The first thing I noticed, before I even counted his fingers, was his hair.
Most babies came into the world as bald as little eggs, or with a faint fuzz you had to tilt your head to see. Not Aegeus. He had a full head of it, dark and soft, sticking up in every direction like he'd been electrified on his way out.
The nurse laughed when she wrapped him and said she'd never seen anything like it in her twenty years on the ward.
When he blinked up at me with eyes too big for his face, I felt something in my chest crack open and rearrange itself permanently around him.
He was, without question or bias, the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I know every mother says that. I didn't care. It was true, and it only got truer as he grew— that small, serious face, those impossibly long lashes.
The attention started before we'd even left the hospital.
Nurses who had seen a thousand newborns had stopped mid-shift to coo over him. Strangers in the hallway had asked to peek into the bassinet like he was something on display at a fair.
The children were somehow worse than the adults. Little ones have no filter, no sense of asking first— they'd reach straight for his cheeks, his hair, his fingers, and I'd find myself moving between them and the crib to shield him more often than not. Adam laughed at me for it. Called me a mama bear standing guard. He was not wrong.
He was a strange, wonderful, maddening child from the start. Placid for hours, content to stare into the distance with an expression of such deep concentration that Adam swore he was doing calculus in there.
"Say, mama."
"..."
"Maa-maa. Come on, say, mama."
I spent months like that, trying to get his first word out of him.
"Mm hm," was all I ever got out of him, in that particular tone that I swore, even then, held a note of amusement at my expense.
Adam thought he was just goofing off. I thought— and I still think— that our son was deliberately playing hard to get.
He would sit in his crib afterward, wheezing with silent laughter the moment my back was turned, like he had gotten away with something mischievous.
The only time the calm cracked entirely was the day of the ceiling.
He was forty-two days old. When they heard him let out that sudden, startled wail.
When we arrived to check on him, he didn't look distressed, just thoroughly put out. I rocked him back and forth and talked to him softly like I always did, and after a while, he would calm down.
In time, that phase faded away, though it certainly wasn't the end of his peculiarities.
Looking at the outfit that fit him a month ago and didn't anymore. The doctors had used words like "small for his age" so often in his first months that I had started to brace myself for it as a permanent issue. It wasn't. It hadn't taken long at all for him to catch up and eventually surpass his peers
The night of the cockroach, Adam and I were both exhausted, half-asleep before our heads hit the pillow, when for the second time sound tore through the house— a scream so raw and awful that for one terrible second I genuinely thought something was being slaughtered in our home.
I reached his room first. I could hear buzzing before I even got the door open— buzzing, and followed by the sound of things being thrown, hard, again and again.
I shoved the door only to find my son on all fours in the middle of a wrecked room, crib overturned, toys scattered everywhere, and a cockroach that was hot on his heels.
He was also glowing faintly— though I didn't process that detail until later, because at that exact moment the cockroach cornered him, and my son looked up, met my eyes across the room in pure desperation— and vanished.
One heartbeat he was on the floor. The next, he was falling through the air directly in front of me.
"Aah—!"
I caught him on pure instinct, my arms moving faster than my brain could keep up with. He slammed into my chest and clung to my shirt like his life depended on it, eyes screwed shut, waiting— I think— for the cockroach to eventually get him.
It did not.
I took my slipper off my foot and ended that particular threat with one swift hit.
Aegeus kept his eyes shut through the whole thing. I had my fun poking his cheeks for a while. He was, God help me, adorable, even in the middle of the worst fright of my life.
Adam arrived a moment later, took one look at the overturned crib, the toy carnage, and the flattened corpse on the floor, and went still.
"So," he said finally. "What the hell happened here?"
When Aegeus finally cracked his eyes open and spotted the flattened bug, I swear to you— he almost looked sorry for it. Then he looked up at me like I had literally hung the moon.
"How did you do that?" I asked him softly, still catching my breath, still feeling the ghost of that half-second where my son had literally teleported.
"Magic~" he chirped.
"There's no such thing as magic, honey," Adam said automatically, patiently— then he froze. "Did you just talk?!"
That, more than the accident, is what nearly undid him. Adam spent the next twenty minutes trying, and failing, to coax another word out of our son, who had apparently decided that one word was generous enough for one evening.
After that, I would pass his room in the evenings and find him standing very seriously in the middle of his crib, fists clenched, face scrunched, trying something, with strong concentration.
Nothing happened, most nights. Some nights I noticed a toy would twitch, or roll an inch, and he would look immensely satisfied with himself regardless.
I never showed myself in the doorway. I would just watch— I couldn't bring myself to interrupt something that clearly mattered to him. He once caught me and got startled, dropping whatever he'd been levitating an inch off the ground.
I just smiled and told him he didn't have to stop. Slowly, he got used to me watching him. For me, that felt like its own small, hard-won gift.
Hermione arrived three years after him.
He waited outside the delivery room without complaint, and when Adam finally came to get him, red-eyed and overjoyed, my son didn't hesitate for a second.
He climbed the little step stool beside my bed, looked at his sister's face for a long moment, then he pressed one finger very gently into her open palm.
Fast forward to our flight to Chicago, Hermione was well past the sleeping-bundle stage— a solid, opinionated presence on my lap, narrating her own version of the flight in a string of babbling that occasionally resolved into actual words.
Aegeus, seated beside us, kept up a quieter narration of his own, pointing out landmarks to her whether or not she was looking, and occasionally reaching over to catch her hand before it found something it shouldn't.
My parents were waiting just past the gate, my mother already crying before we were close enough to hug— crying twice as hard, once she caught sight of the carrier.
She took Hermione from me like she had been waiting years for the chance, which she in fact had, murmuring over her tiny fists and her brown, wispy hair, while my father hung back with that restrained joy he never quite learned to show on his face.
It was my mother's other arm, eventually, that scooped Aegeus up against her hip, exclaiming over how big he had gotten, how much hair he still had— some things, apparently, never stopped being remarkable— and he tolerated it for exactly five seconds before wriggling down to stand beside her instead, watching his sister with interest.
The drive down was long, the flat gray of Chicago giving way slowly to green as we crossed into Indiana and then Kentucky.
My mother twisted around in her seat to keep both grandchildren entertained— Hermione babbling back at her with great enthusiasm and very little grammar.
When Hermione finally wore herself out somewhere past the state line, head lolling against her car seat straps, Aegeus was the one who noticed first, reaching over without a word to tuck a blanket over her.
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TO BE CONTINUED
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