help is that she was wary of sexual tension — because clearly she has had sex with this man before — probably in closets. She just doesn’t want for him to see her naked again and make things utterly terrible between the two of them by groping her ass, trying to put his dick in her mouth, or trying to put a bag over her head. He may know her old self intimately, but she still doesn’t really know him at all. She may have signed up to live in his house and spend time with their children — but she did not sign herself up to do any Fifty Shades of Grey shit with him.

Missandei quickly realizes that her paranoid fears were completely unfounded, because this guy doesn’t take off her clothes in a sexy way at all. Firstly, he is all business as he bluntly asks her if she wants to also change out of her underwear, or if she just wants just the clothes.

She tells him just clothes.

Then, he doesn’t make any weird direct eye contact with her at all, as he reaches underneath her hips to grasp onto her waistband. He just looks off to the side, as he pulls her loose pants off. He quickly folds them — probably a compulsive habit — before he grabs the fresh and clean pair of athletic nylon shorts, manipulates her feet into the short-holes, and then slides them on her. 

Her abs suck, so he has to help her sit up straighter, before he smoothly helps her pull off her shirt over her head. He leaves her a clean t-shirt on her lap, so that she can put that on herself.

“Uh, you seem really pro at this,” she finally remarks to him, as he’s tugging socks onto her feet.

“Well yeah, man,” he says, as he bends over to pick up her trainers, loosening the laces with his fingers. “I’ve been changing our kids’ clothes for nearly an entire decade. You’re just a bigger, longer version of them. Also, I’ve changed your clothes for you — once or twice or dozens of times before. Mostly when you partied too hard. Or were exhausted from breastfeeding and child-rearing.”  

“That’s so crazy, but I believe you,” she tells him. “Your expertise at this is really evident.”  

Grey tries to get some work done — and he feels like he’s doing a terrible job at it — as she does her exercises with her new physical therapist. He types furiously on his phone, trying to send emails, as he also half pays attention to what Missandei is doing, so that he can maybe help her do the exercises at home.

Missandei is sweaty as hell when the session is over. She gingerly walks up to him — he’s only a few feet away — and she tells him her legs are totally jellified.

“Your wife really kicked butt today,” Irri, Missandei’s new physical therapist, proudly tells Grey, quick to disperse the encouragement and appreciation because she’s just that type of person. 

“Yeah,” Grey says in response. “I was totally watching. I saw her kicking ass. Good job, Miss.”

And as they leave and are slowly on their way back to the car, because he can pluck out what she might be thinking, he says, “Sometimes it’s just easier to not correct people. Sometimes, I just go with it for the sake of convenience.” 

The small talk they make during the drive home is what he would describe as excruciating, the kind of excruciating that makes him wonder if he and Missandei were only able to hook up when they first met because they were so drunk that they didn’t realize how terrible they are at talking with each other. 

They talk about the weather. Then they talk about the road and whether asphalt is made of tar. They talk about fossil fuels and how electric cars don’t use fossil fuels. They talk about donuts and how they both agree that donuts are often yummy but unhealthy overall.

Missandei no longer finds him funny at all, which is not only a blow to his ego, it makes him doubt his own funniness and whether she only laughed at him in the past because she thought he was hot. Maybe now his situation is that she no longer thinks he’s hot so she also no longer thinks he’s funny.

He knows all of his jokes sound borderline mean. That’s why he personally thinks they are funny. If she no longer gets him, then to her all of his mean jokes just sound like he's being a dick about everything. 

Because he’s self-conscious around her now, he miserably continues the facade of not being a mean person around her. He expands their conversation about donuts — and he says to her, “Bagels also have holes. A lot of foods seem to have holes.”

After they get back home, he looks at her shiny face, the fluffy tendrils of her hair that have escaped her hair tie, her loose athletic wear, and he casually and vaguely offers her his assistance with anything, if she were to need it.

He means that if she wants to take a bath, he can help her with that. Or he can call her mom and go pick her mom up, if she would rather him do that instead. 

Missandei continues to look at him blankly, like she doesn’t even know what he’s talking about, and she tells him that she already knows his offer of help is ongoing. With finality that feels a touch too deliberate, she tells him that she will certainly continue to reach out when she has a need for assistance.

It’s definitely a kiss-off, so he takes the L graciously and gives her a little salute. It’s a gesture that he used to do with her — mockingly and lovingly — once upon a time. She doesn’t even remember what it means anymore, so he feels okay doing it and bidding her an adieu, before he goes back into his home office to try to hop into a few meetings.

It’s blessedly loud and chaotic and kind of joyous again — almost a glimmer of how it used to be — when the girls get home from school and start shedding some of their youthful spontaneity and energy all over the house. Emmy sings a song about the sun that she just learned at school, at the top of her lungs. She sits at the kitchen counter and faithfully eats the grapes and crackers that he puts in front of her. She chatters loudly and tells him about the pancakes that she had at school for Pancake Day. 

And as usual, he teases her by telling her the truth. He tells her that Pancake Day is not a real thing — it’s not a real holiday. It’s something that her teacher made up so they can feed a bunch of five-year-olds a bunch of carbs and sugar in a celebratory way.

“Daddy,” Emmy says, shoving more crackers into her face and crunching noisily on them. “Jorto can’t drink milk. Or else he will poop and fart.”

He inexplicably finds this lunatic so funny all the time. Her non sequitur makes him laugh — heartily — which in turn, makes her laugh, too. He always thinks that she looks the most like Missandei when she laughs.

He says, “Who told you that? Did Jorto tell you that?”

“Ms. Basik said that. She said not to make him drink my milk.”   

“Wait,” Grey says, pausing carefully. “You tried to give Jorto milk? Am I about to get a call from your teacher?”

“No!” Emmy says, still grinning pretty maniacally. “We were playing farm time and I was the farmer and he was the cow. So of course he needed to drink milk.”

“Ems, cows don’t drink their own milk,” Grey says, choosing to purposefully focus on the wrong thing for right now.

“Baby cows do,” she says simply.

“Oh shit,” he whispers, in awe. “You kinda got me there.”  

When she sees her mom again for the first time since the morning — when her mom ventures out of the guest bedroom to say hello — Emmy acts completely like herself. She stands on a chair and bombastically grabs Missandei’s face and lays a sloppy-ass kiss right on her mom’s mouth — in a way that Missandei does not expect or anticipate at all. 

Missandei freezes during the random and enthusiastic display of affection from her daughter, eyes going right to Grey, the nearest walking parenting cheat-sheet. 

He merely raises his brows in response to her shell-shockedness. He pretty much says nothing and does nothing as their kid’s spit goes into her mouth. 

“Ah!” Emmy exclaims loudly. “Mommy, you’re so salty!” And then she leans forward to take a really big, exaggerated, and pretty humiliating sniff. 

Missy already knows what this kid is about to say, even though in her mind she’s been this kid’s mother for less than a week.

Emmy says, “Mommy, you smell. You need a bath.”

They all wade through the rest of the evening, as chill and as normally as possible. Maddy does her homework at the kitchen table as he cleans up and wipes everything down. She doesn’t really need any help with her homework, and he and Missandei certainly didn’t need to supervise her because she’s naturally so studious, but she does her homework at the table to just be around them all.

He lets the speakers in the living room go a little bit loud, as Emmy has a dance party with Momo, who generally alternates between acting scared of getting trampled and being kinda into it. Emmy’s very transparently showing off her moves to Missandei, who is sitting on the couch and being pretty straight-faced — in light of all the hip thrusting that Emmy is doing. 

Grey can’t stop himself from constantly laughing to himself over her moves though.

Emmy keeps forgetting — or ignoring — Missandei’s limited mobility. She keeps holding her hands out to Missandei and saying, “Dance with me, Mommy. Come dance with me!”

“Honey, I’m sorry, but I can’t right now,” Missandei says, frowning as Emmy grabs onto her hands anyway. And swings them widely.

“You can dance sitting down,” Emmy says, as she twists her body around erratically, jostling Missandei around by the hand still.

Missy looks at Grey once again — to see what the thing to do in this situation is.

He continues to give her a whole hell of a lot of nothing. 

So Missy half-heartedly starts swinging her arms around with Emmy. She observes to herself that this is honestly better than playing make-believe.  

Grey tells himself to just get the fuck over it and ask the love of his life — the mother of his children — if she would like his help in getting naked, so that she can clean herself and stop from getting roasted so hard by a five-year-old. He tells himself that it’s going to be weird and Missandei’s definitely going to look at him like he’s a wannabe rapist, but that’s probably the worst that will happen. And that’s fine. He can deal with that.

He decides to broach the topic after he comes back inside from letting out Momo for one last potty. He’s absently rubbing at a mosquito bite on his arm and watching her splash more water on her face, to clear off her face wash, as he decides to rip off the bandaid. He says, “Hey, so I noticed you’ve been sweating a lot today. And I’ve noticed that you haven’t been able to get a proper wash in, in a few days.”

“Oh awesome,” Missandei says, right away, sounding really sarcastic. She stands up a little bit straight as she blots her face with a towel. “So you want to have a conversation that is embarrassing for me.”

“I’m imagining that you’d like to take a shower or a bath at some point in the near future,” he says. “And I know this is a very awkward situation for you. I want you to know I am totally down to help you myself, if you are okay with that. I won’t make it weird! Or I can call your mom and ask her to come over to help, maybe we can do some regularly scheduled thing until you’re more mobile on your own.”

“Yeah, so I was right,” Missy says. “This is a super embarrassing conversation.”  

She decides that her body consciousness is not enough for her to invite the chaos of her mother each time she wants to wash herself. She decides that the risk of assault is pretty minimal, that the risk of creepiness is much greater — and she is pretty sure she can handle whatever creepiness comes her way. 

She says, “Okay, dude, you can help me get to the tub so I can freshen up — if it means so much to you.”

He smiles at her in response, because her attitude and her tone of voice is familiar to him and she sounds kind of like the lost version of her that he misses so much. He smiles out this nostalgia and this fondness. He says, “Okay, so I’ll help you with this. Thanks for trusting me enough for this.” 

Missandei thinks he looks at her too much sometimes. The smiling often looks weird on him and makes her think that the creepiness — which she will capably handle — is about to start. 

Because it’s bedtime and they don’t have the time to have him witness another painfully vulnerable moment for her, they decide to just defer her bath until the next day. She has already caked on more deodorant. She has already done her best to wipe herself down with a hand towel. She has already felt totally depressed and glum about it, over how not fresh and not cute and not pretty she is. 

While she thinks it’s kind of gross for her to go to bed after a big workout, without showering her body, it’s all she’s got because of her busted body. As she settles into bed by herself, she can feel the friction of her dried sweat dragging against the crisp percale cotton sheets as she shuts her eyes. 

She pretends like she’s chill and casual about it, but she’s actually anxious about getting fully naked in front of this man and letting him see her oldass flabby body. She has a hard enough time looking at herself so she doesn’t know how it’s supposed to be any better, letting a man she doesn’t know that well see her flabby old body.

She intellectually knows that he’s probably seen her oldass body a lot, because she used to indiscriminately take it from this guy. She intellectually knows that her nudity is probably not even going to be a big event for this guy. She knows that the worst that can happen is that he gets an erection in the middle of helping her out in a super humiliating and super vulnerable moment for her — the worst that can happen is that he tries to put his dick in her face.

She realizes that she thinks rape is probably the worst that can happen. And this is probably why she’s been so anxious about this all morning. This is probably why she wasn’t able to sleep very well. 

She would just feel so stupid if she told him she changed her mind about him helping and would like for her mother to come over instead. 

After she says goodbye to the girls — after she gives Emmy a firm hug and waves at Maddy — after he sees them out the door — the house is suddenly quiet and she wonders when her bath is going to commence. 

He walks back into the living room, where she is sitting on the couch. He says, “Ready?” 

Her current weapon of choice in her arsenal of self-protection is a lot of sarcasm and acidic commentary. It’s as if a part of her believes that if she is sharp enough with him, he won’t get near her — for fear of being cut and stabbed with her words. 

She watches as he walks a really fancy-looking stool —  the same one her mother had used to sit on when Missandei was last bathed — into the bathroom. She can sort of see and hear him place it in the tub. 

The dog has trotted in after him. The dog has been let out the cage more often, in part due to Maddy’s many protests, but also because the dog has finally calmed down enough to not try to jump on Missandei on sight. 

“Is it okay for that wood stool to get wet?” she calls to him.

“It’s teak,” he says, as he and the dog walk back into the bedroom.

“Oh, of course it is,” she says with sarcasm that is leagues deep. She had already been in the middle of taking off as much of her clothes as she can to prove to him that she isn’t afraid of him or weirded out by this at all — so just her shirt. She needs his help with her sports bra for sure. She needs his help with her pants and panties. 

“A lot of boats in the Summer Isles are made of a type of teak,” he says, kind of randomly. “It’s really rot-resistant.”

“Fun fact,” she says, still sounding like a complete asshole to him.

“Thanks,” he says plainly.

Then he reaches his hands toward her. Then she blushes hard as the air in the room reaches her bare skin. She raises her arms and generally doesn’t move or try to help him as he sneaks his fingers underneath the elastic band of her sports bra, pulls it, and then smoothly takes it over her breasts and then up her arms. 

She gets a whiff of her boobs once they are freed. And Emmy was right. She definitely smells.

She is pretty mired in how terrible she feels about this entire thing, as she takes her arms and hands down and uses them and her feet to raise her hips a little, as he slides his fingers in between the elastic of her shorts, her panties, and her skin. She generally holds her breath and freezes and ignores the pain in what’s left of her abs, as he pulls her shorts and underwear off.

He drops her clothes into a laundry basket next to his feet.  

She tries to dispel some of the immense awkwardness and vulnerability she feels by pretending that she’s not embarrassed or self-conscious at all. She’s saying, “You’ve probably seen me naked a lot, huh?”

“Yeah,” he says simply, as he purposely looks off to the side. “In totally chill and mundane everyday ways.”

“Okay. I’m ready.”

She already told him that she would just like to be quickly carried to the tub. She already told him that she really doesn’t want him to wait five minutes, staring at her, as she nakedly inches her way to the bathtub with her walker. 

She raises her arms up again to get them out of his way, as he slides his arms underneath her legs and behind her back — and then he easily lifts her. She’s sure that he can smell how ripe she is, with this proximity, and that is annoying and also embarrassing.

She generally hovers her arms in the air so he can get a real whiff of her body odor, and she continues to avoid making eye contact with him, as he takes the quick steps to the bathroom and tub and neatly avoids clobbering her head or feet on anything in the process.

In the bathroom, he smoothly just places her down, so that she’s sitting on the teak stool. After that, he continues to studiously avoid looking at her and her body — because he clearly doesn’t want to make her more uncomfortable than she already is.

She sees that the caddy full of products is hanging out on another teak stool, next to the ultra modern, under slippery free-standing tub. This house really has no shelves or ledges or cabinets.  

He’s still looking off to the side, at the wall. He says, “Okay, we did it. Good job to us. Do you need anything else? Otherwise I’ll leave you to it. Do you want me to close the door? Do you want the dog to stay or leave?”

He kind of releases some of the anxiety and tension that he’s holding in his body, as he hears the faucet run in the bathroom she’s using. He was so paranoid that he was going to accidentally do something wrong — like accidentally touch her in a way that she gets offended by — and then it was going to become a whole entire thing where he feels terrible and she feels very angry with him.

He generally can’t do too much as Missandei bathes. He can’t do work because he’ll be too far away to hear her call out for him. He also can’t work well with half of his attention on her. 

So he cleans. He cleans what he has already cleaned. He starts wiping down all of the flat surfaces in the kitchen and living room again.

It’s still so crazy to him, that they are this to each other now. It’s so crazy to him that she made him hold her hand almost the entire time she was in labor — with both girls — and then made him hold her entire body as she cried loudly in disbelief and happiness. It’s crazy that she can no longer handle him being there for her. 

He tells himself that this sort of thing happens all the time — in a way. While not everyone loses their partner due to memory loss and a car crash, he knows that people fall out of love all the time. He knows that, in a way, what he is experiencing here is not that unique or special. People emotionally leave other people all the time.

“So we’re pals,” she says neutrally to the dog, as the dog lies on the bath mat in front of the sink — on her side, looking really relaxed and chill, actually. “And you like to hang with me as I do stuff like this.”

The dog’s tail does start wagging as Missandei talks to her, though she doesn’t raise her head at all. Missandei stares at this dog’s big brown eyes, the dog’s little button brown nose, the dog's tiny little dark lips, and she begrudgingly feels a tinge of something. She might just be excited that this one is non-verbal and generally quiet and doesn’t currently need that much from her. 

“Okay, so you’re stinkin’ cute as hell,” Missandei finally admits, as she continues working cowash into her hair. “So nearly everyone in this house is stinkin’ cute as hell.” 

He hears her calling for him sooner than he anticipated — he hears her mostly just yelling out that she’s done. She generally still has an aversion to calling him by his name, so she still generally goes out of her way to avoid having to do so. It’s just another one of those pretty bewildering and heart-breaking things for him.

He does his best to not look at her as he re-enters the bathroom, even though she has a towel wrapped around her body. He also does his best to not trip over anything and slam into the wall like a dummy. 

“Dude, you can look at me — in the face. You don’t have to work so hard at being chivalrous, man.”

He’s not sure why she’s so mad at him — other than it’s just how she’s coping with being naked around him — but he does it. He moves his eyes right to her face. “Better?”

“Not really,” she says, gesturing vaguely to her surroundings with her hand. “But I’m ready for you to carry me like a naked princess into my bedroom now.”

He makes quick work of walking over and picking her up. He already knows that she lost weight — but he can also feel that she lost quite a bit of weight. 

He walks her back into the bedroom. He thinks that she smells pretty incredible, but he also really didn’t mind it when she was a little ripe either. 

“Oh,” she says, as he places her down on the bed, as the dog stays on the floor, alert and wagging her tail like crazy. “You changed my sheets.”

“Yeah,” he says. “Is that okay?”

“Totally,” she says, still holding onto the knot of her towel at her breasts. “Thanks, man.”

“No prob, bruh,” he says. 

She gives him a bit of a wry look for that. 

And then she randomly just rips the flaps of her towel apart — she spontaneously and randomly just exposes her body to him. 

He automatically says, “Whoa,” as he generally forgets to take his eyes away, as he naturally and casually does a real quick visual scan down her body — not in a sexy way, but more in a mundane and assessing way. 

“Just thought I’d try something new,” she says, as she watches his face. He brings back the eye contact pretty fast, without any sense of shame or self-consciousness or guilt over seeing her naked body at all. He looks unruffled and pretty normal and kind of blank. 

She’s just waiting for him to comment on her body.

He doesn’t.

So she finally mutters, “Okay, bro, help me put on my underwear.”

Chapter Text

When Friday rolls around, he reminds her that they generally spend a lot of time with family during their weekends. They are often going over to her parents, her brothers, his parents, or they are hosting people over at their house. He tells her that keeping with that routine, helping to make a sense of normalcy again, is good for the girls. He tells her that keeping the girls’ world wide, with a variety of people, is also good. It might help them focus less on what’s going on at home.

He also completely gives Missandei an out, when he gives her the general itinerary for the weekend — his parents on Friday night, her parents on Saturday, her brother’s on Sunday — and she mockingly acts all exhausted by it all. He tells her that she doesn’t have to go over to his parents’ house. He can go by himself, with the girls. He tells her, “You can have the time to yourself. I bet that would be nice, right?”

She doesn’t know what to make of this — whether or not he’s pissed at her for acting like Emmy and being dramatic about having to do something — or whether he is being real with her. She decides that she can only take him at his word though, she says, “Sure, okay. That would be kind of nice.”

“I can call your folks — or whoever — to come over and hang out with you?”

“I mean, I’m capable of calling them myself,” she says, trying to lightly joke around with him about that.

“I know,” he says, sounding altogether too serious. “So you will call them, then.”

He kind of selfishly wants a break from her, too. He kind of would like to have a day where he does all the work with their kids, ensures she’s taken care of and in good hands, and he would like to be somewhere where nobody looks at him with such challenging wariness and misunderstanding. He would like to be with people who know him very well and who inexplicably love him in spite of all of his glaring flaws and shortcomings.

He would also like to talk to his parents about how fucking sad and unhappy he is and how it feels like it will never ever end and how painful it feels to just be doing what he is doing. He wants to talk to them about how he currently is a pretty mediocre and unfun parent. He would like the opportunity to do all of this truth-telling without having to consider Missandei’s feelings.

Azzie and Lena are already there when he arrives with the girls. The girls run up to Lena right away and start shout-talking at her about all of the latest developments in their lives and in their household. 

Lena is a bit of an attraction for the girls because they don’t see her as often — she works and lives close to downtown and has no car, so she has to have her dad come pick her up if she wants to do family dinner with them. 

After the girls calm down and start getting bored enough with grownup stuff — just a whole lot of talking — they start entertaining each other by playing in the backyard. Maddy is currently more athletic than Emmy, and Maddy can tolerate teaching her little sister things. Maddy is pretty patient when Emmy can pay attention and isn’t hopping from topic to topic constantly. 

Lena walks the short steps up to Grey and says, “Hey, Unc,” as she hugs him. 

“Hey, kiddo,” he says, as he hugs her back and gives her a pat in the middle of her back. “How’s work? How was the expo?”

She chuckles as they pull apart. She’s amused because he’s totally her ‘fun uncle’ — that is, he’s her one and only uncle, so he’s ‘fun uncle’ by default. She also snickers because he is so very typically work-focused — and it is very sweet that he tries to be interested in her job.

“The tat expo was good,” she tells him. “Saw a lot of folks from all over. Got sold to a lot. Glow-in-the-dark inks and whatnot. Got condescended to a lot by the old-timers.” 

“So a day in the life,” he says.

“Pretty much,” she says. “Where’s auntie? I thought I was gonna see her today. That’s why I came over.”

Missandei’s absence manages to be pretty conspicuous to his family — his mom made a few comments when she had to put away the extra place setting — but Grey honestly doesn’t even give a shit or have the capacity to take on their feelings about it. He just crams a bunch of steak into his face and groans loudly in pleasure — because his mom’s cooking is incredible and he has missed consuming the flesh of dead animals very much. 

He also groans loudly, in a different way, when he watches his mother drop down a casserole dish with bubbling tomato sauce and melted cheese. With his mouth full, he says, “White people food, Ma? Seriously?”

“It was for Missandei — it's vegetarian.” 

“Hey, I like lasagna, too,” Lena pipes in, as she runs her hand over Emmy’s head, her shiny silver nails glinting underneath the sunshine. 

“I’m sorry, but can you explain to me — again — why Missy needs to see her family four billion times this weekend but doesn’t want to spend just a few hours with us?” his dad cuts in, totally uncaring that he’s saying this in front of his grandkids. 

It’s something he never goes along with, when Grey requests that he doesn’t trash the kids’ mom in front of the kids. He never goes along with it because he loves Missy. And he doesn’t think he’s trashing her when he inquires about her whereabouts.

“I told you already,” Grey says calmly, doing his best not to get into a fun bickering session with his dad and modeling that shit some more for his girls. “We’ve had an eventful week. She’s tired and overwhelmed. She wants to have a bit of time to herself to chill.”

“Being in a coma for three months wasn’t enough chill time for her?” his dad says callously. “Sitting in a hospital bed for a month wasn’t enough chill time?”

“Dad,” Grey says.

“I’m joking,” his dad says dismissively, waving his hand. “Really, I just wanna know why you’re still doing this self-sacrificial shit. Just wanna know why you’re still doing this crazy duty-fulfilling shit.”

“Okay, now I remember why I told her not to come,” Grey snipes back.

“When was the last time you had a full night’s rest, Nudho?” his dad throws back. “When was the last time you chilled out?”

“The hypocrisy is crazy right now,” Grey says. “You’re an old man still working sixty-hour weeks.”

“False, Nudho!” his dad declares. “I only worked forty hours this week. I worked normally, with good life and work balance. I took your mom out to dinner yesterday. We shared a chablis. We had a nice time. I am great at balance.”

“Anyway!” Azzie loudly says, interrupting his dad and his brother’s annoying-ass well-worn schtick. “So you been keeping up with the Shadowcats’ preseason, Nudie?”

“No,” Grey says sullenly. “What’s been going on?”

“Oh shit,” their dad says, cutting in again. “That kid Juaro —”

“Yeah, an Islander!” Azzie says. “Amazing. I was reading that he only started seriously training like, three years ago. Dude’s a savant.”

“Just think of where he’d be if he had been cultivated from the beginning, if he had the trainers and the mentors and coaches from the age these kids on the mainland start training.” 

“Yo, so did you see his co-league tape, Pops?”

“Fuck yeah I did.”

“Okay,” Grey says. “I’m totally lost.”

Missandei kind of feels a certain way about not showing her face at the home of her children’s other grandparents — she was raised a certain way and comes from a very collective and familial culture — so it is always awkward for her to put her needs first and to bow out of familial obligations. 

She reasons to herself that they are technically not her family. She doesn’t remember them. Thus, she doesn’t know them. She doesn’t really want to spend more exhausting hours pretending that she’s someone she’s not.

It feels icky, but it is what it is.

She has a short hour by herself before her parents arrive, with just the dog — which Grey assured her would not need to go potty the entire time they are out. He was about to lock up the dog again, but Missandei has definitely been feeling like a supervillain, based on the way Maddy talks about how cruel it is to kennel the dog and limit her mobility for hours. She told Grey to let the dog run free — that she can handle the dog by herself. Even though she didn’t grow up with a family pet, even though she’s not really an animal person, she can probably keep a dog alive for a few hours.

Missandei is cautiously trying not to piss off Maddy because she’s seen what Maddy is all about when she is pissed off. And Missy also feels bad that she’s the reason the dog gets locked up all the time.

The dog is actually pretty chill after she gets through the initial transition of things. The dog actually just hops right onto Missandei’s bed — after Missandei tells the dog to get off — but the dog doesn’t listen. This is probably what Grey had meant, when he said that the dog doesn’t listen to commands.

The dog just walks right up to her pillow. The dog does just seriously plant her little furry body right next to Missandei, before the dog softly collapses down, draping her head and one arm down Missandei’s thigh — and then just starts snoozing right next to her in bed.

It is kind of cute, even though she doesn’t know how she feels about the dog lying right on her pillow.

“Oh, please don’t pee on the bed,” Missy tells the dog, as she cautiously reaches out to lightly run her hand down the dog’s back, touching the dog’s soft hair. 

His parents had already gone through an accidental pregnancy before Grey sprung his on them — with his brother, at age 19 to boot — so by the time Grey, at age 30, got around to telling his folks that he got a woman pregnant by being bad at practicing safe sex, his parents remarkably took it in stride. They had already been talking between themselves about their youngest kid — how he was probably going to always be doing his shitty, dangerous job, how he was going to die suddenly and horrifically and devastate them, how he was going to die alone because of his bent priorities, how it’s probably all their fault that he’s the way he is, how he was never going to allow himself to meet someone and conceive of something different for himself.   

For various reasons, they were very excited to learn that Maddy was incubating inside of Missandei’s body, even when he himself was staunchly unexcited and kind of pissed about it. His parents acted out their hopes for him by being super nice and welcoming with Missandei, as if they wanted so badly to believe that their good behavior was going to right the entire ship and bring their son back home to them.

It actually did end up working out like that — kind of. And just like he did, they fell in love with her and welcomed her into the family with open arms, often by being too familiar with her and too comfortable displaying their dysfunction with one another in front of her. 

He remembers what it had meant to his mother, that Missandei let his mother into so many aspects of her pregnancy — because her own mother disapproved and was causing her stress, because he was far away and she was overwhelmed and navigating a huge life change by herself. 

He understands that his family is also having a hard time with her memory loss. They also love her. They also had many years with her where that love was returned. They also miss the way she used to be. They miss her presence.

When Azzie volunteers himself as tribute — when he tries to lighten the girls’ moods by prodding at them and teasing them into playing with him — Grey can see Maddy’s quick internal debate. She wants to stay and eavesdrop some more. But she also wants to hang with a guy who is a legit fun uncle. She loves his brother, so the internal debate is over quickly, and she follows Azzie, and the soft rubber ball in his hand, into the backyard.

Once the kids are out of earshot, Lena immediately says, “Unc, have you ever thought of having a you-day , getting a sitter for the kids, and just spend the time on mushrooms.”

“One hundred percent not interested, Lena,” Grey says.

“You can treat PTSD and a whole host of other traumas with mushrooms now,” she insists.

“She’s actually correct,” his dad offers. “There’s evidence in animal studies showing that psilocybin might stimulate nerve cell regrowth in the parts of the brain responsible for emotion and memory.”

“Still don’t want to do mushrooms with my niece,” Grey says.

“You wouldn’t do it with me, Uncle Nudho,” Lena says patiently, breezing over the fact that her stodgy uncle clearly isn’t taking this seriously and holds some archaic stereotypes. “There are practitioners that specialize in this. You pay a grand. You go to some white lady’s house on an island somewhere. You have a guided experience with her there for like, eight hours or something. And then you feel lighter than air and your PTSD will be cured.”

“I’m kind of offended that you are so flippant about my PTSD,” Grey says mildly. He is joking. Then he says, “Okay, cool idea. Will it make you feel better if I tell you I’ll think about it? Just like I’ll think about the sound baths, the crystals, the reiki, and the rest.” 

“Hey, you ended up liking the meditation,” Lena offers.

“Well, that one is based on science.”

“Mushrooms are based in science, too!” Lena argues.

“Sweetheart, call me old-fashioned,” his dad cuts in. “But I don’t think it’s unreasonable that your uncle doesn’t want to do drugs in between caring for Missandei and his children.”

“Grandpa, you’re a doctor.” 

“Exactly,” he says. “I’m a doctor. I like to gatekeep medicine, especially mind-altering drugs. And who is this white lady on an island? Does she even have a medical degree? Your grandma isn’t into this at all, either. Look at her face.”

“I am not into this,” his mom quickly confirms, with her mouth in a tight line.

“Western medicine isn’t the be-all-end-all, guys,” Lena says dismissively, pulling at the thread of a really long, really long-reaching disagreement that they have with each other. She’s into woo stuff, just like her dad. The rest of the family is unimaginative, uncreative, unfun, and into science — so they don’t understand or like woo stuff. “They do this stuff in the Summer Isles all the time.”

“Trip balls?” his dad says sarcastically. “Yeah, I know. And their world-class medical schools and research facilities was why I had to join the military to get the fuck out and work myself to the bone carving out a new and cushy new life here in the West for your dad, your uncle, and you. You are all welcome, by the way.”

“Hey, I helped, too,” his mom says, quietly and sarcastically cutting in.

“Yeah, you sure did, baby,” his dad says, already smiling because he’s already rolling his next comment over in his head. “You contributed, too.”

She lightly swats him with the back of her hand for this.

Missandei quickly discovers that the dog is shockingly tolerant of physical manipulation, not that Missandei is trying to twist her limbs and poke her in the gut. It’s mostly that Missandei experimentally touches and briefly holds onto the dog’s paws and touches her little nose. The dog will wake up and open her eyes momentarily before shutting them and going back to sleep.  

She is not surprised that her parents have arrived early. She is, however, surprised to learn that her parents are able to let themselves into the house as they please. 

Missandei stayed in her bed because it seemed preferable to sitting on the couch by herself, in a large and empty house. 

Her mother assumes laziness though. As her mother walks in, her mom balks and says, “You’re still sleeping? It’s the middle of the afternoon, Missandei.”  

Grey supposes that he became the way he is because his brother rebelled entirely way too hard against his parents’ strictness when they were kids. Because his brother started flunking all his classes, drinking alcohol, doing recreational drugs, staying out late, and hanging out with people their parents didn’t approve of during the time their parents only approved of other Summer Islander nerds — Grey had to bear witness to his dad’s constant rage and his mom’s ongoing heartbreak. And that did stuff to his brain and made him be the most perfect son that never did anything ever to give his parents any grief. 

And then his brother got a woman he didn’t know that well pregnant and dropped out of college. And then stuff got worse in their family for a little bit. And Grey was on the pre-med track. Until he suddenly wasn’t anymore. 

Shockingly, he and his brother never used their differences as a reason to not be close. Their parents generally did a good job of not comparing and not pitting them against each other. His brother generally took the responsibility of being the eldest very seriously and inexplicably kinda loved that Grey was such a weird little nerd with such a bright future ahead of him — at one point.

“How are you, really?” Azzie asks, and he softly nudges an opened beer bottle into Grey’s hand. He clinks their bottles together real quickly before he takes a sip. The girls are playing with Lena and their parents.

“I’m generally a combination of pretty exhausted and very sad,” Grey says bluntly. And then he shrugs. 

“Buddy,” Azzie says empathetically, as he reaches out to give his brother another hug. “I’m so sorry it’s hard. You’re doing really good getting through it, though.” 

“Am I?” Grey says dully, as he takes a swig from his own bottle. 

“Don’t listen to Dad too much,” Azzie advises. “I think it’s obvious you’re doing your very best.”

“My very best isn’t good enough.”

It’s a very typical statement, which is why Azzie gives Grey another squeeze, with an arm swung over his shoulder, and says, “Sure it is. Look at how great and happy your girls are — you did that. You are doing that.”

“Man, I’m not doing that great with the girls,” Grey says. “I lost it on them this week and screamed at them like I think I’m Dad — and I hated that I did that.”

“Nudie, we all accidentally scream at our kids like we think we’re Dad,” Azzie says. “It happens. And I bet you probably apologized afterward, which is not like Dad at all.”

“I did,” Grey affirms. “That’s a really low bar though.”

“Nah,” Azzie says casually, with an ease that Grey often finds maddening and also really enviable.  

She loves her mother to death — and she keeps getting these clues that her mother has changed at least a little bit, in the twelve or so years that got wiped from her brain — but Missandei continues to have issues accepting her mother as she currently is. Missandei is still full of defense mechanisms when it comes to her mother. She has this habit of holding her mother at an arm’s length at times because she’s nervous that her mother will end up making her feel really hurt and sad because she was stupid enough to be vulnerable and honest with her mother. 

Her older self may have had more distance from the past, but her current self still acutely remembers how it felt to be barred from going to a really elite university with a full-ride scholarship — because her mother didn’t think that Naathi girls should move out of the house at 18. Rather, her mother thought that good Naathi girls lived with their parents until they eventually get transferred to their husband’s house. And then they pump out their husband’s children. And they stay home to raise them — just like her mom did. And then they do this tense push-and-pull shit with their grownass daughters until they croak and die.  

Missandei thinks she would probably still be living in a cool apartment in the city, with a cool job and a cool life full of friends and travel — if she had been able to go to an elite university instead of a local state school nearby. 

“So, how is it going?” her mom says calmly, as the three of them sit on the couch together in the living room.

“How do you think it’s going, Mom!” Missy snaps, deciding to just escalate this right away, making Momo jerk in her lap in surprise. “You left me to fend for myself with a random man and his really cute kids and dog!”

“You told me to go home!” her mom shouts back at her, right away. “You said you didn’t need my help anymore! You said I was annoying.”

“Guys,” her dad says, trying to gently interject. “Can we just try and have a nice afternoon together? Can we please try?”

His brother is a real bag of feelings, which is probably very good and an area that Grey is sometimes deficient in because of their Dad. So Grey is not even surprised at all that his brother brings up the elephant in the room and tries to force Grey to talk all about how it makes him feel, that the love of his life still doesn’t remember him and their kids, that she will never remember him and their kids, and that their life is just going to revolve around this loss — forever and ever now. 

“So you make new memories together,” Azzie says, thinking that he sounds reasonable about this. “So you find the love together — again.”

This shit is like nails on a chalkboard to Grey’s ears. This shit only serves to remind him that his brother is often unrealistic and too idealistic, and that’s why he has the various obstacles in life that he sometimes does. The simplicity of this shit makes him think that Azzie doesn’t even know the complexity of what it’s like to live with someone who not only can’t remember him and their kids — she doesn’t even like him that much. 

So Grey tells his brother. He does it in a bit of a punishing way, because he’s so fucking frustrated with his life and so fucking over being in pain over this shit. He says, “No offense, Az, but my problem in life isn’t that my partner no longer thinks I’m cute. My problem isn’t going to be solved by taking her out to a romantic dinner and trying to put the moves on her. My fucking problem is that my partner doesn’t remember our children. My problem is her general disinterest in parenting and how perceptive and sensitive Maddy is. My problem is that Maddy wakes up every day and remembers that her mom doesn’t fucking remember her or exhibit love for her. And I have to helplessly watch this shit because y’all are telling me it would be fucked up and traumatizing for the kids if I cut off an arm to save the heart. So instead, I just continue to be a shitty parent. I continue to not protect my children from heartbreak — as I just uselessly watch this shit continue to rot. I honestly don’t even give a fuck that she hates me. I care that she doesn’t love the girls.”

Azzie listens attentively to this all-too-angry diatribe, figuring that his brother just really needs to vent because it must be hard to be trapped in such a tough situation all day, every day. And in response to it all, Azzie knowingly says, “You’re a really good dad. You know you’re a really good dad. Your girls know how much they are loved.”

Grey starts immediately tearing up over that. He puts his fist right to his traitorous eye socket to clear it, and he says, “What the fuck, man? How are you gonna just spring that on me like that?”

“Bud, you’re going to be okay,” Azzie says, reaching out to his brother again.

“Dude, shut up,” Grey mutters, as he tries to reject his brother’s hug. “I can’t have you embrace me for the sixth time today, dude. The girls are gonna see and start to think that they can get six hugs a day from me, too.”

This makes Azzie laugh — delightedly and openly. He forces the hug on his brother. He squeezes as he earnestly says, “You’re so funny, Nudie.”

“Oh my God, I hate you so much,” Grey says quietly, as he puts his arms around his brother fucking again. “But I also love you so much. How do you know she’s not laughing at any of my jokes?”

“Oh, I just know that’s a hangup you have all the time,” Azzie says. “You hate it when people think I’m funnier than you are.”

“Yo, I hate it when people laugh at your corny ass jokes and they don’t laugh at my insightful observations about how we’re all going to die one day.” 

And then, sounding a bit more serious, Azzie says, “Bud, for the record, when I said you can find the love together again, I meant all four of you. All four of you can find it again.”

“Five,” Grey corrects. “You forgot Mo.”

“No, I counted Mo,” Azzie says. “I left Emmy out. That girl doesn’t need to search for love at all. She just manifests it all the time.”

“Dude, she’s bulletproof,” Grey says, shaking his head. “It’s crazy.”

Missandei understands that her mother wants her to stop being a petty, immature brat and to shape up and rise to the occasion — the occasion is being a good mother and co-parenting two cute little girls with a man who honestly is shaping up to be completely inoffensive and probably not a serial killer. She understands that her family has already spent the better part of the year going through something really tragic and terrible together, and they are still hurting from it and keen for it to be over. Missy understands why they are keen to just move on and move forward.

Missy’s issue is actually that she woke up to a completely different world, was told what her life is, and then she agreed to this — she agreed to co-parent her daughters because of course she’s not going to abandon them — but merely agreeing is apparently not good enough.

