Count on Me
Title: Count on Me
Author:shangrilada (Kira)
Word count: 4,973
Summary: There's a reason there was demon blood in the water. And it had nothing to do with Sam.
Author's Note: This one covers a big span of time. Usual Heartverse warnings apply.
The first time, she tells Cas first just because he's the first one she sees and she's so damn excited. It takes her way too long as a doctor (or as an at-all-intelligent person, honestly) to connect 'throwing up three days in a row' to 'fucking fiance like a bunny' and she grabs a pregnancy test from the pharmacy on her lunch break and figures she might as well pee in her own house (she's stalling taking it, she knows, she's looking at it in the passenger seat and thinking what-if-what-if-what-if and she's scared but she wants it so fucking much and this is so stupid!) and then she's in the bathroom staring at the plus sign and she hears a knock on the bathroom door and that gravely voice asking her if Sam “left his pants in there again, how the hell does he just lose his pants all the time anyway” and she throws open the door and jumps up and wraps herself around that damn angel and kisses his scratchy cheek over and over and he's asking if she's okay because sudden movements confuse him and she's laughing and crying and I'm pregnant! and she's half-afraid for a minute that he won't understand that like he doesn't understand swamps or the Jonas Brothers but then he's spinning her around and mumbling this mess of “I love you I love you I love you.”
She wakes up from a nap and realizes that that was real (not the pregnancy test, which is lying next to her like it is already a person), but telling Cas, because Cas has been gone for a couple weeks, disappearing suddenly after he and Sam ran high fevers.. He didn't say goodbye.
She doesn't know why the fuck she'd dream that he, of all people, was the first person she told. She doesn't know why she dreams that he loved her.
She waits to tell Dean until he's home from work, drops it in casually like it's nothing, because she knows, fucking knows, that even though they've never talked about this in anything but the vaguest terms, he will be as happy as she is. That he'll get filled with that fucking starry-eyed wonder that she should know her twisted-up torn-down husband too well to expect.
Except he does.
For the first few weeks it's like no one's ever been pregnant before. They're delirious, hilarious, throwing out stupid names and slinging their legs under each other and pretending they can feel it kicking. Sam walks around humming and Kylie totally know something's up, but they're waiting until after the first ultrasound to tell her, just in case something doesn't look right.
But they know it will. Christa tells people at work and is childishly hurt when all they do is congratulate her on their way to the coffee machine. Don't they know how amazing this is? She gets home and Dean rubs her feet and kisses her all over and treats her like a goddess of the damn earth.
“It's twins,” Sam says, “It's totally twins,” and she hits him and says are you saying I'm getting fat already but then she and Dean are holding hands in the ultrasound room and it's motherfucking twins (a boy and a girl, they'll find out in a few months, and they will cry like they have never heard of boys and girls until now) and she and Dean sigh and cuddle all the way to city hall and get the hell married.
They're born early-May 2nd, what a funny coincidence-and do a few weeks in the NICU. Christa doesn't do well. She throws up and watches Dean cry at the incubator and thinks about how she wished she'd never had these little things in boxes who make her husband miserable and glue her life to this hospital. She cuts her arms up and gets therapy, anti-depressants, shots of estrogen in the back of her thighs. It helps. They have three beautiful children. The postpartum depression does dry up, slowly, eventually, mostly, and Christa and Dean fall asleep with the twins between them and they are happy.
**
The second time, she tells Cas first because she was going to tell Dean and then Dean went to a bar.
The first order of business is tracking him down, and Cas helps her. He's across town in this sleazy as fuck place that smells like her father and there's her husband mid-throwing damn punches. When he sees her and sees her trying to stop at him, she yells at her to get out like he's someone who's supposed to protect her.
Christa tells herself she isn't afraid of some drunk asshole and she believes it all the way home and into her room, and then she has two six-month-olds crying in their cribs and a boozed-up growling six-foot-one man on her bed and the thing is that yeah. Yeah she is.
Sam, sniffling and scared (and Christa is supposed to be taking care of him, Dean is supposed to be taking care of him) and making flinching moves as soon as he comes in, trying to dab the cut on his brother's face while Dean shoves him off, takes the babies out so Dean and Christa can scream and sob and how could you do this to us and you expect too much from me and what do we do now and maybe you should just leave me, then, Christa and she goes and climbs up to the roof and wants a cigarette like she used to want her mom and then Cas is there, upset because Sam is upset, upset because Dean is upset.
Upset because she is upset.
He tucks her under her arm and smokes her cigarette for her, and she sobs into the shoulder of his coat and tells him.
He kisses her and tells her to tell Dean, and she does, shaking, and she has no idea, not one fucking idea, how he will react (she's on the Pill, they have six-month-old goddamn twins, they're shaking empty piggy-banks as it is, he's fucking drinking again) and he looks up at her and says, “Lock the door. We're getting this the fuck out of me.”
She gives him an IV and they spoon and hug each other and listen to Sam sing wheezy lullabies outside and talk about baby names.
Months later, Cas brings her to the ultrasound but she goes into the room alone, because Dean is serving two months because the asshole in the bar pressed charges and her world has stopped so a couple minutes in the room alone means nothing, because nothing could make this more surreal or more hideously, hideously goddamn real.
Except for telling your husband on that disgusting prison phone, looking at him and his jumpsuit through the thick glass, that you're pregnant with triplets.
You lie to the doctor and tell him you were taking fertility treatments on the side, and you try to block out Sam biting his nails and telling Cas this isn't right, this doesn't make sense, what if this means something and tells herself that for once, maybe once in a Winchester life, meaning something doesn't have to be bad.
She slips Dean folded post-it notes through the compartment on the prison window when she finds out the sexes. They open them and read them together. Boy. Girl. Boy.
