Safety Net
Summary: Clegan parenthood stuff with Betty.
Word count: 2.6k. (Based on @buckpregnant cleganverse!!)
══════ •°• ✧ ✦ ✧•°• ══════
“How is she?”
“She’s beautiful.”
“No,” Gale murmured, a sliver of a laugh slipping from the corner of his mouth like a thread coming loose. “How is she? Hungry? Fussy? Sleeping?”
“Nah,” John replied, lazily, with the kind of blithe confidence Gale found most insufferable in him. “She’s perfect.”
Perfect.
Gale exhaled a sound that had no shape; no centre, no edges, just an exasperated ghost of breath that trickled from the thin line of his lips and vanished. It was neither relief nor resignation, but something liminal and low and worn like the polish on the edge of a well-used coin. He pushed himself up from the desk with hesitancy; his body a barely-stitched thing still uncertain of its own borders.
The Stalag, ever unyielding in its ascetic brutality, was no place for softness, yet John had made it into a nest, a throneroom of sorts, where he reclined on the couch like some sloppy monarch with their offspring on his chest. There lay Betty, tethered to him by breath and skin and impossible peace, tiny limbs sprawled, her miniature fingers splayed like pale sea stars against his collarbone. Her eyes—open, moonwide—tracked John’s face with a reverence that struck Gale as something almost offensive. Reverence. Already.
“You’re meant to be rocking her to sleep.” Gale said, the words falling dully into the room.
“I am,” John said, still watching her. “Or I will. I don’t know. She’s just so small. I don’t want to put her down.”
Gale stopped at the threshold of the couch, though not of the moment, and did not approach further. His hand, as if drawn by a marionette’s string, found its old post at his abdomen. The womb was empty, the stitches long dissolved, the blood long scrubbed away, and yet—there it was. The ache. Not of pain, but of vacancy. Of a hollow bell ringing with memory.
The omega instincts hadn’t caught up to time. His body, confused animal that it was, mistook absence for threat. And beneath that, something worse. A hunger. The notion—absurd, instinctual, unforgivable—that perhaps another child might settle this trembling, like a weight pressing down on a cornered sheet.
“I can’t get over how much she looks like you.” John said softly.
Gale gave the smallest of nods. His face, so practised in its defences, betrayed nothing. A master of careful vacancy. He adjusted the corners of his mouth with the delicacy of a man turning down a bedsheet.
“She’ll grow out of it.”
“I hope not!” John glanced up at him then, a brief flash of bright sincerity in a face Gale wished, just now, would remain bowed forever. “She’s beautiful. Like you. It’d be cruel if she ended up looking like me.”
Cruel.
Gale sat down, crosswise, near John’s legs and without ceremony. John shifted, ever the eager host, but Gale pressed a hand—pale, cold, almost papal—against his knee to still him. He preferred the closeness, or at least what passed for closeness. John’s legs jabbed gently at his side, and it grounded him in a way that almost justified the decision.
But he did not look at Betty.
Because John was right, maddeningly, innocently right; she looked like him. Not in that vague, flattering way new parents liked to assign features as if they were distributing favours at a party, but with exactitude. With eerie precision. A copy, carbon and cruel. As though her soul, on its way down from whatever holding place the unborn reside in, had passed by one of Gale’s old photographs and mistook it for a template. She was him. Down to the tilt of the brow, the sleepy melancholy of the eye, the slope of a nose too delicate to be called noble.
And yet.
No trace of John.
No rescue.
There was no indulgent, wide set nose, no cleft of that stubborn chin, no crooked grin that might have interrupted the mirror. Only Gale, rendered smaller, softer, and thereby more helpless. A dangerous thing.
Of course he loved her—biologically, chemically, irrevocably—but that love came perfumed with unease. Not resentment, exactly, but its distant cousin. He had lived with that face. Knew what it attracted. What it repelled. What it suffered. And to see it now, fragile and unknowing, looking up at John with that exultant, babyish worship; it made something inside Gale twitch. Not just pain. Not just jealousy. But guilt.
Because deep, deep in the animal heat of his second gender, Gale’s omega instincts whispered something treasonous; she should have looked like John.
And she didn’t.
And that meant Gale had failed her, somehow. Failed him.
Worse still—worse in that subterranean, tongue-biting, marrow-deep way she would never understand—was the fact that Betty had failed them both. By being born too soon, in the snarled, blood-slicked twilight of it all, when Gale’s body was still a howl of healing and his heart an unswept room full of broken teacups and breathless pauses. The very event of her arrival, that unconsented thunderclap of pink flesh and wet crying, had snatched away something; something unspoken, unborn, unmade, from Gale. Something unnamed and unnameable, yes, but not unlamented.