Missy’s issue is that she’s being expected to put on a happy face on top of everything she has to confront. Her issue is that she cannot even mourn the future that she was dreaming of for herself. She cannot even express reluctance and reticence over anything in her current life. She isn’t allowed to cope through bitchy comments about how excessively capitalistic her life has become and how materialistic and bland her partner is — because nobody particularly liked it that much when she was an energetic college student who went to protests, did community organizing with her language skills, and was really annoying when she lectured her entire family for their choices and belief systems.

Nobody appreciated her refusal to just go along with the status quo when she was younger, and evidently, nobody appreciates it now. They all just want her to smile and shut up — and it just kills her because she has always felt that her refusal of the status quo was often the very best part of her. It kills her that there is absolutely nobody who loves her for this aspect of herself. They just love her in spite of it.

She wishes her mother would just give her a chance to mourn her life. She has already agreed to give up and to be a mom and to do the wife thing. Now she just wants to have a second to be a major asshole about it. Because she is so hopelessly fucking sad about this. 

She wants to eventually teach her girls that she will never expect this of them. She wants to eventually impart on them that they can be and do anything — and even if she disagrees with them, she will find it in herself to support them in their dreams, no matter what. She wants to teach them that they should not be made to compromise — ever. She wants for them to be earnestly loved for who they are.

“He keeps a really clean house, right?” her mother casually says to her, as she simultaneously examines her nails. “It’s very atypical for a man, but it’s certainly handy. He’s good for you — because you’ve always been a little on the messy side.” 

“Mira,” her dad says, trying to ineffectually run interference. 

Grey accumulates even more leftovers when they leave his parents’ house. He leaves the room temperature food containers in the warm car as he stops over at the ice cream joint and goes all-in on buying his children’s affection. 

His logic is that they don’t have as much fun anymore, and ice cream is fun. His logic also is that it will give them a chance to pick out something for Missandei, and that might be a nice conversation topic for the three of them. The girls can tell her all about why they chose garlic-flavored ice cream for her. 

Emmy almost slams the door on him in her haste to run the ice cream to Missandei. He ends up kicking the door back with his foot, as he carefully walks food containers and multiple other pints of ice cream into the house, making a beeline for the fridge.

He can hear Emmy go, “Mommy, guess what we got you!” 

“Oh my gosh! You got me ice cream!”

“But guess what flavor we got you!”

“Vanilla?”

The refrigerator stays open after Grey pries the door open with just a single finger. It stays open because her dad is holding it for him. 

Grey smiles at the man, as her dad chuckles. Grey says, “Hey.”

“Hi,” her dad says. “You’ve got your hands a little full there.”

“I don’t think we’re ever gonna go hungry ever again,” Grey says dryly.  

“How are your folks?”

“Good — the same. They say hi. How are you?”

“Pretty good,” her dad says vaguely. 

It feels like all Grey ever does is speak to other people in code now, just half-truths because the full truth is currently too hurtful. He feels that there’s nobody left he can be completely honest with anymore. 

Chapter Text

Because it’s their first family dinner in months — the first family dinner since Missandei’s accident, their mom predictably does it all the way up. She makes it big and she makes it a spectacle without really considering how overwhelming it would feel for Missandei to be trotted out to the entire extended family. 

There’s pretty much nowhere to park when they arrive. The driveway is beyond packed. The side yard next to the street is lined with cars. Grey has to drive past the house and circle the block one time, as Missandei stares out the window in horror. 

As the car stops in front of the house — in the middle of the street — he puts his hazard lights on. He’s kind of a bit annoyed and stressed by the situation himself — he’s stressed because Missandei is so unhappy and cranky about this. 

He leaves the car on and unlocks all the doors. He opens the trunk of the SUV to grab Missandei’s walker. From there, he says, “Emmy, you stay here. Maddy, you can get out with your mom. Can you help her into the house while I park?”

“Surre,” Maddy says, all too reluctantly. “What do I do? I just watch Mom in her walker right?”

“Yeah,” Missandei says as she tries to ease herself carefully out of the open door of the passenger side. “Just watch me move slow as heck. And then run for an adult when I fall down on my butt.” She doesn’t feel nowhere near as comfortable swearing in front of the kids as Grey does.

Grey quickly parks the car and just hikes Emmy up in his arms and carries her right up to the house because he doesn’t really have the time for her tiny-ass strides right now. He more or less catches up to Missandei and Maddy by the time they hit the front stoop. Maddy and Emmy gladly look into the throngs of people, when Grey excuses them and tells them they can go play with their cousins after they greet their grandparents and great aunts and great uncles. The girls readily agree before booking it down the hallway. 

The house is hot as hell due to all of the bodies in it — and also Missandei’s parents’ aversion to air conditioning because they think it uses too much electricity. They can’t even take a step before running into someone walking somewhere with a plate of food. They can’t get very far — not really because of Missandei’s walking speed — but mostly because every single relation of hers wants to stop her to have an entire chat about how she feels, how she’s healing, how terrible the accident was, how tragic it is that she lost her memories. A bunch of her uncles and aunts are weird with her — as if they are assuming she doesn’t remember them — until she bluntly cuts in to tell them that she actually still remembers them all. She reminds them that she has known them all since she was a baby, but a few of them still treat her like she is senile. 

They say stuff like, “This is your cousin, Nephanti. He is my son.”

And Missandei has to semi-patiently say stuff like, “Hey, Nephy. Good to see you again. You look older. What are you up to now?”

“Hey, cuz,” Nephy says kindly, smiling widely and giving his dad a little side-eye. “I’m doing good. I’m uh, actually a teacher now. Law school just wasn’t for me.”

“No way! What do you teach?”

“High school math.” Her cousin acknowledges Grey with a nod. “What’s up, Nudho? How are you?”

Grey’s been trying to hang out back to let Missandei deal with all of this herself. He does quickly reach out to bump fists with Nephanti though. He says, “Same ol’ same ol’, man.” 

Once Missandei finally makes it through the gauntlet and gets to the backyard, once she finds her crowd — her sisters-in-law and her female cousins — she settles in and probably accidentally-on-purpose dismisses him right in front of all of them. 

She honestly has been feeling like he’s been crowding her, and it’s been aggravating her on top of her relatives aggravating her. She’s not at all used to walking into her parents house — with a walker — and with a man. She’s used to showing up to this joint all nimble and able to maneuver like a house cat. Nobody used to pay that much attention to her — other than to ask if she was dating anyone and when she was gonna get married already.   

She carefully sits down in between her sisters, with their help, and then she looks up at him and — with a scathing amount of fake cheerfulness — she says, “Okay, well thanks! I appreciate you getting me here in one piece!”

He catches Zoya’s eyes briefly over that — in total happenstance. He ignores all of the pity she is sending his way. He just salutes Missandei again, because that’s probably what butlers do with their masters. And he walks away from them, right about the moment when Safi just blurts out, “Aw, Grey! You’re leaving? You don’t have to leave!”

He spends the entire afternoon and evening trying not to constantly look at his watch. He tries not to do the mental calculation of how much work he could be catching up on right now, if he had the luxury of not being responsible for the constant well-being of three people. He just parks his ass in an empty lawn chair — it happens to be next to her dad and brothers — because they had been saving him the seat — and he starts eating the food put in front of him with robotic enthusiasm. If he can eat his feelings, maybe his feelings will stop being so fucking bitter and achey all the time.

When he gets offered a drink by Moss, he rejects it. He tells them all that he has to drive later, and he’s not going to even mess around with that. 

Her brothers and her uncles reasonably give him a wide berth with alcohol after that. Given what happened to Missandei, nobody is going to insist that he drink.

Missandei continues her general tour of disbelief and anger at the universe, when Zoya and Safi call out to their kids and beckon them to come over to greet their aunt. Missy watches as four really tall, really beautiful, really adult-looking teenagers and young adults stroll up to her. Kaden even has a beard and everything.

Missy sinks her mouth into her hand, propped up against the arm of her patio chair. She says, “Oh my God, you’ve all gotten so big. Oh my God, you all look so cool and photogenic . Oh my God, are you still into airplanes?”

She’s talking to Hassan.  

He’s looking at her in slight confusion. He says, “Airplanes?”

“Nevermind,” she says. “Tell me, how are you all doing? What’s your favorite subject in school? What do you think you’ll be doing when you grow up — you know, a year from now.”

The party condenses down a little bit after the sun goes down, with many of her relatives filtering out because they have things to do in the morning. They end up consolidating — pulling their chairs closer around the fire pit.

Missandei watches out of the corner of her eye as Moss, who has been drinking pretty consistently all day, grabs his wife as she walks by and pulls her into his lap, ostensibly to free up a chair for someone else. Missy pretends like she’s not looking, but she’s kind of looking — as her brother whispers something into Safi’s ear that makes her release a loud peal of laughter.

She actually remembers Safi and Moss struggling a bit in their relationship. She remembers long talks with her sister-in-law and torn loyalties, as Safi confessed that she was not sure if being with one person’s dysfunction forever is what she had signed up for, when she was just a kid. They were high school sweethearts. 

“Nope,” Grey says — seemingly randomly — until she sees him clamp his hand right over Emmy’s messy, marshmallow-smeared mouth. There’s a glowing ball of flames on a stick right in front of her face. “How many times have I told you to not eat fire, dude?” he says in slight exasperation. 

“I wasn’t gonna eat it, Daddy,” Emmy says, from behind his hand. “I was just looking at it!”

“Bro,” Zoya says. “I think the real question is, why are you letting your five-year-old get that close to fire?”

“So she’ll learn,” Grey says, picking up Emmy to put her in his lap, looking serious for a few seconds before he cracks a smile at Zoya.

He was trained by his mother, so at some point, he gives Emmy’s sleeping body to Zoya and lets Zoya cuddle with a little kid again. Everyone probably assumes he’s taking a pee break, but he actually ends up drifting into the kitchen, where her mother is — doing the dishes alone.

She actually professes to prefer it this way and rejects all help, but his own mother has taught him to force his help onto people — in certain situations. 

“Whoa, you’re using the dishwasher,” he comments, as he picks up a towel and reaches over her to wet it underneath the running faucet. 

“People can change and grow, Nudho,” she says smartly, as she loads another plate into the appliance. 

“Evidently,” he says, as he starts to wipe down the kitchen table.

Missandei only notices that Grey is not around and easily findable, when Maddy walks up to them rubbing her eyes tiredly before sleepily leaning on Missandei’s dad’s shoulder. For that, she gets a warm hug. And in response to the hug, she quietly says, “Where’s Daddy?”

She’s kind of directing the question to Missandei — because Missandei is her remaining parent by default. She also continues doing that thing where she avoids having to interact directly with Missandei like she thinks Missandei has the plague, but she doesn’t want to act so obvious about it, in case it’s conspicuous and her grandparents or aunts and uncles talk to her about it make her feel embarrassed and uncomfortable again. 

“I bet he’s hanging out with your grandma right now,” Mars supplies. “What’s up, hon? Is there anything we can help you with?”

“I’m sleepy,” she says softly, leaning into her grandpa. “I just wanna know when we’re gonna go home.”  

Mars is already standing up from his seat. “Hang tight. I’ll go find him for you.”

Missandei’s mom has done quite the about-face since initially meeting Grey. When she first met Grey, it was within the context of her daughter being pregnant and unmarried. He showed up at her house looking entirely younger than he actually was and then proceeded to self-indulgently say whatever he wanted, without regard to her daughter or her family . He told her that, despite their huge life-changing error in judgment — he wasn’t going to take responsibility for it and marry Missandei. He actually told her that they weren’t even together. He had the audacity to tell her that they were just going to be friends who were going to raise a child together. He told her didn’t want to raise the child in their religion because he’s an atheist. 

And then he told her he was going to constantly leave the country for many months at a time and leave her daughter alone to raise their child by herself.

When she first met Grey, she was so angry about it. Because he was a selfish man who took away her daughter’s chance to have a baby and be a first-time parent with someone who completely loves her and is wholly committed to her.

She knows she’s old-fashioned and a bit of a traditionalist. But she is sometimes old-fashioned because she loves her children and she doesn’t want her children to get less than everything they deserve. She wants for her children to be whole in their relationship with their spouses and in their relationships to the gods. 

Before his presence in her daughter’s life, she believed that marriage meant something. Before him, she believed that marriage was very important for the children.

“Are you two still sleeping in separate beds?” she asks Grey, as she digs around under the sink to find the dishwashing detergent.

“Why do you ask things you already know the answer to?” he responds rhetorically, as he continues to wipe down the stove. 

“Sex and intimacy are very important in a relationship, Nudho,” she tells him.

“Mira,” he says, staring at her in mock-horror — in the slow mock-horror of disbelief. 

Honestly though, Missandei’s mother has been inching in this direction for a while now, mostly ever since she tagged along with Missandei’s youngest aunt on her post-divorce Eat, Pray, Love vacation and came to a bunch of revelations about how she had been doing life.

“What?” she says aggressively — in indignation. “I listened to a podcast!”

“You listened to a podcast,” Grey says, repeating it slowly. “What was it about?”

“Female pleasure.”

“Oh my God,” Grey says, as his entire body kind of goes slack and he dips his face toward the stove and starts laughing into his forearm. “So what did you learn — that you want to impart onto me?”

“We have to let go of fear, shame, and guardedness to access greater satisfaction and pleasure,” she says casually. 

“Huh. I mean, I agree with that.”

“You’re so sweet,” she says simply. “You should let her see more of your sweetness.”

They both turn when they hear a light tap on the wall — when they see that Mars has crept on them. Mars is looking most directly at Grey. He’s saying, “Sorry to interrupt your guys’ super weird and cute conversation with each other, but Maddy’s looking for you, man. Ma, you listen to podcasts now?”

“I listen to audiobooks, too. While I garden.”

There was a time when Maddy asked for him and Missandei by equal turns, but ever since Missandei regained consciousness, Maddy has exclusively been seeking comfort from just him. It’s something that feels kind of disconcerting, probably something that is perfectly normal, and something he takes inordinate responsibility for. He makes a beeline for her right away, following Mars. He finds her slouched against Missandei’s dad and talking quietly when he gets to the firepit.

“I heard you’re at zero percent battery life,” Grey says, as he bends down to pick her up. He gives her a kiss on the cheek as she winds her arms around him and rests her head against his shoulder.

She quietly says, “Maybe five percent.”

“So we’ll go home, huh?” he says gently to her. “And we’ll sleep in tomorrow, too.”

“Okay,” she says softly.

As he puts her back down on the ground, he says, “Go say bye to your grandma real quick. I’ll bring the car around.”

And then it occurs to him that he didn’t check in with Missandei at all — because he assumed that she’d be on board with leaving. He looks at sitting by herself in a lawn chair, with her walker directly behind her. “That cool with you? Is it okay for us to leave?”

As she watches him carry both girls up the stairs — instead of asking for her help and carrying them one at a time. Missandei continues to make the observation that she is currently benignly and completely unnecessary to her children’s lives. She is a familiar and comforting source of easy entertainment for Emmy. She is absolutely nothing to Maddy. And she is a source of burden for him.  

He helps her with her bedtime routine with an agonizing put-upon patience. She can feel him countdown the seconds that it takes for her to go from the bathroom to the bedroom. She knows that he still needs to take the dog out to go potty. 

He asks her, “Okay, you good?” after he helps her sit down on the bed. 

She says, “Yeah, I’m good for the rest of the night. Good night.”

She discovers that she apparently no longer gets cramps — because she didn’t even anticipate her period at all. It’s only apparent when she wakes up and senses that something happened overnight.

When she rolls over, there is a tennis-ball-sized bloodstain, from where she had leaked overnight.

It makes her so mad to see this. She is so mad at her traitorous body. She is mad at the string of humiliations she has to continue to endure. She is mad that she’s already such a shitty mother. She is mad that she sucks at kids. She is mad that her entire life imploded and she has nothing left — and her kids still prefer him. She is mad that she has to tell him what happened and then watch him be magnanimously gracious about cleaning her bodily fluids from his expensive-ass sheets. 

She can hear the sound of the girls voices from upstairs — the sound of them chatting and laughing with each other — and she listens to it for long minutes as she continues to just leak blood into the bed — because what else can she even do?

When he finally shows up, he looks kind of alert and fresh and ready for the new day.

She tells him, “I had an accident overnight.”

His face initially looks confused. He says, “Oh, you peed?”

That makes her confused — but she understands how she sounded. 

She flips the top sheet back for him. She reveals herself in her night clothes and also the bright red stain in the middle of the bed. She dully announces, “I got my period.” She also adds, “Sorry.”

“Oh, dude, don’t be sorry,” he says, furrowing his brows. “Um, okay. Will you hang tight? I think your pads and tampons are upstairs. Let me go grab them real quick.”

He can feel her shrinking into herself, as he tries to avoid making her feel more embarrassed about this. He is almost tempted to tell her that it’s really not even a big deal — he’s seen her poop on the table while giving birth to Emmy — and that wasn’t even a big deal either — but he is one hundred percent positive that his attempt at lightening the mood would not be welcomed at all.

He largely responds to her silence with more silence. 

He tries to be quick as he helps her out of her blood-soaked panties — but she groans over the mess of it — over how the blood smears down her thighs and legs as he pulls her underwear off. She looks like she’s about to cry, as the bed gets even more blood on it, as she sits nakedly in the middle of it.  

“It doesn’t matter,” he says quietly to her. “It doesn’t even matter.”

“Okay?” she says, as she starts tearing up. “Can you just like, carry me into the bathroom and put me in the tub?” 

She asks him to shut the door to the bathroom so that she can be alone to clean herself up — but really, she takes a detour and just sinks her face down into her knees and just starts crying over how pathetic she is and how everything just fucking sucks .

It’s the first time she has cried since she regained consciousness. Not crying used to be something she rested her laurels on. She used to secretly tell herself that she is emotionally stronger than what her body went through and the fact that she hasn’t cried for herself is proof of her strength.

Now, she cries because she doesn’t even have the energy to be angry anymore. She doesn’t feel pissed that she is trapped in a life she didn’t ask for. She just feels really sad over it. She just feels a shit ton of grief over it. 

Grey has to clean up the bed the same way that he has to do everything — he has to do it really fast, almost in a rushed panic because he’s liable to get interrupted by a kid at any moment. He strips the sheets off. He finds that the blood soaked through to the mattress. He runs to the laundry room to grab the carpet cleaner, fills it with water, detergent, and the hydrogen peroxide. He plugs it in. And then he’s making a whole lot of ruckus as he turns on the machine and starts pulling the blood out of the pillow top.

“Daddy, what’s going on?”

He glances over at Maddy, who is holding her sister’s hand and standing in the doorway.

“I’m cleaning,” he says simply, giving her a look, trying to tell her that he’ll talk to her later. “Can you guys take Momo out to potty for me, please?”

There’s a big wet spot in the middle of the bed when he carries her from the bathtub back into the bedroom. Fortunately, the wet spot isn’t tinged pink at all.

He sets her down on a towel. And then he’s extracting a maxi pad from its wrapping. He makes quick work of adhering it to her underwear, before he slides her underwear through her legs and up her thighs. And here, she gets a flash of the fact that he’s probably going to see a lot of the blood-soaked maxi pads that she’s going to make put in the waste bin for him over the coming days.

She largely feels completely numb and dead inside at this point. At this point, none of it even matters — just like he said. None of it matters at all.

“What do you wanna wear today?”

“I don’t know,” she tells him. “Why don’t you just pick my outfit for me?”

She doesn’t particularly want to go over to her brother’s house to hang with a bunch of kindergartners and their parents — but she also doesn’t want to be a dick and make her daughter skip out on her bestie’s nameday. 

Five- and six-year-olds, she has discovered, don’t even give a shit that she’s using a walker and will topple over if they slam right into her. 

“Oh my God, there’s a bouncy castle,” Missandei mutters, as she finally eases herself into the backyard.

“This costs too much money,” Grey says, standing beside her, looking around. 

Chapter Text

Over the next week, things start to settle into a bit of a routine. He wakes up before the girls to take the dog on a walk, make their lunches, and help Missandei with the bathroom while having awkward conversations with her. He sees the girls off to school. On Monday and Thursday, he does a little bit of work before he takes Missandei to her physical therapy. On the other days, he holes himself in the home office for a bit, until the afternoon when he makes Missandei’s lunch and helps her with the bathroom again. He generally runs a few errands after that, buying the girls various school supplies, replacing the clothing that they are constantly growing out of, going grocery shopping to buy fresh food to force-feed the girls with. 

The girls get home from school in the afternoon, and he has a snack ready for them as he listens to them tell him about their day. He shows them the school supplies or the new socks he got them and gets blazing hot takes on how he didn’t get the exact thing that they wanted. Missandei makes her way into the living room around the time that he starts preparing dinner — lately, it’s just been heating up a dish and putting together a salad. He eats dinner passively and is hypervigilant over the little subtle ways she avoids interacting with Maddy. He cleans after dinner as Maddy and Emmy play, have a little bit of screen time, watch TV, and generally wind down. About every other day, barring a mess of some sort, then it’s more frequent, he makes sure the girls bathe. Sometimes he has an argument with Emmy over bedtime, because sometimes she is reluctant to leave Missandei to go to bed. He ties the girls' hair up and tells them to just fucking go to sleep already. He takes the dog out to go potty one last time. He helps Missandei with her bedtime routine. He also tries to go the fuck to sleep already.

And then he repeats it all the next day. 

People like his mom and brother — and the former version of Missandei — are often asking him how he feels about things. Presently, he doesn’t feel like he had the luxury of self-examination because presently, he would just like to get them all to the point where Missandei can dependably walk again, he spends more hours on work consistently because it’s unreasonable to expect his business partner to continue covering him indefinitely, Missandei and Maddy have rapport, and he stops constantly searching his daughter’s face for hurt all the time. He thinks that once he can get to that, he will have the spaciousness to examine why he feels so dead inside sometimes.

He knows that this is not what she would’ve wanted for him. He knows that she would want him to pause right now and do the self-examination. She would want him to be better at asking for help. She would want him to be more vulnerable and transparent with his feelings — in front of their children and in front of her. He knows that she would want him to take more emotional chances and not shut himself off just to get through it. 

He silently tells her that the problem is that she’s no longer here to say these things to him. He experimentally tells her that someone who is no longer here can’t have so much influence over his life still. He tells her that, unfortunately, she might’ve been the reason for the best parts of him — and now that she’s gone, so are those parts of him. 

He tells her that while he will love her forever, he doesn’t think he currently likes the younger version of her that much. He might think that the younger version of her is a touch too self-centered and a touch too judgmental and a touch too inflexible. But then, he also has no idea what it feels like to wake up without his memories. 

In actuality, all he has are his memories. All he has are his memories of her and of them and of how their perfect little family used to be. He continues to be constantly haunted by the loss of her. 

She thinks that because the first week was really overwhelming and stressful, the second week is going to be the one where she starts to get her sea legs. 

He does her laundry for her — he does the laundry for the entire house — and he doesn’t put her clothes away or hang them up. Rather, he keeps everything neatly folding in a laundry basket that he props up on a little chair next to the bed, so that it’s easy for her to pick out her own clothes each morning. 

She sees that he has gotten the blood stains out of her underwear pretty well. It’s like the blood was never there. She tries to make herself interpret it all as simple and straightforward — that he is being nice because he thinks about her and he cares — but she can’t but feel like all of his actions are designed to condition her dependence on him. 

She certainly doesn’t intend on being dependent forever. She tries to think positively for fucking once. She makes herself think that she’s making pretty good progress with her body. And she’s making some progress with her new family. She’s pretty okay with Emmy. She’s on her way with Maddy. She’s fine with him. She is even developing a relationship with the dog. They sit on the couch together all the time now. 

“Daddy, if I have to eat leftovers again, I’m going to die,” Emmy declares, as she suddenly collapses right onto the floor.

“That’s adequately dramatic,” Grey says. “We need to eat the food your grandma made because she worked hard on it because she loves us. We don’t want the food to go bad because we didn’t eat it in time. That’s wasteful.”

“What Dad is saying is that we’re gonna eat leftovers, Emmy,” Maddy says, bending down to grab at her sister, dragging her by the shirt across the smooth floor. Emmy has to grab the waistband of her pants, because her sister’s dragging is causing her pants and underwear to peel off. “Come on, let’s go get Momo and play camping with her for a little bit.”

Grey pulls out another glass dish full of vegetables, mushrooms, and tofu. He also pulls out a carton of eggs to see if he can make this feel a little different. 

She is very much looking forward to seeing Daenerys. She is looking forward to spending time with someone who isn’t related to her, who doesn’t see her as a helpless twerp that needs to be counseled and bossed around a lot. She’s excited to talk to her best friend about maybe nothing consequential at all. She’s excited to have a glass of wine on the couch as they gossip and Dany catches her up on the latest happenings of their mutual friends from the last twelve years. 

Missandei honestly just doesn’t anticipate how much her dynamic with Dany has changed with the addition of men and kids.

Dany looks a little ragged, her makeup isn’t that fresh, her hair is tied up in a ponytail, and she’s wearing jeans and flats when she shows up. She does have a bottle of wine though. She does let out a little squeak before she throws her arms around Missandei for a bracing hug.

“Come check out my landscape!” Maddy suddenly exclaims, from behind them.

“Oh my God, have you been winning battles or farming!”

“Wait, I wanna see, too!” 

And then they kind of get slammed into by a kid — Dany’s kid who is a year younger than Maddy — in his haste to go see Maddy’s landscape on the iPad. 

“Jesus!” Drogo immediately shouts, “Rhaego! Apologize!”  

They all hear a vague “Sorry!” as the kids’ pounding footsteps rapidly ascend the stairs. And then Drogo visibly jumps when a door upstairs suddenly slams. He shakes his head over it — and he generally decides to let it go and stops himself from screaming something else at his kid.

“That could’ve been one of mine,” Grey offers, referring to the door slam.

“Okay, sure,” Drogo says sarcastically, as he opens up his arms and grabs Grey. “Hey, sexy,” he says in a low growl, switching his tone from sarcastic to way familiar, hugging Grey tightly, trying to crack Grey’s back. “Thanks for inviting us over. We’ve been excited to see you guys all week. God, you smell really good and clean. You feel so strong and like heaven in my arms.”

“Yeah,” Dany dryly says to Missandei. “I am realizing I forgot to prime you for this.”

“Jealous,” Drogo says, as he breaks the hug and transfers his arm over Grey’s shoulders. “What’s for dinner?”

“Leftovers. You’re gonna help us finish it off.” 

“Aw, baby,” Drogo says, lightly stroking Grey’s cheek with his fingers. “You shouldn’t have.” 

Missandei sees that Dany certainly did not prime her for the Grey and Drogo show. Dany did not prime her for how loud and how oppressively dominating her husband is — how he takes over the entire conversation and pretty much doesn’t let anyone else speak or bring up anything that he’s not interested in talking about.

So far, Missandei has surmised that Dany’s husband is really into sports and cars, two things that Missy has pretty low interest in. Even if she was interested, Drogo seems to have forgotten that she lost over a decade from her brain. She definitely doesn’t know any of the current stats of football players, and she certainly isn’t able to follow along as he and Grey talk about football in maddeningly dull detail.  

She still can’t believe her friend married this guy. It’s like Dany just decided to marry for hotness and not substance. 

She can believe that Grey and Dany’s husband are best friends, though. She can easily see how they can spend hours together, chatting about other men of color like they are beasts in stadium games, about all the things that they want to buy, about getting swole at the gym, and also about how they like sticking their dicks into women’s faces. 

She still can’t believe she had children with Dany’s husband’s best friend.

Hanging out with Daenerys used to be a lot different. They used to do brunch together and share a pitcher of mimosa. Dany used to get a little drunk and belligerent with a nearby patron — usually a man — because he shushes her for being too loud. She and Dany also used to grab happy hour drinks after work. They used to spend so many hours chatting about their coworkers and their bosses and the next steps in their careers and what their aspirations were that happy hour bled into dinner — and then they’d have a fancy lady dinner together, sharing small plates and taking photos of their food. 

Now, having dinner involves the chaos of children, who are constantly shout-talking across the table with each other, who are hyper focused on their game and what they are going to do to advance Maddy’s landscape, once they are done racing to cram food into their mouths, to the satisfaction of their parents. 

“Do you wanna finish this last bite?” Grey asks Emmy, as he catches the wad of tofu that she just spits into his hand. 

“Nope!” she says.

“Okay,” as he deposits her chewed up food into a napkin. 

“Dad, my plate is clean,” Maddy says to Grey, flipping her plate up to prove it to him. “Can we be excused?”

“Mine, too, Daddy!” Emmy says, as Maddy reaches over to wipe some smeared mashed potatoes off of her sister’s mouth.  

“You ate for like, five minutes,” Grey says.

Sitting next to him, Drogo laughs. He says, “Yeah, get outta here! Go on and go back to doing . . . whatever it is you are doing.”

“Oh man, thanks, Dad!”

“Yeah! Thanks, Uncle Drogo!”

“Okay, well bring your plates to the sink,” Grey says, as he watches Maddy pick up both her plate and her sister’s, as he watches Rhaego mimic Maddy with a manic concentration that Drogo has jokingly told him Rhaego is incapable of. 

In her initial disbelief over him, because her family couldn’t give her much more than vague answers, she had asked Dany how she met him. Sitting next to her hospital bed, Dany had told her that she and Grey met at Drogo’s nameday party, in Drogo’s former apartment in the old quarter. Dany actually did the introductions. They shook hands and started talking. And they ended up liking each other quite a bit, enough to make out and then leave together to have sex. And that was the start of that.

It’s something that Missandei can’t imagine at all. She can’t imagine kissing someone she just met at a party — it seems wildly out of character because she’s generally really cautious with this kind of thing. She also can’t imagine having sex with someone the same night that she meets them, because she is scared to death of sexually transmitted infections and there’s generally nobody she’s been close to being immediately attracted to like that. She is also sex positive on paper, but kind of a prude in practice. Her prudishness is a byproduct of her upbringing.

“So how do you two know each other?” she asks Grey and Drogo, in the shortest of pauses when they are not completely dominating the conversation.

“Oh us?” Drogo asks her, even though her question was super obvious, gesturing between himself and Grey. “We met while on deployment almost two decades ago?” He’s checking with Grey for confirmation. Grey nods. “In Yunkai.”   

“Oh, you were both in the military,” Missandei says, raising her brows up in surprise.

“Yeah,” Drogo says bluntly. “I joined right out of high school. I was his CO at first. It was fun bossing him around for a while.” He pauses. “It feels odd to be explaining this to you.”

“And you enjoyed . . . being in the military?” Missandei asks, trying to be polite.

Drogo grins at her. He says, “It had its pros and cons. It gave me a lot of discipline. I was kind of a wild kid, always getting into some trouble, going nowhere with my life fast. The military kinda made me a productive member of society. It also paid for college. I couldn’t afford it otherwise.”

“And you,” Missandei says, directing the comment to Grey. “Why did you join? It certainly wasn’t to pay for college. Your dad’s a doctor.”

There’s a lengthy pause in response to that — maybe because her assumption and general accusation is catching him off guard. 

“I guess I enlisted because my dad’s a doctor,” he finally says, keeping his voice even and neutral. 

“What does that mean?” she asks. “Was it some sort of rebellion then? Like, a rejection of the silver spoon?”

“His dad was an army medic,” Drogo supplies, staring at her closely now — as if understanding something new about her.

“Interesting,” she says, waving her hand — because these details are inexplicably stingy. “So it was a family business, then?” She doesn’t connect that her way of delivering the questions is what is driving the stinginess. “My brothers and dad are cops — or I guess my dad was a cop,” she continues. “He’s retired now. That’s my family’s business.”

“Okay,” Drogo says, plainly — now looking at her with a little bit of skepticism. “We know.”

She smiles — just for show — at that. And then she says, “Don’t you think we’re spending way too much on militarization? I mean, we’re the most armed country in the world.”

Drogo looks surprised by this — not that she holds this opinion — that part, he knows . He is surprised that she is bringing it up in this way, like she’s itching to fight. 

It gives him some additional insight on what Grey’s been going through and Grey’s occasional late-night vent sessions with him. 

Drogo quickly scans his eyes over to his wife, who looks predictably very blank. Then he clears his throat. “That’s just not true,” Drogo says lightly. He’s thinking that he’s not sure what citizen’s access to guns has to do with the military.

Missandei is pretty fucking sure it’s true, based on what she’s been reading.

“We’re actually not the most armed,” Grey calmly interjects. “We’re the second most armed. The Basilisk Isles are the most. That’s because there’s a military base in the Isles, skewing the per capita rate of guns per people.”

Missandei finds this correction incredibly pedantic and annoying as shit and so very fucking typical of someone like him .

“So I guess you’re pretty cool with the excessive militarized presence of Western armies in the East, huh Drogo?” she says.

“Dude,” Grey blurts, automatically reaching out and almost touching her — it’s a habit. He used to touch her whenever she was on the verge of starting, continuing, or extending an insane argument with Drogo, who is always less invested than her in arguing, who likes to treat the things she cares about as fun little thought experiments. 

He stops himself before he touches her.

But she notices — and she glares at him anyway. For having the nerve to try and shut her up and get her to stop challenging his stupid meathead of a fucking boy. 

“In Slaver’s Bay, you mean?” Drogo clarifies, eye glinting. “I mean, I’d say I think that it’s really easy to pull out punchy critical sound bytes at parties to sound woke when you’ve never been on the ground and you haven’t seen what we’ve seen and how people are living over there.”

“D, come on,” Grey mutters, straightening up suddenly in his seat. “Uh, Daenerys.” He looks at Dany, who is just sitting there doing a shit ton of nothing.

“They’re adults, Grey.”

“I thought what I remembered was pretty bad,” Missandei says conversationally. “But imagine waking up one day, twelve years in the future, reading the news, and seeing that things have gotten even worse, in ways you didn’t even think were possible.”

“Yeah, that sounds like it kinda sucks,” Drogo says flippantly. 

And that catches her off-guard. She stares at him incredulously. 

“See!” Drogo suddenly explodes, laughing loudly. “We didn’t have a fight!” he announces to Grey, before he roughly slaps Grey right in the back, making Grey shoot forward a little bit, in his chair. “And you were so worried, but it’s fine! Me and Missy can still agree to disagree!” 

Missy just has to put on a happy face after that and act like everything is totally fine and normal, as if Dany didn’t marry a man who is kind of unhinged, as if Missandei didn’t have babies with that man’s best-friend-forever. Missy just quietly sits there as everyone else also acts like everything is normal. 

Drogo calls the kids down for fire pit time. He throws open the doors to the backyard and he rips open a package of marshmallows. He and Grey briefly bicker over that, because Grey thinks that roasting corn would be just as fun. And then there’s just a lot of shouting and screaming as the kids excitedly call dibs on certain seats, because nobody knows how to speak at a comfortable volume.

Drogo — that psycho — winks winningly at Missandei as she sits on the couch with Dany. And he tells them to have some good girl talk. 

She seriously wants to repeatedly throw her fist in his face. Men like this have historically been the type of men she hates. She hates that they steal all of the air in the room. She hates that they spotlight only themselves and their limited worldview. She hates that they minimize those around them. She hates the condescending way he said girl talk. She hates that he called his grownass wife a girl. She kind of hates what Dany has become and what Dany now allows.

After Grey and Drogo go out the backdoor with the kids, leaving it slightly ajar for the breeze, Dany scoots closer to Missandei and leans forward to briefly squeeze Missandei’s foot. She lowers her voice substantially — something Missy notes is a new thing about Dany, gossip-y Mom voice — and Dany asks Missandei how things have been — like, for real.

Missandei doesn’t even know where to start, whether she should tell Dany about how she’s been discouraged with her body and she doesn’t think she’ll be able to trot or even walk at a brisk pace ever again. She doesn’t know if there’s a point to further fixate on what she has lost — her remaining youthfulness, her independence, her own life selfishly belonging just to her versus a life selflessly being completely devoted to others. She doesn’t know if she should tell Dany that she’s really bad at being a mother, and she is really pessimistic about whether she will ever get better at it. She doesn’t think she’s going to improve at all. She’s honestly not even sure she wants to improve. She’s been conflicted about what she thinks she should be doing — how she should be duty-fulfilling — versus what she wants for herself. She really worries that she’s going to become one of those women that gets judged, the woman who eventually abandons her entire family and crushes her children because she wakes up one day and decides that she’s had enough, that none of this was what she wanted for her life at all.

Missandei is too ashamed to admit this out loud, so instead she focuses on something that is easy for her to talk about. She focuses on low-hanging fruit. She talks about how a man is annoying her.

She says, “Things are going alright. It’s a lot to take in. The kids are really cute and sweet. He’s been good at getting me out of bed and to PT and stuff. I appreciate that. He seems like a nice guy.”

“Oh good,” Dany says casually, as she swirls her wine glass around. “So it sounds like you’re coming around on him.”

“I mean, I guess,” Missandei says skeptically. “I mean, I still barely know him.”

“But you’re getting to know him? And that’s been going well?”

The optimism in Dany’s voice irks her. “It’s been fine,” Missy says. “He’s not . . . super talkative. And when he does say things, he’s mostly talking about the kids — or about stuff that needs to get done.”

“What are you expecting?” Dany asks curiously. “That all sounds normal.”

“I don’t know,” Missy says. “It’s just all kind of a lot of bland small-talk. He never talks about himself. Like, I didn’t even know he was in the military.” 

Dany raises a brow. “Did you ask him?”

Missandei is a little perturbed now. “How would I know to ask him if he was in the military? Why would it be on me to randomly ask him, ‘Oh, have you killed people in the name of nationalism?’ Why would it be on me to randomly be like, ‘Do you love to internalize white supremacy, or what?’”

Dany levels a stare at her. And generally says nothing.

“Why is everyone so in love with this guy anyway?” Missandei mutters rhetorically, now clearly also feeling judged by Dany, as if Dany wasn’t at the dinner table watching this shit go down with her and the men at the freaking table. “Y’all just think that dude is the greatest.”

“You yourself were actually also ‘so in love’ with him, not that long ago,” Dany says mildly, kind of getting irritated with this conversation.

This really annoys Missy. She rolls her eyes. She says, “Yeah, well, I’m not in love with him now. I seriously don’t get it. He’s not even close to being my type or someone I’d be interested in at all if I just randomly met him today — if we didn’t already have kids together. He’s like, a Summer Islander. He’s pretentious and kinda boring and humorless and overly serious. Like, what even happened to me over the years, like who did I even become? Shacking up with some country club dudebro who likes to ensure Western imperialism remains the leader of the free world. I don’t know how I became a person who is shacked up with a guy who loves gated communities so much.” 

She’s actually severely disappointed by what she has discovered about herself. But it is coming out as harsh criticism on him.

“You guys don’t even live in a gated community,” Dany says blandly, as she suddenly gets up from the sofa — to stop this conversation that she is not enjoying — and also to refill her glass of wine. “However, I understand that I do. Do you actually have something you’ve been wanting to say to me?”

“Dany,” Missandei says, sighing. “You’ve always been materialistic. So I’m not surprised you became even richer in the last twelve years.”

“How dare you,” Dany says, with absolutely no heat, as she refills her glass of wine. And then she shakes her head at Missandei in exasperation. “Missandei, you do get that people aren’t static and people change over time, right? You’re absolutely terrible right now, but I’m cutting you slack because I understand you’re still in shock.”

“Well, I’m glad our dynamic hasn’t changed that much.”