They're born in that order, Dean long out of jail, in the same c-section room, holding their same hands. Two identicals with Zoe in-between. They chose three names with three letters each, and while Christa doesn't think they'll ever (which is a stupid phrase, because they are so entirely done now) have a name as pretty as Emilia Jess, Leo and Zoe and Ian make both her and her three-loving brother-in-law feel full in a way a stomach as big as hers couldn't even.
They're in the NICU just for being early, but they're very healthy for preemies. They co-sleep in their incubators and grow at nice rates. They find Ellie, a young, sweet, and rather hilariously strictly Cathrolic nanny, and they bring the babies home one by one just a few days apart. Aside from Zoe entirely failing her hearing tests, the babies are in great shape. Christa's strangely invigorated by her Deaf little baby and Dean eventually stops worrying his ass off about it and they go to ASL classes long before Zoe's chubby little fingers can form words (her first one is that wiggly S, Sam) they study up and have a big vocabulary and learn the strange grammar rules. Polyglots Sam and Cas have a great time. Kylie likes learning new things. The twins and Zoe's trips pick it up quickly. Ellie's signing isn't as good, but it gets the job done.
So largely it's easy, but Sam breaks down one night and tells them that Jude's decently psychic and Zoe is so heavily that she rings in him like a bell (eventually she learns to project whatever the fuck she wants into everyone, and sends them pictures of unicorns and beanstalks when she's supposed to be asleep, this fucking kid) and they can't ignore that asthmatic Jude and Deaf Zoe were the sick ones out of each group, and here they are reading thoughts and changing everyone's routines just like baby Sam did thirty-one years ago.
They can't ignore when Zoe, eight months old, stops getting casual hives and starts having terrifying, breathless reactions, can't try to live their way around it after she goes into the most paralyzing anaphylactic reaction any of them have ever seen that they eventually trace to Ellie frying an egg for Kylie three floors down. They take their Deaf, sensitive-skinned baby in for the allergy tests they were trying to stall and she tests positive for tree nuts, peanuts, eggs, milk, peanuts, tree nuts, beef, carrots, fish, shellfish, cats, dogs, pollen, soy, sesame, mushrooms, wheat, dust, bananas, tomatoes, chicken. She outscores Sam and nut-allergic Kylie and Emmy by a mile.
Sam holds her rubs her back, Dean ruins his cuticles with tearing, and Jude even kisses her cheek.
They can't ignore that her triplets were born two months early.
Like they'd (like something) just pushed them out on May 2nd.
That maybe Christa took swallows of demon blood in the water supply and maybe none of this has been a mistake.
And they love their babies so much.
**
The third time, she tells Cas first just for tradition, mostly, and telling Dean isn't much of a big deal. This is before Zoe's been reacting so hard, when everything should be mostly peaceful, when this is so, so too early for the next baby (babies, litter) to be born on May 2nd, because Christa has no intention of being pregnant for eleven months. The fact is, their triplets are a month old and this should be scientifically impossible but at this point it's just hilarious, and that's ridiculous but it also just is. She tells Dean and she's half expecting the word abortion to come for the first time, but instead he rolls his eyes and kisses her cheek and says “how the fuck are we gonna come up with another name?"
So telling Dean isn't particularly hard this time, and thankfully the first ultrasound shows a (oddly small) singleton, so that makes them think maybe this shit is over. The talk about baby names. They like Asher. It's Jewish, but y'know, so's Sam. And they like James for a middle name, after Cas's vessel. (Emilia's middle was for Jess, obviously, Jude's, Campbell, was Dean's mother's maiden name, while Simon, Leo's, was a few letters removed from Simmons, Christa's and her mother's-and her sister's. Zoe got Diana, after her daddy and the conveniently named goddess of the hunt, and Ian's Nathaniel is a same-rooted version of Christa's brother's name that doesn't start with the M her Michael-vesseled husband can't stand to use.)
So there's really only a couple problems with the circumstances. One is that Sam's in heart failure again, which fucking sucks, but only getting two years out of a transplant heart is on the short end but not enough to be truly surprising (or to mean anything, which they all shrug and decide is a relief). He's back on the transplant list but it's progressing faster than it was last time, which means a lot of time in bed and a lot of uncomfortable days where he shifts around books and papers (that don't mean anything) and mumbles about getting his affairs in order. Dean skulks around like he does when he's drinking, even though he's not.
Other circumstances involve bitches at Kylie's school bullying her to the point that they break her arm (don't worry, Christa's on it, they'll be changing schools, thanks), Christa disturbingly gaining a grand total of two pounds in the first six months of her pregnancy, and the small matter of Sam being grabbed by a slew of demons and dragged back to the goddamn cage on November 2nd.
He's gone for a month, during which Dean locks himself in his room and lets no one in but Kylie, Christa breaks down and slits her wrist open at her brother's house, and baby Asher, negative-three months old, is diagnosed with a kidney disease that kills 40% of children before they're two weeks old and 60% before they make it to ten years. She tells Cas the day she finds out and he fucking sets aside freeing Sam for two entire damn hours to hold her and rest his hand on her too small toofuckingsmall stomach and she takes a week and a half (longer than their baby might live) to tell her silent, ice-cold husband.
On February 14th, Sam's been home for two months and is a panicked, nightmared mess who consumes them all just with how much they fucking love him, and Asher is born. A few years later, Cas will donate him a kidney, and Asher lives for a long time.
**
The fourth time, she tells Cas while she's making allergy-free brownies in the hotel suite. They've all survived the earthquake, even Sam's tortured, now homeless trauma friend Ryan who is locked in one of the bedrooms but is taking, slowly, to some crying on (metaphorically, he does not touch) Christa's shoulder, and is also taking a kind of startling, adorable liking to Christa's eight-year-old. They all survive a round of chicken pox, even the half of them allergic to half the world's antibiotics, and despite a lot of things going well, Christa tells Cas that she truly, really believes Dean will want an abortion this time.
