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martin m. boot ([info]martianmartin) wrote in [info]valesco,
@ 2013-02-11 22:53:00

Previous Entry  Add to memories!  Tell a Friend!  Next Entry
WHO: Nicole, Matthew, and Martin Boot
WHAT: Nick's trying to disguise the fact that she's come down with something
WHERE: Their home!
WHEN: Tooooday!



“Goal! Goal!! Did you see that shot!? A brilliant play by Liverpool. They could well be on the path to League Cup champions with the kinds of tricks they’re pulling out of their hats lately!”

The football announcer’s enthusiastic voice booming from the living room telly drew an ecstatic gurgle from the chubby blonde baby rolling around on the rug. Matthew Chase Boot, hands grabbing his feet as he bobbled around on his back, turned bright eyes away from the game and to his mother before squealing again some incomprehensible excitement for a game that the 1-year-old truthfully knew nothing about.

“You wanna go watch the Cup someday, bud?” Nicole, seated on the ground in front of the couch, returned his grin, and reached over to fluff his soft curls. “Maybe we can talk about it when you’re old enough to understand what you’re getting so worked up about, huh.”

Matthew, face suddenly dropping to a pout--sometimes she really wondered how much that kid did understand--, immediately rolled off his back and to a position where he could grab his mother’s leg, using tiny hands and fingers to clamber into a yet shaky standing position.

“NO!” he managed to work out. “Now now now now!!” Matthew stepped forward, finally falling into Nick’s chest in a big, demanding heap of little boy.

She barely had time to reach an arm out around him before he pushed into her, and instantly the air almost rushed out of her lungs---no, it was more like she suddenly lost the power to move. Nick squeezed her eyes shut and took a deep breath, leaning her head back into the couch cushion until the dizzy, weak feeling subsided. But it didn’t subside, not for what felt like forever. She stayed like that for twenty seconds, thirty seconds, a minute, before finally she opened her eyes again to find her son staring up at her, all hint of anger gone from his face.

Matthew was a big boy, but certainly not big enough to wind her. And still now she felt just... exhausted. And warm--were the heating spells malfunctioning? Nicole took another few breaths before offering the boy a weak smile. “Sorry, bud, didn’t mean to scare you.”

But what had that been?

“GOAAAALLLL!”

Martin charged into the room, a wee bit late, but arms up and flailing in excitement. He knew very little about football and was taking the opportunity to learn it along with his son. As with all things, he was easily amused, but sports things captured his attention the most. With the quidditch season finally on its break, he was more than ready to fill his time with his wife, his baby, food, sex, and more sports. He was really keen on basketball, actually, because he was tall enough to ‘slam dunk.’

It was muggle, but it was awesome.

He kept his arms up so that Matthew could mimic his actions, and he clapped when the baby complied. It was really cool to watch his son grow and change and learn new things each day; Martin wasn’t sure when he’d become such a sap, but he was the worst in the locker rooms when it came to sharing baby stories. Matthew was just so much smarter than all these other babies, really, and it was Martin’s duty to let everyone know that his son had discovered how to undo his diaper. What kind of baby does that?! A genius one, obviously!

Martin dropped to the floor beside his wife, grinning at the display, but he wasn’t completely oblivious. She was red, and he most certainly hadn’t made a vulgar comment in the past three seconds. The back of his hand went to her forehead without any sort of question (he was The Husband, he was allowed to touch without asking) and frowned.

“You’re hot,” he said, catching Matthew with ease as he hurled himself into his chest. Martin let the boy attempt to scramble up and over his shoulder as he eyed Nick curiously, “These footy players getting you excited?”

“Hot? Tell me something I don’t know.”

She forced a cocky smirk that she didn’t feel at all, if only because she didn’t like that look in Martin’s eye as he watched her. Nick was careful to divert her own gaze to Matthew’s badly-executed attempt to clamber himself all the way up onto the couch cushions, not wanting to show that anything further was off. It was gone now, anyway. She was still warm, of course but---

---no, that was definitely the heating spells. It was nothing. The season had just ended, after all. She probably still hadn’t caught up on all the sleep she missed out on with the early morning and late night practices and games day after day.

Just then, Matthew caught a lucky break, and with a grunt, he aimed his foot in just the right spot on his father’s arm, finally giving him the right leverage to push himself, head over feet, onto the top of the couch behind them. It wasn’t particularly graceful, but he was the son of a beater, after all.

“You know, if you’re going to be staying at home with him from now on...” she began as the baby crawled over and took a fistful of her hair, “...you are going to have to teach him to stop climbing all over everything.”

“He’s training to be a rock climber,” Martin said, grabbing onto the back of the baby’s diaper to keep him from tearing out any more of his mother’s hair.

Martin had managed to keep the kid alive for more than a year, obviously with the help of his wife, but he was pretty sure his paternal instincts would kick in. Hell, he’s babysat his nephews without much incident, though Terry’s ten-minute disappearance in the frozen food section of the local grocery was strictly between the tot and his favorite uncle. Sometimes kids decided they wanted to eat ice cream straight out of un-purchased cartons, is all.