“Yeah,” Dany says, raising a glass to her. “I’m still great at putting up with your passive-aggressive judgmental ass.” She sips from her refreshed glass of wine. She says, “I honestly forgot how much nuance you lacked when you were younger. I forgot how excessively principled you were.”

“Are we about to have a fight?” Missy asks warily.

“We actually aren’t,” Dany says. “I’m just telling you the truth about yourself, which is what you’ve been asking from me. I love you very much. I know shit is enormously difficult in ways I can't even understand. I’m just so glad you’re here and you’re alive enough to be the most monstrous bitch. So I don’t care. Say anything you want to me. I am just glad you are here to be like this.” 

They figure out pretty easily that, somehow, they were overheard in their conversation. When Drogo, Grey, and the kids filter back into the house, it’s really clear to Missandei that they overheard her conversation with Dany. 

And it’s not Grey or Drogo who reveals to her that they heard — Grey and Drogo are actually revealing nothing, as they chat with the kids, clean up the s’mores ingredients, and start packing a few leftovers for Drogo and Dany to take home.

It’s even worse than that. Missandei feels sick when she realizes that she was overheard because she catches Maddy glaring at the ground — and avoiding any eye contact with her. And trying not to cry. And generally just ignoring Missandei’s entire existence. 

Chapter Text

Missy used to think that stuff in their household was awkward back when she thought she was merely trapped in a house playing wife with a stranger and their two cute kids and dog — but she finds that she was naive and they hadn’t even skimmed the edge of awkward. Awkward is actually Emmy obliviously rambling on about how she was bitten by mosquitoes even though her dad told her that the smoke from the fire will stop the bugs from getting her — as everyone else carefully navigates around really thick tension. Awkward is actually Emmy thrusting her arm at Missandei and saying, “I’m sooo itchy, Mommy!”

Awkward is Missandei being unsure of what to do — and it’s obvious that she doesn’t know what to do — but then on top of that, all of them hear Maddy say, “You need the anti-itch lotion, Em. Daddy will get it for us later. Mom can’t help you.” 

It makes Missandei internally wince so hard. She tries to smooth it over — for Emmy’s sake. To Emmy, she says, “Maybe once your Daddy gets the lotion, I can apply it on for you?”

“Mom doesn’t remember how to take care of you, Emmy,” Maddy says, voice hard and devoid of emotion. “You’re better off with Dad.”

This confuses Emmy, because despite their pretty consistent clashing — usually spurred on by Maddy’s annoyance with Emmy — Emmy remains a steadfast fan of her big sister. This is why she is sometimes so annoying to Maddy. She very much wants to be like her big sister. She listens to Maddy pretty well. Emmy’s face turns up at Missandei — reflecting her sudden alarm. She says, “You don’t know how to take care of me?” 

“Of course she does,” Grey cuts in softly. “Madilah, will you help me with the dishes?”

Unsurprisingly, Missy doesn’t get that much sympathy from Dany when they gather at the front door, ready to leave. Dany has never been warm and fuzzy. Dany also has never been one for self-pity. Also, Missy can feel that Dany thinks she deserves this — at least a little bit.

“Call me later,” Dany commands, as she wraps her arms around Missandei. 

Missy ends up giving Rhaego a bit of a handshake goodbye — which he finds really weird and isn’t sure what to make of it. He glances at his mom and dad as he shakes his Aunt Missandei’s hand. They usually hug goodbye. But his dad gives him a look — like a just-go-with-it look.

“Okay, well, I had a lovely time,” Drogo cheerfully says to Missandei, when it’s his turn to say goodbye to her. He throws his arm around her shoulder and shakes her enthusiastically. “Great to see ya. Thanks for having us over. Let’s get together again soon.” 

“Sure,” she says vaguely, not even sure what to make of this man.

After Drogo and Dany leaves, Missy just has to stew in it and sit in it. Because Grey is still washing dishes and loading the dishwasher, she is a bit stuck on the couch with Emmy. Maddy is Grey’s little shadow, almost as if Maddy is wary of leaving her dad alone with a mean, cold-hearted bitch. 

When Grey asks Maddy to take the dog out for one last potty and then to take her sister upstairs to get ready for bed, she clearly hesitates.

And he gently says, “It’s okay. Go on. I’ll be up soon, after I finish up down here with Mom.”

She feels pretty terrible as he helps her with the toilet and then leaves her there for a little bit to pee as he goes back out into the kitchen to keep cleaning. She also feels like she doesn’t want to acknowledge this at all. She feels like she wants to just hide and pretend this didn’t happen, until everyone else forgets about it, too. 

He lets her get away with it. He faithfully comes back in to help pull her off the toilet, just like he promised he would. He maneuvers her walker behind her so that she has easy access to it after she finishes washing her face and brushing her teeth. He leaves her alone to do that too. 

After she’s done with that, after he helps ease her back on the bed, he asks her if she needs help changing out of her clothes. And she kind of wants to cry over it, because she’s pretty aware that he just wants to finish his responsibility to her so that he can go upstairs to the kids. 

So she tells him that she’s all good and she wants to sleep in her current clothes.

He looks at her skeptically over that, but he doesn’t challenge her.

He crawls into bed, in between Maddy and Emmy because he’s always the middle. He’s the middle so that they don’t randomly punch each other in their sleep and start some kind of half-conscious insane sleep-fight with each other. Instead, they sometimes randomly punch and kick him in their sleep, and he absorbs all of their body heat and sweat and drool. And it’s actually great. He actually loves being in the middle of his girls.

“Daddy,” Maddy says softly, revealing to him she’s still awake. 

“Yeah, baby?”

“You’re not boring and pretentious,” she says firmly.

That makes him laugh silently, in the dark. “But a little overly serious and humorless, yes?” he responds back to her, as he reaches his hand up to brush his fingers at her face. He quickly presses a kiss against the side of her head. He also says, “Forgive her. She only just got back. It’s been hard for everyone.”

“She doesn’t remember us,” Maddy whispers. “She’s never going to remember us.”   

“I think she might,” Grey says. “Like, maybe deep down — in her subconscious.” 

“She’s so different,” Maddy continues. “She doesn’t sound the same. She doesn’t look the same. She doesn’t act the same at all. She doesn’t know how to talk to me.”

“Yeah, I know,” Grey admits quietly, because he has evidently decided that constantly denying his kid her really fucking astute truth-saying is probably okay in the short term but likely really bad in the long term. “But try to also look at it from her perspective. She got really hurt — like, really really hurt. And we are so lucky we still have her. It’s really hard for her, too — to not remember us. So when she doesn’t know how to talk to you, maybe you can work a little bit harder — and make the effort to try and talk with her.” He sighs. “I know I’m constantly asking you to work harder and to do more. I’m sorry. It’s because I think you are so great and capable of it. She was venting to your aunt, Mad. She didn’t mean for us to hear her.”

Maddy can’t say out loud, how it felt to her to hear her mom say that her mom no longer loves her dad. Her voice feels gone when she even thinks about articulating something so terrible out loud. She just starts crying whenever she thinks about it too hard. 

“But that means that’s how she really feels,” Maddy says pointedly, as she tries to secretly wipe at the tears in her eyes. She doesn’t want her dad to know she is crying. “I don’t know why I have to work even harder with her. She’s the grownup, not me. She’s the mom. Isn’t that what you’re always telling me? Grownups have more responsibility than kids? She’s been pretending with us, Dad. She’s a liar. And she’s so fake.”

“Okay,” he says, sighing. “Seriously, cut your mom some slack. Don’t call her fake. Or a liar. She’s still your mom. And you’re right. I’m sorry. She is the adult. You are our kid. I will talk to her about this tomorrow. And baby, please try and remember. She has to pretend. Because she doesn’t remember anything.” He pauses, before leaning over again to give her another kiss. He knows she’s been crying. He’s just ignoring it because she wants him to. “Look, I love you so much. I know you are being protective of me. It’s so sweet. I appreciate it a lot. But you don’t need to protect me from your mother. I mean, she’s so weak and frail right now. I could totally knock her ass to the ground if I wanted to.”

At that, Maddy chokes out a short, soft, and surprised laugh.

“You know what pretentious means?”

“It means being a bougie ass bitch.”

“Oh shit,” he says. “So you do know what pretentious means.”

He finds that this already stressful situation is made all the more stressful because he and Missandei are now so opaque to each other. It used to be that the kids would do something or say something — and he and Missandei would automatically look at each other and already know what the other was thinking. He and Missandei have been in the trenches together with their kids, from the very beginning of their kids’ existence, that so many things had become second nature to them — the division of labor, the approaches to discipline, the far-reaching parenting philosophies they were occasionally unsuccessful at perfectly embodying but constantly tried to go for and kept each other accountable to. 

He now finds himself incredibly anxious over something that is a fairly straightforward and simple problem — because he has no idea what his partner is thinking and no idea how she is going to behave and what she is going to say.

Maddy is clearly still pretty furious at Missandei. Much like him, Maddy will hold the feelings in and be quiet for a while. And much like him, after Maddy has enough time to process, she will gradually warm up and start engaging again. 

When Maddy was still a baby, in between the long days of pure exhaustion and joy — because he and Missandei were still learning about each other and getting to know one another — they would pass the time by exchanging stories about their respective childhoods and cautiously expressed these secret hopes that they had for Maddy that might be different from what they got. A commonality they found out about each other quickly was that they both felt they weren’t listened to enough and were told what to do and how to behave a lot when they were young. They both seamlessly agreed — and practiced it over time — to try and give their kids more time and more space. Maddy is sensitive and her feelings sink in deep — she is like both of her parents in this respect — so they usually leave Maddy to it and don’t try to force communication and engagement right away. 

Grey thinks the way Missandei is currently pushing artificial cheer and normalcy into this morning is not it. He thinks it’s not the way. But he and Missandei also have a general rule of never undermining or correcting one another in front of the kids. 

“I really like your outfit today!” Missandei says to Emmy, reaching out to squeeze her arm. “Did you pick that out yourself?”

Emmy automatically reaches down to touch her dino shirt, stretching it so she can look at the decal. “Daddy says Mondays are for the dinosaurs.”

“Well, I’d say your daddy has good taste.”

Maddy snorts at that moment, in an semi-ambiguous way that can also be read as pretty sarcastic. She crams another apple slice into her mouth and crunches on it noisily at the kitchen counter. She tries to make eye contact with him, probably to team up and be all like, can you believe this RN, DAD?

But he’s not really having that. He’s not going to bond with his child over her passive-aggressiveness with her mother. He avoids the eye contact. He just continues packing Emmy’s backpack for her, because he doesn’t have the energy to make her unpreparedness for kindergarten into a teachable moment.  

He gets a text from Cami’s mom, giving him a five-minute heads up. He tells the girls that they need to get their stuff and go wait in the driveway for Ms. Jhotu and Cami.

He holds out their backpacks for them. He says, “Okay, come give us a hug and kiss goodbye real quick.” 

It comes out of his mouth on autopilot, before he even has a chance to think about it.

It’s easy with Emmy. She’s already with Missandei, so she throws her arms around Missandei and starts grunting out some syncopated groans and hops around in place as she quickly says, “I love you, Mommyyyy!” And then she makes a sudden break for it and sprints right to him, before she leaps.

He catches her easily, laughing over it because she makes it so easy for him to laugh. He squeezes her tightly and spins her around one time.

And after he puts Emmy down, Maddy walks up to him and raises her arms up, because she also wants to be picked up for a little bit.

“Oh, baby,” he says, as he generally melts over it and lifts her up. “Thanks for putting your dish away. Thanks for taking your sister to school for me. You’re the best.”

“I love you, Dad,” she says quietly.

“Love you, too,” he whispers to her.

And after he puts her back down, Missandei — standing a little ways behind them with the aid of her walker — says, “Have a good day at school, Maddy.”

Maddy stiffens. She doesn’t respond. She just lets a few seconds tick by before she spins on her heels, grabs her sister’s hand, and says, “C’mon, Emmy. Cami and her mom are probably waiting for us. Time to go to school.” 

It makes him internally wince.

Missy is kind of disappointed but is not all that surprised that he is okay with their kid leveling up on the silent treatment. She is also not surprised that he continues to be Perfect Beloved Dad who can scream his frustrations out on the kids but will be forgiven real fast. She is not surprised that she gets to be Shitty Mom whose big offense was that she was caught expressing negative opinions about Perfect Beloved Dad — whose other offenses are that she almost died, has brain damage, can’t walk worth shit, and isn’t the way she used to be anymore. 

She knows she shouldn’t have been so stupidly indiscreet, but she really wasn’t the one that left the door open. How could she be when she can’t walk by herself? She knows she expressed her feelings and opinions in an indelicate way, and she regrets she was overheard, but she does not regret what she said. She regrets the impact it has on Maddy, but she does not regret that she expressed her frustrations. 

She doesn’t remember raising her girls, but she has a hard time imagining that she changed so much that she became a person that would teach her girls to hold negative feelings in, rather than truthfully express something that might be hard to hear. 

She slowly shuffles her way to him with her walker, to where he is feeding the dog in the laundry room. She tries to sound neutral as she says, “So I see Maddy’s still my biggest fan.”

“You get used to it,” he mutters as he puts a clean dog bowl with fresh water on the ground next to Momo, who is scarfing down her food bowl. “You will get used to our daughter’s ongoing disappointment in us soon enough, Missandei.”

“Grey,” she says. And then she pauses, kind of unsure how to broach the subject.

“Missandei,” he says expectantly in response.

“About last night.”

“Okay, I’m glad you brought this up,” he says, sighing, leaning back against the utility sink. “I wanted to talk to you about it, too. It was an unfortunate situation. I tried to pull her further away from the door when we figured out that we could hear you guys talking. But, clearly, she heard some stuff, and that’s a bummer.”

She nods. “I totally didn’t mean for you guys to hear any of that.”

“Yeah, I know,” he says. “I talked to her a little bit last night, but it seems she’s still a bit upset over it. Maybe we can both sit her down after school, reassure her a little.”

His statement makes her pause, because she actually didn’t expect for the conversation to go in this direction. She had intended to just acknowledge what had happened and get it out in the open to clear the air with him, since she’s living with him. She was just planning on expressing that the situation was unfortunate. 

She didn’t expect for him to make this into a bigger deal than it is. She just didn’t anticipate he was going to want her to take it back in front of their daughter.

“Reassure her of what exactly?” Missandei asks warily. “I’m not going to lie to her.”

He looks at her in surprise, because these days he’s constantly confused by the attitude she randomly pushes at him, when he thinks he’s being totally normal. He says, “Uh, I’m not advocating for you to lie to our kid. But you can maybe try to explain to her that maybe what came across wasn’t exactly what you meant?”

“Um, but I meant what I said,” she says boldly. “It was a private conversation. What I didn’t mean was for it to be overheard.”

“Okay, I get that, Missandei,” Grey says, feeling his own frustration growing. “You didn’t intend for our kid to hear you talking about me. But she did. And she’s upset about it. She’s prone to being anxious. I don’t want her to hold this in her head, you know?”

Whether or not he realizes it, he sounds condescending to her. It sounds like how it always sounds — with her not knowing something about their children and him bluntly making it super clear to her that he knows everything about their children. He knows so much about their children and she’s never going to catch up. He will always be a greater authority on their kids over her.  

“Okay,” she says tightly, quietly. “Fine. What do you want me to say to Maddy when she gets home from school?”

“Um, that’s not really how we do this,” he says. 

“How do we usually do things?” she asks. “I obviously don’t know. Do we plan something out together?”

“Not really,” he says. “We just generally wing it in the moment.”

“We wing it in the moment,” she says slowly, reflexively tightening her grip on her walker. “But what if I say something you don’t agree with — or you say something I don’t agree with?”

“That’s typically not something that happens,” he says. 

“So we just magically agreed on everything?” she says skeptically.

“No,” he says. “Of course we don’t agree on everything. But we don’t typically have the kinds of conversations with our kids where we like, lay down definitive statements to the point where we need to coordinate with each other.”

“Okay?” she says, starting to get real impatient now. “Dude, you do understand that I’m new here, and I don’t know how you prefer for us to parent our kids, right?”

Sometimes, he honestly just doesn’t understand this version of her at all. He doesn’t understand why she hates everything he does and says so much. He doesn’t get why she gets so mad when he has been doing everything for the household and their family and she has been occasionally playing with Emmy and getting bored in the middle of playing with Emmy. He doesn’t understand why she is acting like she disagrees with the completely reasonable way that they co-parent together.

All he freaking said was that he doesn’t think he should feed her script for what to say to their daughter. All he freaking tried to suggest was for her to speak her truth honestly and directly to their daughter, while also considering age-appropriateness. All he is freaking asking her is for her to have a real talk with their daughter for a few minutes, instead of throwing out random statements and questions every now and then.

He looks at her incredulously. “It’s really not about what I prefer,” he says.

“Dude, you were the one who told me we need to talk to Maddy together. And I was like, ‘Sure, okay. What should we say?’ And then you get all annoyed with me because I don’t have a clue what I’m doing — on account of never having done this before.” 

“Technically, you have done this before — a lot,” he says, his voice getting louder. “You actually just don’t remember. And actually, I did give you a suggestion on what you could say to her, but you weren’t into my suggestion.”

“Dude,” she says, getting equally frustrated. “You have a real habit of correcting me on the smallest and stupidest technicalities. You knew what I meant when I said I haven’t done this before, dude!”

“Yeah, I did know what you meant,” he says, now transparently ticked off because he can’t believe a person can be so self-centered. “I corrected you because you keep acting like you just landed here and life started again right where your memory resetted itself. But in actuality, that’s just your experience. For Maddy and Emmy, you actually aren’t new here. To Maddy and Emmy, you’ve been doing this shit for their entire lives.”

“Yeah, but y’all need to remember that I don’t remember and give me a freaking break, oh my God!” she shouts. “Just give me a chance to figure this stuff out before punishing me for not being the exact person you all want me to be!”

He stares at her, kind of speechless for a moment. And even though he knows exactly what she’s talking about, he still asks, “What are you talking about?”

“Uh, dude, duh,” Missy says bluntly. “She completely ignores me. She barely acknowledges me when I try and talk to her. She rejects every single fucking gesture I make. And you totally let her get away with it. You totally let her get away with disrespecting me! Because you love being the perfect dad.” 

“Oh my God!” he shouts, throwing his head back so that he’s shouting at the ceiling and not directly at her freaking face, finally letting the full force of his frustration and his derision slip out. “She’s a fucking eight-year-old! They do shit like this! Get over it.” He’s shaking his head and pulling his gaze back down to focus on the wall behind her face. “You’re her mother, Missandei. It doesn’t matter if she’s hiding from you or being a snot or saying things you don’t want her to say. Get over it. And be her mother.”

“It’s my third week —”

“Oh my God, stop saying that!” he says, yelling again — this time directly at her. “It’s actually not your third week! To her, this is your eighth year! We’ve been living in this shit for a long time now. I know you’re pissed about shit — but guess what, so are we! Fucking deal with it because you’re an adult, and they are your children. You have not been trying hard enough! You just haven’t because you are wallowing. But guess what else? You no longer have the luxury of wallowing. You need to be in this one hundred. I’m so over your self-pity and your low effort with the kids.”

“Low effort,” she repeats in complete disgust.

“I’m so sick of you acting like we’re your prison,” he continues. “I’m so sick of you acting like you don’t want to be here and we’re keeping you from a better life.”  

“Oh, are you?” Missandei says sarcastically, mockingly. “Are you over it? Yeah, your life is really hard. Because you were also in a horrific car accident. You also can’t walk. Or take a shit by yourself! Or remember things! Yeah, you are right! We are totally in the same boat!”

“That’s not what I meant.” 

“Sorry I’m a shitty mother!” she shouts back at him, clapping her hands together. “Sorry I’m not as great at this as you are.” She shakes her head. “You are so sanctimonious. You just want me to take over with the kids again because you had to be their primary caregiver for the first time in ever — for just a few months as I laid in a hospital trying not to die. And you are clearly tired of doing the hard work of taking care of our kids, so you’re trying to shove this work back onto me by shaming me into it. Because that’s what you do. It’s fucked up. I can’t even walk right now, dude. Like, give me a fucking minute.”

“Okay,” he says dully. “This has gotten way out of hand and unproductive. We don’t talk to each other this way.”

He actually means that they try not to get crazy petty like this with each other because they don’t want to model it for the kids. He says it impulsively, because he’s really activated and upset and not thinking about how his words are coming across. He’s actually intending to de-escalate this.

However, she takes his statement to mean that he wants her to shut up already, that he is policing her feelings and thoughts and he’s telling her what she can and can’t say out loud. It’s the very fucking worse thing. It’s the thing that she hates the most. 

“I have no idea what I saw in you,” she tells him bitterly. “I have no idea why I had children with you. I fucking wish I hadn’t. I have meant everything I’ve ever said about you.”  

It’s probably one of the worst and most hurtful things she can say to him. She clearly means to make him feel terrible with her words. And he’s feeling like she is certainly accomplishing that. 

He honestly doesn’t even know what the fuck is even happening right now. 

For a brief and insane moment, he considers saying all sorts of hurtful shit right back to her. He considers joining her right the fuck in the gutter. 

But he honestly just doesn’t have the heart for it. He just feels really, really sad again. 

“Do you need to pee?” he asks — calmly and quietly. “Because I’m gonna leave the house for a few hours. Is it okay if you’re alone for that time? I’ll be back before the kids come home from school. I’m not going far, and I’m taking my phone with me. Do you want me to take the dog with me?”  

Chapter Text

She angrily lets herself feel humiliation again, as she lets him help her with the toilet before he leaves. She tries to pee real quickly, so that he can just go already, so that she can just cry alone and in private. 

He leaves her in the guest room with the dog, with a quiet reiteration — that he’s not going far and she can call him if she needs him to come back for something. She responds to that with silence, because she doesn’t know what else she has left to say to him.

He takes the stairs two steps at a time after he leaves her. He goes into their bedroom and gets hit with the sudden reminder that things used to be far different from how they currently are.

He currently can’t stand existing in between all of her stuff, so he rushes into the closet, takes off his clothes, puts on other clothes, and jams his feet into his shoes. He’s going to do something that he hasn’t done in a pretty long time — since before she almost died — he’s going for a run.

She cries, right on cue, as she hears the front door to the house shut. All of this grief flows out of her, as she inexplicably feels so bad for standing up for herself. She feels bad for what she said to him. She feels bad that she is so flawed on so many levels. She feels bad that she is a terrible mother who isn’t trying hard enough. She feels bad that she was under the delusion that she was trying very hard. She feels bad that she currently sees no happy ending for any of them. She is going to continue to suck at this. The girls are going to bear the brunt of her shortcomings. They are going to feel every mistake she is making. They are never going to love her — and they will never know the real her. Only she will know who she really is, and that will be something she can rest her laurels on, when she’s really old and alone and abandoned because she is such an awful person. 

She thinks that he is probably right. She is probably too distracted by her constant wallowing to be any good at being a fucking mother.

“Oh my God,” she says, as she suddenly tries to block her face with her hands from the dog — who has started licking up all of her salty tears. “Read the room, dude,” she says to Momo. “I don’t want your kissies right now.” 

He runs the eight miles into the city center so that he won’t be tempted to be melodramatic and express his feelings out into the open air. He knows he will force himself to be stoic and act not completely heartbroken if he is around other people.

He grabs a coffee and tries to drink it outside on a random bike rail, because the people in his life — and the version of her that still loves him, the one who exclusively lives in his head now — all like to tell him that he needs to be better at practicing self-care and carving out some him-time, where he’s doing shit like . . . sweatily drinking coffee on a bike rail, in the middle of a self-indulgent run.

He thinks back to the beginning of all the things — all the beginnings that led him to here. 

He thinks back to how he felt when he thought the pressure his dad was applying on him to become exactly like the person his dad wanted him to be was actually killing him — so he tried to ruin their relationship forever by dropping out of med school and enlisting in the military. It was the easiest and clearest way to get as far away from his parents as he could.  

He thinks back to when he first met Drogo, this shitbag who lorded his positional power over him and spent every day making his life miserable and trying to humiliate him in front of everyone because Drogo resented him so much for what he represented and the apparent privilege that he came from. Drogo thought his inexperience and softness was going to cause them all to die — and maybe Drogo had been right. It will never be something he knows, because the humiliations certainly did make him work harder.

He remembers the first time they almost died together. It was when Astapor was bombed. He remembers realizing what his quick acceptance in the moment meant. It meant that there was something off about him — that he was right about himself. There has always been something different about him. 

He remembers all the times he visited home and his parents, and they couldn’t and wouldn’t believe that he was no longer someone they thought they had known for his entire life. He remembers how it felt, to be constantly denied his truth about himself. 

He remembers the second time he almost died — every minute of it. He remembers his disbelief as it was happening — and the grief and the pain and the urgent desperate wish that it would just end already. He also remembers and knows what it’s like to wake up in a hospital in confusion. He also remembers and knows what it’s like to start completely over with his body — to relearn everything, from how to eat, how to walk, and how to pee. He remembers the long hot days of never-ending medical leave, and how he wanted to crawl out of skin and just bleed completely out.

He remembers Drogo leaving — and begging him to leave, too. He remembers not even saying no out loud. He just didn’t talk. He just subsided and tolerated and he moved on just like he always does. 

He remembers how pissed he was when his entire family jumped out and surprised him with an intervention. He will forever hate being surprised — because of bombings and also because of that intervention. He remembers how much his mom, dad, and brother cried as they told him he was killing himself right in front of their faces and he needed to quit. Instead of quitting, he agreed to go to therapy.

He remembers still being a real disaster of a person — just a total shitshow — when he went to Drogo’s party and saw her for the first time. He remembers that she made an impression immediately. He liked her smile and he really wanted to know what she looked like with her clothes off. He was too drunk to be scared enough of having sex for the first time since he was tortured.

He’d like to say that he doesn’t even recognize that woman currently in his house — that he would normally never let it get so ugly with the person that he loves — but the truth is that he remembers all too well the many times he let it get really ugly with the person he loves. 

It all happened mostly in the beginning of their relationship — when he was much younger and had the excuse of inexperience to hide behind. 

He remembers the time he straight up told her that he was collateral damage from her biological clock going off.

He remembers the time he accused her of having unprotected sex with him on purpose, to steal his DNA.

He also remembers the time he told her she was selfish for making a decision that was going to affect the rest of his life, when she barely even knew him.

Armed with this bit of perspective, he deposits his coffee cup into the compost bin. He feels a bit queasy from all of the caffeine, but he decides that he might as well go back home.

“Hey,” Grey when he walks into the house through the garage and sees that she managed to get herself from the guest bedroom to the living room. She drops the book she is reading from her face — he catches the cover and he can see that the book is in Valyrian. 

He feels her eyes on him, on the novelty of how fucking sweaty he is. 

She used to be into him in these moments. She used to make a grab for him after his runs, when the house was quiet and the girls were still at school. She used to insist he have sex with her before showering. She used to hold him and wrap herself around him and tell him how much she loved him.  

“Do you need anything?” he asks her politely. “Do you need me to get you anything or move anything closer to you — before I hop in the shower? Do you need to pee again?”

“No, I don’t need to pee again yet,” she mildly says back to him. “I don’t need anything.”

“Okay, cool,” he says, as he leaves her to go back to her book and ascends the stairs.

He gets naked and dunks himself under the flow of lukecold water. He kind of got a bit conditioned to tepid water temperatures and low water pressure from his time overseas, and it’s usually how he likes to shower when he’s by himself. 

As he runs the sweat off his body, he thinks to himself that he actually never really knew her before she was a mother. If he wants to be technical about it, he probably only spent three whopping hours with her before she became pregnant. After that, much of their interactions and conversations revolved around her pregnancy.

He never knew her when she was in her twenties. He only knows the stories that she told him over the years, and he has now figured out that she heavily editorialized those stories — because she used to be content with where her life ended up. She used to tell him that her twenties were a time of false bravado, insecurities, and a lack of purpose. 

He’s only known her as a person who really wanted to have a baby and who really wanted to be a mother. He’s only known her as a person who wanted to be a mother so badly that she was willing to have a baby with someone she barely even knew. 

Because he senses that things are going to change significantly, he furtively steals these quiet observations of his children and tries to memorize them exactly and accurately, when his girls get home from school. He catches the way Emmy throws her backpack off by flicking off both straps at the same time. He watches the way she pivots on her small little feet. He notices all the startling bits of self-expression that he catches in Maddy. It’s startling because her personhood continues to sneak up on him at breakneck speed, in ways that he doesn’t anticipate. He sees all of the stickers she has collected on her water bottle. He sees the outfit she picked for herself, how she coordinated her yellow socks with her yellow sweater. He catches the way she makes faces at her sister, when she’s trying to mess with her sister.

“Dad, will you tell Emmy that Momo came out of her dog mommy’s vagina?”

“Oh, wow,” he says. “Y’all be having conversations on the way home from school.” He looks at Emmy. “It’s true, man. Your sister is telling the truth.”

“What!” Emmy screeches, bending over a little from the effort. It’s something that makes him laugh — and he commits this thing about her to memory too. “Are you serious!”

Because of the events of the day, because of his truly terrible fight with Missandei, he decides to just go fuck it. He has decided that a number of things have to change.

Once he sees that everyone has kind of congregated in roughly the same area of the house, he walks up to all of them. Maddy is lying on the couch with the iPad and Momo, with her headphones over her ears. Missandei is sitting at the kitchen table with Emmy, as Emmy flips through some of her drawings from school and tells Missandei about them. 

He mimes at Maddy. He gestures for her to take her headphones off because he wants her to hear him.

She scooches up higher on the couch, as she pulls just one ear cuff off and looks at him expectantly.

He says, “Hey, so your mom and I were chatting, and she told me that you guys are tired of eating leftovers.”

“Oh my gaw, Daddy, I am so tired of leftovers!” Emmy immediately declares.

“Well, your mom convinced me to give you guys a break,” he says, picking up his phone. “So let’s order something. What do you guys feel like having for dinner?” And then before she can cut back in, he holds his hand up to Emmy’s face. He says, “Don’t say it.”

She is completely delighted to scream out, “Mac and cheese!” at him.  

“Do you think your sister and mom also want mac and cheese?” he asks her as he starts scrolling through the delivery app on his phone. “Do you want to ask them what they want to eat?” 

The girls totally choose white people food — which he was completely anticipating. They choose a pasta place. It was Emmy’s compromise of sorts. They choose a red pasta and a white pasta. He throws in a garden salad and a green bean dish to balance it out.  

And they love it so much, when it arrives. His kids love this food in a way that is alarming and kind of horrific to him, but he thinks that food — like with a lot of things — is something he probably shouldn’t try to enforce so hard all the time. 

He remembers what it was like to be a Summer Islander kid growing up in the suburbs of King’s Landing. He also remembers how embarrassed and distraught he used to be by the ethnic lunches his mom packed for him and how he was bullied relentlessly for being a little weirdo who ate weird food and who was always going to dance class after school because his super ethnic mom didn’t even give a fuck about how uncool she was making him. He used to be so ashamed of being an Islander and not being white that he used to go hungry sometimes and not eat his lunch.

He supposes that it’s partly his resentment of that time that makes him try to ban all of these appealingly palatable Western things that his girls are so drawn to and mesmerized by. He keeps having to remind himself that stuff is different now. Times have changed. White folks like diversity now. 

“How was your show and tell, Emmy?”

“Good! Except Bobby was talking as I was show-and-telling, even though Ms. Mormont said we all had to be quiet and listen to each other.”

“Major dick move,” Maddy mutters, shoveling red pasta into her mouth.

“Yeah!” Emmy echoes. “Major dick move!”

“I’m sure Bobby just has an impulse control issue. I’m sure he didn’t mean to offend you on purpose,” Grey says mildly. “How was your day, Mad? Anything interesting happen?”

“Not really,” she says.

He smiles at her. “I’m sure something new happened to you,” he says. “Why don’t you tell me and your mom about it and let us be the judge of whether or not it’s interesting.”

“Well,” she says reluctantly. “In P.E. today, we did Zumba and we had to find partners. I couldn’t find a partner because Cami wanted to be partners with Jemmon — because she likes him — so everyone had a partner except me and Simon. All the kids stared. So Simon and I became partners.”

“And then y’all danced to a bunch of Pitbull?” Grey says, as he crams some beans into his mouth. “That sounds fun,” he says with his mouth full. “He was a hitmaker back in the day. Was Simon impressed with your moves?”

“No,” Maddy says. “He said I move weird.”

“Oh,” Grey says.

“But Mr. Allain was impressed with my moves! He gave me a sticker in front of the whole class! He said I had a good attitude! I put it on my water bottle. Do you wanna see the sticker?”

“Of course me, your mom, and Emmy wanna see the sticker, baby,” he says. “Go grab it.”

She slides out of her chair and starts running to the kitchen, where her water bottle is hanging upside down to dry. She snatches it up and then runs it back to the table. She points to a little rainbow cat. She says, “It’s this one.”

He grabs her bottle from her and examines the cat for a second. He says, “That’s a really handsome kitty,” before he hands the bottle over to Missandei, who quietly takes it, carefully rolls it in her hands, and also looks at the cat.

“Mr. Allain asked where I got my moves,” Maddy continues. “I said from YouTube. And you.”

Grey laughs at that. “Well, thank you for giving me credit for some of your moves.”

“You like to dance, Maddy?” Missandei inquires softly, as she lays her fork down on her plate. She has been picking at the food on her plate. “What kind of dance do you like? I took some dance classes when I was a kid.”

They all know this already, of course. This is something Maddy is especially well-aware of because she was once caught in the middle of a disagreement between the two of them. It was just last year that they had to make a Sophie’s Choice between Maddy continuing on with soccer or dance — because the schedule didn’t allow her to do both. Missandei had kind of been anti-dance because she was feeling that Maddy’s teacher was a little too focused on body stuff and Missandei didn’t want Maddy to develop body image issues. He had been pro-dance, because he felt it was better at teaching discipline and was more challenging, not like the chaotic free-for-all that second grade non-competitive soccer is. He had argued that doing dance right now would actually be good training for the sports Maddy will undoubtedly play when she gets older. 

He had told Missandei that it was how it worked for him. In response, she had told him that he was a boy, and it’s a little different for boys than it is for girls. She also told him that, unlike him, she honestly didn’t care if their kids are any good at their activities. She didn’t particularly care that second grade soccer wasn’t that competitive.

At the end of it all, he was determined not to be like his dad. They decided to just let Maddy pick. 

She picked super non-competitive soccer. Because her friends did soccer. And she wanted to hang out and play with them.

He acutely remembers how Missandei always used to advocate for fun and self-expression for their girls — sometimes in direct opposition to what he tends to be about. He acutely remembers how long it took him to get it, and how he was annoyingly prone to arguing that dance is artistic expression to the max — once Maddy got to a certain technical proficiency with it. 

In this long and sad and protracted silence — as Maddy continues to be cold as hell to her mother — Grey very much remembers the words that Missandei yelled at him this morning. He remembers how upset she was when she told him that he lets their daughter be disrespectful to her because he loves being the perfect dad. 

He nudges Maddy. He says, “You like to dance, right, baby? You used to do ballet but now you mostly just get crunk for fun, right?”

Maddy casts a look at her dad — like telling him she knows what he’s doing. And she says, “Dad, don’t say ‘get crunk,’” without looking at her mom. And then she says, “I’m done eating, Daddy — Mom. May I be excused now? And can I go on the iPad?”

“If your mom thinks it’s cool?” he says. He looks at Missandei.

“It’s totally fine,” Missandei says awkwardly — because she also knows what he’s been doing. Because it’s been so desperately blatant.  

Much like him, Missandei has also been pretty affected by their fight. The words that he yelled at her when he was angry with her has permeated deep into her soul and stuff. She very much remembers that he totally agrees with her — that she’s a pretty shitty mother currently. She has thought about it, over and over, the fact that he thinks she is not putting in enough effort with Maddy and the fact that it’s something that Maddy acutely notices. 

This is why Missandei calls out, “Hey,” when she catches Maddy taking Momo for a potty. “Can we chat for a bit?”

Maddy feels dread right away — and the feeling is awful — as she clutches Momo in her arms tightly, as she inches her way toward the open door of the guest room. She knows she has to hold Momo tightly so that Momo doesn’t act like a dog and get in her mom’s face. She knows that her mom hates dogs now. “What do you need?” Maddy asks, with just half of her face in the room. “Do you want me to get Dad?”

Missandei tries to smile at Maddy warmly — but frankly, she is intimidated as hell by this child. “Um, do you wanna, like, actually come inside the room?”

“Do I have to?” Maddy says bluntly. “And is this going to take long? It’s my bedtime.”

“Can I have ten minutes?” Missandei asks, feeling her heartbeat speed up and throb in her throat. “Please?”

Maddy is actually similarly anxious. This is a way in which they are very similar. Grey and Emmy like to pretend they know what anxiety is about, but they actually just have ice and sunshine in their veins all the time. Social anxiety is more the familiar realm of Missandei and her older daughter. 

“I guess,” Maddy says, inching a little deeper into the room.

Missandei can’t help but stare at this kid. It’s the first time Missy has been afforded the chance to look at Maddy really closely. She’s looked at Emmy’s face up close a bunch of times — she’s already seen all the obvious ways her own features manifest on Emmy’s baby face. She hasn't gotten a chance to really track the physical parts of her that are in Maddy’s face. 

She says, “You’re really beautiful. You look a lot like your dad. But maybe you have my eyes. You definitely have my hair.”

Maddy stiffens, because she seriously hears stuff like this all the time. Just not usually that often from her own mom. She mostly hears this from strangers who see her with her parents for the first time. “Uh, thanks. I guess.”

“I’m sorry I can’t remember you guys,” Missandei says. “I really wish I could.”

Maddy says nothing in response to that. She just holds onto Momo in comfort.

“Um, so I wanted to talk to you,” Missandei says carefully — slowly. “Um, I want you know that I’m really sorry you heard me saying mean things about your Dad. That must’ve been really tough for you to hear because I know how much your dad means to you.”

This is exactly the conversation that Maddy was expecting and dreading. It’s exactly what she doesn’t want to talk about. She doesn’t want to talk about this at all because she doesn’t want to cry in front of her mom. She doesn’t want her mom to know how she feels about it and feel embarrassed over it. 

So Maddy just shrugs. She doesn’t say anything because she doesn’t want to accidentally start crying. 

“Sorry, I shouldn’t assume,” Missy says softly, trying her best to interpret the silence through Maddy’s face. “How did it make you feel? Do you want to talk about what you heard?”

“Not really,” Maddy says.

“Are you sure?” Missandei asks, because she thinks that maybe this is the thing to do. He did tell her that it’s her job as the mother to push and prod a little bit, when Maddy doesn’t want to engage. “You can tell me anything. You can say anything to me.”

Maddy stares at her, as if trying to decide whether or not to call her mother’s bluff.

And then she starts crying — it just comes out. The tears start streaming down her face and she’s so upset about it — that her mom forced this to happen and that her mom is so mean now. So she feels like she has nothing left to lose. So she demands to know, “Why do you hate Summer Islanders? Dad is a Summer Islander. Grandma and Grandpa are Summer Islanders. Me and Emmy are half.”

“Oh, honey,” Missandei says, as her face falls and as her heart generally just breaks apart inside her chest —  as she watches Maddy cry really viscerally. “I don’t hate Summer Islanders at all.” She’s kind of shaking her head, because she’s kind of stunned right now. She’s stunned she’s such an idiot. “I’m so sorry I said that. It was kind of a joke.”