It's just too much. It's got to be, right?
She and Dean lie on the balcony of this ridiculously ridiculous suite (but where else where they all gonna stay, Matt can't even begin to fit them all anymore) and they do talk about abortion this time, but like it's careless and unimportant, “Hills Like White Elephants” bullshit. Maybe they know the whole time that they're not going to do it. They talk about baby names.
When she finds out that it's twins they're pretty unimpressed with the unshock of it all. They tell people at the grocery store that they've had freak IVF results and laugh at the Jon and Kate jokes like it's the first time they've heard them and do not tell them they're on condoms and the Pill and why don't they just get a vasectomy and tie her tubes like they keep half-heartedly suggesting (the same way they talked about abortion, because maybe they really don't want it to end, maybe they're crazy, maybe Christa's at her happiest when she's pregnant, maybe they really fucking love these goddamn kids and they're happier to their cores every day now than they have been in so long, these beautiful kids, this stunning goddamn marriage like an uncut diamond).
But when they find out it's two girls they do cry, they cry with their fucking foreheads to the floor, because they just got Emmy (Emmy Emmy Emmy oh God baby oh God) back two weeks ago and if anything like that ever happens to another one of their girls Christa will have to shoot the whole world this time and not just her father (Emmy baby why did you have to look just like your mother) and Dean cuddles all three of his daughters and his rape-survivor brother (boy) while Ryan wraps himself in blankets in their spare room and awkwardly flirts with their nanny, and he tells them that the world is bad but so many aren't, and he'll make sure they will always, always find them. Emmy listens. Their two-year-old.
Jess is pregnant at the same time, magically knocked-up by an an angel. They name the baby Aviva, Hebrew for spring, but half-angel pregnancies are apparently short and she's born nine pounds and long-winged at the end of summer. Cas works himself ragged but somehow manages to have Jess down here with them for the last couple weeks of her pregnancy, which means Sam gets the sunlight (not so far up in the sky for a little while) here for a handful of days of holding and laughing and apparently far superior, Sam tells Christa sleepily, earth-fucking. It also means Jess has to die again, bleeding out in Christa's hand while Christa (seriously, she's a psychiatrist) delivers the baby. Sam and Aviva shake their way right up to heaven and stay with Jess and Cas for a while and Dean reminds Christa of her brother the way he grouches around that his niece isn't here for him to spoil. He arranges Zoe's barbies around their kitchen table for a party for her and he and Jude (who has declared that he will absolutely marry Jess someday) and Ian make a tiny WELCOME HOME, AVIVA! sign when Dean predicts they'll be home. He's pretty much right, off by a day and a half, and he holds this beautiful blonde baby for a while before he gives Cas a hug and this fucking adorable shy kiss on the cheek and then wraps his little brother in a hug that's somehow bigger than Sam and Sam won't let go of him for a long time.
The twins are born on a lovely April day. They're humorously one dark and one light, perfectly healthy, home the day after they are born, and, Sam informs then gleefully (Sam is back to the point of being capable of goddamn glee, and anti-(really, how could she not be, how Sam not be) religious Christa thinks it has a lot to do with the regular synagogue visits he's taken to having, informs them that neither of the twins is psychic. Nadia grows a big mop of curly hair and is reading by the time she's two, so that's weird, and Bella is best friends with Aviva but gets anxious when she can't see Nadia and likes to leave spiders (damn it, Bella, but she's so cute Sam has a hard time minding on his good days) in the triplet's room. Leo adores her. They rebuild the house with a separate addition just for Cas and Sam. Zoe has hearing aids that she puts on and takes off as she pleases and is learning to play guitar and says her life goal is to be Grace Slick. Jude's on the swim team and Emmy does gymnastics. Kylie is written up in the newspaper for her ballet now (partly because she's black, true, but also because she's fucking fantastic) and Dean's the manager of his auto shop. Christa counsels Ryan and Dean now finds her victims of demon possession to work on as well.
Sam gets his new heart and, after scaring the shit out of them all with sepsis, does well.
**
The fifth time, she tells Cas because he's the one who finds her crying on the bathroom floor.
She doesn't know why she's crying, really. Maybe because this baby, unlike the other two, is set up to be born around May 2nd. Maybe because she is so embarrassed by the fucking persistence of this to go in and tell her doctor (can she deliver her own baby?). Maybe because Bella (much too young to play with spiders at this point in time) has colic and she hasn't slept in fifty-two hours or maybe because she can't stand to get fat again or maybe because Sam isn't doing well, because sometimes he just isn't, awful asthma attacks and more awful panic attacks. Maybe because her marriage isn't going well, because sometimes they just don't, and she and Dean are so fucking busy, too fucking swamped (probably Cas understands swamps now) to even talk much anymore. They have slow, gentle sex and kiss and cook dinner together, and usually they end all of it with fighting.
Cas loves Aviva down to Jimmy's bones but understands how she feels, a little, because Sam and Jess are already pushing for a second child and Cas took a painfully long time to agree to one.
“He won't hate you if you want to end it,” he says.
She knows that. And she knows that she's vehemently pro-choice.
For other people.
But she thinks about it to the point that she has to talk Dean out of it, a little.
It ends itself at four months. One minute she's standing in the kitchen making egg-free Zoe-bread French toast for her toddlers, the next she's staring down at a puddle of blood on the tile. She wakes up in the hospital and knows immediately, but this time Dean's the one hesitant to tell, this time Dean's the one crying first, this time he's the one sweeping her up and I love you so much and I miss her already and she nods and nods and maybe has never loved him more.
