Chương 874: Day Eight Hundred And Seventy-Two

Dear Diary, Funny what things here and now I remember and which ones I forget. Or really, which things I've made it a point to remember, and which ones made some kind of impression on me the first time around, and maybe the second, but which didn't really register as 'this will keep happening each and every year, barring some kind of tragedy'. Because while we've had a couple tragedies, and includes some deaths the other day that wound up not being Revived, we've kept all prior kaiju from getting to shore.

We had some flooding along the coast, but while that messed up some fishing villages and set the construction of some of our watch towers back a few weeks, those villages kind of expect at least one flood this time of year, and the watch towers are manned by military personnel. Not that they're not important, but the villages were prepared and know how to recover fast, and the military folks are in good shape, both in terms of physical fitness and supplies to keep themselves in one piece and get back to building.

But despite the flooding and snow and storms, all the harvests got in early this year. Which means today wound up being the harvest festival. Got home from talking stuff over with Conrad, making some decisions, including a few decisions that were more 'deciding to let other people decide', only to find the kit's table full of food. By 'full', I don't mean just lots of plates, either. A table big enough to act as a playpen for eight active toddlers had been filled from one side to the other with food.

I think we had a whole assed turkey. We definitely had three large fowl, but I'm honestly not sure how big chickens get, and I know geese are a thing people hunt and eat here and now. One of them could have just been a big assed duck, too Duck, at least the duck I've had here and now, is gamier than goose, which is itself somehow different to turkey. Again, I think it's gamier than the turkeys I remember.

I'd have asked, but honestly everybody was having so much of a good time just eating and talking and singing and laughing that I couldn't bring myself to. Like, what if they told me all three birds were, I dunno, some kind of winged sewer rat. Mutant seagulls or something. I figured I'd eat now, enjoy now, ask later. I did ask Marie if she'd made any of the banquet. Her only reply?

"Pie."

"Which one? All of them?" She just smirked at me and said, "Guess." I couldn't be upset. Even with Marie and I being Co-Located to the Tentacles and Black Dragon to stand watch while the ladies slept, the harvest feast and everything going on with it hit me too hard to be anything but... Content. Holy fuck and fucking hell, the moment I realized it the feeling vanished in a wave of anxiety about whatever I'd missed, but for an entire assed moment I'd been content.

Like, not post-coital bliss, not high, not drunk, not floating in post-massage paralysis, but actually content entirely by being surrounded by family at a celebration. What I could do was try each and every thing. Three bites, and not massive noms, either. Siobhan called me on it mid-feast, although she did so quietly.

"Why three bites, Tabitha?" I snuggled her, fed her a bite of the stuffing I'd been nomming, then did the same for Hailee.

"Because, Darling, I don't want to leave anybody else to go hungry, but I also don't want anybody to feel left out."

"Okay, but why three bites?" I laughed, remembering this discussion with Saffron. Specifically about Siobhan, now that I thought about it. After leaning over Hailee to kiss our sweet little Healer, I kissed my kit on the forehead, then explained.

"Gotta try everything at least three times before I can be sure if I like it. Once might be a fluke. Second time might be too. So the third time's for the tiebreaker." I couldn't help my smile stretching my face as her brow knit, and she asked, "but what if you like it on the first two bites?"

"Well then, the third bite's just gravy, isn't it?" Her frown didn't go away.

"But what if you don't like either of the first two bites?" I scrunched up my nose.

"Well, on top of the fact that I'm not gonna insult anybody here by not taking that third bite, it's still a rule, and if you don't follow the rules when you don't want to, why even have them?" At that point Saffron, who'd been circulating and thanking the women who'd done most of the cooking, lifted Siobhan and Hailee atop her, slipped under them, and settled Siobhan on her lap. Grinning up at me while her hands slipped around Siobhan's swelling belly, she asked, "So. Have you made up your mind yet?"

I smiled back and said, "pretty sure my Ice Pop nom count is way, way, way past four by now, isn't it?" While Siobhan showed her adorable blush, and showed no signs of passing out, Saffron said, "oh, but I believe I recall the item under evaluation was a sandwich."

"Uh..." An image flashed into my head, and by Siobhan's expression, into hers as well.

"Oh. Um. She's, uh..."

"Not up to anything extended. So you'd best be quick." I certainly will.

"What's Ice Pop?" Hailee's innocent question set Siobhan and I spluttering. Saffron just chuckled. Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more. I looked over at Marie.

"Is there any fruit syrup left over?" She raised an eyebrow. I sent her a quick mental picture of what I'd intended. She smiled and said, "Will Be." I gave Siobhan and Saffron each a quick kiss, then looked at Hailee and said, "tell you what. I'll show you." I hopped up to my office and, after struggling with the door for a minute to get it open without breaking it, slipped out and collected icicles from the edge of the roof.

With the constant flow of hot air coming up through the Bore, my little shack was practically a icicle making machine. Just to be sure, before I went any further I hammered the entire stack of icicles with a Cure Disease, then tossed aside any that were less than crystal clear. Some of the icicles were honestly more 'ice sheet' than icicle, but I fixed that with judicious Mana Blade application until I had a few dozen sticks as long as my arm.

When I hopped back to the kitchen, Marie had four different bowls of fruit syrup set up. Not sure how she'd done it, but each one had a basting brush in it. She picked those up, and together we went into the dining room.