“It didn’t sound like a joke,” Maddy says firmly. “Jokes are like, ‘knock knock, who’s there.’ Your joke wasn’t really a joke. Your ‘joke’ sounded like you are prejudiced.”

“Um,” Missy says helplessly. “That’s a good point.”

“And why are you even here?” Maddy accuses, finally just deciding to stop holding in all of her anger at her mother, finally just deciding to let it all come out. “If you hate it here so much, why don’t you just leave? Since you hate it here so much, since you hate my Dad so much — since you don’t want to be my mom anymore — why don’t you just leave us alone?”

Missy is crying against her will now, too. She also didn’t want to cry because she didn’t want to put her emotions onto her child, like how her mother sometimes did to her when she was a child. She didn't want to cry and make this all about her. 

“I do want to be your mom, though,” she says through the crying. “I don’t want to leave.”

“You’re lying,” Maddy says coldly. “I know you don’t want to be my mom at all. I know you don’t want to be here. And I don’t care. You can keep faking it with Emmy, but you don’t need to fake it with me anymore.”

Chapter Text

He honestly thought that Maddy and Missandei were going to talk it out and clear the air because Maddy forgives easily and he knows in his gut who Missandei is as a person at her core. He put two and two together and figured it was gonna be all good, which was why he felt okay leaving them alone together to go get Emmy ready for bed. 

This is why he is utterly stunned when he sees Maddy’s wet and crying red face show up in the bedroom door. 

“Baby,” Grey says in alarm. Emmy is already asleep, so he leaves her in bed and gets up to grab Maddy and pick her up right away. “Are you okay?” he asks, as he presses his hand against her back. “What happened?”

“Don’t make me talk to Mom ever again,” she tells him, as she very lightly smacks her fist against his shoulder.

He tries not to make any noise that would wake up Emmy as he carries Maddy to the master bathroom, shuts the door behind them, and turns the bright lights on so he can clean her up properly. 

He sits her on the vanity and wets a cotton towel with cool water before he starts wiping her face down. “What happened?” he repeats.

“I don’t want to talk about it!” she exclaims at him, right before her face scrunches up and she starts crying again. 

“Okay okay, I’m sorry,” he says as he wraps his arms around her and pulls her into a tight hug. 

Maddy’s also conscious about not waking her little sister up, so she smashes her face into her dad’s shoulder and muffles her crying there. 

She kind of falls asleep quickly — like she usually does in these moments — because this kind of emotional outpour is exhausting for her. 

He carries her into the bedroom and is grateful to see that Emmy is still soundly sleeping. He lays Maddy down in the bed next to her sister and pulls the covers over her, tucking the sheets and blankets underneath her back. It’s a dumb thing he does, but he’s irrationally scared the girls will roll off the bed and slam into the floor in the middle of the night. 

He honestly can’t wait until the morning to talk to Missandei about what the fuck even happened with their kid. So he sneaks out of the master bedroom and walks down to the guest room. He sees that the light from the side table is still on.

He lightly knocks on the closed door. He softly says, “You up? Can I come in?”

He hears her say, “Yeah.”

And when he opens the door, he sees that she is also a real mess. If anything, she actually looks worse than Maddy did.

The sight of her like this — so devastated and in obvious pain — just gets to his guts. It makes him hurt a little bit along with her. It makes him want to crawl into bed with her and hold onto her tightly so that she doesn’t feel so alone in her grief. 

He doesn’t do that. Instead, he maintains his distance and he quietly asks, “Miss, are you okay? What happened?”

“Um, I had a pretty brutal conversation with Maddy,” she says, as she ineffectively tries to wipe her eyes — because she is not especially keen on having him see her like this. 

“Yeah,” he says softly, as he quickly ducks into the bathroom to grab a towel and wet it in the sink. He brings it back into the bedroom and hands it to her. “I tried to talk to Maddy a little bit about it — she didn’t want to say much though. She was pretty upset.”

“Okay,” she says hollowly, taking the towel and immediately pressing it into her face. “Well, if it’s okay with you, I don’t really want to give you a recap of the dirty details, right now.”

“That’s okay,” he says. “Um, can I do anything or get you anything?”

“No,” she mutters, rubbing the towel down her face, revealing her red eyes again. 

“Do you want me to give you some alone time? Or do you want me to be here?” It sounds totally ridiculous to his ears.

“Why did you come down here?” she asks. “I thought you needed something from me. Or I thought you wanted to urgently tell me something about how I handled talking to our daughter all wrong.”

He frowns. Because she is actually partly right. He kinda did come downstairs to investigate why she decided to devastate their kid.  

So he lies. “I came down here to check in on you.”

She probably totally knows he’s lying. She says, “Okay. Well, you’ve done that. I think I want to go to sleep now.”

In the morning, Maddy and Missandei are both confronted with the fallout of their conversation. Both of their eyes are bloodshot and swollen. Even Emmy is uncharacteristically quiet, as he sits Maddy on the kitchen counter and smooths his hands across her cheek, under her eyes, over her eyelids, and over her forehead. He’s trying to massage down the swelling around her eyes because he knows that she’s self-conscious and embarrassed over the possibility that her classmates will know that she spent the night crying. 

Missandei gets herself to the refrigerator so that she can put some ice into a plastic bag. And then she wraps the bag with one of the dish towels that she knows he just washed because it’s folded and was placed in the drawer. She tries not to get too close to Maddy, in case her presence makes it worse again. She just leaves the bag and towel on the corner of the kitchen island, in his peripheral vision. 

He picks up the ice pack and gives it to Maddy. He says, “Press this against your eyes,” as he continues massaging her face.

“Daddy, what’s wrong with Maddy?” Emmy suddenly asks.

“Hey, honey,” Missandei cuts in. “Can you come here and tell me what you need to pack in your pack-pack?”

Today, he knows better than to solicit hugs from the girls and give Maddy another chance to shut Missandei down. Today, he just silently hugs them both, kisses them, and tells them to have a good day at school before he ushers them out the door.

He thinks about how awful he’d feel if his kids stopped being affectionate with him, if they stopped wanting to hug him goodbye and just ignored him all the time. He thinks that he really hasn’t been empathetic enough about this.

Once the girls are gone, he also thinks about what he and Missandei used to do and how they used to coexist with each other — before her accident — when they had quiet moments together without the kids.

He goes to the stove to boil some water. He pulls out one of her favorite loose leaf teas. He puts it in a little steeper that she liked — shaped like a little fish. He pours hot water over it.

“How are you?” he asks her, as he walks up to her in the living room, he sets down the hot mug of peppermint tea in front of her on the coffee table, before he takes a seat on the other side of the sectional. 

She sighs. She also leans forward to grab the mug. “I’m a solid shitty,” she says. She raises the mug to him. “Thanks.”

“Thanks for your help this morning,” he offers. “I think the ice helped.”

“Yeah, she looked pretty good, by the time she had to leave for the bus,” Missy says tiredly.

“You have your PT at eleven,” he reminds her. “Do you wanna change now or later?”

“It doesn’t matter to me. Whatever is convenient for you.”

They’ve locked into a routine at this point. She sleeps braless but prefers to spend the day wearing a sports bra underneath a t-shirt. He lifts the laundry basket full of her clean clothes and puts it next to her on the bed, so she can burrow through it and grab the sports bra and t-shirt that she wants to wear.

It kind of feels almost familiar — with her being so tender and quiet as he waits for her to take off her sleep shirt before pulling on a sports bra. She is getting better at twisting her midsection and moving around. She is also far less self-conscious about being naked in front of him. 

When they are on their way to physical therapy, he pulls the car out of the garage and into the driveway, like he usually does, so that they have plenty of room for her to get into the passenger seat. He runs her walker into the trunk as she buckles up.

She’s quiet and reflective, so he doesn’t try to talk to her as they drive.

She is not in the mood for toxic positivity, but she has no tactful way to convey this to her physical therapist, whose current crime is that she believes in Missandei too vocally and too enthusiastically. 

Irri’s positively is just fucking killing her right now. Irri is really into visualization. 

“You’ve got this, Missandei! Just see yourself walking through forest, on an easy stable pathway. Just one foot in front of the other, Missandei! At the end of this it's going to be a beautiful vantage point. You’re going to be able to look down into the valley and see every single step of your journey it took to get you to the finish line! Come on, Missandei! You’re doing great!”

“Okay, sure, if you say so,” Missandei says sarcastically, as she pushes herself to take the final few steps.

She’s able to get herself naked now — and she can do that on the bed by herself before he comes back into the bedroom to pick her up and carry her into the tub. She also doesn’t need to sit in the chair to bathe anymore. She requested that they do away with the chair a few days ago. Now, she can plug up the tub, turn on the faucet, fill it with the hot water that will soothe her sore muscles — and let her body be fully submerged.

When she’s done with getting herself clean, she drains the tub before he comes back in, because it would be really wet and messy for him to pull her from a tub full of water. 

He gives her a towel to wrap around her body before he bends over and picks her up. She holds the edges of the towel tightly as he carefully but quickly walks her back to the bedroom.

She says, “Thanks,” as he places her back on the bed.

“Totally,” he says.

He thinks back to the moment he finally gave up all of his self-defeating beliefs about how he was poison, about how he was a walking disaster who was better off alone forever. He thinks back to the moment he finally listened to her and finally allowed himself to fully reciprocate her mind-breaking love. 

It had taken him entirely too long to pull his head out of his ass to actually see the reality of his situation — the fact that he had made the most amazing little baby with the most amazing person he’s ever known. 

Missandei had been intensely convinced that the risk of permanence was going to pay off for them. Missandei had always been the more positive and hopeful one — between the two of them. Missandei was always the one who was better at demonstrating love and freely giving her love to him, selflessly, without expecting him to love her in the obvious ways that they’ve both been conditioned to expect. 

This is the reason he decides to just go for love — to do the really hard thing because of love.

He lightly knocks on her open bedroom door, and he pokes his head in. “Hey, is it a good time to talk? About the last couple of days?”

She was browsing her phone — looking at more photos from the past few years — and she’s embarrassed about it and quick to put her phone down as she nods and pushes herself to sit up straighter. She says, “Sure.”

He enters the room. He stays close to the door. He says, “Okay, thank you. Um, first of all — whatever happened with Maddy yesterday — um, can I tell you that it will be okay?” He says it in a rush, because he’s kind of been wanting to tell her this all day, but he’s been afraid that she wouldn’t believe him and it would make her cry. “It’s not at all the first time she’s been that furious with one of us. And it will definitely not be the last time. It will be okay. And she’ll get over it.”

Missandei’s eyes fill up with tears over this, as she stares up at him. “Really?” she says skeptically, as her face tenses up. “She will get over believing that her mom doesn’t want to be her mom anymore? She’ll get over her mom being a hateful liar? And also kinda xenophobic?”

Grey winces over this economical recap of their conversation. But he still says, “Yeah, she will get over it. Just prove her wrong by showing up truthfully for her every day. And maybe by also not being xenophobic?”

The last bit was a joke. It’s so obvious to him that it’s a joke, but he regrets saying it, when he sees her complete non-amusement in response to it.

“Okay,” Missandei says blankly — seriously — like she’s taking in the feedback. “Okay. I’ll watch my words much more carefully.”

“She really got to you, huh?” he asks sympathetically, crossing his arms over his chest. 

She releases a self-deriding scoff. She says, “Uh, yeah.”

He kind of smiles. “She’s really good at knowing the exact thing to say to crush your heart down into a million pieces — and then saying it.”

“Oh my God, I wonder where she got that from,” Missandei mutters, shaking her head — at herself. And then she says something that she’s kinda been wanting to say to him all day, but she was too gutless and too immature to know how to bring it up or when to bring it up. She says. “So, I’m really fucking sorry I said I regret having Maddy and Emmy with you. That was the craziest bullshit. I totally lost my mind. And I crossed a serious line. It’s not true, what I said. I’m glad we had Maddy and Emmy together. I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry about yesterday, too,” he says plainly. “I’m sorry I haven’t been understanding enough, with the fact that all of this really is brand new to you. I’m sorry I haven’t been more helpful with you and Maddy.” 

“Thank you for saying that,” she says, as she tears up again. 

He remembers exactly how she looked when he told her he was finally giving up all of his self-defeating beliefs about himself, when he was finally giving up being a dumb, scared little coward when it came to being with her. 

He remembers that it was in the middle of the summer — their very first summer with Maddy — crammed together in her small studio apartment in the middle of downtown. They had bought an AC unit for that apartment even though the both of them are from island cultures and believed in sweating it out. They blasted that AC and racked up quite the electricity bill, because they were both adamantly against letting Maddy’s tiny body sweat it out. 

He remembers coming home and looking at her sitting with their child. And he remembers thinking that he was such a fucking idiot. For taking so long in telling her that he actually didn’t want to be just friends with her at all. He actually very much wanted to be more than friends with her. 

“You’ve said that this wasn’t what you would’ve picked for yourself,” he says, purposefully editorializing and adjusting what she actually said a little bit — when she said that he wasn’t what she would’ve picked for herself. He articulates it differently because he doesn’t want it to sound narrow and small. He knows it’s bigger than just him. “What did you mean by that?”

She starts crying in earnest, in response to this. 

He remembers she was shirtless and just wearing a stretchy black bra that was easy to pull down in order to nurse for most of that summer. He remembers that she continues to be the most beautiful person he knows and has ever seen. He remembers her hair was piled on top of her head in a ball that day, as she stared at him and listened with her brows furrowed, as he rambled on confusingly and told her that was ready to fucking do this thing for real with her.

He can remember when it finally clicked in her head — when she realized what he was saying — that he was ready to give over all of himself to her. 

He doesn’t think he will ever forget that look of triumphant hope on her perfect face. 

“Um, I think I meant that I didn’t think I wanted to live in a house like this,” Missandei tells him, with her eyes shiny, gesturing to the white bed linens that she had picked out years ago for this room. “Because, um, I don’t think there’s anything of me here. This house is a nice house, but it doesn’t feel like my home.” She shrugs. “And I guess I was trying to say I don’t want to lose my entire identity and just be a mom. I don’t think I ever wanted to be a housewife or a stay-at-home mom, so I’ve just been shocked that I became those things — not that it’s bad to be a housewife or a stay-at-home mom. It just didn’t seem like my thing.” Missandei sighs. She adds, “I don’t think I want to be a terrible and selfish person, but maybe I just am that person. Sometimes I feel hopeless and trapped in all of this, because I don’t remember choosing any of it, I guess.”

Grey thinks that, at some point, the memories that he has of her and of them just have to be enough for him. He thinks that he has already gotten way more from her than he ever even thought was possible. He already got more than nine years of her love. He already got two super incredible kids from her. He honestly can’t ask for more than this from her.  

“Okay,” he says calmly. “So let’s figure this out. Let’s figure out how to untrap you.”

She turns her face fully toward him. He can tell she’s holding her breath. She reflects hesitance and cautiousness. 

“So we’re actually not married, so you’re technically not a housewife — and I’m not trying to correct you, right now — sorry, I have a tendency of talking like this,” he says, sighing too. “I was more saying that we — me and the girls — never saw you that way — but I see what you mean. Anyway, we can figure that out. And you not liking this house and not wanting to be trapped here — we can figure that part out, too. I know you feel trapped by me,” he adds frankly. “But uh, do you feel trapped by the girls? Do you want to continue to be a pretty big part of their lives?”

It hurts his heart to ask this. But he feels that it’s important to be clear. 

It also hurts her heart to hear it — and she’s initially not sure if she heard it right. But as she rolls it around in her head and interprets his question, she  thinks that it’s pretty clear he’s asking her if she wants to be a mother. 

She starts crying again. She cries out, “Oh my God, they’re my children.”

Seeing how distraught she is because of what he asked — it makes the relief hit him right away. “Sorry,” he says quickly. “I was just confirming. Now we know. And we can work together to figure out how to share custody of the girls.”

“Share custody?”

“Yeah,” he says plainly. “That’s what will happen when you move out.”

“I’m moving out,” she repeats.

“If you want to,” he says, staring at her. “I’m not kicking you out. I would never do that. But it sounds like you want to live somewhere else. Did I interpret that correctly?”

She takes a beat to really think about it. And she finally says, “Yes.” And then she adds, “Sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” he says. “I’m hearing you. I’m trying to be better at hearing you. And I’ve been thinking about this, too. A lot. And I am down to help you get what you want, however I can. You’ve said you want to regain your autonomy and your independence and your sense of who you are outside of being a mother. I get that. You deserve that. Your basic needs need to be met before you can properly focus on those things. You need to be more mobile and independent before you can move out, so let’s first work on getting you more solid on your feet.”

She is completely stunned that he’s saying this. “I have no job though,” she blurts. She means that she has no job with which to sustain herself enough to be independent. 

“You can get a job,” he says casually. “And if your concern is money, we share a bank account. You actually have plenty of money.”

“That’s your money,” she says quietly.

“No, it’s not,” he says plainly. “It’s ours. Probably at some point in the future, we’ll separate our finances — maybe after you’re settled in a job and we know how much your salary is — but that’s not for a while, unfortunately. Before that though, maybe we can find you a place close by, so it’s not too disruptive to the girls. I know it won’t be close to downtown like you might want, and it’s up to you — but I think it would be good if you were close.”

All she can do right now is just stare at him.

And he feels pretty sick over all the things he’s saying — just the idea that at some point in time, he wouldn’t be able to see his girls and talk to them every single day — but he tells himself this is nowhere near the end of the world. He tells himself that he can definitely survive this too. He has survived a lot of things. 

“We also need to get you a car — yours got totalled, obviously,” he adds. “We got the insurance payout. But I never replaced it. But once you’re walking again, you’ll need to be able to get to places farther than walking distance. We can go car shopping when you’re done with the walker. Also, I think we should refrain from telling the girls until you’re more physically ready to transition out of here. It will only stress them out and upset them if they know you’re gonna move out, a while before you actually move out.”

He takes a pause here, because while he’s sure there’s a multitude of other logistical details that need to be covered — like he and Missandei both own the house and depending on how things shake out, he might need to buy her out and give her her half of the value of the house — he doesn’t really think all of the minutiae need to be covered right now. 

“Why would you do all this?”

“Um, it’s what you’ve expressed that you want,” he says, as if it’s very plainly obvious. “Not just with your words, but in a lot of ways, since you regained consciousness. Um, what were you expecting from me?” 

“I guess I was expecting you to fight me and try and force me to just get over it and accept this,” she says.

He frowns. “That wasn't what I meant, when I said that yesterday,” he says softly. “I didn’t mean that you should accept unhappiness for the sake of the girls.”

He thinks that maybe he and Missandei had been a little shortsighted, before her accident. They avoided or didn’t get around to talking about this — this complex long term relationship stuff. He remembers that they were so busy and so run ragged that they didn’t get around to writing up the first version of their will until Maddy was two years old. When they did though, the conversation was fairly easy. She would go to his parents, if they were still alive. And if they weren’t, she would go to Marselen and Zoya. 

They didn’t talk much about what they’d do if they both stayed alive but just stopped wanting to be together. He was more prone to bringing that sort of thing up, because he compulsively plans for disaster situations. She used to block them from getting too far in the subject, maybe because they were young and in love and couldn’t fathom a future where the love would be gone. 

She used to clamp her hand over his mouth. She used to playfully act like him saying it out loud would jinx them. She used to smile at him slyly and tell him she was going to take all his money and bleed him dry in the ‘divorce.’  

“Okay,” Missandei says. “So I’m going to ask you something about us — that I can’t remember.”

“Okay,” he says.

“Did we have a good relationship?” she asks, as her face tenses up. “Like, really. Did we?”

“Oh,” he says, a little surprised by the question — and also inexplicably embarrassed by it. “I mean, I’m not really sure what the definition of a good relationship is. We got along well most of the time and we enjoyed being a family and being with the girls.”

He stupidly feels like he doesn’t want to dishonor the memory of who she is to him, by dropping trite platitudes about how she means the world to him and he was imperfect, but she was cool putting up with it because she really loved him back and made him believe it. 

Missandei clears her throat. “I guess what I mean to ask is — are you shockingly okay with the idea of me moving out because our relationship wasn’t great — before my accident? Are you like, kind of relieved or something? Because you are seriously shockingly calm about this. You have all of these plans already, too. Have we been planning this for a while?”

“Oh,” he says. “I see what you’re asking now. No, we haven’t been planning this for a while. I haven’t planned any of this at all. I was just talking it out. Um, you don’t know this about me — yet — but I’m kind of good at planning bad stuff out. I’m kind of obsessive and I fixate on details a lot. It is pretty annoying.”

He clears his throat, too. Because he feels awkwardly vulnerable. 

“Um, and a thing you must at least already know about me is that I love our kids,” he adds, sounding a touch more emotional now. “I would do anything for them. I would sacrifice anything for them, especially for their long-term well-being and their long-term happiness. It doesn’t do them any good if their mother feels deeply unhappy with her life. I want you to have a great relationship with them.”

She’s staring at him again. “Okay.” 

He shrugs. And he can’t say this to her face anymore — because he hates what he sees in her face these days — so he says this next part to the wall. He says, “And another thing you probably don’t know about me is that I really love you. I have probably been in love with you for just about the entire time I’ve known you. I would also do anything for you. Your happiness really matters to me. So that’s why I wanna figure this out together.” 

He’s not looking at her, so he has no idea how she is emotionally responding to this. He can only hear her apology. She says, “I’m really sorry.”

He nods. It sucks to hear it as much as he imagined it would. He says, “I know. It’s okay.”

He’s forever trying to be less rigid and less intense about randomass shit — because he hears that the people he loves aren’t always crazy about these traits in him. 

He force-feeds himself the rest of Missandei’s mom tofu bake. As he eats it over the sink by himself, he reminds himself to be randomly annoying to Missandei’s mom, the next time he sees her — as retribution for this. Maybe the next time he sees her, he can tell her that he has failed in his devotion to her daughter. That would really get in her craw.  

He eats the rest of the tofu bake so that he can feel okay about digging through the stores of pantry items that Missandei’s mom saddled them with, to try to cobble together a meal with some beans, rice, and canned corn. 

He cooks a little bit of frozen ham for himself and the girls, because he can tell they have also been missing a bit of meat — probably due to the blood-thirsty Summer Islander part of their genetics. He bakes a cornbread because he has the time, and he is kind of bored.

He kind of feels like shit when the girls get home because he’s hyper aware that he is keeping something big from them. He tries his best to be normal and cheerful with them, as his mind constantly goes to a really dark place. He thinks about all of the horror stories he’s read about in the news and heard about from friends over the years — about what happens to kids whose parents split up. Like sometimes Mom starts ignorantly dating a sexual predator who rapes and kills children and discards their bodies in ditches.

He’s been trying to get himself to stop this.

“This is really good,” Missandei says, when they are all sitting together at the dinner table. “I didn’t know you cook. And bake.”

He can see Maddy kind of flinch over that. He feels fucking the same. But he just mentally shrugs it off and says, “Yeah. I like to dabble.”

Stuff lightens up for him after dinner — thanks to their resident ball of sunshine.

“Dance party time!” Emmy shrieks, after Maddy seriously and purposefully picks out Pitbull from their dad’s phone and then streams it through all of the downstairs speakers. Emmy starts hopping up and down to the bass, with her bare feet slapping in time on the ground.

They used to do this all the time, before Missandei’s accident.

“Dance party time,” Maddy says, with a touch more self-consciousness and a bit less enthusiasm. She makes herself ignore and shut out everything that is going on with her mom. She tries to loosen up enough to pretend that everything is the same as it used to be, for Emmy’s sake. Maddy watches her little sister’s feet as Maddy starts really capably dance-walking to the middle of the living room, hitting the down beats with her body. She holds one hand out to Emmy as she matches some of Emmy’s hopping and puts a little flair to it — because Emmy likes it when she does that. 

Maddy tells herself that it’s kinda like old times, as she briefly shuts her eyes and holds her arm out to their dad. She beckons him to come join them with her hand, with the come-here signal.  

Grey actually feels similarly to Maddy. He feels strikingly self-conscious and reluctant to dance in front of Missandei — in part because she can’t even walk, in part because he and she are the only ones so far that know they are splitting up, but mostly because he doesn’t really want her to see him dance. It’s always been something too expressive and thus maybe too personal and revealing about him.  

So he keeps it economical and casually sloppy. He moves his head and lightly imitates Maddy’s movements minimally before he reaches her, grabs her hand, then also grabs Emmy’s. He hops in place, just like Emmy, keeping himself close to the ground so he doesn’t actually pull her too high on the hops. 

“Come on, Mommy,” Emmy says, letting go of his hand to reach out for Missandei. 

Missandei’s natural inclination is really to bow out and say that she can’t participate because of her body, and because she’d rather be a spectator. 

But she fights this instinct, because she needs to try harder. 

She shoots her hand out, to the first person who will help her up. That person just happens to be him. She looks at him in slight surprise as he grabs her by the wrist initially before he decides that’s weird and hard on her wrist — so he slides his hand down to grasp onto hers. She gives him a short squeeze. And then he firmly and carefully pulls her to her feet.

To the girls, he says, “Oh, damn, Mommy has joined the party.” He lightly holds onto Missandei’s hand for a little longer, to make sure that she has her balance without the aid of the walker. And then he transfers her hand to Emmy’s shoulder — because Emmy’s shoulder is kind of the same height as the walker. “Help Mommy stay up,” he tells her.

He wriggles himself to the center of the living room, next to the coffee table. And then he says, “Okay, hands up,” and the girls obediently snap their hands up and start bouncing on their heels. He’s doing a move that he knows Missandei can do. “C’mon, push up the sky — and up, up, up.”

Chapter Text

She finds that she has a shocking lack of close friends that she feels she can confide in. She has learned that she has lost touch with and drifted apart from a lot of people she went to college and high school with — besides Dany. 

Dany has told Missy that she actually has a lot of friends — but the cosmic joke of it all is that she made a lot of these friends in the last decade. Dany told her that stuff like friendship shifts around when people couple-up.

Missy knows that Dany is not going to be a source of comfort for her, because Dany is a hardcore fan of Grey. Whether because she legitimately likes him as a person or just likes the convenience of him being her husband’s best friend, Missandei isn’t sure. 

Daenerys is unfortunately all that Missandei has got. She feels like she needs to talk to someone about this. She feels like she’s going to go crazy if she just keeps all of this in her head. 

There also might be a completely stupid and irrational part of her still holding onto the idea of who Dany used to be to her. She might just be stupidly hoping against hope that this woman that she grew up with, who at one point advocated so hard for her to find her voice when she was a meek and shy young woman constantly conditioned to be so afraid of speaking out of turn — is still there somewhere, underneath all of the designer clothes. 

 So over the phone, she tells Dany she’s going to move out. She tells Dany that she’s probably going to find a place nearby. She tells Dany that the girls will divide time with her and Grey. She tells Dany she needs this. 

“So you and Grey are splitting up,” Dany says, managing to sound ticked off already. “This is a huge mistake,” she says, being really transparent about the opinion she holds. “You are going to really regret this, and I’m not going to feel bad for you when you realize you’ve made a big mistake.”

In Daenerys’ point of view, she is also looking for her old friend. She is also searching for a version of Missandei that she sorely misses, the version of Missandei who would never blow up her entire family and disrupt the lives of her children — after they have already lived through the trauma of almost losing their mother — because Missandei self-indulgently feels unfulfilled.

Dany is also a mother now and doing shit like wasting her fucking time fundraising for the boosters even though she would rather write a check and deal with none of the other parents — but she’s been told she’s standoffish and cold and the other mothers don’t like her, and it’s been causing issues for Rhaego and affecting whether or not he gets ostracized or gets invited to stupid equestrian bullshit. Dany used to be able to talk about these things — in detail — with Missandei. They used to be able to commiserate together about how awful other mothers are. Missandei used to know that she bled out and almost died having Rhaego — and how traumatic that was. The old Missandei probably would’ve picked out that it was really hard for Dany to see her in the hospital, also passively threatening to die. The old Missandei would know that Rhaego is an only child because Dany can’t have any more children.  

The old Missandei would never look at her two perfect children who have zero behavioral issues that would cause her to get called into school for a talk in the middle of the work day — and her perfect partner who gets along insanely well with all of his in-laws — and resent them for existing. 

The old Missandei would also not be so fucking self-centered and constantly unloading her truly stupid problems onto Dany all the time. The old Missandei would occasionally ask Dany about what’s going on in her life. 

Dany has honestly been pretty disgusted by her friend, but Drogo keeps telling her that she needs to hold on. He’s been telling her that history matters and shared experience matters. He’s been so fucking annoying about this, but she’s been listening to his stupid ass and trying so hard to hold onto this obnoxious person because of the entirety of their history together. 

“So what do you need from me?” Dany asks Missandei. “You want me to help you hire movers so you can move your old shit to your new and fabulous single life?”

“No, I’m good on that,” Missandei says, as she starts to teach herself to be numb to Dany’s scathing judgment. Because she knows she’s going to be hearing this type of thing a lot.  

He spends his Saturday ignoring Drogo’s many texts and calls because he’s busy shuttling the girls around by himself. He sneaks in a few seconds here and there to text Drogo back to tell the guy that he’s fine and that they can talk later. 

He takes the girls clothes shopping in the morning because Emmy has a theme day at school and needs to wear red, but she doesn’t want to wear the fifty red things that she already owns. By the afternoon, he has pulled up to Cami’s house to drop off Maddy at her sleepover. He gives her a spare phone — because she only gets to have a phone when she’s not at school and not under his and Missandei’s direct supervision. 

He gives her the phone and tells her to call him if some weird shit goes down or if she feels scared or wants to go home right away. If she wants to go home slowly, then she should actually talk to Cami’s mom or stepmom about it, and she can call him from Cami’s mom or stepmom’s phone like a normal person.

She says, “Got it.” And then she says, “Dad, you’re a bit much.”

“I have PTSD and shit — give me a break,” he says flippantly, leaning over to do a quick once-over of Cami’s house, to peep the cars in the driveway. It looks totally normal. “Okay, give me and your sister a hug and a kiss, baby. I hope you have loads of fun being out from under my thumb.”

Maddy laughs as she reaches for Emmy’s tearful little body first. Emmy is super distraught that her big sister is leaving her to go play with someone her own age, for a whole night. Maddy says, “I love you, Emmy.”

“Oh my gaw, don’t gooo, Maddy!”

One of the goals and practices that came out of the years of therapy he had was his consistent and concerted effort at staying close with his parents, even when their feelings feel burdensome to him and all he wants to do is hide from them. For this reason, he knows that he has to swiftly tell them about what is going on with Missandei. It also just makes a lot of logistical sense to. Missandei hasn’t been by to see them since she’s been out of the hospital, and at this rate, she’s probably not gonna be coming around much at all. If he gives them an explanation of why, they will not get on his ass about why she hates them so much. Because it’s not that she hates them. It’s because she no longer loves him.   

Because neither of his folks are retired yet and they both work stupid hours, he can only get time with them both together on the weekends, when he is also on active dad duty with the girls. It is inconvenient to talk about Missandei with the girls around, and that’s why he was smart and took the serendipitous opportunity to try to talk to his folks after dropping Maddy off at her sleepover.

He is kind of stuck with Emmy though, because he doesn’t feel comfortable trapping Emmy and Missandei together, alone, by themselves. Missandei can’t dependably walk yet. And Emmy is unpredictable and doesn’t always listen to commands, much like the dog. 

He ended up asking his brother for a favor. Naturally, his brother was kind of aghast by how the favor was framed, because he doesn’t think watching his niece for an hour or two on a Saturday is a favor at all. 

“It’s just a turn of phrase, man,” Grey says, as he hands Emmy over to Azzie. 

“Oh man, it’s been a while since I had one this small and this cute,” Azzie says, as he hikes Emmy up really high, so that she’s taller than both him and her dad. She shriek-laughs and grabs onto her uncle’s head. “Whaddya want to do with Uncle Azzie, munchkin? Shall we wash my car together?”

“Dude,” Grey says. “You’re never gonna be able to wash your car with her around.”

“Okay, obviously I was joking, Nudie,” Azzie says. “She’s a kid. I’m not going to make her watch me do chores.” 

“Okay, funny joke, man,” Grey says in a deadpan.

Azzie assesses his brother for a protracted moment — and Grey is great at not giving anything away. But due to the circumstances — his brother never needing random childcare in non-emergency situations — Azzie knows something is up. 

In fact, he’s now conditioned to expect the worst, because the last time he had to suddenly watch Grey’s kids was the night of Missandei’s accident. 

“Everything cool, man?”

“Everything is great,” Grey says. And it’s such an obvious and purposeful lie — because Grey never says that anything is great — that Azzie knows that something is up. 

He hugs Emmy a little tighter in his arms. He nods. He says, “Okay, so I’ll talk to you later, too, bud?”

“Yeah, probably,” Grey says.  

She honestly tries to do some snooping around the house because she has the luxury of being completely alone in it, with the dog. 

Unfortunately, she still can’t do stairs without half worrying that she’s going to trip and give herself another head injury, and she suspects that the juiciest stuff is probably upstairs. She probably shared a bed with him up there before the accident. Because he said he loved her and stuff. She assumes it was reciprocated. She assumes that she also loved him back.

It’s something that she tries not to think that hard about, because she feels so bad about it. 

The only mildly interesting room on the bottom floor of the house is his home office. It’s very neat and orderly, which she now knows is very him. She picks up a little notepad and observes with mild interest that he actually has pretty messy handwriting. 

Dany has been reluctant to share too many details — probably because they’ve been so off — so Missy doesn’t know any of the little nuances of them as a couple. She doesn’t know who made the first move. She doesn’t know if they had pet names for each other.

She’s never been in love before — she doesn’t think. Or maybe she has and she just didn’t know it. She told her high school boyfriend that she loved him. She really felt it and believed it at the time. Now she can’t really remember Stephen’s face anymore. 

The men she used to date would sometimes joke about their confusion of her damage, because on paper, she had two parents who have been married since the beginning of time. They used to ask her why she was so suspicious and skeptical of love, when she grew up with it all around her.

She just doesn’t want the love that her parents have — for herself. She just really doesn’t want to cope with her maddening powerlessness by going overboard with the limited influence that she has. She doesn’t want to fucking give her children anxiety because she didn’t make her own money, never had a career, and never carved out a purpose outside of molding and contorting her children into her limited worldview. She really doesn’t want that kind of love. And she’s very aware that human beings are very prone to reenacting and repeating the very dynamics that they grew up with. 

She thinks that she might want to break this cycle, maybe, for her daughters. She thinks that it has to be good for her daughters to see her be a person outside of a house. It has to be good because otherwise, Dany is right, and she’s doing something truly terrible to her children.

She picks up a small framed photo of her on his desk — obviously she doesn’t remember getting her picture taken at all. Obviously she doesn’t remember wearing a periwinkle tank top and making a funny face at the camera.

She tries to see if she can pick out love from the photo.

His parents are obsessed with each other, and he supposes the immenseness of their love for each other was always something he and his brother found subconsciously really hard to live up to. His mom is his dad’s favorite person, and it sometimes preemptively breaks his heart, when he thinks about what it’s going to be like when one of them dies — what it’s going to be like for the one that is left.

In a way, he hopes that they both die at the same time, in some very peaceful and calm accident, when they are 95 years or older.

He’s pretty sure that his parents are not going to be able to fully empathize or fully understand how and why he sucks at longevity in a relationship. He’s pretty sure this is going to go pretty badly. But he has to tell them, because of all of the shit he put them through when he was in his 20s.

He feels this way because he has kids now. The moment he became a father was the moment a whole bunch of fucking regrets flooded his body. The moment he became a father was the moment he realized that he was totally wrong about a whole bunch of things . And he was a total self-centered asshole.

When Grey tells his parents about what’s going on with Missandei, when he tells them that he and Missandei are splitting up, his mom is like, so dramatic about it. She presses her hand to her mouth as her eyes go wide — and she starts crying at the table, right in front of him. She says, “Oh my God, no.”  

Her being so upset over this really doesn’t make him feel better. It actually makes him feel a lot worse.

“Why?” she asks him, as she takes the box of tissues that his dad drops in front of her, as his dad retakes his seat.

Grey shrugs, acting as if he doesn’t even fucking know. But he actually does know. The reason is just fucking tragic and sad. He bluntly says, “Because she doesn’t love me anymore. Because it’s weird to be stuck in a relationship with someone you don’t love just because everyone around you tells you you have to be. Because she’s still young enough to start over and find someone new and better to be happy with. I don’t fucking know, Mom — why do you think?” 

“Baby,” she says, as the waterworks really start coming in. She makes a grab for his head, as a way to grasp onto the rest of him. She pulls him into a hug. “I’m so sorry.” 

“What the fuck?” his dad says. He feels his dad’s heavy hand on his back. “What the fuck?” his dad repeats. “You have kids together,” his dad adds derisively, because getting mad about stuff is his dad’s default. “What the fuck? What is this shit? What the fuck?”

Grey reaches around to hook his hand over his shoulder, to place his palm over his dad’s hand. He says, “I’ll be okay, you guys. Just wanted you to know.”

“What the fuck?” his dad says again.

“Oh my God, what the fuck!” his mom also suddenly exclaims, which is crazy because he’s not sure he’s ever heard her swear before. She’s pulling away a little bit to look at him and to grasp his face with both of her hands as she urgently searches through his expression with her manic eyes. “What the fuck, you’re fucking perfect,” she declares. “You’re my fucking most perfect baby. What’s there not to love? What the fuck!”

“Jesus, Sanaa,” his dad mutters — joking — trying to lighten the mood of this truly terrible shit. “I’m really glad Azzie isn’t here to hear you say that.”

Missandei takes some leftover cold ham from the fridge and peels off a slice. She eats it over the sink, just in case it makes her throw up. She keeps thinking about and remembering how Dany told her that she started craving meat when she grew a little half-Summer Islander baby in her body. She keeps thinking that maybe that was the start of the change in her — maybe it started with something so small — just her diet. 

She doesn’t vomit up the meat. It tastes fine. It probably tastes good to an enthusiastic meat eater. But it does pretty much nothing emotionally for her. It yields no interesting revelations. 

The dog probably smells it on her, because the dog gloms right onto her when she returns to the sofa. Momo pastes herself to Missandei’s hip and flips over onto her back to resume sleeping like a person.

Missandei reaches down to scratch her nails into Momo’s belly. Mo’s little tail starts wagging.

“Me and your daddy forgot to talk about custody of you,” she tells the dog. 

He tells his folks that he doesn’t want them to choose sides — clearly. He doesn’t want this to get acrimonious at all and there are a multitude of ways it can get really ugly, with the division of their shared assets, custody, and co-parenting from different households, but he’s determined to keep it smooth and minimally disruptive for the sake of the girls. He tells his parents he’s planning on giving Missandei half of everything. He rambles on and tells them that his co-ownership of his company will be sticky and complicated, but they can probably figure it out.

His parents are not surprised by this admission whatsoever. There is a cautious exchange of looks over it though — not because their son wants to go half-half — more that he’s already obsessing about these sorts of things, instead of processing through his feelings. But they quickly move on from it because he probably needs to go through it this way, for now. 