That night they go home and lie awake in bed and he plays with the cuts she can't stop making on her arm and he breaks his M-rule to finally, finally name one after Christa's sister. Mia Angela. They cry like they knew her. They cry like they've never fought.
He takes her hand as she's falling asleep and signs I love you fiercely, into her hand.
And she feels it and her empty stomach as she sleeps, without dreams, for nine hours. One for each o her little ones.
Except she sleeps for ten.
Dean is at work, a note for her and a lollipop (what the hell, you weird guy) set on her nightstand, and Christa goes downstairs and knocks on Sam's door and holds her tenth child against her chest and I am so glad you were born, Sam, and her angel pushes his thumbs into the soles of her feet.
**
The sixth time, she tells Dean first.
They'd decided they weren't going to have anymore. At least not for a long, long time. It's so soon after the miscarriage; it's actually on a return trip to Hawaii for a long Christmas, partly to help her, partly because it's right after Kylie's stomach surgery and even though she got Clara in the Nutcracker this year (she gets it the next year, too, even though she really wanted the Snow Queen, which she does get but not until she's in LA living with newlyweds Ryan and Ellie, which is another several stories) she needs time off from her entire life and a bucket load of time off. Sam cuddles Kylie and gives everyone winter hats for Christmas because it's seventy-five degrees and he thinks he's hilarious (and they will give him all the laughs and all the anything he wants because his heart failure is at the point where he can't shower alone because he needs someone to keep hands on him in case he faints from the hot water and from being off his oxygen and from fucking standing). In their own shower, she and Dean have the most violent sex he's capable of giving her and she soaks him up like he's the water and she has a funny feeling on his birthday and sneaks out to a drug store before anyone is awake.
.
They get out of the shower that morning and she gets into her favorite dress and says casually that she better enjoy it, because soon she won't fit into it.
She looks up and Dean has the same shocked, incredible smile that he hasn't had since they saw Emmy and Jude on the ultrasound.
Since before any of this.
Like they are still, deep within them, underneath the depression and the hell and the brother and the kidnapping and the demons and, yeah, the motherfucking rape, innocently, stupidly in love with each other.
Because they fucking are. Lately she's excited when he walks into rooms because she missed him while he was gone. Lately he's coming up behind her and wrapping his arms around her and humming in her ear when he's supposed to be folding laundry, you bastard, you gorgeous damn bastard.
Their marriage is lovely right now, because sometimes they just are.
Healthy, un-psychic Oscar (named by his suuuny day, sweeping the cloooouds away fucking sexual assault survivor big sister, middle name Trey after Sam, who is a fan of threes) is born in hilarious, miraculous June. And as nice as that is that it's not May, it's still too early, and it's back to the NICU. Christa doesn't do so well after the C-section and Dean darts between her hospital room and Oscar's incubator or a week and a half, and the kids visit her when she's a little better and Leo bitches that he only gets one soda from the machine and Sam needs his heart and is sick and curls up beside her and offers to give her therapy.
Oscar comes home after he's grown enough. He cries the amount of a normal baby and nurses like a normal baby. Kylie goes to her new school in September and is a lot happier, though Christa sees more and more the same sadness that lives in her orphaned husband, Zoe has reaction after reaction and gets a home ventilator that she peacefully tolerates because she can still sign like she always could and it comes on a cart so she can still chase her brothers around, which she now has the energy for. She even gets to go outside now that she won't have to breathe in the pollen that's sent her to the hospital more than once, this little fucking girl, psychic and overwhelmed and stuck in bed while sick people and grieving families bounce around her three-year-old head. Leo and Ian take care of her like this is all normal, because for them it is, and check the fit of her respirator in-between throwing shit at her. Jude makes the diving team and is an asshole about taking his medicine for reasons Sam is very frustrated to not understand, but he's doing okay. Emmy's seeing a psychiatrist that she fucking asks for when things are bad. Nadia's scaring her father and amusing her uncles by being a genius. Cas, Sam, and Jess have Noah, which is another story and comes with Sam breaking both his wrists and ankles. Aviva reaches her arms up high to “PUSH YOU DADDY” in his wheelchair, nudges him an inch and a half, and declares it a success. Cas and Dean prefer carrying him. Christa prefers the dark room and long therapy sessions like they used to have and like she still does, daily, with Ryan, who's thankfully offically nanny number two now. On Oscar's six month birthday, a fire in Dean's garage kills two people because welcome to their fucking lives, but they deal with it and build a new garage on their land and Dean lines up the kids to press their handprints into the cement.
Sam stays on the transplant list. Asher gets his kidney around all of this. Probably before Oscar's born. It's hard to keep track nowadays. Things used to happen in stops and starts, but now it all flows together, and she floats. There are good days and bad days. There are struggles that would kill most families. But it doesn't feel like it anymore. It feels like her sick babies cuddling with her for storytime. It feels like the soft rumbling of ventilators and nebulizers and slow shots of hydromorphone or Sam before he goes to sleep and fast pushes of epipen for Zoe more weeks than not. It sounds like four-year-olds laughing and tripping when they run and splashing in the pool and screaming NO ZOE THAT IS MY TRUCK and DON'T CRY EMMY I WILL RESCUE YOU and COME OUT COME OUT WHEREVER YOU ARE.
It feels like the new, comfy chair in Christa's office, and the diamond she still loves on her fingers. It looks like the pictures of the little wedding ceremony they had outside, and the big wedding party her little brother had, and it smells like her husband's sweat after hell nightmares and like the stink of her father's skin when she wakes up, gasping, from her own.
It's a stupid, impossible, and an easy and incredible life.
She probably would have chosen something simpler, but that doesn't matter now.
For better or for worse, she forgets that that there could possibly be another way to feel anything.
**
The seventh time, they just laugh.