And though Gale—rational, refined, embarrassingly educated Gale—knew better, his body had not forgiven her. Not quite. It was not forgiveness he could give, nor blame he could justify, and yet; it lived in him. Grew in him. Like mould under wallpaper. It was a blame he was helpless to hold, and still, he held it like a lover’s secret.
It did not help. No, not at all, that the little usurper had apparently stolen the brightest part of his life with her mewling, milk-sour mouth. John. She had taken John. When he did not hold her, she held him. She laughed at his idiotic sounds and idiotic faces, as if the world were built of nothing but those stupid noises and the endless space of his grin. She went to Gale for the ugly things; the wipes, the midnight feeds, the nasal suction. She turned to John for joy.
Sometimes—God, the cruelty of sometimes—in the black-slick hush of three in the morning, with Betty fussing against the blankets and John gone off on his selfless night shift (because of course he would take the night shifts, sweet idiot, to earn extra ration cards so they could have socks, mittens, a second-hand wool cap), Gale would look at her. Just look.
And she would look back.
In that strange mirror-like silence, Gale would wonder.
Did she know? Did she hate him, too? Was it mutual?
He saw it then; that grim, ironic symmetry; she was his, down to the ghost-print of her eyes and the pout of her lip, and yet they were locked in this impossible geometry, two reflections forever failing to overlap. Perhaps they had both been built not to love themselves—only to love John. And now, condemned to this tragic comedy, they must compete for him.
The room, dim and chilled and thin-skinned with silence, burst—softly, impossibly—with a sudden peal of sleepy giggles. A breathless cascade, bubbles of joy too light for gravity. John had lowered his head to pepper Betty’s face with kisses; absurd, ticklish, relentless. Her tiny fists, comically ineffective, clutched at the two-day-old bristle of his cheeks. Her feet pattered against his ribs. It must have hurt—those little bones, so firm in their kicking—but if it did, John gave no sign. His face was lit from within. He glowed.
And more than that, he smelt happy.
That deep, resin-thick scent, cedar and sap and sun-warmed loam; joy, in the unmistakable language of alpha pheromones poured off him in waves. Gale had never smelt it this strong. Not even when they had first mated, not when they had lain together for hours in the empty classroom of the school house and whispered the future like prayers into each other’s mouths.
No—this scent had arrived with Betty, bloodied and screaming and still half-wrapped in afterbirth, and John had cried and held her like the world had just been rebooted in miniature.
And something, everything, had changed after that.
Not overtly. Not in any way one could jot in a journal or mention aloud. But Gale noticed. He felt it. Or perhaps he had simply never seen it from the outside before, never known how radiant John could be without him as the source.
John, who now paraded Betty through the camp like a saint bearing a relic. Everyone knew her. Everyone adored her. John, who wrapped her in a sling under his coat when the winds turned cruel. Her little cheeks, pink and luminous, peeked out like rosebuds.
John, who sang nonsense lullabies to her; off-key, off-tempo, perfect. Who rocked her through fever and teething. Who bartered his own ration cards for the sheer delight of gifting her something useless and beautiful.
He began carving old, useless wood into small toys. Blocks. A car with no wheels. And, Betty’s personal favourite, a carved unicorn. Soft-wooded. Its horn had broken off within the week, and still she adored it. Refused to let it go unless she was in John’s arms.
John was everything a father ought to be. No—he was something more. The alpha in technicolour. Hyperreal. Constant, alert, unspeakably kind. He rose to every cry. He moved like the wind itself when Gale so much as twitched in sleep. And Gale, God help him, felt no resentment. Not really. Or if he did, it was the kind made sweet by longing.
Because watching John love Betty was, in its own aching way, a gift. A cruel, honey-dripped punishment. A thing Gale could swallow. He would have felt guilty, perhaps, if he weren’t already so utterly consumed by the pleasure of watching them from this place of half-shadow. Because this, too, was love. Warped, yes. Bitter as fruit too early picked. But real.
And it was all he had left. It was, like it or not, his life now.
Gale let himself lean, just a fraction, into John’s leg.
It was an accident at first; an unconscious tilt of weight, like a flower stem bending towards sunlight, but John, ever attuned to his omega, shifted to catch it, to make space where there was none. His hand slid, large and dry-warm, to rest against Gale’s nape, the heel of his palm pressing lightly into the tense line of muscle there. Not possessive. Not even protective. Just there. A touch that didn’t ask for anything in return.
Betty giggled again—soft this time, breathy, half-asleep already—and Gale felt the vibration of it in the air. In his nerves. She reached one chubby arm up, smacking her fingers against John’s mouth, and he took them into his lips, play-biting, humming. She squirmed with sleepy delight.