“I read a news story about a woman who had like, meningitis and she went into a coma,” Grey conversationally tells his parents. “And when she woke up, she was a completely different person. She started abusing her kids. And then she killed her husband.” He pauses. “The murder was the reason it made the news, but I thought the rest of it was crazy, too.”

His mom blinks and automatically reaches around under the table for his dad’s hand. Because she does not even know what to say in response to this. All she is sure of is that his old job made him this way — it made him this tortured and pain-filled person. She hates his old job so much. 

His dad says, “Jesus, son.”

“I know Missandei is probably not going to end up abusing the kids and killing me,” Grey says plainly. “I know it’s extremely unlikely. But maybe just in case, you can help me watch out for that kind of thing.” And because he can sort of pick out what his parents’ general silence means, he adds, “I’m not saying this kind of stuff in front of the kids. I’m very careful.” 

He thinks that sometimes he’s kind of bummed for his children, that they are saddled with his depression, his trauma, and his genetics. But sometimes he thinks that he’s very grateful for his children, because they are the biggest motivators pushing his ongoing self-awareness and all of his concerted efforts at not becoming a fucking depressed psycho again. He thinks that if he and Missandei didn’t have kids — and if she just up and decided to leave him one day and took her love away, he would go depressed psycho over it. He would totally lose his mind and act out in the multitude of really destructive ways that he knows he’s really capable of.

But because he would never ever fucking do that to his children, he knows he’s gonna handle this shit with aplomb. He’s not going to start binge drinking. He’s not going to go days without sleeping. He’s not going to have a bunch of impersonal and anonymous sex just to prove to himself that he can still feel. 

He ends up grabbing some frozen yogurt with Emmy and his brother, and then taking the froyo into the nearby park, standing around and watching Emmy as she runs around with other kids on the jungle gym. 

“Man,” he mutters to Azzie, watching her. “She’s bossing that kid around so hard. Missandei says not to correct that all the time, but Emmy’s not gonna have friends if she keeps it up.”

Azzie lightly laughs, as he digs through the rest of Emmy’s leftover froyo. “Lena also went through a bossy phase, remember? And now she’s a normal person. These kinds of things tend to naturally work themselves out.”

“How’s work?” Grey asks, keeping his eyes still trained on Emmy.

“Good, man. Normal. How’s work for you?”

“Man, not good. But who fucking cares?”

“Hey, that’s good progress for you!” Azzie says, nudging his brother. “Apathy that work isn’t going good is a good step forward, man!”

Grey lightly chuckles over that. And then he says, “What was it like for Lena when you split with Amelia?”

“Hey, man,” Azzie says. “Me and Amelia are way different from you and Missy.”

“I know,” Grey says simply. “But I’m asking. How was it for Lena when you and her mom split?”

“I mean you remember,” Azzie says. “It was really hard on her for a while. She was really angry about it, and there were some things at school.”

“But it ended up working out,” Grey finishes.

“It ended up working out,” Azzie echoes. “And she’s now a well-adjusted and happy adult and an amazing artist. I’m so proud of her. She has a great life now, man.”

“She really does — she’s really amazing,” Grey says. “Okay, that helps.”

Azzie sighs. “Nudho, I didn’t love Amelia the way you love Missy. And Amelia didn’t love me the way Missy loves you.”

“Don’t say that,” Grey says plainly, shaking his head.

“It’s going to work out,” Azzie says. “You guys will find your way back to each other.”

Grey is still shaking his head. “Did your psychic tell you that?”

“You’re such a dick,” Azzie says, as he tilts his head back and sucks down the last of the frozen yogurt. “And hello, she prefers to be called a healer.”

“Okay, well, be sure to light some sage on fire for me and Missandei. I need all the help I can get.” 

When he asks her if she would like to go out to a restaurant for dinner, she’s not sure if he’s doing it to try and make her fall back in love with him and win her back — or if he just heard her wail a whole bunch about how she hates being trapped in the house and he internalized it. She hopes that it’s the latter thing, but she still doesn’t know him well enough to rule out the first thing.

They end up at Red Lobster. She watches as he has a swift argument with Emmy about ordering off the kids menu. He actually does not want her to eat off the kids menu because he is horrified to learn that there is straight up mac and cheese on the kids menu. He wants Emmy to eat ‘real food.’

“All food is real food,” she mildly interjects, as she carefully eyes Emmy’s face for any sort of disappointment or discouragement. “And I’m not sure um, popcorn shrimp is less calorically dense.” 

He swings his eyes up to her to press a stare at her face. He’s so blank and so hard to read that she has to make up what he’s thinking half the time. She’s half sure that she just overstepped and he’s annoyed at her for correcting him in front of their kid.

“My deal is not really about the calorie density or the healthfulness of the food — at this moment,” he tells her. “It’s more that she’s a picky eater, and I lack empathy in this area because my parents yelled at me and forced me to eat everything on my plate when I was a kid — and that ended up working out great for me. I am now great with food. So now I have to actively work against a parenting tactic that I think is really effective, all the time, Missandei. It’s hard.” 

He drops a small smile — so that she finally understands that he is kind of being funny. 

She says, “Oh! Why is she picky?”

He shrugs in response to that. And then he silently nods at Emmy’s downturned face, which is examining the kids menu closely. He’s gesturing to Emmy and signaling her to get her information directly from the source.

“Emmy, why are you a picky eater?” Missandei asks.

Grey smiles — immediately — the second the words leave her mouth.

“I’m not a picky eater!” Emmy screeches out, indignantly.

“Oh, so sorry,” Missy says, also cracking a smile. “I didn’t mean to offend. How come you want to eat something you’ve already eaten before? Why don’t you wanna try something new?”

“Because mac and cheese tastes good,” Emmy says.

“Don’t you think that other things might taste good, too?”

Emmy shakes her head. She holds up the plastic coated menu and points to the various fried items on it. She says, “This looks gross.” 

That’s pretty crazy to Missandei. Because she thinks that crunchy deep fried foods are really freaking good, but not good to have all the time. “If I order something new and different, do you think you’d like to try a little nibble of what’s on my plate?”

Emmy shakes her head again. She straight up says, “No.”

Missandei looks at Grey — in defeat. She says, “Okay, so I feel like I’ve reached a dead end. Where do we go from here?”

“I have no idea,” he says, as he drops his arm from the back of Emmy’s chair in order to lightly pull her curls off of her face as she goes back to pouring over the kids menu and only making ga-ga eyes at the mac and cheese. “This is an ongoing problem we’ve been trying to hack. I honestly think that shaming her could work. But you tended to not be into that.” 

This makes her smile again — because she’s kinda realizing that this is what he sounds like when he’s joking.

Chapter Text

She is concerned she will never feel attached to her kids.

She’s been obsessively trying to hack this, in part by watching a bunch of old videos that she previously recorded on her phone — often really long, semi-indecipherable videos of Maddy running back and forth on a soccer field, of Emmy rambling about something random, of Maddy dancing, and of both girls having cute and sweet little conversations with her. There are also a number of videos of all of them in the car going somewhere, doing little sing-alongs, and celebration type videos — of the girls’ namedays and them being sung to as they sit behind a glowing cake. 

While it’s interesting and cute to see how much younger the girls used to be, none of it really strikes a strong maternal chord in her.

She honestly fears that she will never love her children the way they deserve ever again. She fears that losing all the years that she did with them during a pivotal time in their development will prevent her from ever truly loving them — like in the way that her own mom loves her. She doesn’t think she will ever automatically jump in front of a bullet for them. She doesn’t think she will ever eat half-masticated food from their mouths. She doesn’t even think she will ever be so obsessed with them that she will prevent them from moving out of the house and ban them from going to college far away. She doesn’t even really miss them when they’re in school or when Grey takes them out of the house for the entire day.

She just feels a deep responsibility for her girls. She feels like it’s her duty to make sure they are clothed, sheltered, get a good education, and have all of the resources they need to be healthy and happy adults. She feels like she has a high sense of investment in the girls that she doesn’t with random kids because she can clearly see that they are her children because they look like her and they do a bunch of things that sometimes remind her of herself. She thinks that her keenness to parent is currently based on just a whole lot of ego.

She is very concerned that this is never going to change. She worries that it will always feel like an obligation. She worries that Emmy will always fatigue her and be just a touch too needy for her to love. She worries that Maddy will always hate her and continue to exclusively run to Grey for everything. She worries that she doesn’t have the capacity to love unconditionally — to love someone that doesn’t love her back.

She actually wonders if she’s just a psychopath now — because she is incapable of loving two really cute kids and one nice man.  

She finds a rare video of him and her, being mundane together. She can’t see her own face in it because of course she’s the one holding her phone. She sees him clearly though, shirtless and still lying in bed, like he had just woken up. 

“Yo, how many times do I need to tell you? I’m not interested in making pornography with you.”

“Honey, guess what day it is.”

“It’s Sunday.”

“Okay, ha ha. Seriously, did you forget?”

“That it’s Sunday?”

“Nudho.”

“Happy anniversary, baby.”

She decides that her only course of action is really to fake it until she makes it. She has to fake being what she thinks is a competent mother. She has to pretend she’s a person that knows what the right thing to say is, when to spring into action, when to hang back, when to yell and correct, and when to comfort and hold. 

Honestly, Missandei’s model for a really competent mother is basically her own mother, which feels a little risky but it’s all she’s got. She starts walking around the house asking herself, what would Mira do?  

Maddy has started wearing headphones constantly, and Missy knows it’s not normal, based on her weeks of experience with this child. She is guessing the headphones are a self-protection measure, a way for Maddy to exist in shared spaces but to also not have to interact with Missy.

Missy knows that her own mother would be real hell no about the headphones. Her own mother would tell her off so hard for disrespect and the willful ignoring.

She’s also seen Grey gesture to Maddy to remove her headphones so he can talk to her, a few times. Missy knows that it’s a technique that works.

So she fights down all of her nerves and her anxiety, and she forces her stupidly weak legs to limp as fast as they can all the way to where Maddy is refilling her water bottle at the fridge. She has to lean way over to very obviously put herself in Maddy’s line of sight. And when Maddy messes up and accidentally makes eye contact with Missy, Missy very exaggerated mimes herself taking off imaginary headphones.

Missy then loudly says, “Hi! Do you have time to talk for a second?” 

This type of super uncool intrusiveness and lack of subtlety is totally her own mom’s style. 

It totally works.

Maddy looks at her warily, but Maddy does pull off her headphones. “Yeah?”

“Hey!” Missy practically shouts, because she’s still in loud Mira-mode. “How was your sleepover at Cami’s?” 

Grey had volunteered a bunch of information about it to Missy, and she is finally getting that he doesn’t just tell her things about the kids just to pass the time. He’s telling her stuff about the kids to help get her up to speed on things that might be important for her to know.

She knows that Cami is Maddy’s really good friend and it’s kind of a pretty new thing — since the start of the school year. She knows that Page used to be Maddy’s closest friend, but they got put in different classes and only see each other at recess and lunch. She knows that Maddy isn’t the most gregarious kid and doesn’t have a ton of friends the way Emmy kind of already does, but Maddy has a good number of close friends — enough that they are not worried about her being too lonely and too removed from her peers. She is just a bit of a shy and reserved kid, maybe.

As Maddy caps her water bottle again, she looks at Missandei like she thinks Missandei is about to prank her — or about to pull the rug out from under her. She looks at her mom with guardedness. “It was fine,” Maddy says.

Missy smiles. “What did you guys get up to?”

“Nothing much.”

“Oh, cool,” Missy says. And then — taking another page out of her own mother’s parenting handbook — Missy decides to just ask intrusive questions. “Is Cami your best friend?”

Maddy shrugs. 

“I heard she has two moms. That’s cool.”

Maddy is just staring at her now. And waiting for this to be over. 

Missy can kind of remember doing this kind of thing to her own mother, except she clearly remembers doing it when she was older, like when she was in her teen years, when she and her mother started butting heads far more often. She remembers how everything her mother did or said annoyed the shit out of her. 

“Your dad, Emmy, and I went to Red Lobster yesterday,” Missy continues. “Not sure why. It was his decision. We missed your presence though. He told me you like cheddar bay biscuits. We brought you some back. They are in the fridge.”

“Oh my God!” Maddy finally says in exasperation, doing a pretty amazing impression of Grey. “What are you doing right now? What do you want, Mom?”

“I just wanna chat with you,” Missy says, valiantly trying not to shrink under the heat of Maddy’s stare, trying to remember that this is what mothers do — be impervious to their kid’s complete annoyance with them. 

“You’re being so weird!” Maddy says, as she frowns unhappily.

“I know — I get weird when I’m nervous.” Missy says it in a rush, as she tries to lean against the counter casually — before she realizes that the countertop is actually a touch too low and she has to bend over too much and it feels super uncomfortable and stiff — so she has to correct herself with her hands and lift herself up back into full upright position. “So I want to say that I know you’re still angry with me and I get why you’re angry with me. I also want to say I am really sorry for all the things I did and said and didn’t do — that caused you to be understandably angry with me. I also want to say that I do want to be your mom, very much. I am your mom. You’re stuck with me. Uh, sorry-not-sorry for that.”

Missy kind of decides to pause here, maybe for a reaction of sorts or for a chance for Maddy to express something back to her.

But all she gets is a scrutinizing stare and a whole lot of silence.

So Missy blows up the remaining silence in nervousness. It’s really what her own mother would do — not let moments breathe before she hopped in with another thought. Missy wants to explain something she’s been itching to say. She’s been wanting to make it clear to her daughter that she’s not that xenophobic. She just has a completely understandable wariness when it comes to Summer Islander men.

She says, “Uh I also want to say that you were right. I am prejudiced against Summer Islanders, but probably not in the way you think. I’m not like, ‘Oh, Summer Islanders don’t deserve to vote.’ It’s more like, ‘Haha, Summer Islander men are hyper competitive and like to go to medical school and make lots of money and buy a bunch of expensive things to avoid feeling existential dread, feeling the weight of the meaningless of a life spent just acquiring things.’” Missy pauses awkwardly again. “I feel like this would all make more sense if you understand my context as a Naathi woman.”

“Grandma didn’t care that much if you were good at school,” Maddy says dully in a scathing monotone, like she is bored. “Grandma wanted you to listen to her and Grandpa all the time. She wanted you to get married and listen to your husband a lot.”

Missy’s jaw drops, blatantly and comically. She feels very much like Emmy in this moment, but the thing is, she is legitimately shocked. 

“How do you know that?” she blurts.

Maddy continues to be pretty underwhelmed by her mom’s current state. She continues to lose patience with her mom’s amnesia and how it makes her mom feel like a complete stranger to her. 

Maddy shrugs. She also stops herself from being disrespectful and saying something like duh. She knows her dad wouldn’t like that, so she makes herself stick with the unadorned truth because her dad and her mom used to both tell her that while the truth is sometimes more important than not making someone feel bad, don’t try and be a jerk about it. She says, “You told me. You used to tell me this all the time, to explain to me why school matters so much to you and Dad.”

“Uh, wow,” Missy says, as her mind runs a mile a minute, trying to imagine just how much of it all she’s shared with Maddy. Missy is shocked that her former self apparently decided it was okay to talk about this stuff with a child.  

“Dad’s a Summer Islander,” Maddy says, finally responding to her mom’s long ramble. And before Missy can break in and say something dumb, like, ‘I know,’ Maddy continues and adds, “Dad is really competitive. And he went to medical school —”

“He went to medical school?” Missy interjects incredulously. “God, how many careers has that man had?”

“So you think Dad’s life is meaningless,” Maddy finishes. “You think Grandpa’s life is meaningless.”

“Oh my God,” Missy says, as she shakes her head in disbelief. At herself. “No. I don’t think that at all. Your grandpa’s situation is different because he’s first generation.”

Maddy is seriously looking at her like, WTF?

Missandei frowns. “Dang, I am apparently really bad at explaining things.”

“She is trying to explain that Summer Islanders have had a history of being really oppressive with Naathi people,” Grey suddenly cuts in as he walks into the kitchen carrying Emmy. 

Missandei’s and Maddy’s voices have been echoing across the entire house, and he’s been trying to wait it out to see if they work this out between themselves and have a nice bonding moment together — but then he heard Missandei shoot herself in the foot. 

He’s walking right in between them to get to the fridge. 

He’s also trying to get Emmy a glass of skim milk because she requested juice and he has nixed giving her more sugar. He’s carrying her because he was trying to stop her from blasting into the kitchen and killing Maddy and Missandei’s conversation. Emmy’s been really patient about waiting, but she has been getting antsy in his arms and grabbing his shirt in her little fists and basically going, what are we doing, man, I need juice!  

“Summer Islanders did a bunch of fucked up stuff to Naathi people because Summer Islanders were historically a much more aggressive people,” he continues, as he balances Emmy with one arm and pulls out the carton of milk with his free hand. “And Naathi people were very peaceful and nice, and generations of them were subjugated and stuff. And stuff that happened hundreds of years ago are often still felt today. It’s sometimes understandably annoying to Naathi people that there are assholes like me walk around being swaggy as fuck because a lot of the reason we have wealth and resources is because we took it from another culture. And a lot of the reason Naathi people don’t have as much wealth and resources is because it was taken from them.” 

He plops Emmy down on the counter so that he can grab one of her plastic, non-breakable little tumblers from the cabinet.

He and Missandei haven’t talked about this stuff at all with the girls — because they had wanted to be careful with the girls since they are both still so young. They wanted the girls to take pride in both of their heritages and to not get all conflicted in the brain over the more unsavory aspects of history — for the time being at least. Their plan kind of was to indoctrinate and brainwash the girls with cultural pride — and once that was really cemented in, then they were gonna bring up this stickiness.

Though, he doesn’t think it’s the worst thing in the world, that the timeline has been sped up a little. Maddy is really mature and mostly good at nuance. Emmy is still probably way too young though, but he’s banking on her just forgetting this. And then they can have a redo in a few years.

As he pours and then gives Emmy the milk she doesn’t really want, he says, “This stuff is probably way too complex for us to be trying to explain to you guys right now, but your ma really didn’t intend for you to hear her roasting me, Maddy. It was just a little joke about how I’m such a basic ass Chad.” 

He looks at Emmy. “Drink your drink, dude. You asked for it.”

She scrunches up her face — because she really doesn’t remember asking for milk. She grabs the cup anyway though, because she can go for milk. 

“Careful,” he tells her, as he steadies the cup in her hands.

“What exactly is a basic ass Chad, Dad?” Maddy asks. 

“Oh my God,” Missandei softly mutters. She is realizing that she is prejudiced and it might not have been for a good reason. She is also realizing that she’s still a pretty terrible and judgmental person — and a crappy mother to boot. And probably also a wallower. 

“You know,” Grey says conversationally to Maddy. “Some asshole who golfs on the weekends and talks a lot about ETFs and crypto.”

“You golf on the weekends though.” She skips over the ETFs and crypto because she doesn’t know what they are but can surmise that they are money-related. “Or I guess you used to.” 

“I never said I’m not a basic ass Chad, baby,” he says. “We have actually not established that I’m not a basic ass Chad. Your mommy is actually kind of right about me. Now if you’ll excuse us, me and Emmy are gonna go use a shit ton of that natural resource we call ‘water,’ and we’re gonna wash my electric car together. Let’s hit it, punk. You done with your milk?”

Before waiting for her to answer, because he can tell she’s done, he picks up her glass and he downs the rest of it before he wipes her mouth with his bare hand and then takes the glass to the sink, running the faucet briefly. “What playlist do you wanna jam out to?”

As he lightly sprays Emmy with the hose on purpose, as she cackle-laughs and starts running around with Momo, trying to get him to catch her with the hose again, he thinks that maybe he should buy a little sprinkler for this purpose and let her and her sister go nuts playing outside and getting pelted in the face with streams of water. 

He’s still constantly thinking of ways to inject more fun into his daughters’ lives. He’s also thinking that this task is now more important than ever, because he wants to give them very good memories before he blows up their entire fucking life. He wants them to have good memories for when they are older and look back on this time in their lives. He wants them to remember that they had fun sometimes, in between the complete and utter devastation of their family splitting apart.

He also wants to help clean up things for them with their mom, before they are told that Missandei is moving out. He anticipates that Maddy will be pissed and Maddy will really blame Missandei and be misguidedly loyal to him and pick sides. He really doesn’t want this to affect her relationship with Missandei forever, so he’s been thinking a lot about how he can help facilitate more understanding between her and her mother. 

It apparently involves acting like he’s totally cool with being called a basic ass Chad. 

Emmy is getting soaked. She’s going to need a bath after this. And they actually aren’t really washing the car. He’s kind of lazily spraying the car in between spraying her and Momo. 

Maddy is really done having awkward chats with her mom for the time being, so Missy smiles at Maddy like a lunatic and gives Maddy a double thumbs up, just as Maddy slides her headphones back on over her ears. 

Maddy wanders back upstairs after that, because Maddy knows that her mom currently can’t do stairs.

Missy generally tries not to feel too discouraged over this. She tells herself that she probably cannot repair weeks of disengagement and months of trauma through one really awkward conversation. 

She also tells herself that she needs to conquer stairs, if she is gonna be able to chase her kid up them to continue to force her dorkiness on her kid. She also needs to be able to do stairs before she can move out. 

She decides to do her physical therapy exercise in the living room, instead of in the privacy of the guest bedroom. She has also decided that she probably needs to stop acting like a guest or an interloper in her children’s lives. She needs to be a fixture. She needs to take up more space.

The quiet house shifts back into being full of sound and chatter, when Grey, Emmy, and Momo come back in from washing the car. As she stretches on the concrete floor of the living room, she hears Emmy asking Grey if he’s going to be taking a bath too.

Missandei hears him say, “Nah, man. Just you.”

“But why just me!”

“Because I’m your father. And I like to lord my power over you. Also, guess what else? You’re gonna take a nap after you’re done with your bath.”

“Daddy, nooo! Why!”

“I already told you, man.” 

While he’s mildly surprised that Missandei is hanging out by herself in the living room and isn’t holed up in the guestroom like how she usually is, he doesn’t comment on it.

He does sees her drop her phone screen from her face when he walks into the room, carrying a basket of laundry full of dirty clothes. He does notice her shutting off her screen real quick.

He quickly walks into her room too, to grab some of her dirty laundry, adding it to the load. He’s already taken the liberty many times before, so it’s less weird for her at this point — that he’s handling her underwear and her bras.

And he has noticed that she really doesn’t want him to see whatever she is looking at on her phone. And while he has no idea what she’s looking at, he does have a couple of doomsday guesses.

She’s probably looking up a lawyer to team up with, to make his life an utter living hell when it comes to custody of their girls. 

Or she’s probably Facebooking with an ex, one of the many dorky and emotionally demonstrative white or Naathi dudes she dated before she met him. The two of them are probably super romantic and gentle with each other. They’re probably writing shitty poetry to each other. There are probably a lot of puns and a lot of GIFs of hearts bursting in glitter. She and her ex are probably in love. She and her ex are probably plotting out when they can be together again. They are probably sexting a bunch about how soft and gentle penis-in-vagina missionary sex is great and about how she thinks she doesn’t like it when her hair is pulled. She is probably telling her new guy that she doesn’t like biting during sex at all. 

Something like that. Probably.

He quickly starts a load of just the whites before he pulls out clothes from the dryer and mounds it all in a second basket. He takes that basket back out in the living room and he plops it and himself on the ground. He dumps it out and he starts pushing everything into quick little piles. Maddy’s pile. Emmy’s pile. His pile. Missandei’s pile.

As he starts folding clothes, she says, from her spot on the sofa, “Dude, thanks so much for earlier, with Maddy. You really bailed me out.” 

“Don’t mention it,” he mutters, as he folds one of Emmy’s little tiny t-shirts and knows that it’s a completely empty exercise. She’s going to fuck up all his hard work the second after he gets her drawers nice and neat again. Emmy is more like Missandei in this respect — casual and blase with stuff. Maddy is more like him — anal retentive and kind of controlling with stuff. 

“You went to medical school?” she asks. “You were a doctor?”

“I dropped out of medical school,” he corrects, because now that they are alone, he can finally let out how much he actually does not like being called a basic ass Chad. “I was never a doctor.” He also didn’t love it when she told him she meant everything she has ever said about him.

“That was before you joined the military?”

“Yep.”

“How long were you in the military?”

“A long time,” he says. “Nearly my entire 20s.”

“Wow. Why did you join?”

“Mostly to uphold Western imperialism,” he says, as his hands firm up Maddy’s pile of clothes so it doesn’t topple over. “That was my fave part.”

She, at least, has the decency to look kinda sheepish here. “Ah, so you remember that I said that.”

“Yep,” he says, staring at her in the exact same way that Maddy stares at her when Maddy is unimpressed with her. 

“Sorry.”

“It’s all good. It was kind of funny,” he says. And then upon quick thought, he amends it to, “It was barely funny.”

She shrugs lightly over that — even as her face flushes. And then she says, “Can I help?”

He looks down quizzically. “With laundry?”

“Yeah. I know I can’t do much. But I think I can handle folding clothes.”

She honestly did not help him that much with laundry before her accident. She was down to wash dishes, clean the floors, vacuum, and the rest of it. He knows that she just hates doing laundry, actually. That’s why her old apartment was littered with clothes when he first saw it. That’s why living with her for the first time in that apartment drove him nuts.  

“Okay, sure,” he says, as he stands up and throws some clothes back into the basket, intending on walking the basket over to her. “Thanks.”

Chapter Text

She doesn’t give him a heads up on her internal decision-making at all, which manages to surprise him only because he made an assumption. He assumed that she’d want to tell her family about them splitting up swiftly. 

He assumes because he spent years getting conditioned to her telling him every single thought she’s ever had. He’s still too used to the version of her that is a complete open book with him. He’s still used to the version of her that is very close with her family and greatly enjoys spending time with them.

He learns that she isn’t in a hurry to tell her family that they are splitting up — in the moment — right after dinner when the girls run off to go play with Rani in her bedroom upstairs. He learns that he has to be an accomplice in Missandei’s lie of omission when he clears his throat during a pause in between conversation topics and quietly announces, “So we have something to tell you guys.”

And she jumps all over that by loudly saying, “I can go to the toilet by myself again! Very slowly. I can also almost do a quarter of a sit-up!”

Grey glances at her in total surprise — briefly — before he covers it up and smoothly says, “It’s been a big week for us. I have more free time now.”

“Congrats, sis,” Moss says appreciatively, as he reaches out and lightly pats Missandei on the back. “That’s huge. Proud of you.”

He really hates lying. He’s the kind of person that thinks lying by omission is still lying. He tells his kids to try and tell the truth in tough moments when they are reluctant to tell the truth but feel in their gut that the truth is important. He encourages them to tell the truth, even when they can anticipate that the truth will probably not be well-received. 

He hates lying because it assumes that other people are fragile, that they can’t handle an opinion or a belief or someone else’s authenticity. He refuses to be a pessimist. He honestly feels like he is honoring people’s strength and their humanity when he tells them the truth. He tells people the truth because he is hopeful, and he believes in people’s capacity for reciprocating care and respect. 

He really hates lying so much, but he understands there are situations when it feels necessary. He understands there are gray areas. He’s lying to his children, for instance, to spare them some pain.  

He can make himself try and understand why Missandei wants to lie to her family. It honestly makes him feel pretty sad and disappointed, because the version of her that he knows isn’t so scared of being truthful with her family. The version of her that he fell in love with worked extremely hard over the years to repair her relationship with her parents and brothers. 

He’s also been having a bit of a hard time hiding how not-great his relationship with Missandei currently is, and he feels very exhausted and bad whenever he catches these furtive looks from her mom, her dad, Moss, Mars, Safi, Zoya — just all of them, really. They all feel sorry for him. 

Even Chako is giving him looks. Chako has a light jacket on and probably has applied a gallon of cologne. Chako has grabbed his mom’s car keys and — in the course of heading to the car to meet up with someone he’s excited about — Chako’s gaze pauses on Grey and Chako is like, “Sup, Uncle Nudho!” enthusiastically at first. And then he drops his face in a frown of empathy — because he suddenly re-remembers the time his uncle broke down in front of him, when Aunt Missy was still in the hospital. “What’s up, Uncle Nudho?” Chako says sympathetically.

“Oh my God,” Grey mutters — because even Chako feels sorry for him — as he also reaches into his back pocket for his slim wallet. “Do you have enough money? Do you want more?”

It’s an ongoing joke. Because Moss kept obnoxiously calling Grey a poor little rich boy to ridicule and low-key test him when they first met. Grey tried to make the mockery less fun by living up to it and just throwing money at all the kids whenever he sees them.  

“Uh, yes,” Chako says, as he also jokingly snatches the bills from Grey’s hand.

“Hey,” Moss corrects, sounding and looking altogether too serious — because he gets triggered by this every time. This feels like a reflection of his parenting every time. “No,” he says firmly to Chako. “Give it back to him.”  

Chako easily pats the wad of cash back into Grey’s chest, giving him quick hug from behind before he says, “You can’t say I didn’t try,” before he waves at the rest of the table and says, “Night, fam! See ya later! Bye, Auntie! You lookin’ good! Healthy!” 

He leans over and spontaneously gives Missandei a quick kiss on her cheek — probably because he’s maybe too young and self-involved to understand what it actually truly means, that she doesn’t remember most of his life. 

Once he’s out of the room, Zoya says, “Oh man, I could use some of his energy.”

“But is the trade-off worth it?” Safi rhetorically asks, leaning her head back to smile at Moss. “Being a teenage boy in the thick of puberty.”

“Oh my God,” Moss says. “His socks.”

Safi immediately snaps the back of her hand to the center of his chest, as Mars laughs loudly. “Don’t be gross in front of your mother!” 

“Yo,” Moss says, as he starts chuckling. “Our mom actually knows all about crusty socks.” He’s gesturing between himself and his brother. “Hello?”

“I honestly didn’t know what they were for the longest time,” their mom admits, shrugging. “I thought you were both blowing your noses in your socks. Your dad had to tell me.”

“I really did have to tell her,” their dad says, grinning. “And she was all, ‘What! He’s ten years old! He’s still a baby!’ And I was all, ‘Yeah, he’s still your precious and helpless little baby boy, but he’s definitely jacking off into his socks.’”

“Girls and puberty are a little less gross,” Mars says conversationally. “But much scarier.” He points to Grey and his brother. He does some quick finger guns at them. He says, “Look forward to that. You especially, Nudho. It’s coming up for ya fast.”  

He’s actually talking about all of the slimy period blood he has had to clean off of all of the toilets in his house and all of the soiled maxi pads and tampons he’s had to pick up because the dog digs them out of the garbage to tear them up into a million bloody pieces. He’s actually talking about the fact that Mara is apparently incapable of listening to him when he tells her to walk her shit to a garbage can with a lid, and maybe not put her tampons in the waste bin in her bedroom just because she’s too lazy to walk it the next door over — and how she freaks out and screams at him for body shaming her when he thinks that he really isn’t. 

This is what he actually means by gross and scary. 

But of course, Missandei only remembers her big brother when he was a much younger and much more inexperienced father. She only remembers him as the dad to a toddler. She remembers the frilly dresses, the princess talking points, and the alpha male over-protective schtick. She has missed all of the ups and downs and learning over time. She missed the rebellions, the shaved head, the gender fluidity, the one weekend Mara ran away from home, and the many times Mara called her dad a self-hating pig just to hurt his feelings and enrage him. 

This is why Missy leans into passive aggressiveness. This is why, with her arms crossed over her chest, she says, “Yeah, it’s really gross and scary how little girls start developing breasts and are sexualized by grown men — right away.” 

Mars completely knows where his sister’s mind is at. And he’s not even about to fall for her trap and play her game today. He’s pretty determined to not have their nice dinner end with their relations watching them scream “fuck you!” a lot at each other — again.   

He says, “Yeah, that is terrifying.” He says this because it’s the truth. 

Grey wants to go home because he’s tired and it’s been a long week. He knows that Missandei is on the verge of picking another argument with one of her family members, so it’s probably definitely a real good time for her to go home, too. But he can hear the sound of his girls and his niece laughing loudly upstairs. He can hear the loud thumping of their footsteps as they jump from spot to spot. 

So he pushes himself to stay extra long with her family. He wants to prolong the fun for the girls. 

This is how he ends up on the couch, squished between her two brothers even though it’s a three-seater. Her brothers are sitting extra close to him on purpose, to mess with him. 

There’s a bowl of plain tortilla chips in front of them on the coffee table. Her dad is rocking back and forth in an armchair that is also kind of like a slider too. All three of the men in her family are mesmerized by the glowing TV screen. They are watching basketball highlights and also trying to have a half-conversation with one another. 

Grey used to enjoy this quite a bit — basketball, hanging out with her dad and brothers, and chatting about nothing important at all. 

But as with everything else, it no longer feels the same after her accident. 

He’s also kinda sad about it and too wrapped up in that to enjoy the mundanity of the moment. He doesn’t think that he’s going to be around them as much after he and Missandei officially split. He can’t imagine that he’ll still be having dinner with her parents and siblings on a regular basis after they split. It would be weird for him to. They aren’t actually his family, after all.  

“He’s really fun to watch,” Mars says, staring at the TV.

“Real fun,” Moss affirms.

“It’s actually more fun to watch him now than in his early years.”

“Yo, agree.”

“The best rim finisher of all time and can guard almost anyone.”

Everyone is wrong about her. 

She’s not leaving her relationship because she thinks she can do better than him or because she thinks there’s this great love out there that she hasn’t yet found. She’s not leaving in order to chase some sort of missing fulfillment, to fill some hole inside of her heart.

She’s leaving the relationship because she needs to have a choice in it all, and she needs some real memories of her own self-sufficiency and strength. 

She thinks he’s nice. She thinks that all signs point to him being a fantastic father — just like everyone has told her he is. She thinks he was likely a very good partner to her and likely gave her everything she wanted at some point. She even thinks he’s excessively handsome and that’s very nice for him. She knows that he’s a catch. She understands why she was drawn to him and why she had babies with him.

She just doesn’t want to be with someone she doesn’t remember choosing. 

She actually doesn’t want to be with anyone — period. 

That’s the thing — that’s the rub. In this new world, she’s a mother to two girls, and she just wants to put all of her energy into being a decent mother to two girls. She doesn’t want a man to love her. She doesn’t want to be distracted by someone who is less important than her kids. She already sucks at parenting her children, so she really does not have the time to worry about a man on top of it. She has zero interest in sucking face with a good-looking man and listening to his hopes and dreams and giving over more of herself as she tells him that she also believes in his hopes and dreams. 

She knows she doesn’t have the capacity for this. She doesn’t want this. 

She just wants to co-parent with her children’s father, who seems like a good man — just like her dad said. Her children’s father legitimately seems like a great father — just like her brothers and mom have all said. And she is very glad that she gets to co-parent with someone who is so competent at being a parent.

She just doesn’t want the romantic relationship. And she doesn’t think it’s right or fair to him for her to tie up more years of his life. She doesn’t want to take away his chance at being happier without her. 

She can tell he’s great on paper — handsome and rich and all of that — and that lots of women would find him very attractive and be very into him. She imagines that he wouldn’t be single for very long because he’s so great on paper. She will be very happy for him, too — when he inevitably finds someone who is a much better match for him than she is. 

She doesn’t want to tell her parents about her and Grey splitting up right away because she wants to have some time and space to process through it herself, before she has a Naathi woman screeching in her ear about how she’s an idiot and a failure at doing the one thing that she was put on this earth to do. 

She ends up self-segregating in the kitchen with her mom, Safi, and Zoya. As her mom passionately cleans Safi’s stove, she has some tea with her sisters-in-law and tries not to sound like a complete idiot and a terrible mother, as she answers the questions they ask her about the girls. She tells them things with Maddy are a bit difficult, and she listens as they give her unsolicited advice about what eight-year-olds be like and counsel her on doing stuff she’s already considered — like reassuring Maddy and talking to Maddy and explaining that her memory is totally kaput. 

Missy tries to remember if it’s normal for her to resent every piece of advice she didn’t ask for or if this is something new that cropped up due to all the brain damage she suffered.

When she shuffles with her walker back to the living room to check in on them, she finds that Mars is smiling at her and conspicuously pointing hard at Grey’s head, which is resting against her brother’s shoulder, unconscious. Mars is grinning and quietly saying, “He just fell asleep! Lil’ buddy is tuckered out.”

“He’s a real cute sleeper,” Moss says, right before he leans forward to snatch up another tortilla chip from the bowl on the coffee table and jams it into his mouth, crunching on it noisily. “Whaddya want to do, sis? Y’all want to sleep over? The girls can sleep in Rani’s room. You and Nudho can have the guest room.” 

Upon her brief look of skepticism, he rolls his eyes and quickly amends it to, “One of you can have the guest room and the other can sleep out here on the couch, then.” 

“Or we can wake him up,” Missy suggests dryly.

“Miss,” Mars says patiently. “Your man clearly has not slept in months. But sure, let’s wake him up and have him drive y’all home because you don’t want to be inconvenienced.” 

She honestly thinks that it’s not her fault he’s bad at sleeping. She honestly thinks this is the kind of thing she doesn’t want to be on the hook for — whether or not a man gets enough sleep for himself. This is the kind of thing that would distract her from being a good mother to her young children — being busy mothering a grownass man. 

“If you two can get him into the car without waking him up, I bet your mom and I can handle the rest actually,” their dad says.

“Dad,” Mars says, as he opens his mouth for Moss to pop in a chip. He can’t lean forward, lest he accidentally wake Grey. “We’re not gonna have you and mom carry Nudho’s skinny ass into his house,” he says as he noisily chews. He thoughtfully pauses after he swallows. And then he says, “Zoya and I can do it though.”

“Guys,” Grey mutters quietly — groggily with his eyes still shut — surprising them all with his sudden consciousness. “I appreciate all of the work y’all are putting into this. But I am awake now.” He pops his eyes open — though they are still heavy and it’s obvious he hasn’t been awake long. “Hearing my name woke me up,” he explains. “And there was also no way you were gonna get me into the car without waking me up.” He lightly yawns. “What time is it?” He looks at Missandei. “Shall we head out?”

It’s only eleven o’clock and staying out this late on a Saturday night isn’t even that abnormal for them — before her accident — but of course things are different now, and he’s been on the hook for the responsibilities that both he and Missandei used to tackle together. He’s been on the hook for getting the girls to school, cleaning the house, making dinner, doing the girls’ hair, doing the various errands, taking them to various activities, and also just generally interacting with them and ensuring they don’t feel ignored or overlooked during this really difficult time with their mother. 

And he knows he hasn’t been sleeping well — because literally everyone has a hot take and tells him about how he looks tired and exhausted all the time and how he needs to take better care of himself for the sake of his children — but he honestly doesn't know what he’s supposed to do with this feedback. Ignore his children and sleep more? Skip helping them with their schoolwork so that he can nap? Let the house fall into disarray? Order in shitty junk food every day? Let Missandei deal with her lack of mobility by herself?

He thinks that maybe splitting up with Missandei could be good for his health. He could maybe take a freaking nap again once she’s on her own and able to help care for the girls again.

He thinks that it still feels a ways off from that, as he pulls their car into the driveway and spends the next fifteen minutes ushering each person into the house by himself. He picks up Maddy first in his arms and then tiredly walks her up the stairs. She stirs in his arms and softly asks him if they are home. He tells her that they are definitely home and she should keep sleeping. He lays her down on the bed a little sloppily, because he has to still get her ready for bed, before he goes back downstairs to grab Emmy. She’s lighter so he can be a little faster with her. She doesn’t wake up at all, as he lays her down next to her sister.