"Okay, everybody. One each, and don't be greedy with the syrup!" I demonstrated, not like it was too necessary, by snapping two ice sticks in half, then painting three of the resulting half-sticks with cherry, then the final one with strawberry. I handed one cherry stick to Marie, who smirked and took over the station, what with her being the only other person I knew could snap one of the icicles cleanly.

Then I carried the other three back to Saffron and Siobhan, handing a cherry pop to Saffron and the strawberry one to Siobhan.

"Since the last strawberry was just a regular strawberry." She got the reference and blushed. At which point I realized I'd fucked up.

"Marie?" She turned.

"One for Hailee?" Marie chuckled and tossed me a deep purple-blue ice pop, which I handed over to Hailee. She took one lick and smiled.

"Grape!"

"You like it?"

"Yes!" After sucking on it, then crunching the end off, Hailee asked, "what flavor is yours?" Staring right at Siobhan, I said, "Mom, Marie, and I like cherry." I swear if Siobhan had still been underfed, she'd have checked out permanently right then. As it was she just blushed as bright red as our ice pops. If anybody thought I'd screwed up by not having some kind of way to hold our ice pops other than our hands, nobody complained.

Everybody got stupidly messy hands, but here and now nobody saw any problems with licking food off their hands. Things got even stickier when Devorah ran off, then returned a few minutes later with a jar of honey. As she sucked on her honey pop, she sashayed over to the three of us, an amber mason jar in hand. I glanced at it, then back at her.

"Is that what I think it is?" She licked her honey pop, sucked it into her mouth, and nodded.

"Fuck." She nodded again, and Saffron and I laughed.

"No, I mean I can't really commit to anything what with the kaiju still incoming." Surprisingly, she didn't look upset. She just shrugged, slowly slipped the honey pop out of her mouth, then said, "At this point it will only get better with time." I reached out, then paused.

"It doesn't seem fair to take that now then."

"No." She shook her head, then pressed the jar into my hand.

"It's absolutely not." Then she spun, chuckling, and sashayed away.

"Did she look like that with me?" Siobhan whispered.

"No." Before Siobhan could deflate, Saffron said, "she was so much more besotted with you."

"Hey!" I turned to see both of them grinning at me, while Hailee nommed the last bits of her grape pop.

"I... Guess I kinda was." I turned to Saffron.

"You sure you're not feeling some kinda way about that?"

"Even if I was." She grinned at me around Siobhan, who still sat in her lap, and with her hands still wrapped around Siobhan's belly said, "it's far too late for that, isn't it?" That shut me up for a while. All the way into the Bath, in fact. As we lay there soaking, I thought at her, you didn't, y'know, do that just because you were upset at me, did you? She chuckled aloud at that, snuggling Siobhan to her. Love, whose type is she again?

As that clue slapped its way into my head, she followed it with, I'd wanted to do that since the moment I first slipped inside her, Goof. Then she tickled Siobhan gently, getting her to tense and try not to squirm and disturb Hailee. I think some part of me planned to do it from the moment you interrupted my carefully laid defloration plans, Darling. I'm sorry. Siobhan looked genuinely guilty until Saffron nuzzled her neck.

Whyever would you be sorry for filling me with an overwhelming desire to bind you and I in the most intimate way possible, Darling? Really? In response Saffron just inundated Siobhan's neck with little kisses. If you'd have told me back before we got together that I'd be this serenely blissful seeing Saffron doing that with someone else, I'd probably have laughed nervously and worried about being replaced. Same the other way, really. Okay, not entirely serene.

But after we had the kids in bed, completely wiped out, Saffron slipped Siobhan and me off to the Bedroom and whispered, "first try." I am absolutely certain that I will rule in favor of Saffron Siobhan sandwich after three tries, but as I've said before, no sense having a rule and not enforcing it. On the other hand, my life wouldn't be my life if it didn't mess with me in ways that I had no response to.

Right in the middle of the 'any involuntary motion by any of us setting the other two off' stage of things, Siobhan, who laid atop me, entirely spent, with her arms along my thighs and her thighs on my shoulders, poked me in the tit. That made me giggle, which set off another wave of antic aftershocks. Then my brain kicked into gear.

"Wait. How did you..." Then she did it again, and I twitched, which set the other two off. For my part, I'd just realized what was happening, which interrupted my own response enough to carefully, gently, lift Siobhan away from me.

"Hey! I was enjoying that." I slipped free of Saffron impalement, which got me squawks of irritation from my tiny tyrant, which lasted right up until I grabbed her hand and pressed it against Siobhan's belly. Saffron's eyes went wide, then she sort of spluttered, "Siobhan! Why didn't you tell us?"

"Because the first one set Tabitha off, and that kind of overwhelmed anything I was about to say?" I snorted.

"And the second time?"

"I mean, I'd already done it once, so..." I couldn't help it, I fell off the bed laughing. Saffron said, "well, I suppose she's annoyed at being woken up?" Siobhan shrugged.

"It's not like either of you jostled my belly. You've both been extra careful with me, especially there." I remembered something just then, and it spilled out of my mouth before I could think about the consequences.

"Y'know, one of my friends got pregnant back in the day, and when she got close to her due date with no signs of contractions or dilation or anything, her OB/GYN told her to have sex. Something about it jump starting the whole decanting process." I realized I'd fucked up at least a little when Siobhan leapt on Saffron, grabbing her by the arms and staring at her desperately as she said, "I insist on sex every night from now until she arrives." Yeah. Fucked up. Oh, no, such a chore. Yeah, I know.

First world problems.