OK, I’M COMING INTO THIS HEADCANON ON A FREIGHT TRAIN. (also, I blame @humanityinahandbag, it’s her doing, she made me cry about babies)
Jim never expects to like this child, because, first of all, it’s Strickler’s child (That he made. With Jim’s mother.) and second, well, when you grow up as an only son, and the only person with siblings that you know is your girlfriend (who is very chill about raising her brother, but it’s her brother), the concept of becoming the first child is sometimes hard to grasp. Toby keeps mentioning that Jim forgets about his Older Brother Instinct, which applies to everything that surrounds him. Jim, in return, points out that a) no, he does not have that, and b) it’s Strickler’s baby.
But then it just happens.
Because when Jim sits in the hospital, his mother, despite dark circles under her eyes, and hair in a shock of ginger, her breathing deep and measured and calmly tired, is glowing, and her voice, soft and warm like a blanket in her arms, makes him catch his breath, toeing on the edge of what looks like a brand new, completely unexplored life, with trepidation.
Her fingers pull on a side of the wrapping, and a pair of eyes stare at him.
Large green eyes, that can fit the entire world in them, but that would be silly, because she is so small, with chubby puffed up cheeks and a beginning of a frown that Jim knows will define their entire relationship, and an upturned button of a nose, wrinkled in confusion.
And Barbara tucks in a bunch of barely visible, yet already red and unruly hairs right back under the baby cap, making those eyes shift with wonderment. “Cassie, this is your older brother, Jim.”
The baby, Cassie, responds with gurgling noises. Happy gurgling noises.
And just like that, without having a second thought, fear and uncertainty and light twitchiness in his fingers that has been bothering him for the last six hours - those were six long hours, with 5AM hospital coffee and statue-like Walter by his side, Walt, who still doesn’t say a single word (astonishingly since Strickler always has something to say, even if no one asked him), and spend the past ten minutes with his face buried in Barbara’s hair - vanished away.
Jim falls so hard he thinks his heart would give up, the hammering of rushing blood thumping in his ears, and he has to swallow with a dry throat, leaning forward, to let those eyes see him better.
“Hi,” he says, and the eyes - very intent, very focused, are all babies like that? - switch right back at him. “I’m your brother.”
His finger touches the soft bump of her nose. The frown, the Frown comes back, and the cheer offence and shock at such a barbaric action towards her person catches Jim off guard, she is going to cry and I’m going to die, turns him into a deer in the headlights of baby eyes - baby, who uses this to her advantage. She wiggles, giving her mother a start, getting out one plump baby arm, with five little nubby fingers, grabbing his offending finger, and sticking it right into her small pursed mouth.
Something touches his hair. Something is his mother’s hand, slim, kind. “Jim, baby, you are crying.”
“No, I’m not,” Walt calls back from behind his mother’s ear.
Barbara just sighs. “What am I going to with you?” And her you, Jim realises, becomes bigger, greater.
Because now, there were four.