And then he’s back down in the car, to pop the trunk and pull Missandei’s walker out. He puts it in front of her and watches as she gingerly grabs onto it for balance as she slides out of the passenger seat. The transition to the garage into the house is a little tight for her and her walker, but she’s been wanting to do everything herself lately, so he waits patiently, holding the heavy door open for her, as she quietly shuffles by him.

After that, he pulls the car into the garage and parks it. After that, he briskly walks into the house and softly calls the name of his middle child as Missandei gets herself ready for bed. 

He stands on the edge of the patio, as Momo runs outside real quickly and takes the longest pee ever. He picks her up after she’s done, takes her to the sink, and cleans some of the grass stains and maybe a little bit of piss from her little paws. He gives her a little snuggle and continues holding her as he stops over at Missandei’s room.

All he wants to do is just crash, but he wants to bring up her reluctance to disclose their new relationship status with her family — and this is as good of a time as any to do it since the girls are asleep. He tiredly stands in her doorway and watches her rub some lotion on her arms, and he finds that he can’t even find it in himself to give a shit that she doesn’t love him anymore. He just wants to know. 

“So what’s the plan?” he asks. “With your family?”

She’s defensive about it right away, even though he truly meant it as a question, not an accusation. She crankily says, “I don’t know, maybe not spring it on them during family dinner?”  

“Okay, sorry,” he says, even though he’s not really sorry at all. “So when were you thinking?”

“I don’t know,” she repeats. “Why are you itching to tell them right away? I’m still a ways off from being able to walk without an aid.” 

“I hate lying to them,” he says simply.

This is apparently something she hasn’t considered. Because she goes, “Oh.”

“But I get it,” he adds. “Can you give me a heads up when you decide to tell them? And let me know if you want me there, too?” 

“Oh, sure,” she says. 

While he thinks it’s ridiculous he has to constantly give her the most basic pointers on how to co-parent with him, he’s been trying to also constantly remind himself that he needs to practice patience. She apparently became a really cool person and someone he was really attracted to — later in her life. She was apparently kinda bad at relationships when she was in her twenties. 

Even as he thinks this, he realizes he’s wrong. She was still actually kind of bad at relationships when they first met. The way she handled telling him she was pregnant was not great. 

He asks her if she needs anything else from him before he heads upstairs. She predictably says she needs nothing else from him.

He takes the stairs two at a time, with Momo still cradled in his arms.

He stays up longer when he gets to the bedroom, because he has to change the girls out of their day clothes and put them in more comfortable sleep clothes. He has to handle Emmy’s sleeping corpse-like little body, as he flips her to her side and starts undoing a bunch of little buttons on the back of her dress in the dark because she wanted to feel regal today. He makes a vow to himself to only buy clothes with velcro after this shit.

He has to brush their teeth for them, waking them up briefly to get them to rinse and spit into a cup that he cleans up in the sink. He also has to undo their hair and take out the hair bands and rub out some of the tightness from their heads. He doesn’t even have the energy to brush out their tangles, so he leaves it all for the time being and reminds himself to have an entirely stupid argument with Emmy about this tomorrow, because she thinks the hairstyles he does for her are real basic and he’s nowhere near as good at hair as her mommy is. And he wants to tell her no shit he’s not as good at hair as her mommy is, but his remedial ass is her only option on most days. 

Missandei has expressed zero interest in their girls’ hair, so he’s not going to suddenly throw their heads at her, even though he’s kinda tempted to shake her and tell her to do more shit, holy shit. He refrains from doing that more for the girls’ sake than Missandei’s. He doesn’t want her to accidentally hurt their feelings by being all unpracticed and only semi-interested in parenting them. 

It’s nearly one in the morning before he can crawl in and go to sleep.

He doesn’t sleep right away though. His mind is still too busy thinking about everything that needs to be squared away before he and Missandei split.

Chapter Text

He’s not surprised to see Drogo spontaneously show up at his house on a Monday evening whatsoever because Drogo has a proven track record of being bad with boundaries. Grey is, however, mildly surprised that Drogo is alone and that Daenerys and Rhaego didn’t tag along. 

Grey gently lowers the bag of compost that he was carrying down to the ground and pulls the hem of his shirt up to wipe his sweaty face with. 

“You’ve been avoiding me,” Drogo announces, after he pulls up into the driveway and lowers his window.

“I mean, obviously,” Grey says as he walks up and braces his arms against Drogo’s SUV. “So you thought it was a good idea to go against what I asked from you and you show up to my house on a weeknight?”

“Yeah, man. With some libations, too,” Drogo says, holding up the six pack. “Can you like, order a pizza and have Missandei watch her own children for an hour to two? Can she do that for you, or is that too strenuous for her?”

“Okay, so you showed up ready to be a dick to her — again.”

“Nah, man. I showed up ready to be really sad with you,” Drogo says casually. “I showed up because more people need to show up for you. I showed up because she’s fucking selfish as fuck. I showed up because at least now there’s at least one other adult in this house that gets how fucking brillant and amazing and selfless you are.”

“Oh my God, you’re so dramatic,” Grey says as he lightly claps his hands on the top of Drogo’s car, as he moves out of the way of Drogo’s door. “Okay, come in, asshole.”

The story he likes to tell other people is that he and Grey met at a pivotal time in their lives and they were destined to be each other’s BFF. After all, what were the chances that they came from the same city in the West — the biggest city in the West — and met each other halfway around the world? 

Drogo likes to call it fate, rather than a mere coincidence. 

In actuality though, they were barely able to stand each other for the longest time. The only reason they stuck around with each other for as long as they needed to become friends was because it was pretty illegal for them to spend time away from each other. 

When they first met, Drogo thought Grey was a soft little Summer Islander bitch who impulsively enlisted to rebel against his rich daddy. When they first met, Grey thought that Drogo was a toxic Dothraki idiot who couldn’t cut it in the real world once he aged out of the glory days of high school football, so he had to seek out a violent environment in order to feel like a hero again, like the total fucking tool he is.

They had both been really right about one another — and also really wrong. 

Drogo is interrupting Grey in the middle of doing chores outside in the yard — some weeding, feeding, and mulching — and due to spending an abundance of time with the guy in a past life, Drogo’s well-aware that Grey is not gonna stop his chores just because Drogo wants to be entertained and have an emotional conversation together. 

He delays forcing his help onto Grey for a short few minutes, as he wanders in the house to put the beer in the fridge and to check in on the ladies. 

Drogo pops the cap off of a beer bottle and tosses it in the recycle bin as he enthusiastically greets Maddy and Emmy, asks them what their plans are for dinner, and straight up decides to fuck with whatever Grey has planned for dinner. He grins winningly at them and asks them what kind of pizza they want for dinner. Emmy goes for this dastardliness right away. She says, “Ooh, yesss! I love pizza!”

Maddy is predictably more concerned with their dad being put out by the change in plans. She asks, “Did Dad say that it’s okay to order pizza?” She’s eyeing her mom, watching her mom’s face to see how her mom feels about this.

Missandei is furrowing her brows and looking at Drogo with a lot of suspicion. 

“No, your dad doesn’t know yet.” Drogo says conversationally before he takes a swig from the beer bottle. And then he exaggeratedly winks at all of them. “But he’ll be cool with it. I’ll talk to him.”

This simple statement makes Maddy smile and relax — because she’s familiar with this song and dance — because her Uncle Drogo has a way of making her dad more chill and easy going. She says, “Okay! Thanks, Uncle Drogo!”

“Okay, wait a minute,” Missandei suddenly says, cutting in. “He has like, a fish in the fridge.”

“Yeah, I saw,” Drogo says, smiling at her as he takes another swig. “You guys can eat fish tomorrow.”

Drogo very much remembers when he first met Missandei. It was fairly early in his relationship with Dany — about one month in — but he already knew that he was gonna try and be with her forever. Dany jokingly told him that he needed to pass the best friend test if he was going to have any staying power.

He met Missy. The three of them had drinks together at a bougie cocktail bar. He felt like he knew exactly who she was as a person based on the way she dressed, carried herself, and also her drink order. He treated her accordingly.

And he completely failed the best friend test. Since he initially found her really uptight and judgmental, he honestly did not even give a shit that someone like her didn’t think he was good enough for Dany.  

He’s been getting many touches of deja vu lately. He supposes that Missandei’s ‘old and unimproved’ personality is a shock for Grey and Dany because the both of them have generally only known the version of Missandei that loved them really hard and really comprehensively. They both have had so many years of affection and sweetness to draw from that the punctuated bits of bitter that keeps cropping up now feel especially bewildering.

However, Drogo very much remembers judgmental Missandei. So his feelings are less affected by this reemergence.

And Drogo is honestly not trying to be a dick, but he has certain opinions about what’s been going on here, in this house. 

So to Missandei, who is hovering around the kids and watching him with such suspicion, he says, “Do you mind ordering the pizzas, Missy? Get a variety. I have no dietary restrictions. Go nuts.” 

He then does something that he knows will make her incensed. 

He pulls out his wallet and extracts his credit card. 

He and Missy had moved beyond their differences and had become very good friends at some point — but of course she doesn’t remember that. What he does remember though, is that she’s going to really hate this. 

And just like before, he honestly doesn’t give that much of a shit. Because she’s kind of wrong about him. And her disengagement and unwillingness to see what is so fucking obviously in front of her face really annoys him too. He’s annoyed that Grey continues to go through the shittiest year he’s ever gone through — and Grey has gone through a lot in life. Drogo’s annoyed that this woman doesn’t realize that she had kids with a supremely amazing person. He’s annoyed that this woman’s snobbery, elitism, and snap judgments is making her blind to a supremely amazing person.

Drogo gives her his credit card. He winks at her too. Because he knows she hates this shit so much. He knows that she’s currently too self-centered and thinks she’s way smarter than he is — to realize that he’s doing this deliberately because he has some unresolved issues with his mom and is weirdly resentful yet totally mesmerized by angry beautiful women who don’t think he’s shit. 

To Missy, he says, “Dinner’s on me tonight, babe. Charge it! Get whatever you want!”

“Oh man, thanks, Uncle Drogo!” Maddy says enthusiastically, preventing Missandei from taking this gift away — because she cannot be the bad guy with Maddy again. 

“You’re very welcome, sweetie,” he says, as he accepts her hugs and picks her up off the ground. 

Emmy is quick to pile on. She also throws her little arms around his leg and says, “I can’t wait! Thank you thank you, Uncle Drogo!” 

They are obviously both excited because their dad rarely lets them have pizza for dinner. 

Missy is holding his credit card and generally doing her best to bite her tongue. He can see it clearly in her eyes. She hates him right now. She hates him so much.

But she is misguided and doesn’t even get that he’s doing her a real solid.

As he drops Maddy back on the ground, Missy eventually sighs and says, “Okay, so do you guys want to look at a menu together and decide what we want?”

“Yesss!”

Grey is pretty nonplussed and blase as Drogo tells the guy that they are having pizza for dinner. Grey just shrugs it off — because he basically understands what happened and what led to this — as he continues picking out weeds and dead plants from the flower bed.

Grey does look at Drogo in transparent exasperation, however, as Drogo takes off his organic cotton shirt and leaves it on the patio chair, before grabbing a pair of extra gloves and sliding them on. 

Grey rolls his eyes as Drogo picks up a bag of mulch. Grey flicks open the knife in his hand as Drogo walks up to him. Grey says, “You’re so fucking annoying. I’m not taking off my shirt, asshole.”

“You’re already sweaty and glistening though,” Drogo says, as he casually tries to kick Grey in the ass. “Man, this is gonna go so much faster with me here, man. How did you get so lucky?” 

While Missandei has shifted her interpretation of Grey in various ways, she has not changed her mind on Dany’s husband at all. She still thinks he’s completely the worst. She still thinks that he thinks he’s charming, but he’s actually obnoxiously full of himself and has that unearned confidence that she finds especially repulsive in men. She continues to not even understand what Dany sees in him — besides supremely boring hotness. 

She continues to think that it reflects badly on Grey, that this man is apparently his best friend. She thinks that this pointlessly shirtless man is obviously trash-talking her to Grey in the backyard right now and is probably trying to convince Grey to use all of his considerable wealth and resources to try and take her children away from her. Drogo is probably telling Grey that she’s unfit to be a mother — because she has the audacity to not want to have sex with him. 

Her anxiety is a bit high, so she barely notices that Emmy is climbing into her lap — not until Emmy is already halfway in her lap. 

She is just there for a cuddle, so Missandei automatically wraps her arms around Emmy and gives her a squeeze and a kiss on her forehead, as she continues sending accusing glances out the window.

“Whose garden is that?” Missy asks, looking directly at a vegetable bed full of desiccated dead plants. “Is it mine?”

Maddy leans over to peep out the window, to see what her mom is referring to. Maddy says, “It’s ours. The whole house. But you probably liked it the most. It was your idea. You liked to say that Naathi people have to grow our own food.”

It took a while for Grey to finally meet Daenerys, because Grey was still contracted, had very limited leave, and lived clear on the other side of the world. 

There was no big thing around them meeting. Drogo doesn’t care for that kind of thing. He just told Grey that he was in love with someone and he wanted his buddy to meet his girl. He just told Dany that since things were going well for them, she might as well meet the guy from all of the stories that Drogo told. 

She was pretty prepared to be annoyed having dinner with them, because she was so sure that the two of them together would be two of the same — and they’d just spend the evening boring her to death as they drunkenly reminisced with each other.

Instead, a super quiet and unfailingly respectful guy showed up to dinner. A guy who kept asking her questions about herself showed up to dinner.

After that dinner, Drogo had told her to eat shit and to take back all of her pessimism about him that she had ever felt. He told her that he will exceed her expectations — sometimes. He told her that he will rise to the occasion — sometimes. He told her to get ready for an entire lifetime of this.  

“Hey, remember when we almost died in Astapor together?” Drogo asks Grey conversationally before he dumps another bag of mulch into the flower bed. “Do you think this shit with Missandei is better than that or worse than that — for you?”

Grey laughs at that — which was what Drogo was hoping for. As Grey spreads the mulch around on his hands and knees, he says, “Shut up. You’re so fucking annoying.”

“Maybe this is just a phase, a little speed bump,” Drogo says optimistically. “Maybe you just need to remind her of why she used to be so fond of you. Like, have you considered telling her you don’t vote even though you are registered because you don’t like empty exercises that obscure forever-broken systems? Missandei loves that shit. Also, have you even thought about just walking around the house shirtless? Have you thought about showing her how flexible you are?” 

Grey is plainly shaking his head at Drogo. Because Drogo is sometimes still an idiot. He says, “Nah, man, this isn’t a phase. This is real. I know her. This isn’t some wolf-crying. She isn’t waiting for some guy to sweep her off her feet and make her feel okay with the state of her life. She had these struggles too — before the accident. I guess the difference was that she was way too emotionally attached to me and the girls to like — want this in a tangible way. But we used to talk about it a lot, who we thought we’d be versus who we actually are.”

“Yo, that’s just being an adult,” Drogo says. “I thought I was gonna play football and rake in the cash and be super famous and be set for life. But now I’m stuck with a cranky B who will randomly tell me she gets annoyed with the way I breathe sometimes — saying it like she wants me to stop breathing. And I didn’t think this was gonna be my life, either. But I love her and our kid. And ya know — that’s life, man.” 

She honestly feels really pissed and annoyed when she has to pay for the pizzas with Drogo’s credit card. She is pissed and annoyed that she doesn’t have a job and she doesn’t have her own credit card to be able to buy stuff for her kids with. She is pissed and annoyed at all the evidence that she was a bit of a kept woman, even before the accident. 

She tries to hide how ticked she is by trying on a new speed of Mom. She tries to be Cool and Permissive Mom, because she has gathered that Grey is kind of Strict Dad who loves rules. Maybe she can win over Maddy by really screwing with Grey and saying yes whenever he says no.

Her first act of being Cool and Permissive Mom is that she wants to get the table ready for all of the delicious pizza they are about to eat that she totally ordered herself and paid for with Drogo’s credit card. 

She asks Maddy to please grab some plates, glasses, and napkins. She hates that she has to ask Maddy to do this, but she can’t really carry plates with her walker. Even as Cool and Permissive Mom, she can’t yet do simple things like set the table for her kids. 

Missy’s honestly really surprised that Maddy does what she’s asked without any smart commentary or retort. Maddy just goes to the cabinets, gets on the little step stool that they keep in the kitchen, and pulls down the right number of plates and the right number of glasses. 

And as Missy watches Maddy try to carry all of it at once, her eyes go wide. She says, “Sorry, honey, but can you try to take just a little bit at once? Can you take multiple trips so you don’t accidentally drop anything?”

Maddy is actually responding well to Bossy Mom, because Bossy Mom is very close to what she’s used to. 

“Thank you, Maddy.”

Maddy turns her face up to look at Missy. She says, “Should I get a knife and fork?”

Missy scrunches her face. “Who eats pizza with a knife and fork?”

“You usually cut up the pizza for Emmy,” Maddy says patiently, kind of feeling immediately let down again — that her mom doesn’t intuitively know this part.

“Oh!” Missy says, perking up again. “Then yes. Can you please get me a knife and fork?”

Drogo has been an ardent fan of Grey and Missandei together from the very get-go. He had wanted to introduce them to each other way earlier than his nameday party, but Dany kept resisting and lecturing him about not pimping for his boy. 

She felt this way because she knew about the horrible thing that happened to Grey and knew that Drogo was all freaked out that Grey was going to become suicidally depressed. She also felt this way because she didn’t see the point in setting Grey up with Missandei when he lived clear across the world — and Missandei didn’t. Them hitting it off didn’t matter. Because a relationship between the two of them was unfeasible. 

She’s a planner and a plotter. Drogo never bothers to go that far. He just knew that Missandei was quiet, judgmental, and very sweet — and he knew that Grey was really quiet, really judgmental, and also very sweet. He knew the both of them were culturally kind of sameish. He knew that they were both hot. 

It was that clear and that obvious to him that they’d be a good match. He knew that at the very least, they’d have a nice chat together.

It took Drogo a while to convince Dany that she actually can’t avoid the two of them meeting — because Grey and Missy are such fixtures in their respective lives, and he and Dany were getting real serious with one another. It took Drogo a long time to convince her that he actually wasn’t trying to pimp for his boy. 

That declaration took a hit when Grey and Missandei fucked — just about right away — upon meeting each other. He really felt the egg on his face, when they learned that Missy was pregnant. 

“Honestly, I don’t have those same kind of yearnings,” Grey says casually, as he neatly rolls up a plastic mulch bag before stuffing it into a garbage bag. “Sometimes I have a hard time relating to you guys — when you say this stuff,” he adds. “Sometimes I think I’m actually in the version of the universe that is peak. I mean, before Missandei’s accident at least. Now, it’s almost peak. I never thought I wanted to be a dad for most of my life. I actually adamantly thought I didn’t want to be a dad. But now I’m a dad, and it’s like, the greatest thing ever. So I’m gonna be fine, man. Don’t worry about me.”

Because Drogo has all these memories of Missandei and Grey together — especially in the early days, Drogo says, “Yo, man, you don’t want to fight for her — not even a little? I remember the first night you met her, man —”

“Yo, I want to fight for her a lot,” Grey cuts in. “I mean, I fucking hate this. But me fighting something she says she needs right now doesn’t serve her — or the kids. It would just be me trying to selfishly hold onto her even though I know she doesn’t feel that way about me anymore. I’m the only one that remembers the entirety of us, man. I can’t make her remember — or feel differently about me.”

Drogo is shaking his head. “Well, for the record, I think you should do that. You should fucking fight to keep your family together. It sucks for the kids. Remember, I am a child of divorce. I’d know.”

“Dude, your dad was an asshole.”

“Oh, the biggest,” Drogo says, agreeing heartily. 

Grey is looking at him skeptically. “And you wanted him to force your mom to stay with him?”

“I mean, he tried,” Drogo says, sighing. “Grey, you’re fucking losing the thread. You’re not an asshole like my dad. You’re the best person I fucking know, what the fuck. So make your wife understand that.” 

“Yeah, this is kinda why I almost didn’t let you into my house,” Grey says. He sighs, too. “Dude, this is painful for me. Obviously it is. I just need you to support me. I don’t need you to tell me you don’t agree with me. I know you don’t. And you know that I don’t change course just because you vehemently disagree with my decisions. Just help me by sometimes distracting me from how bad this has gotten. Just — I don’t know. I don’t know how else you can help me.” 

“Okay,” Drogo says, reaching out to give Grey’s shoulder a quick squeeze with his gloved hand. “Okay, okay,” he says quickly. “But first, can you promise me something?”

“What?” Grey says, looking at him with really weary wariness. 

“If I ever get into a horrific accident and lose all my memories of us, I actually do want you to force me to love you again, against my will,” Drogo says, letting a grin spread across his face. “I know I will hate you at first because you’re fucking judgmental as shit and naturally good at everything and I’m too competitive and easily threatened by another man’s competence. But you have to promise me, Grey — that you will woo the shit out of me and make me fall for you again.”

“Oh, okay,” Grey says right away, shrugging. “Done. You’re gonna be super easy. I’m just gonna bring over some beer and records and cut a rug with you — and then it’ll be over for you, dude. You won’t be able to resist me.”

“I really won’t,” Drogo says, grinning. “We’re gonna do it all over again. I’m gonna bully you hardcore, but you’re just gonna be maddeningly sexy and always turning the other cheek like a classy baby — and being really good at your job. And I will be like, oh my God, why is he so hot when he can’t even bench two hundred?”

Grey is laughing over this, so much. “I’m just not that strong, man! I just don’t see the point in being able to pick up big rocks, man!” he says, repeating a very old joke between the two of them. 

“Man, when Dany gets mad at me, she sometimes legit says I’m secretly in love with you, but am too homophobic to like, have gotten with you. So I settled for her. And I’m like, ‘Secretly, Dany? Come on. It’s not a secret.’”

Grey is still laughing over this — something that Drogo thinks is a bit of a mini-miracle and very much welcomed. “She is so scary, sometimes,” Grey says. 

“She’s honestly confused and perturbed by healthy, intimate male friendship — because the men in her family are total psychos.”

After Maddy comes and nicely tells them that it’s dinner time, Grey makes Drogo put his shirt back on — because he knows that Missandei will think it’s weird and be annoyed by how comfortable Drogo is in his body. Grey also grabs a pair of sweatshirts from the laundry room and places it on the chairs before he lets Drogo and himself sit down — because they are kind of dirty.

Drogo looks at Grey as his chair gets prepared, in amusement, but otherwise doesn’t comment. They’ve known each other for so long that it’s all moot at this point anyway. Instead, he leans over Emmy’s shoulder and says, “Whatcha got there, squirt?” Then he quickly steals her bite right off of her fork. “Just cheese?” he says as he chews. “Girl, come on. You gotta be more adventurous than that!” 

Her face reflects her delighted surprise. She likes being teased. She says, “Oh my — Uncle Drogo!”

“Uncle Drogo!” Drogo says in a falsetto, mocking Emmy a little. She just laughs in response. He plucks off one of the combo slices from the box in front of him and then slides himself into the chair that Grey prepped for him, across from Missandei and the girls. 

Drogo already knows all about Grey and Missandei’s ongoing battle with Emmy’s pickiness. He knows that this shit kinda worked with Rhaego — kinda. That is — having Rhaego see Grey eat adventurously — watching someone who isn’t his parent be effortlessly cool around him with food maybe helped push Rhaego to stop being such a basic bitch. 

Or he grew out of it. 

These things are often hard to track.

With his mouth full, Drogo says a quick thanks as Grey slides a freshly opened beer bottle in front of him, before Grey takes the chair right beside him with a bottle of his own.

“So what’s new, Madster?” Drogo asks, after he swallows his bite, before he takes another quick sip. “Your dad told me you’re on some special math team at school.”

“Mathletes,” Grey supplies, as he starts shaking a ton of dried chili flakes onto his pizza.

“Yo, mathletes!” Drogo says assessingly, as he silently slides the remaining half of his pizza slice at Grey to put chilis on — he had actually forgotten in his haste. “Man, that’s cool. I was never smart enough to do stuff like that when I was your age.”

“You were smart, man,” Grey says. “Just the kind that doesn’t get captured on like, tests and report cards and stuff.”

Grey said it so earnestly and with no mockery at all that Drogo chuckles graciously over it. He appreciates this about Grey — who is actually not as much of a snob as he originally predicted. To Maddy, he says, “You’re like your dad — and mom. They’re both smarties. Do you think it’s genetic? Do you think you inherited it from them? Or do you think you just learned it because your dad is still such a nerd?”    

“I don’t see how you can inherit smartness,” Maddy says, scrunching up her face pretty hard and really adorably as she continues to think about it. “Because I don’t just know math. I had to be taught and stuff by my teachers.”

“So the latter then? You think you just learned it because your dad is still such a nerd.”

She smiles — also in a real way. She looks exactly like her dad when she smiles. She quietly says, “Daddy’s a nerd?”

“Oh my God, do you actually think your dad is cool?” Drogo says exaggeratedly.

“Yo, I’m real fucking cool,” Grey says in a deadpan — as he also rolls his eyes, making Maddy smile at him. He’s saying this because he does not want his kids to even care about this kind of thing. He’s saying this because he does not even give a shit how other people feel about him. 

“Daddy’s different from the other dads at school,” Maddy admits.

“Oh, your dad is different from most people,” Drogo says, readily agreeing. “How is your dad different from the other dads?”

“She means not white,” Grey supplies.

“No!” Maddy immediately corrects. “Taqi’s dad is not white! Neither are Kaeta’s dad or Mamo’s dads.” 

“They are all kind of white,” Grey says to Drogo. 

“Daddy!” Emmy suddenly shouts in distress, holding her fork and pizza piece up to her dad’s face. There’s a teeny bit of applesauce on her pizza. She currently can’t handle her foods touching. 

Grey mutters, “Jesus Christ,” as he takes her hand and just steers the applesauced pizza into his mouth. “Better?” he asks her, before he also leans over to give her a quick kiss. 

“So how is your Daddy different from the other dads?” Drogo says to Maddy, steering the conversation back around.

“The other dads are like, they dress differently —”

“Yeah, your dad has some real fashion moments sometimes.”

“And they’re all friendly and nice. And they’re cheerful.”

“Oh!” Drogo says, cracking up now. “Okay, okay, okay, I get what you mean now! I get what you’re laying down now!” He reaches out and lightly shoves Grey. 

“So, I stand by what I said,” Grey says. 

“Do you think your Mom is a nerd?” Drogo asks, as he grabs another slice — a ham and pineapple slice — and sends it to Grey for another dousing of chilis. He hears enthusiastic shaking as he takes another swig of his beer. “Your mom’s definitely at least a language nerd.”

“Mom is definitely not a nerd,” Maddy says.

“I’m not?” Missandei says quizzically, as she reaches out and repositions Emmy’s milk, so that it’s not so close to the edge of the table. 

Drogo grins appreciatively at this, because the discrepancy in the way Missandei sees herself and the way others see her is cute. “Why not?” Drogo asks Maddy. “Your mommy’s so smart!”

“Mommy is Hot Mom,” Maddy says, rolling her eyes in a major way — also looking exactly like Grey as she does it. 

Missandei kind of looks horrified when she hears this. Because she’s imagining all sorts of off-base things about what her past self was wearing or doing around children, to earn that nickname. “What?” she says.

“Yeah, that’s what some of the other kids called you, whenever you came to school to pick me up,” Maddy says, shrugging. She also hates that her mom is Hot Mom. She hated the way the boys talked about her mom. She especially hated the way they made fun of her, for not being hot like her mom. 

“Yeah, kids are weird,” Grey says, cutting in to try and quickly move on from this topic because he knows the entire backstory of it and how it makes Maddy feel about herself. He knows that it’s kinda hard for a little girl to look a lot like her dad, who is a dude, and to not look as much like her beautiful-ass mother. 

It’s just too much of a topic for the dinner table right now. 

Drogo picks up on the vibe right away, even though he doesn’t know the details — so he distracts. He smiles at Maddy and reaches out to smear her cheek with the little bit of pizza sauce that is on his fingers. 

“Uncle Drogo!” she says, scandalized and laughing over it as she takes her napkin and wipes her face. “What the heck!”

On his way out the door, after he’s already loved on the kids with some bone crushing hugs — after he’s already given Missandei a respectable wave of his hand in the air and took back his credit card, which he basically had forgot about until she reminded him — Drogo wraps his arms around his buddy and he walk-slams the two of them right into the closed door of the house. It results in a loud thump, Grey’s light groan, and the girls’ cute little giggles. “You’re my favorite,” Drogo announces, as he squeezes Grey tightly. “It’s so nice to do friendship with you. It’s been a minute.” 

“Christ D, it’s nice to do friendship with you, too,” Grey mutters, finally returning the hard-as-shit hug. “Maybe we can do friendship more often.”

“Ball’s in your court, man,” Drogo says as he pulls away a little bit and throws his heavy hand right into the side of Grey’s face, slapping it hard and then palming it tenderly. “I can’t always go out of my way and force you to engage with me. I’m busy and stuff sometimes. Also, sometimes I want to be the one you chase. Sometimes I want to be pursued by you, baby. Sometimes I want you to think about me and what I would enjoy, and create an experience for us.”

“Okay, heard — I’ll chase you more,” Grey says seriously. “I’ll be more romantic with you. And I’ll look at my calendar. Text you later. Maybe we can do something with the kids, too — but something that requires very low supervision and attention on our parts.”

“Oh man, Daddy,” Maddy says. “What if we all go camping? We haven’t been camping in forever!”

“Okay, that’s a great idea, kiddo — me and Rhaego are in,” Drogo says, letting Grey go and clapping him on the chest. “Let me work on your aunt and get back to you guys. You know she hates fun. And being happy. And laughter. And being outside.” And then Drogo levels a look at Missandei. He very purposely asks, “You also down, Momma? You wanna go camping with us?”

Missandei totally knows what he’s doing. He’s trying to force her to agree to spend more time with his boy and their kids — in front of the kids. It’s insulting because she would readily agree to hang out with his freaking boy and her children in the freaking woods. She’s not an asshole.

This is why it sounds a little heated, as she says, “Of course I wanna go camping with y’all. I have nothing else on my dance card at the moment.”

“Oh my God, yay, Mom!” Maddy says, as she claps her hands together and does a little hop. “We haven’t been camping in so long!” 

As usual, Drogo is more convinced that he’s constantly doing Missandei a favor, and she just doesn’t get it.  

Chapter Text

He assumed that she wouldn’t want to go — because she doesn’t even want to visit his parents so why would she want to hang with a bunch of white people she doesn’t even remember? 

For this reason, he doesn’t really think to invite her or even tell her much about Page’s nameday or Page’s parents. 

Missandei finds out that he’s going to a nine-year-old’s nameday party and staying there when she asks him a few questions about it and is surprised when she learns that he is okay with taking Emmy along and apparently leaving their five-year-old at a party with mostly older kids.

Grey says, “Oh, dude — nah, man. I’m not leaving our kid to fend for herself at a rando’s house. I’m gonna be hanging with her.”

“You’re going to a child’s nameday party?” Missy says skeptically, because she’s having a hard time imagining it. 

“Yeah, man,” he says. “And it’s not just me and a bunch of kids. Other parents will be there, too.”

“And you didn’t think to ask me if I wanted to go to a party full of children and people I don’t know?” Missandei asks him, staring at him hard.

He hesitates. He also kinda ducks his head down a little sheepishly. He says, “Oh.”

And then she loudly huffs out a “ha!” before she also quickly says, “I’m just kidding. I understand why you didn’t ask me. But I mean — it wouldn’t kill me to go and meet some of our kids’ friends, right?”

Missandei used to be the one that did all of this type of work. She used to be the one who corresponded with the other parents — usually another mom — on the finer party details. She was also the one that usually took the girls shopping to pick out a present for their friends. 

She used to be in charge of this stuff because he doesn’t have the patience for this mind-numbing shit and he honestly doesn’t think children should get so many presents and so much extravagance just because they were born. She used to do all of the coordination because one of his many personality flaws is that he’s antisocial and weird, he doesn’t like most other people, and he thinks he’s normal — so he’s bad at empathizing when his children wail that they won’t fit in with their peers if he doesn’t buy them the right kind of notebook, the right shirt, the right backpack, or pack them the right lunch.

If anything, he’s probably a little bit anti-conformity and lazily tolerant of the unpopularity of his children. He wasn’t that popular when he was a kid. He was actually bullied a lot. And he turned out totally fine. 

He likes to joke-seriously tell his girls that it doesn’t matter at all if they are liked by others. 

His girls are still too young to get how wise and how right he is about this. Emmy, in particular, is already obsessed with her self-image — how she’s dressed, her hair, her lunch box, her toys, and whether all of it is on trend and stuff that her friends also have. 

Maddy is more into asserting her own individualism, but she is still entirely too self-conscious and concerned about others’ opinions. 

Without Missandei though, he has found himself on some really stupid email threads about nameday parties and school spirit day. He has found that he’s been carrying on with this stupid fucking bullshit, even without Missandei’s active participation in it. He’s been carrying on because maybe it’s a habit now, maybe it’s because he feels so guilty that he couldn’t make it work with their mom, or maybe it’s because it’s another one of those perverse ways that he’s holding onto the version of her that he loves so fucking much.  

“Do we have friends at this party?” Missy asks him after they arrive at the house, after Emmy and Maddy run up ahead of them to join their friends at the nameday party. 

Missy’s not surprised, whatsoever, that the house they are arriving at is ginormous.

“Depends on your definition of friendship,” Grey mutters, as he internally bitches out freaking Peck and Pia and their stupid ass steep yard. He had emailed Pia to tell her that Missandei’s mobility is limited and to inquire whether or not the backyard will be easily accessible for a person with a walker. She had told him absolutely it was.

Fucking false. 

“We’re friendly with them out of convenience,” he tells Missandei. “They are nice people. As for the rest of it, I’ll let you see for yourself.” 

She ends up seeing what he means — right away. Because there is a ginormous ball pit in the middle of the gigantic backyard as well as a mini topsy-turvy type of theme park ride — also in the middle of the gigantic backyard — and a bunch of people dressed up as clowns and carnies walking around with trays of hors d'oeuvres.

As Missy just spontaneously nods apologetically at a “bearded” woman — really a fake beard, but still pretty offensive-looking — Missy quietly mutters to Grey. She says, “Oh my God, I totally see what you’re talking about.” 

“Yeah,” he says, keeping his voice low. “You know what’s really fun? The girls’ namedays. It’s really fun to return the favor and invite these people over to our house. That’s historically been your favorite.” 

If it were up to him, the girls’ namedays would just involve having their friends over for a playdate and some cake. If it were up to him, they’d probably play with rocks and sticks in the backyard. But Missandei has always been far more self-conscious than he is about these things. 

She used to tell him that it was easy for him to be a non-conforming dad because he’s a dad. She used to constantly point out the various ways in which he was fawned over and congratulated by everyone — by her mother, by the teachers, by the other moms at school — just for being a decent dad. She used to tell him that there was no way she, a woman, could have children over at her house playing with rocks and sticks in the backyard. The shame would be too great.

He thought of her a lot, as he helped Maddy pick out a present for Page. She was the reason he didn’t just hand Maddy cold hard cash to give to Page.

He’s watching as Page’s mother makes a beeline to them. She’s wearing a pastel yellow sundress with a gingham pattern on it. He knows Pia well enough to know that her outfit is somehow coordinated with the cracked-out-carnival party theme she’s got going on.  

“Heads up, I did you a favor and I didn’t tell anybody that you can’t remember them,” Grey quickly tells Missy. “Because it doesn’t matter. Just smile and nod. Just smile and nod, man.” 

They live in this neighborhood because they love the house and they really like the school district. At one point, he made Missandei promise him that they are never going to be the kind of people that send their kids to a private school full of elites. At one point, he made a big speech about what it means to believe in the potential of every fucking child and not only his own children just because he has resources now. 

And at some point, he also got real nervous about that declaration when he mentally revisited what school was like for him — but he was determined not to walk it back. 

This neighborhood is their loophole or workaround. 

He’s not always proud of himself, for the shades of his hypocrisy.

“Hi, Missy!” Pia gushes, walking right up to Missy to give her an air-hug because Grey emailed her to tell her that Missandei is still fragile and doesn’t want her hugs. Pia air hugs because she can’t go without hugging Missy, but she’s also nervous about accidentally hurting Missy. “I’m so glad to see you out and about! You look sooo great!”

“Uh, well, you know, doing my best,” Missy says, as she gently lifts up her walker a couple inches for emphasis. “I can’t run marathons or anything like that yet.”  

Grey forgot to tell Missandei that Pia doesn’t really get jokes. Pia looks confused as she says, “You’re going to train for a marathon, too? I didn’t realize you were both runners! That’s so neat! Bonding time!”

“Maybe a 5K,” Grey says smoothly, deflecting. “Cool party, Pee-pee. I like the theme. I also like how I don’t have to supervise any children or participate in any games at all.”

She smiles widely in response to that. “Peck and I remember your feedback from last time.” She gestures to the ginormous ball pit. “That is kind of for you.”

She is referring to last year’s party, which was luau-themed. It felt very much like appropriation. He hated that there was a dress code so he refused to wear a tropical shirt. His obvious lack of festive outfit kind of embarrassed Maddy. His criticism of the games — like limbo and how it favored short people — also embarrassed Maddy. His refusal to do a really simple choreographed hula dance also embarrassed Maddy. Her complete displeasure with him aggravated him so much that he ended up bluntly telling Pia that he hated how interactive her child’s party was.

Missandei had laughed at him so much during that party. Her gorgeous fucking amusement with him honestly egged him on so much. Their daughter couldn’t yet handle him as he was, but Missandei thought he was so fucking funny — and he basked in her infectious laughter so hard. 

Right now, as he stares at the ball pit, he feels legit touched. He looks at Pia and smiles at her — in a for real way. He says, “Yo! That’s so nice! Thank you.”

“Yeah, of course,” she says, nodding — and totally getting spontaneously teary-eyed like the sensitive thing that she is. “We know you both have had a really tough time. And I know it’s just a silly little party. But we really did think of you when we brainstormed activities.” She sighs loudly at that. “Gosh, I’m just so glad you’re okay, Missy!” she exclaims, right before she goes for another air-hug.  

The nameday party is far more diverse than what Missy was expecting. She was obviously expecting a sea of whiteness, but instead, she’s seeing a significant number of people of color. She also sees a couple of same-sex parents — she sees Cami’s moms for instance — and she silently waves to them.  

Yet somehow, the racial and ethnic diversity doesn’t suddenly make her feel completely at ease in this party. She supposes that because she didn’t grow up rich — and because she has no memories of becoming a fancy lady in a fancy house with a fancy partner — she feels uncomfortable with what she is interpreting as a distinct lack of class diversity. 

She wonders just what exactly she and Grey are teaching their girls, by taking their girls to parties that cost more than a year of someone’s wages. 

“Missandei.”

It’s a masculine voice. 

She almost doesn’t turn around because her name was said totally all wrong — so she knows she’s about to have a great conversation.

