hi hello I cannot stop thinking about the IF-verse ever but more specifically luca and ash bc i adore them so so so much and theyre my everything!!!!!!!! also out of curiosity, after going off of everything how long did it take ash to get pregnant??? idk i just. as an afab person who was kinda raised in a similar culture to ash's family the fact that he got out, he still wanted kids, and healed to a point where he could carry his own kids is everything to me. and just i just KNOW he and luca would be incredible dads and i really hope we get to see that in future IF-Verse fics!!!!!!! and then last thing for now i think anyway! do you have any headcanons about luca and ash when ash was pregnant and them as dads from when they had newborns into when the twins were toddlers and whatnot?
Oh they got pregnant right away to the point Ash is almost embarrassed how quickly that lil line turned pink.
They weren’t even really actively trying. Of you remember the age gaps betwen Luca and his sisters, hos family has had struggles w firtility before, so doing the “not trying but not not trying” was a way to like, not get their hopes up. Plus if Ash crashed and needed to go back on his antidepressants and/or T then that wouldn’t be as much of a heartbreak thing since they “weren’t really trying anyway”.
They just stopped using birth control after Ash was weaned off his antidepressants and stopped his HRT. And like, within Ash’s first month being completely free of everything he ended up pregnant.
The first person Ash tells is Yuna, because the Cens are on a roadie and Yuna is the only person in Ash’s close chosen family who’s been pregnant. They don’t say anything to anyone else (including Shane and Ilya) until after the All Stars game. Which is why Mac doesn’t mention it.
But that first Christmas Aris spends with the Hol-Roz family? Yeah Ash is pregnant there.
They do, however, end up waiting to tell other people because Ash gets An Idea. They wait because by that point a lot of the Ducklings have been traded/signed to other teams. So they put an event in the shared calendar when they all are either playing Ottawa or Montreal, or have a day off. Ash tells Harris he has a PowerPoint and makes the ducklings sit through it.
Ash standing there with the first slide having an actual title abt long distance friendships. He clicks the next slide, it reads “I lied”. The next slide is a sonogram of the twins with their due date on the screen. Chaos happens.
No one tells Ilya or Shane tho bc they wanna tell Shane and Ilya and Mac together so they have to wait for a day when Mac’s in town.
They tell the Hollander-Rozanovs the same way Sveta told the Hol-Rozes that the implantation was successful: t-shirts. Shane and Ilya’s have “best godfather” on them, Mac’s has “best uncle”. There are tears. Ilya and Ash just hold each other for a bit because look how far they’ve come. They both have children, have families that would die for and live for them, they made it through the worst bits and are building better futures one step at a time.
As for them as dads well! They raise the twins completely gender neutral, kids start to express gender identity around 3 which is when they find out they have one son and one gender-ooblek child who prefers she/her most often. They do have a gender reveal party for the twins’ fourth birthdays.
The kids grow up spending as much time outside as inside, Ilya accidentally starts the trend of making sure all the kids in their family network speak Russian as well as any other languages. Aris slides in with some Greek. They learn Swiss-German specifically, though some weirdness happens with Janz visiting as often as he does (which tbf is because he’s the twins’ uncle through marriage as well as Duckling) and their French is mostly Quebecois French.
Ash and Alex both end up deconstructing a lot of their relationship (esp the bad bits) so they can make sure that Ash’s twins don’t grow up with the same borderline unhealthy enmeshment that Ash and Alex have. Which mostly comes down to parenting choices early on that are easy to make.