Bring it.
Author:shangrilada (Kira)
Word count: 4,973
Summary: There's a reason there was demon blood in the water. And it had nothing to do with Sam.
Author's Note: This one covers a big span of time. Usual Heartverse warnings apply.
The first time, she tells Cas first just because he's the first one she sees and she's so damn excited. It takes her way too long as a doctor (or as an at-all-intelligent person, honestly) to connect 'throwing up three days in a row' to 'fucking fiance like a bunny' and she grabs a pregnancy test from the pharmacy on her lunch break and figures she might as well pee in her own house (she's stalling taking it, she knows, she's looking at it in the passenger seat and thinking what-if-what-if-what-if and she's scared but she wants it so fucking much and this is so stupid!) and then she's in the bathroom staring at the plus sign and she hears a knock on the bathroom door and that gravely voice asking her if Sam “left his pants in there again, how the hell does he just lose his pants all the time anyway” and she throws open the door and jumps up and wraps herself around that damn angel and kisses his scratchy cheek over and over and he's asking if she's okay because sudden movements confuse him and she's laughing and crying and I'm pregnant! and she's half-afraid for a minute that he won't understand that like he doesn't understand swamps or the Jonas Brothers but then he's spinning her around and mumbling this mess of “I love you I love you I love you.”
She wakes up from a nap and realizes that that was real (not the pregnancy test, which is lying next to her like it is already a person), but telling Cas, because Cas has been gone for a couple weeks, disappearing suddenly after he and Sam ran high fevers.. He didn't say goodbye.
She doesn't know why the fuck she'd dream that he, of all people, was the first person she told. She doesn't know why she dreams that he loved her.
She waits to tell Dean until he's home from work, drops it in casually like it's nothing, because she knows, fucking knows, that even though they've never talked about this in anything but the vaguest terms, he will be as happy as she is. That he'll get filled with that fucking starry-eyed wonder that she should know her twisted-up torn-down husband too well to expect.
Except he does.
For the first few weeks it's like no one's ever been pregnant before. They're delirious, hilarious, throwing out stupid names and slinging their legs under each other and pretending they can feel it kicking. Sam walks around humming and Kylie totally know something's up, but they're waiting until after the first ultrasound to tell her, just in case something doesn't look right.
But they know it will. Christa tells people at work and is childishly hurt when all they do is congratulate her on their way to the coffee machine. Don't they know how amazing this is? She gets home and Dean rubs her feet and kisses her all over and treats her like a goddess of the damn earth.
“It's twins,” Sam says, “It's totally twins,” and she hits him and says are you saying I'm getting fat already but then she and Dean are holding hands in the ultrasound room and it's motherfucking twins (a boy and a girl, they'll find out in a few months, and they will cry like they have never heard of boys and girls until now) and she and Dean sigh and cuddle all the way to city hall and get the hell married.
They're born early-May 2nd, what a funny coincidence-and do a few weeks in the NICU. Christa doesn't do well. She throws up and watches Dean cry at the incubator and thinks about how she wished she'd never had these little things in boxes who make her husband miserable and glue her life to this hospital. She cuts her arms up and gets therapy, anti-depressants, shots of estrogen in the back of her thighs. It helps. They have three beautiful children. The postpartum depression does dry up, slowly, eventually, mostly, and Christa and Dean fall asleep with the twins between them and they are happy.
**
The second time, she tells Cas first because she was going to tell Dean and then Dean went to a bar.
The first order of business is tracking him down, and Cas helps her. He's across town in this sleazy as fuck place that smells like her father and there's her husband mid-throwing damn punches. When he sees her and sees her trying to stop at him, she yells at her to get out like he's someone who's supposed to protect her.
Christa tells herself she isn't afraid of some drunk asshole and she believes it all the way home and into her room, and then she has two six-month-olds crying in their cribs and a boozed-up growling six-foot-one man on her bed and the thing is that yeah. Yeah she is.
Sam, sniffling and scared (and Christa is supposed to be taking care of him, Dean is supposed to be taking care of him) and making flinching moves as soon as he comes in, trying to dab the cut on his brother's face while Dean shoves him off, takes the babies out so Dean and Christa can scream and sob and how could you do this to us and you expect too much from me and what do we do now and maybe you should just leave me, then, Christa and she goes and climbs up to the roof and wants a cigarette like she used to want her mom and then Cas is there, upset because Sam is upset, upset because Dean is upset.
Upset because she is upset.
He tucks her under her arm and smokes her cigarette for her, and she sobs into the shoulder of his coat and tells him.
He kisses her and tells her to tell Dean, and she does, shaking, and she has no idea, not one fucking idea, how he will react (she's on the Pill, they have six-month-old goddamn twins, they're shaking empty piggy-banks as it is, he's fucking drinking again) and he looks up at her and says, “Lock the door. We're getting this the fuck out of me.”
She gives him an IV and they spoon and hug each other and listen to Sam sing wheezy lullabies outside and talk about baby names.
Months later, Cas brings her to the ultrasound but she goes into the room alone, because Dean is serving two months because the asshole in the bar pressed charges and her world has stopped so a couple minutes in the room alone means nothing, because nothing could make this more surreal or more hideously, hideously goddamn real.
Except for telling your husband on that disgusting prison phone, looking at him and his jumpsuit through the thick glass, that you're pregnant with triplets.
You lie to the doctor and tell him you were taking fertility treatments on the side, and you try to block out Sam biting his nails and telling Cas this isn't right, this doesn't make sense, what if this means something and tells herself that for once, maybe once in a Winchester life, meaning something doesn't have to be bad.
She slips Dean folded post-it notes through the compartment on the prison window when she finds out the sexes. They open them and read them together. Boy. Girl. Boy.