She also thinks it’s real nice that this person is making the lady with a walker do all of the hard work of spinning in place.

As she pivots, Missy sees an older white man — older than her and Grey by at least fifteen years — with a salt and pepper beard. “Hello, good to see you. How are you?” She’s following Grey’s script of just pretending she knows what’s going on.   

“I’ve been well,” he says, smiling at her and staring at her closely, with his eyes searching her face for something. “I’ve been fairly good. But more importantly, how are you? I was so surprised to see you over here. I haven’t seen you in a long while — not since what happened.” He pauses. “We were all so broken up to learn what had happened to you, Missandei. So really — honestly — how are you doing?”

“I’m doing pretty alright, all things considered,” Missy says. “I feel very grateful that I’m okay.”

“And we are very grateful that you are okay,” he says. “You look really great, by the way. You look beautiful — as always.”

At this point, Missy is one-hundred-percent sure that she was not having an affair outside of her relationship with Grey before her accident — because she was so busy with the kids and there is nothing in her phone that would suggest she was flirting with anyone.

But she thinks this interaction is super weird.

“Thank you,” she says. “Um, it’s nice to be out and about again.” She laughs awkwardly. “Of course I won’t be winning many foot races at the moment, but I feel stronger and stronger every day.”

“That’s fantastic, Missandei. That’s just fantastic news.”

She continues to struggle through the conversation with the dude she doesn’t even know, talking about music education of all things, until she finally spots her freaking partner wandering back up to her with two plates stacked full of mini versions of food. 

Grey’s cramming a mini taco into his mouth as he reaches them. He nods at the man Missandei is talking to. He says, “‘Sup, Davos?” And then to her, he says, “I got you snacks.”

“Hey, Grey,” Davos says. “How are you?”

“Man, same ol’ same ol’. You?”

“Similar.”

“Cool.”

And then to Missandei, he says, “Wanna find a spot to sit down so you can have your snacks?” Then back to Davos, Grey says, “Good to see ya, man.”

They are closely watched as he helps her go from standing all the way down to sitting on the grass. He generally ignores all of the condescendingly sympathetic stares as he quietly tells her he’s sorry for this, as he cheats and just lifts her up in his arms, feels her grabbing onto his shoulder to keep her balance, and then he lowers them and kneels on the lawn, before he carefully places her down on the grass — ass-first. 

He just doesn’t want these people to watch as Missandei awkwardly tries to maneuver her body into sitting position for longass seconds. 

After she’s situated, under her breath, she mutters, “What was that about?” referring to Davos.

“Hot Mom shit,” he says evasively, as he slides her plate of her snacks onto her lap. 

“What exactly is Hot Mom shit?” she asks.

“It basically sounds like what it is,” he tells her. “You are a hot mom, and you get hit on or creeped on by some of the other dads sometimes. They just flirt with you sometimes. Or they are overly friendly. It kinda annoys you, but I think you must be used to it — looking the way you do for your entire life — so it didn’t like, distress you or anything like that.”

“Okay,” she says quietly, because she feels like she is pretty much caught up. 

She does pretty much understand Hot Mom shit. She’s been dealing with Hot Mom shit for a long time, long before she was ever a mom. Hot Mom shit was probably partly why her mother didn’t want her to go to college far away. Her parents may have guarded her extra closely her entire childhood because they were definitely concerned she was going to get sexually assaulted because she was such a pretty little girl and a well-developed teenager. 

Her parents’ understandable worries probably very much affected how she feels about her body, her looks, relationships, attraction in general, attractiveness in general, and sex. 

“Maddy doesn’t seem to be a fan of Hot Mom shit,” she says. “What’s the story there?” 

“Ah,” he says softly, keeping his voice low so they are not overheard. “It’s hard for her because people harp on your looks a lot. You get told you’re beautiful a lot, in front of her. And then people will turn around and gush over how Emmy looks exactly like you. And then — with far less enthusiasm — they will say Maddy looks exactly like me.”

“What’s so wrong about looking like you?” Missandei asks rhetorically, frowning.

This makes him smile briefly. “She makes the correlation in her head — that she’s not beautiful,” he says. 

“She is beautiful, though,” Missy asserts. “She knows that, right? We tell her?”

“It’s kind of a hard thing to navigate,” he says, leaning back with his hands braced against the ground. “I don’t really want to overcompensate by complimenting Maddy on how she looks — because it’s not important. She’s so smart, too. And I’m irrationally afraid that if I tell her she’s beautiful too much, she’ll stop being smart.”

This makes Missandei laugh a little bit. It makes her say, “I’m not sure that’s how it works. I was told I was beautiful a lot. And I still managed to be very bookish. I still managed to repel plenty of boys with my personality — so effectively that I had a lot of time to study for school and stuff.”  

“Is that the secret?” he asks lightly. “Being beautiful, but having a shitty personality?”

“I mean, you tell me,” she says, staring at him. “How’s it been going for you?”

That makes him do an exaggerated and comical doubletake at her. It makes him pretend to be very offended, before he picks at his plate some more and shoves a mini grilled cheese sandwich into his mouth, which he holds in his cheek as he says, “I also think this shit is affecting Emmy, too. I think being told she’s so cute and beautiful like her mom all the time is doing things to her underdeveloped brain. She’s such a girly girl already. What if she’s not smart, Missandei?”

“Oh my God,” Missy mutters. “Don’t worry about that. She’s already brilliant. I watch her manipulate you with cuteness , all day. She’s smart, dude.” 

“Hey, I let her manipulate me with cuteness.” 

As she slowly chews through the congealed goo in her mini grilled cheese sandwich, she furtively looks at his profile — at the side of his face, at his facial structure, his brow bone, where his eyes are set, the thickness of his lashes, the straightness of his nose bridge, the swoop of his mouth, the angle and point of his chin — and she mentally maps all of his features onto their daughter’s individual faces. Maddy very obviously looks like him, but she thinks that Emmy has traces of him, too. 

He can probably feel her staring at him, but for now he’s acting like he’s interested in watching the girls jump around in the ball pit.  

After finishing what she wants to eat of the snacks, he helps her get back to her feet before he goes and gets rid of their plates by giving them to a sad clown. 

He’s honestly bored out of his mind, but he figures that they should probably stay until after the cake, for the girls’ sake. They keep telling him that they want to fit in and they don’t want to be the first to leave parties just because their dad got bored. 

He finds Missandei standing in front of the ball pit, having moved a bit closer in the brief time he was away. He finds her watching the activity in the pit intently, and he follows her line of sight.  

He catches a kid — a boy who is probably slightly older than Maddy — pushing her from the ledge to the pit. She falls over — and then he jumps right in, on top of her. 

“I think that kid is being a little rough with Maddy,” Missy says in nervousness, gesturing over to where Maddy is. 

Having also clocked this, he also reaches out to gently push her pointing hand down because she’s bad at being covert sometimes. He says, “Give her a little bit of time to figure it out.” 

Missandei listens to him for just a second, but when she sees the boy shove Maddy again, she gets really tense and starts looking around the area for the adults that this boy belongs to. She says, “Where are his parents? What the fuck?”

“It’s okay,” Grey says, pressing his fingers lightly into her arm — to try to remind her to calm down a little. 

“Unbelievable. What do we do? Should I go over and tell him to stop it?”

“If Maddy doesn’t like it, she can get him to stop,” he says, trying to sound even and reasonable.

“Like, how?” Missandei says pointedly. “How do you expect our eight-year-old to defend herself against this bully — as her own parents watch from the sidelines?”

In this way, Grey has taken a page out of his dad’s book. 

He also doesn’t believe in teaching his kids to come running to him or another adult every time there’s an altercation. He thinks that he knows so many adults in life that don’t know how to be real with one another because of this. He thinks that there are so many conflict-avoidant adults in the world, who don’t stand for anything because they are so scared of having ideals that they would need to defend at one point. He thinks that constantly looking for an authority figure to make them all feel safe is one hundred percent not the way. He thinks this is a chronic societal problem. 

“Grey, he’s pushing her,” Missandei insists, just amped with anxiety.

“I know it’s hard to watch,” he tells her. “Just give it a second, baby.” 

It’s out of his mouth before he even realizes what he just said — because there is something just deeply familiar about this interaction. 

They seriously used to have this conversation all the time. She used to get way more upset than he did, whenever she saw one of their kids getting pushed around by another kid — which he understands. He doesn’t like it either. But she used to want to jump in way earlier than he did, and he used to have to try and stop her from solving all of their kids' problems for them. 

“Sorry,” he mutters. “It just came out.”

“It’s okay,” Missandei says softly. 

And because he feels so freaking embarrassed about this, he covers it up by doing what he doesn’t believe in. He jumps in too early, and he doesn’t give his kid a chance to figure it out for herself. 

He cups his hands and he slams them together. It’s so sudden and loud that it startles Missandei. 

“Hey!” Grey shouts into the overall void of the ball pit, trying not to focus too directly on the kid that is pushing his daughter, because it could get a little worse for her, if he’s too direct. “No pushing each other!” he yells at all the kids, because they honestly all can stand this mini-lecture. A bunch of them — the ones that can hear him, including the kid that was pushing Maddy — swivel their heads to stare at him. “Someone can get hurt! So play nicer! I’m watching you all!” he shouts at all of them. 

He crosses his arms after that and makes good on his promise. He catches Maddy’s eyes. She looks grateful for a second as she bounces her way away from the kid who was pushing her and goes toward the middle of the pit. 

As she looks around, Missy catches a number of parents — the women in particular — looking at each other and leaning in close to one another. She sees them lift their hands to their mouths as they whisper something about him between each other — before giggling. 

She catches one of them full-on checking him out. She catches a blond woman looking at his ass. The woman has the politeness to look kind of embarrassed, when she accidentally locks eyes with Missy. 

Chapter Text

As she comes out of the bathroom, Missandei runs across Grey and Emmy as Emmy sits on the couch and he sits on the floor. Her little foot is braced against her dad’s bent knee and he’s buckling up her black patent leather shoes.

“Going somewhere?” Missy asks, mildly stating the very obvious. 

They are definitely going somewhere — another one of the multitude of the activities or nameday parties or errands that he and the girls are constantly doing — another activity that she gets shut out of because her mobility is limited and also because him and the girls are such a trio. 

“I’m gonna stop over at my folks with the girls,” he mumbles, as he navigates the tiny buckles with his adult-sized fingers. “It’s been a couple weeks since they’ve seen them. You cool to hang with Mo for a few hours?”

“Yeah, that’s totally fine,” Missandei says. “But is there a reason I’m also not invited to your parents’ house?”

He pauses, enough to look up at her from the floor. “I thought you wouldn’t want to come.” 

He says this because she’s leaving him, and she doesn’t remember his family at all. He doesn’t understand the logic in ending a relationship and then wanting to spend time with the soon-to-be-ex’s family. He doesn’t understand the logic in spending time with people that mean nothing to her and who mean everything to him. 

“Um, you never asked me,” she says awkwardly. 

She is inviting herself because it’s this relatively new thing she’s trying out — to be more in her children’s lives. She is just inserting herself in situations and events that she has not been invited to and hoping that her daughters will see that she very much gives a shit.

“Um, okay,” he says, as he resumes buckling Emmy’s shoe. “Well, um, we’re leaving in fifteen minutes.” Then he says, “Baby,” referring to Emmy. “Stop kicking your feet, Christ.”

“You’re taking so long, dude.”

“Have you considered that moving your feet as I do this is making it take longer?”

He was actually conspicuously absent during Missandei’s first meeting with his parents — because he was already overseas and back at work and she was about eight weeks pregnant. He remembers her expressing her nerves to him over the phone — because she kind of expected his parents to be dicks about her pregnancy, just like he initially was. She kind of expected his folks to make her feel bad for being a loose, promiscuous woman — kind of like her own mother did. 

He had told her not to worry though. He sardonically and half-heartedly tried to allay her concerns by telling her that his dad is rarely a dick to women for fun, just when he thinks they deserve it. He told her that his mom also had babies out of wedlock, so his mother is also a loose, promiscuous woman. He had told Missandei that she and his mother have this in common, so they can maybe chat about it with each other.

Of course, she had not been reassured by him at all. But then, they didn’t know each other well enough at all at that point. She didn’t yet know that he is purposefully very bad at reassuring people because he believes in their strength so much. He believes in their ability to handle things. He knew his parents. He kinda had a vibe about Missandei. He wasn’t worried.

And he had turned out to be right. He got a call from her the next day, excitedly recapping all the things that she said and all the things that his parents said to her about how happy they were that she was pregnant with their grandchild.

He supposes that this reunion can be a bookend for all of them. That first auspicious meeting was a hello. And this can be a goodbye of sorts. 

He readily agreed to have her come along, because he also wants to give his parents a bit of closure.

“Whoa, what the fuck?” his dad blurts loudly as he walks out of the house — and he spots who is in the front seat — right as Grey stops the car and opens his driver’s side door. “Missy, great to see you, sweetheart! Really wasn’t expecting you, but we can pull out another chair.”

Based on everything she knows about him so far, she was expecting to be taken to another mansion with a manicured lawn, sculpted shrubbery, and pricey cars in the driveway. She was expecting a lot of things that would make her feel uncomfortable and very outclassed because she grew up in a one-income household with three mouths to feed, on a cop’s salary. She grew up not being able to buy school lunch. She always brought lunch because it was cheaper. She grew up a little bit of a tomboy, sometimes wearing her brothers’ hand-me-downs — their graphic t-shirts. 

She grew up very humbly. She’s sure that she didn’t grow up however Grey grew up.

Because she knows that his dad is a doctor and his mom is a lawyer, she was expecting stuff like classical music and canapes and maybe a housekeeper and cook hanging around somewhere. 

So his parents’ house isn’t what she expected at all.  

She has to stop her jaw from hitting the ground when he pulls up to a pretty modest-looking one-story house, smaller than her parents’ house even. The grass is a little long and the flower beds a little wild — mostly likely because his parents are busy and haven’t gotten around to it. 

Missy sees a pair of children’s bikes — the girls’ bikes probably — hanging out casually in the driveway instead of any pricey cars. She sees a reasonable Toyota that is at least a decade old on the curb, in front of the house.

She tries really hard to hide her shock, just in case her shock comes across as way insulting. She grabs onto her walker and carefully walks forward, as she hears Grey say to his dad, “Pops, can you go put a shirt on? Or pants?”

She hears his dad say, “It’s my goddamn house,” and she sees him begrudgingly close the flaps of his robe. He’s wearing boxers. “I can be naked in my own house, if I wanted. God, you’re so Westernized and weird about nudity and your body.”

She hears Grey say, “Okay, I’m not that Westernized, how dare you. And you know why I’m weird about nudity and my body.”

“Okay,” his dad says quickly, trying to gloss over why his son has become so body conscious because now is not the time for that. “Okay, I stand corrected. You’re right. I’ll go put some more clothes on so I don’t embarrass you in front of Missy.” His dad catches her eye and winks at her. “Just kidding. I mean, I’m putting on clothes, but I’m definitely still gonna embarrass you in front of Missy and your children.”

“Thanks,” Grey says, as the girls giggle at their grandpa.

“Girls, I think you forgot something,” his dad says, as he stoops down in front of them in the driveway and holds out his arms. 

She watches as Grey stands around looking patiently blank, as their kids run into his dad’s arms and give him a bunch of enthusiastic hugs.

For a brief and crazy moment, she speculated to herself that maybe his parents are bad with money and they blew their income on the ponies or something and had to downsize, but as she walks through the house, she quickly sees that it’s their family home — because there are a bunch of relics from decades and decades ago. The walls are packed with framed family photos, all mismatched and seemingly put up at different phases of life. 

The light fixtures are old and the appliances are somewhat outdated — about 10 years old, maybe — because they look recognizable to her. 

Honestly, she doesn’t get it at all.

She doesn’t get how his dad is a doctor and prominent researcher, how his mom is a lawyer — and how this is their house. She also retroactively doesn’t understand Grey — how he is who he seemingly is and how his house is the way it is. 

She starts wondering if maybe she had more influence on their house than she realizes. 

“Should I text Azzie?” his mother blurts, as she continues bouncing Emmy in her arms, as she eyes Missandei up and down. “He hasn’t seen Missy in a while.”

His mom barely greeted her when she came in. Unlike his dad, his mom didn’t try to give her a hug at all. 

She knows that Grey told them that they are splitting up.

“Who is Azzie?” she asks politely.

She can tell this is a very dumb question right away. Because his dad raises his brows comically.

“Uncle Azzie is Dad’s brother,” Maddy says stiffly, still holding onto Momo’s leash and hovering close to Grey.

“What?” Missy says, as her jaw finally drops in exasperation. “Okay, this one really isn’t my fault.” She stares at Grey. “You didn’t tell me you had a brother, dude!”

He has the nerve to look kind of unrepentant about this. He says, “Hey, I’m sorry. But there’s a lot to be telling you. I can’t keep track of it all.” And then he pauses. “Do I really give off only-child vibes?”

“Kinda,” Missy says evasively. And then her eyes connect with Maddy’s — and she takes the opportunity to start nodding a lot — exaggeratedly. 

Maddy doesn’t quite get the joke, but she smiles back at Missandei secretively anyway.  

“Okay, so I should text Azzie?” his mom says, as she’s already one-handedly cobbling out a text on her phone.

“Sure,” Grey says. “He’s probably busy because it’s so last minute.”

“Nope, he actually isn’t,” his mother announces, because her other son texted her back right away. “He’s doing nothing. So he’s coming over.”

“Oh, damn,” Grey says assessingly, shrugging. “Cool.” 

“Is Grey older or younger?” Missy asks, mostly orienting the question at his dad, who seems friendlier and thus significantly less intimidating than his mother. 

“Guess,” his dad suggests, grinning.

“Um, older.” 

“Because he gives off eldest brother vibes, right?” his dad asks, eyes twinkling.

“Wrong again, Missandei,” Grey declares. “How embarrassing for you.”  

Grey’s brother is — in a word — hot. 

Like, really hot. 

He’s super, super good-looking — really tall, really broad, really fit, great face, and just has an air of calm and easy charisma. He looks very much like a subtype of a certain kind of Summer Islander man. He looks really masculine and creatively inclined and expressive, based on the way he’s dressed, based on his haircut, based on the fact that his muscular arms are covered in tattoos. 

She doesn’t know why she’s so surprised by this because their parents are good-looking people and Grey himself is handsome. She doesn’t know why she was expecting his brother to be some sort of troll — instead of someone who is pretty much perfect-looking.

She supposes that she’s being thrown for a loop because Grey and his parents are so straight-laced and professional-looking. Grey and his parents very much look like they’re ready to sit down and do some math formulas in a spreadsheet. 

She’s fighting through her surprise — and also a little bit of blushing what the fuck — as Grey’s brother smiles at her with two rows of perfectly white teeth and says, “Hey, sis. Been a long time.” 

Grey is not surprised, whatsoever, the way Missandei responded to and looked at Azzie. He’s very used to it with his brother. It’s the story of his entire young life — being constantly overlooked and eclipsed by the greatest athlete their high school had ever seen, having girls become friends with him only so they could come over and coldly ignore him as they fawn all over his big brother. 

He supposes that’s how he ended up very miserable in medical school. It was because all he had in common with their dad was being a nerd. Their dad was proudest of him when he was being really good at school. 

It’s actually kind of interesting for him to see her meet his brother for the very first time again. He missed out on all of the awe and nervous giggling the first time around, because he was on the other side of the world.

He leaves them to do whatever it is that excessively good-looking people do with one another — weird gazing maybe, a secret handshake maybe — as he wanders through the kitchen, through the glass doors, and onto the patio. 

He thinks that he can be useful as they all get reacquainted. He can start up a fire in the grill for lunch.

He hears the glass door sliding open behind him. And then he hears it shut again.

And then he feels his brother’s heavy arm slide across his shoulders. He feels his brother kiss him on the side of his head. He generally tamps down on the tension inside of himself, as his brother says, “I haven’t gotten a chance to say hi to you yet. Hey. Why are you out here being unsocial and quiet?”

Grey thinks this is a supremely annoying question. So he doesn’t answer it. Instead, he says, “Lena busy today?”

“I didn’t text her,” Azzie admits. “She’d try to get here to see Missy, but I don’t want her to disrupt her plans just to haul ass over here. She can see Missy some other time.”

And then he gives Grey a tight side-hug. He says, “Do you wanna make fun of tarot readings and chakras right now? Because you can. I can feel it. I can feel you wanna bitch out cleanses and auras.”  

His parents didn’t expect her presence at all, so they exclusively have a bunch of marinated meat, some bread, and ears of corn for lunch. It’s something that his parents fret over — and blame him for — for not giving them a heads up. She watches as his dad gets on his ass for being bad at texting and being bad at telling them shit they should know.

She watches as Grey goes a little internal — he goes blank-face extra hardcore — and he tells his parents that it’s not even a big deal, that she can eat some corn and bread.

“No, it is a big deal,” his dad tells him. “It takes literally no effort to tell your mother and me, ‘Hey, Missandei is coming. Buy some fucking vegetables.’”

She can tell that Grey is trying to avoid telling his parents that he didn’t think she was coming at all — that she actually invited herself at the last second. He says, “Okay, so do you want me to go to the store right now and buy some stuff for her?”

“No,” his dad says crankily. “I want you to have had the foresight to tell me shit that would be useful to me, Christ.”

“Sorry,” Grey says. “I forgot.”

“You forgot?” his dad says. “You forget your kids’ lunches sometimes too?”

“Sometimes,” Grey says, pretty much going dead inside at this point. “Sometimes I send Maddy to school without giving her breakfast. It’s great. She loves being hungry at school.”

“Dad,” Azzie says, cutting in now. “Maybe you don’t have to tear Nudho a new asshole right in front of his kids.”

“I’m joking!” their dad says defensively. “They know I’m joking! And real cute. It’s real cute how you still defend your grownass brother.” 

“I’m going back outside,” Grey suddenly announces. “I’m gonna check on the chicken and probably over- and undercook it — ‘cause you don’t let me use a thermometer.”

“You gotta feel it, son,” his dad says, finally calming down and relaxing out again. “You gotta use your intuition and not be so prescriptive about everything. We don’t always have thermometers lying around all the time.” 

His dad actually comes outside with a beer soon after that, to press it into his hand and to apologize to him. His dad tells him that springing Missandei on them when they weren’t expecting her really threw him for a loop and made him all anxious. 

His dad tells him, “I know I’m not supposed to be an asshole to the woman who is upending your entire life — but maybe I needed to divert that energy somewhere. And I was a dickwad to you. I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine,” Grey says, as his hand and forearm get super hot over the coals and he continues vigorously flipping the chicken thighs, trying not to burn any of them while still cooking them through. His dad refuses to get a heat-resistant glove for this shit. His dad is very much about creating impossibly difficult scenarios for him to work immensely hard at — only to kinda fail at. “I get it,” Grey says. “I appreciate that you aren’t being an asshole to her.”

“It’s so annoying she doesn’t eat meat anymore,” his dad mutters, because his dad actually has a lot of shit that he’s been holding in, that he can complain about when it comes to Missandei. She is being cruel to his son, for one. That’s his fucking chief complaint about her that he can’t say to her face.

“She’s pretty chill about it,” Grey says. “You don’t really have to make her special meals. She just eats around the meat.” 

Missy finds his dad to be a real novelty — a kinda scary, kinda funny novelty. She sort of can guess now — how Grey ended up in medical school. She can also sort of guess now, what he meant when he said he joined the military because his dad is a doctor. It probably was rebellion. She can sort of understand now, why he is the way he is — kinda. It is probably hard to have to be perfect with everything — all the time. 

It’s not really something she can relate to. In a way, she’s almost kind of jealous of it — because it obviously worked out for him. He has a nice house, a nice car, two really great kids, and he had her — a trophy wife. 

Her parents never pushed her that hard. When she wanted to quit things, they let her quit. When she got good grades, they said it was nice. And when all of her teachers told them she was gifted and a genius, they also said that was merely nice.  

She was never pushed to reach a potential that didn’t involve a man somewhere along the way. Her parents didn’t know what anyone did with the language abilities that she had — besides becoming a teacher. 

She thinks that it’s really cosmic and maybe funny and a little terrifying, that every parent can wield such influence over their kids. She knows that she’s wielding a lot of influence over her children’s future selves, right now. 

Missy watches in surprise as Grey’s mom walks back into the room with a whole plastic storage container full of hair products. She watches as his mom lays down a little plastic sheet over the carpet. Then she sees Maddy intuitively and silently seating herself at her grandma’s feet, in front of the kitchen chair that Sanaa has dragged into the living room. 

By the time Grey’s mom is removing Maddy’s hair tie and pulling apart her puff, Missandei understands what is going on. Her face flushes as she watches Grey’s mom start sectioning out Maddy’s hair before clipping swatches of it out of the way. She pulls out a large jar of leave-in, uncaps it, and then balances it in her lap.

“Oh,” Missy says, kind of stunned that it’s only now occurring to her that someone has been doing her girls’ hair. “So your grandma is the reason your hair is so pretty,” she says to Maddy.

“And Daddy,” Maddy adds.

Missy stares at Maddy’s face, as she feels this ball drop into the pit of her stomach. Her voice is even a little hoarse, as she says, “Your daddy does your hair?”

“Yep,” Maddy says, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world. 

The shock of this is just so surprising to her. She supposes that she didn’t notice at all because there had been nothing to notice — the girls always look so cute and very neat. It never occurred to her to wonder how they are always so cute and neat. 

It still feels like another fucking motherly flaw on her part, all the same. 

Missy remembers all of the comments about her hair growing up, that got under her skin and festered. She remembers being taken to salons and not having anything explained to her. She remembers always getting her hair flat-ironed by white men as her mother supervised and having no choice in it at all. She remembers so many comments about how beautiful she and her hair were — and how boys were going to be a problem for her.

She remembers her mom hating hair that wasn’t straightened, flattened, pressed down, or otherwise tamed. Missy remembers being told to just put up with it and to understand that her mom is from a different generation of women. She remembers how stupid and pathetically minor she thought her rebellion was, when she started growing out her natural hair and her mother freaked out about it over the course of many, many years and expressed all of these passive aggressive self-hating anti-Black comments about the way she looked — how she was purposefully making herself less beautiful — and what her hypothetical husband will think of her. 

“Why are you crying?”

“I’m not crying,” Missy says back at Maddy, as she totally cries — as she reaches up to wipe her eyes with her fingers.

“Yes, you are,” Maddy says, voice blunt and blank like her dad.

“Oh my God,” Missy mutters in embarrassment, as his mother — who is clearly eavesdropping on this conversation very easily because it’s happening in front of her face — kind of half-smiles and is probably silently laughing at Missy’s stupid embarrassing pain. “I’m just really sorry I haven’t been doing your hair for you, honey,” Missy says to Maddy. “Oh my God, why am I crying over hair?” She sniffs audibly, pressing her fingers to her eyes again. “It just didn’t occur to me, oh my God — that’s so terrible. It’s just so sad that you’ve been going to school with hair your dad did for you.”

“Hey, Daddy’s good at hair,” Maddy says, frowning at her mother again, feeling very defensive and protective of her dad.

“Baby, I know,” Missandei says. “Your dad is great at everything. We know. And that’s not what I meant. I just meant that he’s really annoying to me because he’s so good at everything that he chokes out all the air from the freaking room and doesn’t give other people the chance to shine, too. Other people might want to be decent at things, too.”  

Maddy doesn’t really get the joke — there are too many layers of context in it — but she does kind of get that her mom is trying to tell a joke. She’s less upset about this. She might just be slowly getting used to her mom randomly roasting her dad for being a really nice person.

She’s also less upset about this because her grandma is laughing at the stuff her mom is saying — a lot. Her grandma apparently thinks her mom’s mean jokes about her dad are funny.  

“He’s not great at everything,” his mom corrects. “For instance, it sounds like he’s been a bit of a poor communicator.” 

“Oh my God, I’ll do your hair on your next wash day,” Missandei vows to Maddy. And then her face drops again. “Oh my God, I don’t know what your wash days are!” 

It really sucks for him to see his little brother so sad and passively hopeless these days, because he knows how it feels when his little brother is happy and full of profuse hope. The difference is stark. In a way, it reminds Azzie too much of when they were kids and how it wasn’t enough for him to go around beating up every little asshole that was torturing his sensitive and sweet little brother. 

He tends to always look at the bright side — and to believe that things will work out. He knows his optimism aggravates his little brother. It feels tragic that something as simple as hope can make his little brother so sad these days. 

“Uh, you guys all seem like you’re getting along pretty well,” Azzie says, lightly kicking Grey in the shin as Grey holds Emmy in his arms. “Everyone seems like they are having a nice day today — right, baby?” he adds, speaking that last part just to her, as he holds his hands out to his niece. “Wanna be an airplane?”

“Yuss! I wanna be a airplane!” Emmy says, as she fearlessly launches herself at her uncle, before her dad can prepare for her.

“Jesus Christ, Emmy!” Grey says, as he tightens his grip on her legs — because he has lost control of her torso — right before he just hands her over to his brother. “Don’t do that. What if I drop you?”

“Then she’ll learn,” their dad says, grinning at her. “Right, baby? You’re gonna learn so hard when you hit floor.”

Emmy giggles. “Yeah, Grandpa!”

“See? She gets it.”

When Sanaa was a young girl growing up in the Summer Isles, burns from hot combs heated over the stove top and scars from chemicals were the risks that her mother took on at the altar of her auspicious future. Sanaa spent years breaking down her body and sacrificing her hair to make her all of mother’s burns and scars worth it. 

She wears her hair short and natural these days, because she can no longer grow it out, due to years of straightening it, relaxing it, and pulling it back tightly into a severe bun. 

Missandei was the first and only girl that their son has ever brought home — and he didn’t even technically bring her home. He gave her an address that she wrote down in her phone. Missandei showed up on their doorstep, this bundle of nerves — these big eyes under a bundle of natural curls. 

For some reason, her first sight of Missandei made her feel very hopeful. She remembers being flooded with relief for her son, when she saw Missandei on her doorstep. 

“You’re so fast,” Missy says, as she leans forward to watch Sanaa’s handiwork. “You look like you do this all the time — how are you so fast? You have sons!”

“My hair was very high maintenance, when I was a girl,” Sanaa says. “I picked up a few tricks over the years.”

“Oh, because of unreasonable beauty standards?” Missy asks. 

“Yes,” Sanaa says. “But also —”

“Mommy!” Emmy suddenly screams, breaking all peace in the house. They hear one loud bang on the glass sliding door — Emmy hitting her fist because the door is shut closed — before they hear and see the Grey sliding the door open for her.

She immediately runs over to Missandei, scream-sobbing, her face wet and red as her arms go up. 

“Oh my God,” Missy says, as she reaches out for Emmy and helps pull Emmy into her lap. Her hand goes to cradle the back of Emmy’s head and her arm winds around Emmy’s small back as her daughter continues screaming her guts out. “What happened?”  

She’s asking Grey this, which is why he looks kind of sheepish as he goes, “Uh —”

“Daddy dropped me!” Emmy screams into Missy’s chest.

“Oh my God, what?” Missy says as she tries to push Emmy off of her enough to look Emmy over. “Are you okay? Where did he drop you?”

“On the ground!” Emmy wails, before her face crumples and she starts burying her crying face into Missandei again. 

“Okay,” Grey cuts in, taking a few steps into the house, still in the kitchen but heading closer to the living room. “Okay, in my defense — can I just explain —”

“You dropped me, Daddy!” Emmy shouts accusingly. 

“Okay, so technically that’s true,” Grey says — solely speaking to Missandei, because obviously Emmy can’t currently be reasoned with. And he knows she is totally okay. “But let me explain —”

“What happened, baby?” Missandei asks Emmy, ignoring him for the time being. 

“W-we were p-playing a-airplane,” Emmy pushes out, hiccuping pathetically. And then she screams, “And he dropped me!” 

“I mean, you didn’t follow the rules of airplane,” Grey says, as he casts a quick look to his dad and brother — who are both still outside, but waiting at the open glass door. 

“Oh my God,” Azzie mutters, kind of staring at the sky, with his face puffed up from holding in his breath. And then he suddenly ejects a laugh. 

Which sets off their dad. He starts cracking up, too.

And that sets off Grey — whose entire face twitches and constricts painfully as he tries to swallow up his laugh.

“Daddy!” Emmy screeches, because she’s sensing how seriously he is not taking this. “You dropped me!”

“I mean, I warned ya not to launch yourself out of people’s arms,” Grey says, as he continues to struggle and mostly looks like he’s laugh-crying right now. He hears his dad and brother cracking up, and he starts chuckling audibly too — in little choked hiccups. “I guess I’m sorry I wasn’t quick enough to catch you all the way.”

And then he starts coughing — from the effort of it all.  

“Oh my God,” Missandei says, because she can’t believe this — on many counts. “Just go back outside,” she tells Grey. “The three of you just go finish laughing at her outside.” 

When he first learned of Missandei’s existence, he felt a little inkling of hope for his son. Then when Missandei appeared on his doorstep and he saw that she was older and more mature than he expected, generally not at all what he expected his son’s one-night-stand to be — the hope inside him grew tenfold. He was very hopeful she was going to be the person who was going to save his son’s life.  

He tries to stay quiet during lunch, because Sanaa always tells him that he talks too much and doesn’t let other people talk. He makes himself eat the chicken without commentary, as he looks around the room at his family.

He sees Sanaa ignoring her plate as she hurriedly tries to finish Maddy’s hair so that she can get started on Emmy. He sees Maddy quietly smile to herself, as she watches videos on her iPad. He sees Missandei cradling Emmy with her body, as she continues to quietly chat with Sanaa.

He also catches her sneaking looks at Nudho, as Nudho and Azzie talk about football and take turns holding Nudho’s dog directly on the other side of the sliding glass door. They are outside because they are still cooking the last of the chicken.

He grabs three bottles of beer and takes them out back, to hand two over to his sons. 

And then he tries to surprise Nudho by shoving him right into the side of the house.

“What the fuck, Dad?”

He does it because he’s hopeful. He does it because he really doesn’t think that Missandei is done with his son at all. 

Chapter Text

For a couple weeks in their house, they settle into a pattern that is predictable and nice. 

She starts feeling more comfortable in the house and taking more liberties in the spaces that she occupies. She starts leaving a cardigan on the arm of the sofa, so that she can put it on when she’s a touch cold without having the arduous task of getting herself to the bedroom just for warmth. She starts leaving her belongings in places that are convenient for her — her e-reader is constantly on the coffee table, her reading glasses are next to it. She’s got two pairs of shoes by the front door. 

He doesn’t say anything to her about her little piles of clutter. He just straightens her clutter when he comes across it, just like how he does with the girls. He lines up her shoes so they are neatly parallel to the area rug. He just constantly moves her glasses so that it sits on top of her e-reader. He just constantly folds her cardigan even though she constantly unfolds it to wear it and replaces it all sloppily. 

She wonders if this is something new and conspicuous for him — or if this feels like nothing to him because he’s so used to it. She wonders what they used to do in regard to this stuff and the roles they used to inhabit in this house.

Her boldness with the house extends to her boldness and her increasing comfort with the three of them. She does take over doing the girls’ hair, quickly each morning, and then sometimes more extensively in the evening before bed. She tries to tell Maddy all of these beliefs that she has about hair. She tries to tell Maddy that her hair and hair texture is gorgeous and perfect. 

Missy is only mildly surprised and mildly put out, when she learns — again — that Maddy already knows, that Maddy had already had this conversation many times with the superior version of her. Missy finds that she is beginning to resent a woman who doesn’t exist anymore — a woman who is her. She finds herself jealous that this woman got to have so many firsts with her children and cheat her out of certain experiences. 

Because she’s more independent and can go to the toilet by herself now, he leaves the house during the day more frequently and for longer amounts of time. The pragmatic part of her knows that he’s going to work and that he also doesn’t owe her his company. The pessimistic part of her wonders if maybe he is having an affair, and maybe her near-death experience interrupted his affair for long months because he was too busy taking care of her. The realistic part of her knows that he’s not. The honest part of her knows that he must still be in love with a version of her that no longer exists.

She feels it in the way he cleans up after her.

“Hey, do you mind doing something with Emmy out of the house for a few hours Friday evening?” she asks him, after dinner, as he’s rinsing off the dishes in the kitchen. She sees him pausing. She adds, “I want to spend some one-on-one time with Maddy.”

“Oh,” he says softly. “Sure. If she’s okay with it, I’m okay with it.”

“I already asked her,” she says. “She’s okay with it.”

“Okay, cool.” 

She scrutinizes him through narrowed eyes. She finds that there are now certain subtle things in him now, that she can read. She says, “You hesitated just now. How come?”

He frowns, as he stares ahead — past the window in front of the sink. He says, “I was actually gonna ask you if you could watch both girls without me this Friday, but it’s no big deal. Just Maddy is fine. I’ll take Emmy.” 

Her purse and wallet burned in the crash, and took him entirely too long to get around to pulling out the remains that the police gave him — to inventory what she had on her when she was hit. He found what he expected — her driver’s license, her credit cards, a library card, a pack of gum, a cracked bottle of perfume, a granola bar, a billion crumpled up receipts that were somehow spared from the fire, and half a plane ticket stub from their last vacation in Naath. 

He threw away the trash, the gum, the perfume, and he shredded the partially melted plastic cards before he spent the time requesting new cards for her. He supposes that he procrastinated for so long because he didn’t see the point in replacing a dying woman’s driver’s license. He didn’t think that a woman in a coma needed her credit cards to buy things. 

He holds her new-old wallet in his hand — a yellow leather bifold that he picked out of her many bags in the master bedroom closet. He picked it because it was the slimmest one and he doesn’t think that she will want to carry a purse with her walker. 

He lightly knocks on her bedroom door after he finishes getting the girls ready for bed. After she tells him that it’s okay for him to come in, after a pause, he opens the door and he says, “I have something for you.”

She arches a brow at him. She says, “Ooh, a present?”

“Not really,” he says.

He shows her the wallet. He unclasps it and opens it up to show her before he lays it on her bed.

“So this is the debit card to our checking account,” he says, touching the top card. “And these two are our credit cards. This one is cashback and this is mileage, and it honestly doesn’t matter which one you use. This is your library card. And of course, this is your driver’s license.” He pauses. “Um, do you have questions?”

“Yeah, a bunch,” she says, as she absently swipes up her driver’s license and pulls it out of the wallet. She pulls it up to her face and scrutinizes it — looking at her photo, probably. “Do we have separate bank accounts?”

“No, we have a shared account.”

“And money goes into that account, from your job?”

“Yeah.”

“And I would buy groceries and school supplies for the kids, with these cards?”

“Yes.”

“Who pays the bills?” she says, pulling her driver’s license down from her face, replacing it in the wallet slot. “I mean — who does the administrative stuff for the family?”

“I do.”

She raises her brows in mild surprise. She says, “Oh.”

He can only guess why she responded this way. He guesses that she’s thinking he’s a control freak that doesn’t let her do anything, which may not actually be that far off-base, if he were to be brutally honest with himself. “It wasn’t that you were not also fully capable,” he says quickly. “It was more than you were less into it.”

She nods as she takes in the explanation. She purses her lips as she stares down at the wallet. She says, “Um, so what do I need to check in with you on, before buying? Anything above a certain threshold?”