But with his best friend Drake retired and playing stay-at-home dad as well with a quidditch star for a wife, Martin was sure that he would have more than enough support when it came to situations he may not have faced before. At least, he was pretty sure Drake would help him out too.

“Maybe I’ll build him his own little rock wall,” Martin said, his grip on the diaper still tight, revealing just a bit of cute baby butt. His attention was mainly on Nick, however, and he leaned closer to get a better look at her, “You’re not only hot, but you’re a little green too. Are you sick?”

Illness was not taken lightly in this household. Martin got himself serious over few things: Nick, Matthew, quidditch, beer, and being sick. Specially, Nicole being sick; he had too many not-so-fond memories of her on the brink of death that he did not want to repeat.

“Let me take your temperature,” he said, his large hand going around Matthew as he stood, carrying the baby under his arm like a wiggling quaffle.

Sometimes--just sometimes--the thought of Martin being at home, alone, with their child all day worried at the back of Nicole’s mind. It wasn’ t that she didn’t think he was a good father... The opposite was true, of course. Martin had an amazing gift with children. She’d seen that from long before Matthew had come into their lives, back when Noah had taken in Terry. He was really the best uncle that little boy could have asked for.

But sometimes... Well, Martin was a fun dad, the kind of dad that became your best friend but who might occasionally need to be reminded that discipline and the teaching of manners was also necessary in raising a child. Nick somehow doubted that, short of retiring from quidditch and staying home herself, Matthew was ever going to learn the many things that she also wanted to teach him.

So she just had to accept it. Her son was going to grow up to be a couch-climbing, loud, drinking-milk-out-of-the-carton ball of energy. Just like his father.

Well, she thought, unable to help the upward quirk of her lips at the idea. Martin wasn’t the worst person in the world that he could emulate.

But---where was he going? Oh--

“Come back here, the commercials just came off!” she called after him, just having noticed that her husband was no longer sitting next to her. Nick jumped up from the floor to follow him across the room, quite determined to stop this nonsense before it got any further. She was fine, and there were few things that she hated more than people worrying about her or wanting to take care of her, so he needed to come sit back down and watch the game and just---

She had made it as far as the opening into the hallway before it hit her. The same dizziness, clouding over her vision and sending her brain tumbling in spirals, weakening her legs and forcing her down to her knees. A hand gripped tightly around the edge of the nearest object--an end table--and she forced herself to breathe. The only good thing was that he was not in the room still, that maybe she could pull herself together before he returned and really got started in on her.

Martin stuck Matthew in the kid-proof tub as he dug around for a thermometer. The sides of the tub were too slippery for the baby to get a good grip, so Matthew let out a whine, knowing he was trapped until further notice.

“I’m serious, Nick,” Martin called from the bathroom, “If you’re not sick, then this is just a slight, minor annoyance to your day and you can get back to your footy game---and you can be smug about me being wrong, which I know you love doing.--aha!”

He pulled out the thermometer, glad he’d found it and excited to use it. He’d always gotten a silly thrill when it read ‘GET YOURSELF TO A HOSPITAL, YOU NINNY!’ If only all magical items had the same sense of humor, the world would be a lot more interesting place. They’d banned talking mirrors in the locker room after one of the girls got a bit pissy about its comments...okay, maybe he’d chucked his beater’s bat at it, but he was sure that the girls didn’t like those faceless opinions, either.

“Come on, it’ll only take a second,” he said, leaving the bathroom. He spotted his wife and froze again, eying her carefully. “How do you look worse, I was gone for one minute!” Martin pushed forward to Nick, shaking his head. His astonishment was evident, and he forced himself not to stick the thermometer in her mouth. He had that much sense. “Here. Now, please.”

She had tried, she had really tried with everything she had to push herself up and make a good show of things before he came back and--this started. That look on his face that said he was about to force-feed her that stupid thermometer and was only holding back because he suspected she could probably still kick him in his bad knee, even like this.

Truth was, she probably couldn’t, but as long as he was thinking that, she had at least one thing going for her. Even if the rest of the world was still spinning around her, making it particularly difficult to confidently snatch the thermometer from his hand like she wanted to.

“I just got up too fast,” she muttered before shoving the stupid thing in her mouth reluctantly. But even as she said it, she knew that it wasn’t true. One time was a fluke, but two times getting dizzy like this in a short period was not normal. And as the thermometer began yelling at her not more than thirty seconds later, it was definitely not just the heating spells.

A full 38 degrees. She groaned.

Nick put the thermometer on the table and pinched the bridge of her nose with her thumb and forefinger, knowing now that there was no way that the evening was just going to end peacefully for her. It reminded her why she sometimes a part of her missed living alone, where she could just go lay in bed for a couple of days without anyone fretting or even knowing any the better. Of course, last time she’d done that, she’d gone to a championship game and played and then fallen off her broom and ended up in Mungo’s for a couple weeks---

---come to think of it, this felt strangely similar to what she had been feeling in the days leading up to that.

Not that she would say that aloud. It couldn’t be, anyway. That virus had been taken care of by the healers a long time ago. No one had gotten it since, as far as she knew. Of course. It couldn’t be that serious, then. So...

“Can I at least finish watching the game?”


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