They're born in that order, Dean long out of jail, in the same c-section room, holding their same hands. Two identicals with Zoe in-between. They chose three names with three letters each, and while Christa doesn't think they'll ever (which is a stupid phrase, because they are so entirely done now) have a name as pretty as Emilia Jess, Leo and Zoe and Ian make both her and her three-loving brother-in-law feel full in a way a stomach as big as hers couldn't even.
They're in the NICU just for being early, but they're very healthy for preemies. They co-sleep in their incubators and grow at nice rates. They find Ellie, a young, sweet, and rather hilariously strictly Cathrolic nanny, and they bring the babies home one by one just a few days apart. Aside from Zoe entirely failing her hearing tests, the babies are in great shape. Christa's strangely invigorated by her Deaf little baby and Dean eventually stops worrying his ass off about it and they go to ASL classes long before Zoe's chubby little fingers can form words (her first one is that wiggly S, Sam) they study up and have a big vocabulary and learn the strange grammar rules. Polyglots Sam and Cas have a great time. Kylie likes learning new things. The twins and Zoe's trips pick it up quickly. Ellie's signing isn't as good, but it gets the job done.
So largely it's easy, but Sam breaks down one night and tells them that Jude's decently psychic and Zoe is so heavily that she rings in him like a bell (eventually she learns to project whatever the fuck she wants into everyone, and sends them pictures of unicorns and beanstalks when she's supposed to be asleep, this fucking kid) and they can't ignore that asthmatic Jude and Deaf Zoe were the sick ones out of each group, and here they are reading thoughts and changing everyone's routines just like baby Sam did thirty-one years ago.
They can't ignore when Zoe, eight months old, stops getting casual hives and starts having terrifying, breathless reactions, can't try to live their way around it after she goes into the most paralyzing anaphylactic reaction any of them have ever seen that they eventually trace to Ellie frying an egg for Kylie three floors down. They take their Deaf, sensitive-skinned baby in for the allergy tests they were trying to stall and she tests positive for tree nuts, peanuts, eggs, milk, peanuts, tree nuts, beef, carrots, fish, shellfish, cats, dogs, pollen, soy, sesame, mushrooms, wheat, dust, bananas, tomatoes, chicken. She outscores Sam and nut-allergic Kylie and Emmy by a mile.
Sam holds her rubs her back, Dean ruins his cuticles with tearing, and Jude even kisses her cheek.
They can't ignore that her triplets were born two months early.
Like they'd (like something) just pushed them out on May 2nd.
That maybe Christa took swallows of demon blood in the water supply and maybe none of this has been a mistake.
And they love their babies so much.
**
The third time, she tells Cas first just for tradition, mostly, and telling Dean isn't much of a big deal. This is before Zoe's been reacting so hard, when everything should be mostly peaceful, when this is so, so too early for the next baby (babies, litter) to be born on May 2nd, because Christa has no intention of being pregnant for eleven months. The fact is, their triplets are a month old and this should be scientifically impossible but at this point it's just hilarious, and that's ridiculous but it also just is. She tells Dean and she's half expecting the word abortion to come for the first time, but instead he rolls his eyes and kisses her cheek and says “how the fuck are we gonna come up with another name?"
So telling Dean isn't particularly hard this time, and thankfully the first ultrasound shows a (oddly small) singleton, so that makes them think maybe this shit is over. The talk about baby names. They like Asher. It's Jewish, but y'know, so's Sam. And they like James for a middle name, after Cas's vessel. (Emilia's middle was for Jess, obviously, Jude's, Campbell, was Dean's mother's maiden name, while Simon, Leo's, was a few letters removed from Simmons, Christa's and her mother's-and her sister's. Zoe got Diana, after her daddy and the conveniently named goddess of the hunt, and Ian's Nathaniel is a same-rooted version of Christa's brother's name that doesn't start with the M her Michael-vesseled husband can't stand to use.)
So there's really only a couple problems with the circumstances. One is that Sam's in heart failure again, which fucking sucks, but only getting two years out of a transplant heart is on the short end but not enough to be truly surprising (or to mean anything, which they all shrug and decide is a relief). He's back on the transplant list but it's progressing faster than it was last time, which means a lot of time in bed and a lot of uncomfortable days where he shifts around books and papers (that don't mean anything) and mumbles about getting his affairs in order. Dean skulks around like he does when he's drinking, even though he's not.
Other circumstances involve bitches at Kylie's school bullying her to the point that they break her arm (don't worry, Christa's on it, they'll be changing schools, thanks), Christa disturbingly gaining a grand total of two pounds in the first six months of her pregnancy, and the small matter of Sam being grabbed by a slew of demons and dragged back to the goddamn cage on November 2nd.
He's gone for a month, during which Dean locks himself in his room and lets no one in but Kylie, Christa breaks down and slits her wrist open at her brother's house, and baby Asher, negative-three months old, is diagnosed with a kidney disease that kills 40% of children before they're two weeks old and 60% before they make it to ten years. She tells Cas the day she finds out and he fucking sets aside freeing Sam for two entire damn hours to hold her and rest his hand on her too small toofuckingsmall stomach and she takes a week and a half (longer than their baby might live) to tell her silent, ice-cold husband.
On February 14th, Sam's been home for two months and is a panicked, nightmared mess who consumes them all just with how much they fucking love him, and Asher is born. A few years later, Cas will donate him a kidney, and Asher lives for a long time.
**
The fourth time, she tells Cas while she's making allergy-free brownies in the hotel suite. They've all survived the earthquake, even Sam's tortured, now homeless trauma friend Ryan who is locked in one of the bedrooms but is taking, slowly, to some crying on (metaphorically, he does not touch) Christa's shoulder, and is also taking a kind of startling, adorable liking to Christa's eight-year-old. They all survive a round of chicken pox, even the half of them allergic to half the world's antibiotics, and despite a lot of things going well, Christa tells Cas that she truly, really believes Dean will want an abortion this time.