He shrugs. “I mean, maybe don’t buy a boat without talking to me about it, but generally, you don’t need to check in with me on anything.” He pauses. “And seriously, don’t feel weird about using the cards. And it’s not just for the kids. If you want to buy stuff, please buy stuff you want or need.” 

She feels awkward about this — simultaneously undeserving and also entitled. She feels like she shouldn’t use money that she didn’t earn. She feels like she still doesn’t know what it meant for them, to be together in a relationship and in a family. 

She also feels like it’s about time that she has money. She’s not a child, and she will never have to use Drogo’s credit card to buy her children pizza ever again. 

She mutters, “This feels so weird. Um, I’m not going to go on a spending spree. I’m not going to drain our bank account before — you know.” She means before they split up for good.

“I know,” he says quietly — quickly. “I know you wouldn’t do that. I trust you. And half of our money is yours anyway.” 

He tries to be peppy as he puts on a suit — because Emmy and Momo are hanging out in the closet and watching him get changed. He lets the steamer run as he uncaps his deodorant and lets Emmy smell it before he applies it. He stands in front of the vanity mirror and lets his daughter make the foam for his shaving cream. She makes entirely too much of it, but he puts a lot of it on his face anyway, so that she will smile at him. 

She tries to convince him to let her handle the razor and shave his face for him. He tells her that she’s a nutball and that he doesn’t want to bleed out all over the bathroom floor because she nicks an artery. 

He lets her run her soft little hands all over his face and give him her saliva-filled smooches after he washes his face. He basks in the feel of this simplicity and this intimacy and he reminds himself that he has to remember it, because one day soon, she’s not going to be that interested in him at all.

He lets her pick out his tie — by giving her a choice between slate and charcoal. She tries to go for the lavender one that’s deep in the rack, but he tells her he’s not very fun today. 

She ends up pointing to the charcoal tie. 

Once he’s fully dressed — collar smooth, buttoned up, wallet on his right side, a touch of cologne on his neck, gel uniformly holding together the waves in his hair, watch on his left wrist, leather shoes buffed and shiny — he reaches out to Emmy to hold hands with her. He’s not picking her up because he doesn’t want her to wrinkle his suit.

They walk down the stairs together hand-in-hand, with Momo’s bouncing butt keeping pace with them. 

Missandei and Maddy pause their conversation when they spot him and Emmy. 

Maddy grins. Because she hasn’t seen her dad look like this in a minute. Her dad has been all sad and stressed out and wearing sweatpants and t-shirts for months now. Seeing him in a suit kind of fills her with optimism — that he might be getting back to his old self, just like her mom is kinda getting back to her old self. She says, “Dad! Rawr!”

He’s shaking his head at her. He’s saying, “Yo, don’t catcall me. It’s so weird.” 

“You look really nice,” Missandei says lightly, as she looks him up and down. “Hot date?”

She’s actually talking about him and Emmy — going on a hot date.

He doesn’t pick up on that, though. To him, it sounds like she’s giving him a little bit of shit for his suit — because he knows that she thinks he’s a basic ass Chad. He knows he’s exemplifying that to the max right now. 

So he says, “Yep,” as he yanks Emmy’s backpack and carries it to the kitchen table, unzipping it to take out some of the crazy shit she usually packs for herself. He pulls out three cans of coconut water.

He’s not at all proud of this — or particularly looking forward to the blazin’ hot takes from his folks, but he kind of has no other option. Azzie is busy.

He holds his daughter’s hand in his after he extracts her from her car seat.  He helps her hop out of the car, still being careful and not letting her hang over him and mess with his suit. Her backpack bounces on her back as they walk up to his parents front door.  

His dad is already waiting for them, having spotted the car from the living room window. The door to the house automatically opens. “You look all handsome,” his dad says, eyeing his suit up and down, before he quickly changes his expression and smiles widely at Emmy, picking her up and holding her in his arms as she leans her head against his and gives him a hug. “Seeing you so handsome makes me feel exasperated and annoyed with you,” his dad tells him. “Where are you going?”

“Just going to grab a drink downtown with some colleagues.”

“So you’re going to work,” his dad says, voice dripping with judgment. “You’re dropping your kid off to me on a Friday, so that you can continue running yourself into the ground.”

“I don’t think you understand that I can’t just take months off from my business and bear no repercussions from it,” Grey says, before he leans forward and gives his kid a kiss on her cheek. He tells her, “I love you so much. And I am really sorry I am working today instead of hanging with you. You be good for Grandpa and Grandma, okay?” 

This kid continues to be a tough nut to crack, continually wary and defensive around Missandei, but sometimes warm and friendly. 

Maddy still generally avoids hugging her. Maddy still generally avoids going to her for anything. Grey still continues to be the very clear favorite of this particular child. 

Missy requested time for just the two of them for obvious reasons, but chief among that is that she knows that Emmy is extroverted and very talented at commanding everyone’s attention by being loud and cute. She remembers the fight that Maddy and Grey had, during her first day back in the house. She remembers Maddy yelling at Grey that she thinks her little sister gets everything just because her little sister cries. Missy remembers Maddy shouting at Grey that it’s not fair. 

Missy’s been wondering if Emmy’s general personality has been preventing her from bonding with Maddy on a deeper level, if Maddy feels like she doesn’t have as much access to her own mother because Emmy easily grabs so much access to their mother.

She has Maddy sit on the couch with her, which Maddy obediently agrees to, with Momo as a safety net in her lap. Missy reaches over to lightly squeeze her daughter’s leg. She starts off by grinning slyly and asking, “So do you have a crush on anyone?”

Maddy scoffs and breaks eye contact, looking embarrassed right away. She says, “Mom. I’m just a kid.”

“What?” Missandei says. “I had a few crushes when I was your age.”

“I’m not a girly girl,” Maddy says.

“I know,” Missandei says. “I mean, I can tell you’re not a girly girl. You can still like people and not be a girly girl.”

“I don’t like anyone right now.”

“Okay, so you wanna keep your secrets,” Missandei says, winking. “Got it.”

He straightens his tie in the reflective surface of the elevator doors as he rides it up to the rooftop of the building, to the fiftieth floor.

He thinks life is pretty wild and unpredictable. He used to sleep on a grass mat, laid over bare dirt. He used to spend his days with people who wouldn’t even be able to accumulate as much wealth in their entire lives as the people he is meeting make in a second. 

He spots her at the bar, sitting by herself. He spies her blood red pumps with stiletto heels and he sees the long length of her bare legs. She’s wearing a short skirt. 

He knows she’s miserable like he is.

He gestures to the bartender as he walks up behind her. He gestures to her drink and puts up two fingers. The bartender nods.

She glances at him, from over her shoulder. Her face reflects no surprise whatsoever. Her face actually reflects nothing. 

“Hey fucker,” Yara says, as she watches him slide into the seat next to her. “Fancy seeing you. No last-minute disruptions? Emmy didn’t barf all over you again?”

“I said I’d be here,” he says, adjusting his butt in his seat, touching his tie. “Here I am.”

“Okay, well thank you,” she says seriously. “I really appreciate that you’re here.”

Missy has quickly figured out that sitting on the sofa and just having conversations with one another is maybe a bit too adult and too intense for Maddy. So they end up grabbing Momo and giving her an impromptu trim and grooming session right in the middle of the living room. In a way, Missy is mimicking what Maddy gets at Grey’s parents’ house. In another way, the dog honestly can’t currently see that well because her hair has grown so long that it’s covering her eyes.

“What does it feel like not to remember?” Maddy asks, as she softly pets Momo’s back and watches as her mom holds onto Mo’s squirming head and takes the scissors to Mo’s face. “What is the last thing you remember?”

“There’s not an exact day that my memories start,” Missy says. “I don’t remember a last specific day or anything like that. I just remember being younger. Like maybe it’s like — it’s as if you woke up tomorrow and everything feels normal to you and you tell everyone you’re a third-grader and a really, really amazing artist. But then everyone around you — like me and your dad — are telling you are actually in high school, and you don’t like art anymore. You like . . . cheerleading . . . and the color pink . . . and being a girly girl.” Missandei smiles. “It’s kind of like that.” 

“That sounds awful,” Maddy says. 

“Sometimes it’s confusing and frustrating,” Missandei admits. “I think that’s part of why I get upset and say really hurtful things that aren’t true. Like imagine everyone around you is telling you are a high schooler and a cheerleader and you love being a cheerleader. If you hear it a lot, you might get mad at people and exaggerate and say something like, ‘Cheerleaders are scum of the earth.’ And we know that not all cheerleaders aren’t scum of the earth. They are just people. There are some cool cheerleaders.” Missy pauses, pulling out some crusty eye boogers from Momo’s face. “This example seems like it’s sinking real hard. It feels like I’m really belaboring the point. The point is that I actually think your dad is great. Your dad is a wonderful dad.”

He never planned on being good at making money. He never wanted to be good at making money, but one of the enduring secret hypocrisies in him is that he will do the things he previously didn’t think he had the stomach for or the belief in — if he thinks he’s doing it for his children. 

After Missandei gave birth to Maddy, and all of these unexpected costs kept cropping up and stressing them out — Missandei especially, because of how she grew up. That first year was especially very difficult because he couldn’t work for the majority of it — because it took entirely way too long for his security clearance to transfer over. So for that first year, he cared for their kid in the tiny apartment and had to watch helplessly as Missandei went back to work sooner than either of them would’ve liked in order to pay the bills. He also remembers her exhaustion. He very much remembers all the nights she cried, because it was killing her that she was spending so much time away from her very young baby. 

He ended up reformulating and giving up a lot of his ideals. He wanted to eliminate one source of their stress. He just wanted his kid and the woman he loves to be comfortable and to have access to whatever the fuck it is they could ever want. It felt like, one day, his life stopped being about just him and taking care of himself.

He also has a dearth of skills. He is only good at one kind of thing, honestly. And his skill set and knowledge are so specific and specialized that it is kind of lucrative. Yara never lets them undercharge for many reasons that are important to her. She also has an entitlement that comes from being born into wealth. 

“Okay, God fuck me,” Yara says, as she gives him her hand to hold, as she slips off of her stool, as they see the Valyrians walking up to them.

“Allyn,” Grey says, as he leans forward and offers his hand. “Good to see you again.” 

“Black!” Allyn exclaims, ignoring Grey’s hand. He’s clearly already fucked up on alcohol or coke or whatever it is that this douchebag is into these days. 

Grey distinctly does not react to this.

“It’s actually Grey, right?” Naegar says, stepping forward and smiling like a dork, taking Grey’s hand. “Valar morghulis.”

“Valar dohaeris.”

Missy wonders how she used to feed her children. She wonders if she was a mother that just made them cold sandwiches — like she is doing right now — or if she was the kind of mother that made elaborate meals from the meat that she bought and out of vegetables that she grew in the garden. She wonders if she spent hours standing over the stove each day to make her kids happy. She wonders if, after spending hours at the stove each day, she found it within herself to gather enough remaining energy to get naked and let him touch her body so that it would make him happy. 

“Daddy hasn’t been sleeping,” Maddy says. 

Missy pauses, slowly lowering her avocado sandwich from her mouth. It’s not the first time she’s been made aware of this, but she still plays dumb and says, “What do you mean?”

“He hasn’t been sleeping very much,” Maddy repeats. “Grandma talks about it all the time. And Grandpa’s a doctor. He says Daddy can die if he doesn’t sleep.”

Missy raises her brows in alarm — that their kid is being told this scary stuff. “What? They told you this?”

Maddy shakes her head. “No. I just heard them talking about it a few times.”

“Have you talked to your dad about this?”

“Yes.”

“And what did he say?”

Maddy frowns. “He said not to worry about it. He said he’s sleeping fine.” 

Missy thinks that certainly sounds like him. To allay their daughter’s concerns, she says, “Maybe he is.”

Maddy is shaking her head. “I don’t think so. He’s always awake when I wake up.”

Missy is surprised again. “You sleep with your dad?” She’s surprised because this is another one of those things that she assumed. She assumed that every time Grey took the girls upstairs to bed, he was tucking them in their own beds.

“Me and Emmy do,” Maddy says, starting to feel self-conscious now, because of how her mother is reacting to this — and also her general awareness that it’s maybe a little weird that she sleeps with her dad. She has already gathered that her friends do not do this.

“Every night?”

Maddy nods. “Every night.”

“Okay, thank you for letting me know, hon,” Missy says, pausing to think all of this over. “Do you think I should talk to him about this?”

“Yes,” Maddy says right away, because this very thing has been very trapped in her head and making her really upset and nervous. “That’s why I told you.”

She really doesn’t want her dad to die. Obviously she doesn’t want her dad to die because she loves her dad so much. But she knows that her dad hasn’t been listening to Grandma and Grandpa. Her dad doesn’t think he has a sleeping problem. 

She also can make the connections and pinpoint the moment her dad started having problems sleeping. It was when her mom got hurt and had to stay in the hospital for a very long time. She knows that that was about the time her dad had an emotional breakdown because that’s what she heard her grandpa say to her grandma. That was also the time she and Emmy had to go stay with grandma and grandpa by themselves, without their dad. That was the time her grandma took her and Emmy to school every day. 

She’s heard all of the grownups say that her dad has a hard time without her mom at home. So she waited patiently because she thought things would be better once her mom was home again. 

But they have not been okay. Her grandma and grandpa are still talking about her dad all the time. 

She used to think that her dad can’t sleep alone, and it’s when he’s alone that he has an emotional breakdown. So she lied to him and told him that she has nightmares and when she sleeps with him, she doesn’t have nightmares. She lied to him even though she knows she’s not supposed to. She did it so that he can be okay again.

When she thinks about this too much, she just wants to cry so much over it — just like she wants to cry whenever she thinks too much about how her mom doesn’t love her dad anymore. 

“Are you and Daddy going to get a divorce?”

Missy freezes in place over this, as her heart immediately starts throbbing painfully in her chest. “What? What makes you ask this?”

“What you said about him to Aunt Dany,” Maddy says. “And you guys aren’t the same anymore.”

Missy is internally panicking — because she doesn’t think she’s equipped to navigate this by herself, without Grey. She doesn’t think she should lie to her child. She also doesn't think she should tell her eight-year-old child the unadorned truth. She honestly doesn’t know what to do — so she does what she is good at. She kind of ignores and she deflects. She says, “How were we before?”

“You were Mom and Dad,” Maddy says, keeping it vague as her face flushes. “You acted like Mom and Dad.” 

She honestly feels too shy to express that her mom and dad used to hug and kiss each other all the time. She feels too awkward and scared telling her injured mom that she feels very scared and nervous that they don’t hug and kiss anymore. Cami told her that it means her parents aren’t having sex anymore. Cami told her that divorce happens after that, because that’s basically what happened to Cami’s mom and dad. 

Maddy sees now that it’s not really her and Emmy that her dad needs in order to sleep. Maddy is now pretty positive that her dad needs her mom in order to sleep. She knows this because before her mom got hurt, everything was great. Her mom and dad loved each other and they slept in the same bed and everything was good.

“Baby,” Missandei says softly. “Don’t worry about this. I hate that you’re worrying about this. You don’t have to worry about it. We’re always going to be Mom and Dad. We’re always going to love you.”

Missy can feel Maddy withdrawing from her again, because she probably completely failed at answering this question. Missy can feel that she is failing at being a good mother. Again.  

Maddy just feels so let down and angry at her mom, because her mom doesn’t even care about her dad anymore. Her mom doesn’t even give a shit that her dad can’t sleep without her because her mom is selfish. Her mom doesn’t even give a shit that people die when they don’t get enough sleep. Her mom doesn’t even care if her dad dies.

She just wishes her mom would come back and be the same as she used to be. She just wishes that her mom would freaking remember them again. 

She hates so much that her mom is like this now. All she sees sometimes is how much her mom doesn’t give a shit.

Missy sees Maddy doing that thing that Grey does — where she pulls all of her feelings inward and blanks out. She sees Maddy go numb as Maddy says, “Okay. Sure.” 

One of his skills — in his very limited toolbox — is actually taking it up the ass without defending himself or having any self-respect. He supposes that he honed this skill from the years he got beaten up at school, apparently for being a weird little bitch that danced all the time and was bad at Western social cues because he was so culturally different from his peers. 

He supposes that one of his monetized talents in life is being a professional little bitch.

He drinks way more than he wants to, to keep up with Allyn, who is clearly a high-functioning addict. He sucks down all of the poison into his body and laughs at Allyn’s stupid racism and joyfully agrees that they do know best. He does it all in his High Valyrian, which will never sound correct. He will always speak with the wrong accent and the wrong inflection. He will always sound dumber in this language, and he supposes that that’s the point. 

He, Allyn, and Naegar rack up an insane bill that his and Yara’s company will foot. And they have stayed for far longer than he expected — hours longer. He doesn’t even get a chance to drunkenly make his dad proud by calling or texting his dad, to tell his dad that he totally knows he did not come back when he said he was gonna. He totally did not pick up his child when he said he was gonna. 

He knows his dad must be raging right now. 

It’s all these fucking assholes’ fault.

“Black-Grey,” Allyn slurs. “Are you married?”

“Yes,” he says. He says it because it’s what these fuckers find palatable. These fuckers are obsessed with marriage.

“To a man?”

“To a woman.”

Allyn loudly laughs in his face, in response to that.

Chapter Text

Grey is right. His dad is raging right now.

Kamau’s heart is pounding hard and he’s wanting to punch walls because because he’s almost completely fucking sure that his son is dead somewhere and they are going to get a visit from cops telling them they have to go somewhere to look at their son’s corpse, because his son would never just leave his child behind and not show up to get her. His son would never be so fucking irresponsible.

He comes from a family and a culture where this kind of shit was normal. He was the youngest son in a family of seven. He spent his childhood watching his father leave his family to do God knows even what — women and booze probably — anything besides being a father. Kamau spent his childhood watching his mother act like she was fine with it. 

She was not fine with it. Because she beat them entirely way too much to be fine with her life. 

He is currently not fine with his son’s sudden inaccessibility. None of his calls or messages to his son are being returned. None of Sanaa’s calls or messages to their son are being acknowledged or returned. Their calls are going straight to voicemail — either because their son’s phone ran out of battery — or his phone is broken and crushed under the wheel of a car or something fucking horrific like that — or his stupid son fucking turned his phone off. 

“Honey-bear,” Sanaa says, pulling Emmy from his tense arms. “It’s getting a little dark and I bet your mommy is wondering where you are. Maybe we should go take you home.”

“But we’re not done playing house yet, Grammy” Emmy says, as she wiggles a little bit in her grandma’s grasp. 

“Oh, maybe we can continue playing house when we get to your house. It’s almost your bedtime.” 

“I’m calling her,” Kamau says, looking at his phone for the billionth time and seeing that he has no message from his fucking son. He calls Missandei, to give her a heads up that Nudho is probably fine but completely MIA. He calls her to tell her that they’re heading over to her house with her child.

Grey feels so dead inside and hopeless and so fucking drunk. It’s all the fucking things he doesn’t want. 

He goes to the toilets right after the Valyrians leave, and he forces himself to throw up everything in his stomach, to get rid of the alcohol that hasn’t gotten to his bloodstream yet. He heaves painfully, repeatedly, until his eyes are wet and he doesn’t even bile left to vomit. 

He’s still dizzy and wrecked — completely unable to even walk straight. In a way, it reminds him of how it felt when he first woke up in the hospital, after he was tortured. He was really drugged up then. And he also couldn’t fucking walk straight. And he was also really weighted down by the fucking pointlessness of it all. 

He’s so pissed about this. 

When he gets back to Yara, who was able to avoid drinking because she’s a woman and it’s unbecoming for a woman to be so messy, she says to him, “Thanks for this,” slapping him on the back. “I knew I sensed sexism — and I was right. Thank God you were here. It would’ve been better terms if you were a white man, though.”

He’s looking at his phone — he can’t even fucking read how much his dad is going to kill him because he’s so dizzy. “I need a favor from you,” he tells her. “I need you to drive me and my car home for me.”

“The burbs, Torgo?” she says. “The burbs?”

“Yeah,” he says in agitation. “Missandei was almost killed by a fucking drunk asshole kid. So yeah, I don’t want to fucking get behind the wheel right now.”

“Calm down. I was just fucking with you. Yeah, I’ll drive your ass home so you don’t die. Christ.”

He shoves his phone at her. “Call Missandei for me. And then give me the phone. I’m fucking useless right now.”

“How’s this different from sober-you?”

“Dude,” he says, shaking his head — as his jaw trembles a little bit. He’s getting the shakes. Or he’s having another emotional breakdown right now. He tells her, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I’ve been sucking. I’m sorry I’ve been a burden on you, okay? I’m sorry.” 

“Grey, shit man. Calm down. You’re a fucking basketcase right now. You’re acting like you haven’t spent five hours dealing with casual racism from Valyrians before. Come on, man. Pull yourself together.” She’s digging her hand around in his pants pocket, digging for his keys. “Where did you leave your car?” 

She tries really hard to not continue shitting the bed with Maddy. She tries to sound calm and normal and not completely confused and alarmed after she hangs up with Grey’s dad. 

She tells Maddy that her grandparents are coming over to drop Emmy off. Before Maddy can ask about Grey, Missy tells Maddy that Grey got tied up with work stuff and is taking longer than expected. 

In response to this, Maddy astutely says, “Dad’s at work? But it’s Friday night. He never works this late on Friday.”

Missy has no freaking clue what to say in response to this. So she just says, “Yeah, it’s a bit weird.”

When her phone rings again, she’s expecting Grey’s dad again — with maybe an update on Grey’s whereabouts. 

For some reason, she doesn’t expect to get a call from Grey at all. She doesn’t think they’ve ever talked on the phone since she came back home to live with them. 

“Hey, are you okay?”

He tells Yara not to speed, even though he would like to get home to his family swiftly. He tells her to stop at an intersection before the light turns red, because he doesn’t want her to try and make it through the yellow light. 

He knows his side-seat driving really irritates her, but he just cannot risk it and be irresponsible like this when his daughters are still so young and still need him to be around to take care of them. He just can’t die quite yet.

“You’re still so depressing and annoying to be around,” Yara lightly comments. “I thought you’d revert back to normal, now that Missandei is home.”

“I think this is just my new personality now,” he mutters. “So you should probably get used to it.”

“How have you been — like really?”

“You don’t care,” he says dismissively.

“I actually do. If I didn’t care, would I have covered for your ass for half of a year? Nah, man. I would’ve torched this joint down.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Man, I’m so sick of you constantly apologizing. It’s so boring.” After a pause, she says, “Thanks for tonight. I’m sorry you had to do it.”

“I don’t care anymore,” he tells her. “I’m dead inside again. I owe you so much. So I’ll eat all the shit you need me to. It costs me nothing.”

She sighs because that doesn’t sound great. To her, he sounds a lot like how he did in Astapor. She had been real aggravated by his quick acceptance of unfavorable conditions back then, too. His quick acceptance of unfavorable conditions makes her feel a little scared, a feeling that she generally fucking hates. 

She bitterly says, “Try to have some fucking self-respect sometimes, Torgo. Try to want to fight sometimes, huh?”

“I’m so fucking tired of fighting for shit,” he says back to her, feeling just as bitter. “I’m fucking tired of fighting for my life. And my worthiness. And my humanity. I don’t fucking even care anymore. I will grovel. I will fucking kneel in front of anything and anyone.”  

“Grey,” she says. “You don’t really mean that.”

His dad does not calm down very much after his parents arrive at the house and Missandei quickly tells them that Grey is totally fine and he’s on his way home. Emmy runs up to Missy immediately to greet her with a hug and a cuddle. Missy has to lower her voice a lot — for no reason because Maddy and Emmy can completely hear her — as she tells his parents that he’s kind of drunk.

His dad does the opposite of calming down when he hears this. He looks like he’s about to go ballistic over this.

He doesn’t know how his son can do this when his son knows exactly what happened to Missandei. He doesn’t know how his kid is such a fucking idiot. 

Missy reaches out and touches his forearm in response, as she continues rocking Emmy’s tired body, which has glommed onto her. She quietly says, “Give him a break, please. I think he feels bad about this. He apologized a lot on the phone.”

“He should be apologizing.” 

Missy feels relieved when she hears the garage whirring and hears the creak of the door as it opens. She’s doubly relieved when she sees Grey soon after — looking completely okay and all in one piece — tripping his way into the living room. They all watch him almost hit the ground before he catches himself on a wall and mutters, “What the fuck?” 

Missandei then sees a blond, really fit, and attractive white woman trail after Grey. This particular blond woman is wearing a really expensive tailored suit, has long legs made longer by her stilettos, and a face that is completely defiant and not apologetic whatsoever. 

Yara stutters to a stop when she gets there — mildly surprised as she’s looking back at all of them. And then she says, “Torgo, your entire family is staring at us like they are disappointed in you as a person, too.” And then she smiles easily. She says, “Hey, guys! Long time no see!” 

“Hi, Auntie Yara,” Maddy says cheerfully. 

“Hey, darlin.’ What’s the good word?”

“Popinjay,” Maddy says, completely pulling it out at random, because this is what she does with her super cool aunt.

“Okay,” Yara says, as she walks over and gives Maddy a fist bump. “I’ll go with that. Popinjay.”

“How was work?” Grey’s dad asks, as he mean-mugs the shit out of his son. He asks this solely for the purpose of setting up his next damning statement. “Your job is weird. If I had to do my job fucked up, well, people would die.”

“Kamau,” Grey’s mom says, now starting to echo what Missandei said. “Give it a rest. You’re giving me a headache.”

He ignores the feedback — because he is so fucking mad at this irresponsible shit. He doesn’t think his son has the luxury of being a complete fucking selfish idiot anymore — not when he has children of his own. He doesn’t think his son fucking understands that he just can’t dick around like a fucking dumbass as his children sit around wondering where the fuck their father is. 

“You couldn’t fucking call?” he demands, still glaring at his son. “You were too busy getting drunk during your business meeting to fucking call and inquire about your kid?”

Grey generally ignores his dad because he is not in the fucking mood for this. He just walks up to Missandei on the couch — the person that he is probably actually most accountable to, in this moment — and he asks, “Where’s Emmy? Was she upset? I’m so sorry.”

“She’s totally fine,” Missy says, wanting to quickly reassure him. “She’s sleeping upstairs. Your mom put her to bed. It’s all totally fine and not a big deal. She actually didn’t even realize she was getting extra time with your folks.”

“Okay,” Grey says, swallowing down some of the taste of bile in his mouth. “Okay,” he repeats. “I’m so sorry.” 

“Hey, I’m talking to you!” his dad suddenly snaps — being loud enough that it makes Maddy jump in fright, causing her grandma to reach over to hug her.

“Nah, Dad,” Grey says, as he walks unsteadily into his own kitchen, to grab some water so that he can try and detoxify his stupid body. “You’re actually yelling at me.”

“We met some Valyrian client contacts,” Yara interjects here, as she takes a short step to get into Grey’s dad’s eyeline, opting to just be frank. “They’ve been mismanaging the hell out of a contract and direct services on the ground are having a hell of a time getting through clearance and approval to disperse supplies. It’s real disruptive and hard on folks. And — and — if you can believe — getting them to want to back off was kind of contingent on how much your son can debase himself by putting on a minstrel show, looking pretty and talking pretty in that High Valyrian dialect he apparently learned from missionaries.” She pauses, reaching out to press her hand into his dad’s shoulder. She lowers her voice. “For the record, he wasn’t having fun at all. He couldn’t check his phone. He really wanted to let you know. We were kinda trapped for hours. He also mentioned to me you were unhappy with him for working during the weekend. That’s on me. Sorry I stole him today. He did it because he felt like he owed it to me.” 

After a long-enough pause, one that manages to make them all a tad uneasy, Grey’s dad finally says, “Okay, well now I feel like an asshole.” 

Yara grins, dropping her hand from his shoulder. “Good,” she says. And then to the kitchen, she hollers, “See, Torgo? I told you that your dad is a reasonable and forgiving man.”

As Grey walks back, he shoves a glass of water into Yara’s hand — looking at her with gratitude as she gives him a wry half-smile back. He then looks down at Maddy on the couch with his mother. He knows that she’s been waiting for his attention because he knows his kid. Because it’s past her bedtime, he says, “Why are you still up?”

“I wanted to see you,” she says softly, as she pushes herself off the couch, gets to her feet, and starts walking up to him. She’s trying to hug him.

Grey automatically tries to stop her — by blocking her as she tries to wrap her arms around him. 

And it makes her face fall. It makes her arms drop.

“Baby, sorry,” he says quickly. “I don’t really want you to be around me when I’m like this.” 

And then her face crumples suddenly. Her eyes water and she’s very embarrassed about it, but can’t help it. She starts to quietly cry.

He dies inside when he sees this. Everyone watching this also feels pretty sad about this.

“Fuck, just joking,” he says, as he quickly and uneasily stumbles to the couch and collapses down onto it, in the spare spot between his mom and Missandei. He accidentally slams his glass of water on the coffee table. He gestures to Maddy once he’s situated. He says, “Come here.”

She immediately climbs into his lap and throws her arms around him, because while she doesn’t know exactly what’s been going on with him — outside of the sleeping thing — she has definitely been sensing that something has been going on with him. And while she can’t fully understand why she feels so anxious and nervous about her dad lately — she does sense that she feels scared for him sometimes. Like right now. She feels very scared for him right now. She wonders if this is what an emotional breakdown looks like. 

She’s crying as she softly and carefully touches his face — just in case it hurts him to be touched harder than this. She asks him, “Are you okay?”

“Oh, sweetie,” Yara cuts in, taking the liberty of answering for him because this shit is so crazy, and she also suddenly feels terrible for how much pressure she’s been applying on Grey to come back to work full time and get his fucking head on straight. She either didn’t realize or didn’t believe him, when he told her that he’s having a really hard time at home. “You know this weirdo is never really okay,” she says. “But your dad will be fine. He kinda played a game that he couldn’t win tonight — because he’s a nice person capable of empathy and not a psychopath. We should all be happy that he’s so fucked up right now, actually. It’s proof he’s not a psychopath, really.”

“Oh my God,” Grey mutters, directing that at Yara, as he presses a kiss into his kid’s wet face. She’s starting to calm back down, and he’s very grateful for this. 

“He’s so sweaty,” Maddy says to her Aunt Yara, sniffing, as she wraps her arms around Grey again. 

“Yeah, I agree. He’s so gross right now,” Yara says. 

“You should go to sleep, Daddy.” 

And then, because she’s full of purposeful timing, Yara takes a few short steps to the side, so that she’s standing in front of Missandei — who has been very obviously staring at her this whole time. She bends her knees a little, so they are closer in each other’s sight. She’s looking directly at Missandei’s face as she offers out her hand. She thinks that Grey really wasn’t fucking around — that he was being for real with her. She thinks that this entire thing is so fucking crazy and tragic. 

To Missandei, Yara says, “Hi. I’m Yara, by the way. I’m your husband’s work-husband.”

Grey’s parents leave soon after, once they realize all is well and it’s late and everyone is fucking tired and cranky. 

His dad tries to gloss over his entire freakout and all of the anger that poured out of him by giving his son a hug, but Grey feels kind of a way about it — so he stands stiffly and doesn’t return the hug. He just waits for it to be over. 

This clearly hurts his dad’s feelings. He can feel and see his dad’s gaze searching his face. And he’s not really sure what else this man expects from him. He doesn’t think he’s in the mood to take his dad’s shit — on top of taking Valyrian shit. He doesn’t think he currently has the capacity to make his dad feel better about thinking the very fucking worse of him. 

“I’ll talk to him,” his mom tells him — straight up — right in front of his dad as she embraces him and pressed her lips to his hot and sweaty cheek. 

They leave soon after, leaving Grey to put Maddy to bed by himself. She’s become glued to him again, resistant to letting him out of her sight again.

Left by themselves, Yara arranges herself on the sofa, a healthy distance from Missandei but still enough to have a comfortable conversation. She adjusts her stupid skirt after she sits down, yanking it down as it threatens to ride up. 

“So, what’s new?” Yara asks, as she stares at Missandei. “What have you been up to?”

Missandei is looking at her like Missandei is slowly coming to a conclusion about her.

Yara smiles sardonically. “I’m fucking with you,” she says. “I don’t actually care. Hmm, spoiler — you’re totally gonna dislike me — a lot — for a while. But then you’ll get used to me and will come around and begrudgingly like me. At least, that’s how it happened the first time.” 

“Okay,” Missandei says evenly. 

Yara looks at Missandei’s pajamas — or maybe her everyday wear, and she says, “What’s up with this outfit?”

“What?” Missandei says, looking down at herself. “What about this outfit?”

“Why aren’t you wearing your regular clothes?” 

“Because I can’t do stairs. I also don’t remember what my regular clothes are. I also don’t care?”

“Interesting,” Yara says. And then she points a finger up to the ceiling. “See? It’s already happening. You’re already finding me deeply unlikable.” 

And then they spot and hear Grey having a hard time walking back down the stairs after putting Maddy to bed. 

She says, “Torgo, why does your missus look so dowdy now?”

Missy is currently wondering why all of his friends are assholes. She is wondering why he is so mesmerized by assholes. Is it because his dad traumatized him too much? 

“Shut up,” Grey says to Yara, as he walks up to her, still in his suit — which is now really wrinkled — and hands her a thick wad of cash, which Yara quickly hides away in the inside pocket of her blazer.  

To Missandei, she says, “It’s for coke.”

“It’s not,” he says to Missandei.

“Walk me to the car, Torgo,” she says, because her phone is telling her that her ride has arrived. “Be chivalrous and make sure the driver isn’t a creep.” She nods her head at Missandei. She says, “Night, wifey.”

“Have a good night,” Missandei says, even though she finds this woman completely obnoxious. She says it only because Yara predicted she’d hate her, and Missy doesn’t want Yara to be right. 

“Well,” Yara says once they are out the door, as she steps down into the driveway. “She is definitely not herself.” She clears her throat. “Grey, if you need more time, you should take more time. It’s okay. I can handle it. You were great when I was going through that stuff with my brother.”

“Nah,” he says.

She rolls her eyes. “Okay,” she says. 

And then she holds out her arms, which he predictably walks into. They give each other a firm and quick hug. 

“Try to get more sleep,” she says, as she claps him hard on the back. “Talk to you Monday. Let’s try to push the amendment through without any addendums, yeah?”

“Yeah, man, we’re on the same page,” he says as he starts stumbling his way back into his house. “Good night, Yara.”

“Hey, you didn’t even check if this guy is a creep or not! No offense, sir.”

Something really obvious occurs to her as she watches him refill his glass of water at the fridge and gulp it down with his head thrown back — desperately like he is trying to get himself sober again through hydration. 

She realizes that there’s so much about this person that she just doesn’t know. 

She supposed that this observation manages to be new and novel in addition to being completely obvious because she previously didn’t care that much about who he is as a person, on account of all of the knee-jerk assumptions she made about him when she first saw him. When she first saw him, she thought she already knew everything she needed to know about him, so there was no need to be curious. 

She didn’t anticipate that she’d end up standing with him in their kitchen, him wearing a very nice suit that is very damp and very wrinkled now, watching him try and drown himself in water because his job is apparently kind of stressful. 

“Are you okay?” she asks.

“Oh, I’m great,” he says sarcastically, as he force-feeds himself more water.

“You really don’t look okay.”

“That’s actually because I was joking,” he throws back at her, going back to the fridge to refill his glass again. “I actually had the shittiest night, Miss. I feel like complete shit. I’m pissed I didn’t pick up Emmy. My dad is pissed at me. I think I’m pissed at him. I’m pissed Maddy saw me wasted and had to make me feel better about it. I’m fucking pissed at myself. I want to punch myself in the face until I’m unconscious. So that’s how I am.”

She wonders if they’ve done this already — in a different life that she can’t remember. She wonders if these kinds of meetings are somewhat normal for him, and if she was the kind of woman that put their kids to bed by herself and waited up for him. 

She wonders if she has ever watched him be this angry at himself and how she used to feel about bearing his feelings, on top of her own.

“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” she says quietly to him. “I don’t even think it’s a big deal that you left our daughter for a few extra hours with people who would give up their lives keeping her safe. I don’t think it’s that bad that Maddy saw you be a little messy and sloppy — it might teach her that it’s okay to be imperfect sometimes. I think your dad was just really worried about you. He seems to be pretty bad at processing his emotions healthily in the moment sometimes, though — and I’m sorry for that. That’s hard. Do you need help?”

She’s referring to the cufflinks, which he has been messing with and is on the verge of just ripping off. She’s gesturing to him, as she takes a limping step forward, using the edge of the countertop to keep her balance. 

She leans against the kitchen island as he gives her his wrist.

“You really are sweating so much,” she says quietly to him, smiling up at him as she easily undoes his first cufflink and holds it in her palm with her fingertips as she guesses what he’s wanting and pushes up his jacket and shirt sleeves for him, to get more air on his hot skin. Then she gets to work on the other side.

“I am sweating so much,” he echoes. That’s why I’ve been drinking so much water. I’m scared my body’s gonna run out of water , man.”

After she finishes with his other arm, pushing up the sleeves too, she grabs his hand, turns it over, and drops his cufflinks into his palm. 

She smiles at him as she says, “Do you need help with anything else? Pants? Shirt? Shoes?”

She knows it sounds super flirtatious. She’s kind of testing something out. It’s a little bit like how she dealt with her humiliation over being naked around him by just being fully naked around him. 

“Yeah,” he says, looking back at her, but not smiling. “You wanna take my clothes off for me?”

“Yeah,” she says, as she inches a little closer and slowly — super slowly starts to reach for his suit jacket, kind of pushing it off of his shoulders.

He takes a good step back after that, clearing his throat loudly — because he’s drunk and he knows she’s trying to mess with him. He knows her better than probably anyone else in the entire world. He knows how she thinks and what she’s motivated by. 

He knows that this isn’t what it looks like and what it feels like to him. 

He remembers her doing this kind of thing with him — when they were getting to know each other. He remembers walking off of a plane in King’s Landing, jetlagged as hell and rushing past the crowds so that he can see her already. He remembers being stunned at how pregnant she looked, when he met up with her at her car in arrivals.

He remembers her asking him if he thought she was still pretty. It was a test — she wanted to measure his integrity maybe. Or she wanted to measure his ability to read subtext. Or she wanted to see if he had a sense of humor.   

He says, “I see what you’re doing,” as he starts pulling at his tie because he really is sweating to death. “It’s funny. You’re funny. Sometimes.” He pauses. “Thanks for the pep talk. It was nice.”

“I meant it.”

He’s not really super surprised at the reception he gets when he finally makes it to the bedroom.

He pees a lot — because of all the water he drank. He knows he’s gonna probably need to pee a lot in the middle of the night. 

He starts taking off his clothes as he’s in the middle of peeing. He flushes the toilet and he quickly strips off the rest of the suit and haphazardly leaves pieces of it on hangers. He throws a pair of shorts on. 

And then he tries to crawl in between his girls.

He’s not even there for very long before he gets punched in the arm and kicked in the stomach. He’s barely even touching her, but she’s using her entire weight to push him away.  

“Daddy, stop touching me!” Emmy says, groaning in annoyance even though she’s still half-asleep. She’s kicking him because her dad is so hot and sweaty and kind of smelly. “I can’t sleep when you touch me!”