“Little menace,” John murmured fondly.
Gale made a small sound—closer to a hum than a laugh—and let his hand drift, idly, towards John’s knee. He didn’t grip, didn’t need to. He just wanted to touch. He wanted to feel the ripple of muscle under his palm. A pulse. A grounding.
There was no urgency now. No sharpness. Only the strange, hush-wrapped feeling of a moment sealing itself shut before anyone could ruin it with speech. John, Betty, the slight weight of heat shared among them in a room far too cold and far too dim. And yet warm, somehow. Like the warmth had decided to exist here anyway, just for them. A quiet, illogical miracle.
“She’s getting heavy,” John said, and then, after a beat: “You want to hold her?”
Gale looked up, almost startled. He hadn’t thought John would ask. He hadn’t even realised how long it had been since he had held her like this—not just to feed, or change, or calm a screaming fit—but simply to hold. The suggestion felt frightening, and then shamefully wanted.
“I…yeah,” Gale said, softly. “If you’re tired.”
John moved slowly. Reverently. As if he were about to hand over something impossibly fragile. Gale sat up straighter, arms already instinctively forming that cradle curve. Betty, all warmth and drowsy resistance, whimpered a little in protest before her cheek found Gale’s shoulder. She settled with an unconscious sigh, snuffling into his collarbone with a heavy huff.
She smelt like sleep. Like milk and the dusty-sweet scent of baby scalp. And underneath it, faint but unmistakeable, was John. All of it; her skin, her softness, her trusting weight, was steeped in him. It hit Gale’s chest like a kiss pressed just under the sternum.
“Hey, bug,” Gale murmured, the words barely more than a vibration in his throat. “Hi.”
Betty blinked once; slowly, deliberately, with all the casual apathy of the moon turning its back to the sun. Her fingers flexed, groping his shirt in tiny, unsure pulses. Her face contorted—not into a cry, not exactly—but into something ancestral and unknowable.
A grimace pulled from Gale’s own face like a weed from old soil. The tight cheeks. That solemn, blinking-less stare. A mimeograph of his unease. She did not cry. Not really. She made a soft noise, a fussy growl of dissatisfaction, and kicked her little legs in theatrical protest.
But no tears.
It wasn’t a victory. Not a revelation. Just a passing moment, a flicker, a pause in the storm—and God, Gale would take it. He would clutch it like a lucky coin rubbed smooth by a thousand prayers.
John was still close, always close, the constant orbit. His arm slipped around them both; not tentative, not performative, but instinctive, like an anchor thrown in deep waters. His cheek found Gale’s temple with practised ease.
“You’re doing good,” John whispered, and it was almost criminal, the warmth in his voice. “She likes you.”
“I’d hope so,” Gale replied with a dry grunt. “Tore me open on her way out. Least she could do is not scream bloody murder every time I pick her up.”
John laughed, low and amused, the sound like a velvet rope pulled gently in a dark room. Then he pressed his nose to Gale’s neck—familiar territory, conquered and reconquered—and kissed the bond, that raw, invisible seam where their lives had been stitched together. Lips against gland, pulse against pulse, until the tightness in Gale’s shoulders began to uncoil like old film unwinding. Tension evaporated. Something in him, some grim little soldier of shame, sat down and wept.
Perhaps Betty felt it, too. Her feet stilled. Her face, still scrunched in baby-level injustice, slowly unfurled like a morning leaf. Was it John’s scent—amber, cedar, that golden molasses of alpha serenity? Was it Gale’s own changing aroma, no longer sharp and electric with fear, but gentled now, soft and low, like lavender bruised under a thumb? Or was it simply that Gale had stopped holding her like a live grenade, and had begun, somehow, to hold her like his daughter?
“See,” John whispered, as if speaking into a dream. “It’s alright. You’re doing great.”
Gale said nothing. He didn’t nod. He barely breathed. But his hand—resting against Betty’s impossibly small spine—tightened just slightly. Not in hesitation, but in instinct. Protection. Possession. Not the kind born of obligation, but of some strange, half-forbidden hope. As if she were not just a stranger born of pain. Not just a mirror he couldn’t bear to look into. But something his. Something, maybe, to keep.
And in that moment, the three of them; tangled in the hush of their own slow, steady breathing, warm as bread in the fading chill, did not feel like a wound. Or a failure. Or a punishment. They felt, impossibly, like a constellation.
Not the clean kind you could name in books, no. But the kind that only wolves knew. Or madmen. Or lovers who walked too far from home. The kind you saw only once in a lifetime; above a desert, or a frozen lake, and never forgot. The kind that meant home. Or at least the aching, impossible possibility of it.