It's just too much. It's got to be, right?
She and Dean lie on the balcony of this ridiculously ridiculous suite (but where else where they all gonna stay, Matt can't even begin to fit them all anymore) and they do talk about abortion this time, but like it's careless and unimportant, “Hills Like White Elephants” bullshit. Maybe they know the whole time that they're not going to do it. They talk about baby names.
When she finds out that it's twins they're pretty unimpressed with the unshock of it all. They tell people at the grocery store that they've had freak IVF results and laugh at the Jon and Kate jokes like it's the first time they've heard them and do not tell them they're on condoms and the Pill and why don't they just get a vasectomy and tie her tubes like they keep half-heartedly suggesting (the same way they talked about abortion, because maybe they really don't want it to end, maybe they're crazy, maybe Christa's at her happiest when she's pregnant, maybe they really fucking love these goddamn kids and they're happier to their cores every day now than they have been in so long, these beautiful kids, this stunning goddamn marriage like an uncut diamond).
But when they find out it's two girls they do cry, they cry with their fucking foreheads to the floor, because they just got Emmy (Emmy Emmy Emmy oh God baby oh God) back two weeks ago and if anything like that ever happens to another one of their girls Christa will have to shoot the whole world this time and not just her father (Emmy baby why did you have to look just like your mother) and Dean cuddles all three of his daughters and his rape-survivor brother (boy) while Ryan wraps himself in blankets in their spare room and awkwardly flirts with their nanny, and he tells them that the world is bad but so many aren't, and he'll make sure they will always, always find them. Emmy listens. Their two-year-old.
Jess is pregnant at the same time, magically knocked-up by an an angel. They name the baby Aviva, Hebrew for spring, but half-angel pregnancies are apparently short and she's born nine pounds and long-winged at the end of summer. Cas works himself ragged but somehow manages to have Jess down here with them for the last couple weeks of her pregnancy, which means Sam gets the sunlight (not so far up in the sky for a little while) here for a handful of days of holding and laughing and apparently far superior, Sam tells Christa sleepily, earth-fucking. It also means Jess has to die again, bleeding out in Christa's hand while Christa (seriously, she's a psychiatrist) delivers the baby. Sam and Aviva shake their way right up to heaven and stay with Jess and Cas for a while and Dean reminds Christa of her brother the way he grouches around that his niece isn't here for him to spoil. He arranges Zoe's barbies around their kitchen table for a party for her and he and Jude (who has declared that he will absolutely marry Jess someday) and Ian make a tiny WELCOME HOME, AVIVA! sign when Dean predicts they'll be home. He's pretty much right, off by a day and a half, and he holds this beautiful blonde baby for a while before he gives Cas a hug and this fucking adorable shy kiss on the cheek and then wraps his little brother in a hug that's somehow bigger than Sam and Sam won't let go of him for a long time.
The twins are born on a lovely April day. They're humorously one dark and one light, perfectly healthy, home the day after they are born, and, Sam informs then gleefully (Sam is back to the point of being capable of goddamn glee, and anti-(really, how could she not be, how Sam not be) religious Christa thinks it has a lot to do with the regular synagogue visits he's taken to having, informs them that neither of the twins is psychic. Nadia grows a big mop of curly hair and is reading by the time she's two, so that's weird, and Bella is best friends with Aviva but gets anxious when she can't see Nadia and likes to leave spiders (damn it, Bella, but she's so cute Sam has a hard time minding on his good days) in the triplet's room. Leo adores her. They rebuild the house with a separate addition just for Cas and Sam. Zoe has hearing aids that she puts on and takes off as she pleases and is learning to play guitar and says her life goal is to be Grace Slick. Jude's on the swim team and Emmy does gymnastics. Kylie is written up in the newspaper for her ballet now (partly because she's black, true, but also because she's fucking fantastic) and Dean's the manager of his auto shop. Christa counsels Ryan and Dean now finds her victims of demon possession to work on as well.
Sam gets his new heart and, after scaring the shit out of them all with sepsis, does well.
**
The fifth time, she tells Cas because he's the one who finds her crying on the bathroom floor.
She doesn't know why she's crying, really. Maybe because this baby, unlike the other two, is set up to be born around May 2nd. Maybe because she is so embarrassed by the fucking persistence of this to go in and tell her doctor (can she deliver her own baby?). Maybe because Bella (much too young to play with spiders at this point in time) has colic and she hasn't slept in fifty-two hours or maybe because she can't stand to get fat again or maybe because Sam isn't doing well, because sometimes he just isn't, awful asthma attacks and more awful panic attacks. Maybe because her marriage isn't going well, because sometimes they just don't, and she and Dean are so fucking busy, too fucking swamped (probably Cas understands swamps now) to even talk much anymore. They have slow, gentle sex and kiss and cook dinner together, and usually they end all of it with fighting.
Cas loves Aviva down to Jimmy's bones but understands how she feels, a little, because Sam and Jess are already pushing for a second child and Cas took a painfully long time to agree to one.
“He won't hate you if you want to end it,” he says.
She knows that. And she knows that she's vehemently pro-choice.
For other people.
But she thinks about it to the point that she has to talk Dean out of it, a little.
It ends itself at four months. One minute she's standing in the kitchen making egg-free Zoe-bread French toast for her toddlers, the next she's staring down at a puddle of blood on the tile. She wakes up in the hospital and knows immediately, but this time Dean's the one hesitant to tell, this time Dean's the one crying first, this time he's the one sweeping her up and I love you so much and I miss her already and she nods and nods and maybe has never loved him more.
That night they go home and lie awake in bed and he plays with the cuts she can't stop making on her arm and he breaks his M-rule to finally, finally name one after Christa's sister. Mia Angela. They cry like they knew her. They cry like they've never fought.
He takes her hand as she's falling asleep and signs I love you fiercely, into her hand.
And she feels it and her empty stomach as she sleeps, without dreams, for nine hours. One for each o her little ones.
Except she sleeps for ten.
Dean is at work, a note for her and a lollipop (what the hell, you weird guy) set on her nightstand, and Christa goes downstairs and knocks on Sam's door and holds her tenth child against her chest and I am so glad you were born, Sam, and her angel pushes his thumbs into the soles of her feet.
**
The sixth time, she tells Dean first.
They'd decided they weren't going to have anymore. At least not for a long, long time. It's so soon after the miscarriage; it's actually on a return trip to Hawaii for a long Christmas, partly to help her, partly because it's right after Kylie's stomach surgery and even though she got Clara in the Nutcracker this year (she gets it the next year, too, even though she really wanted the Snow Queen, which she does get but not until she's in LA living with newlyweds Ryan and Ellie, which is another several stories) she needs time off from her entire life and a bucket load of time off. Sam cuddles Kylie and gives everyone winter hats for Christmas because it's seventy-five degrees and he thinks he's hilarious (and they will give him all the laughs and all the anything he wants because his heart failure is at the point where he can't shower alone because he needs someone to keep hands on him in case he faints from the hot water and from being off his oxygen and from fucking standing). In their own shower, she and Dean have the most violent sex he's capable of giving her and she soaks him up like he's the water and she has a funny feeling on his birthday and sneaks out to a drug store before anyone is awake.
.
They get out of the shower that morning and she gets into her favorite dress and says casually that she better enjoy it, because soon she won't fit into it.
She looks up and Dean has the same shocked, incredible smile that he hasn't had since they saw Emmy and Jude on the ultrasound.
Since before any of this.
Like they are still, deep within them, underneath the depression and the hell and the brother and the kidnapping and the demons and, yeah, the motherfucking rape, innocently, stupidly in love with each other.
Because they fucking are. Lately she's excited when he walks into rooms because she missed him while he was gone. Lately he's coming up behind her and wrapping his arms around her and humming in her ear when he's supposed to be folding laundry, you bastard, you gorgeous damn bastard.
Their marriage is lovely right now, because sometimes they just are.
Healthy, un-psychic Oscar (named by his suuuny day, sweeping the cloooouds away fucking sexual assault survivor big sister, middle name Trey after Sam, who is a fan of threes) is born in hilarious, miraculous June. And as nice as that is that it's not May, it's still too early, and it's back to the NICU. Christa doesn't do so well after the C-section and Dean darts between her hospital room and Oscar's incubator or a week and a half, and the kids visit her when she's a little better and Leo bitches that he only gets one soda from the machine and Sam needs his heart and is sick and curls up beside her and offers to give her therapy.
Oscar comes home after he's grown enough. He cries the amount of a normal baby and nurses like a normal baby. Kylie goes to her new school in September and is a lot happier, though Christa sees more and more the same sadness that lives in her orphaned husband, Zoe has reaction after reaction and gets a home ventilator that she peacefully tolerates because she can still sign like she always could and it comes on a cart so she can still chase her brothers around, which she now has the energy for. She even gets to go outside now that she won't have to breathe in the pollen that's sent her to the hospital more than once, this little fucking girl, psychic and overwhelmed and stuck in bed while sick people and grieving families bounce around her three-year-old head. Leo and Ian take care of her like this is all normal, because for them it is, and check the fit of her respirator in-between throwing shit at her. Jude makes the diving team and is an asshole about taking his medicine for reasons Sam is very frustrated to not understand, but he's doing okay. Emmy's seeing a psychiatrist that she fucking asks for when things are bad. Nadia's scaring her father and amusing her uncles by being a genius. Cas, Sam, and Jess have Noah, which is another story and comes with Sam breaking both his wrists and ankles. Aviva reaches her arms up high to “PUSH YOU DADDY” in his wheelchair, nudges him an inch and a half, and declares it a success. Cas and Dean prefer carrying him. Christa prefers the dark room and long therapy sessions like they used to have and like she still does, daily, with Ryan, who's thankfully offically nanny number two now. On Oscar's six month birthday, a fire in Dean's garage kills two people because welcome to their fucking lives, but they deal with it and build a new garage on their land and Dean lines up the kids to press their handprints into the cement.
Sam stays on the transplant list. Asher gets his kidney around all of this. Probably before Oscar's born. It's hard to keep track nowadays. Things used to happen in stops and starts, but now it all flows together, and she floats. There are good days and bad days. There are struggles that would kill most families. But it doesn't feel like it anymore. It feels like her sick babies cuddling with her for storytime. It feels like the soft rumbling of ventilators and nebulizers and slow shots of hydromorphone or Sam before he goes to sleep and fast pushes of epipen for Zoe more weeks than not. It sounds like four-year-olds laughing and tripping when they run and splashing in the pool and screaming NO ZOE THAT IS MY TRUCK and DON'T CRY EMMY I WILL RESCUE YOU and COME OUT COME OUT WHEREVER YOU ARE.
It feels like the new, comfy chair in Christa's office, and the diamond she still loves on her fingers. It looks like the pictures of the little wedding ceremony they had outside, and the big wedding party her little brother had, and it smells like her husband's sweat after hell nightmares and like the stink of her father's skin when she wakes up, gasping, from her own.
It's a stupid, impossible, and an easy and incredible life.
She probably would have chosen something simpler, but that doesn't matter now.
For better or for worse, she forgets that that there could possibly be another way to feel anything.
**
The seventh time, they just laugh.
Bring it.