The joy of having a child not far past the age of one was the experimental stage of seeing what all they could eat. A baby’s face after eating a lemon is one of the cutest things Jason had ever seen. At least on his baby—he was quite particular about Aidan, though. Grinning as Aidan dropped the lemon unceremoniously onto the table top, Jason pushed it aside and put cut up spaghetti in front of his son. Messing up his hair a little, Jason laughed softly at the smile that Aidan gave.

Leaning back into his chair, stretching his arms up way high in the air, Jason wondered when Fiona would get back. She hadn't been home in a couple days. Yawning and covering his mouth, he shook his head to stay awake. While Aidan put his curious little fists into the spaghetti, picking up a handful, and stuffing it around his mouth to finally make it in, Jason mulled over the idea of taking another bite or having another beer. Both sounded good…

Twirling a forkful of pasta, he took a bite and followed it with a swig of beer—that was how he solved that problem. Watching Aidan out of the corner of his eye, Jason wiped his mouth off and drummed his fingers on the back of the chair that Aidan sat on, content in the high chair. The plus to having dinner with Aidan, whether at home or out and about, was that he was, like both parents, easy to please with food. No doubt, when he was older, a bit of alcohol would also weigh nicely.

They had gotten quite lucky with the little guy—he was well behaved for having Fiona as a mother. Standing up from the table, Jason checked once more on Aidan before heading to the fridge and pulling out another beer. The top was off by the time he sat back down, lounging out after a satisfied gulp of cold liquid. “Mmm… Mummy is going to be out of luck if she doesn’t hurry back, isn’t that right, Aidan? Daddy’s going to finish all the beer…”

Laughing and leaning forward at the curiously confused look his son gave him, Jason planted a quick kiss on the top of his head so that he was able to pull back and out of the way of the suddenly fast moving spaghetti hand. Luckily for Jason, he got out with only a chin hit before he was free of flying sauce and cut up noodles, watching as Aidan’s little hands patted himself reassuringly on the head near where Jason had put a kiss.

“You’re going to need a bath… Lucky for you, it’s your mum’s turn to do that.” Smirking knowingly, Jason took another bite of his pasta before glancing back towards the living room. A small frown came to his face but he shook his head. She'd be there eventually, right?

Damp.
From the tip of her toes right through thick woollen socks, jeans and a fleece shirt up to tip of her nose: everything was damp.
Even the key in her hand that she pushed so violently into the lock und turned was damp, from the inside as from the outside.
Has it been a day or two or maybe three since she’d last been home? How impossible to think through it all.
Work could be like a heavy wave, collapsing over you head when you didn’t even see it coming.
The exhaustion that filled herself had even taken over her hair, which was only hanging now, not floating around her shoulders in this cheerful beastliness only a deep forest should be able to possess.

The young Mrs. Marren pushed the muddy shoes off her feet and left them on the doorstep of her home. They wouldn’t dry in the last light of the sun, but she just couldn’t bring herself to care about that. The house was filled with the smell of spaghetti, as it was so often. The comfort of a regular every-day life. For some reason, spaghetti have become a vital part of it all. Maybe because it was so easy to do, maybe because Fiona was so incredibly thick when it came to cooking that even cooking pasta had been a chore -until she had met Jason and his patience. She took a deep breath before stripping off her fleece and throwing it over the banister of the stairs nearby, her eyes searching for the clock. The time.
Ten past seven.
Ten past six for her mother in Paris. But did she care about that, really? More than for the drying of her shoes? Maybe not. It came to her mind nonetheless.

For a moment she simply stood there. Feeling slightly out of it and uncomfortable beneath her skin. Then, out of the oddest silence, she turned slowly around, not knowing where to go.
“Is anyone home?” she asked plainly into the silence of the house, impossible to hear in the other rooms and then, after a moment of hesitation and slightly louder “I’m home,”
“finally.”

And home she was.
Not at the brink of dawn or in the middle of the night, with papers and files under her arm and her head stuffed with work and even more work. Just home, for a change.
The soft scent of baby powder and snot that had accompanied her had once again cleared the field for dusty books, mud, the dampness of the forest and the boredom of a museum’s archive. All in all, she felt it was more…-well, her.

She had been searching for that, a little. For herself. Because at some point she felt the snot and poo and spaghetti had tried to drown her and she struggled to break free.
On May 5th she would find a 29-year-old wife and mother starring at her out of the mirror. No wild whatever-age-she-was, beer-drinking, untamed woman in the depth of a random adventure that was somehow linked with historic events.
So she went to work and didn’t come back for a bit.

It wasn’t that Fiona was a particularly bad mother – or wife – who didn’t give a damn about her family and couldn’t stop her extreme dives into work days at a time. She was just a little overwhelmed and slightly complicated at times. Maybe scared even.
Handling herself had always been a problem, handling or dealing with someone else (like, say, a little boy called Aiden) was a completely different kind of shoes.
Doing what she always did – reading in books about problems you better talk about with someone like your mother or aunt who has been through the same- hadn’t helped either. Quite the opposite: she got frantic. Was it really that easy to mess a kid’s life up? Could she deal with that kind of responsibility?

Pushing it away for a bit seemed a good way to go. But today Fiona had found herself feeling something she hadn’t expected from herself. Midst of her work, she found some three-day old snot on her t-shirt – and she wanted some more. She wanted to go home.

“Heeeeelllooo-hoo! Boys, where are youuu?”

Jason hadn’t heard much from Fiona the past few days. That was often how she did things, though. It was frustrating, especially because she tried to act as if there was never a problem. So while he had told Aidan that it was his mum’s turn to give him a bath, Jason wasn’t going to hold his breath. The boy might be unnoticeable under days of filth and spaghetti sauce before he got a bath then. In the end, Jason had sent the dishes to the sink to rinse off and picked up the hyper young boy and held him at arms length to keep the waving spaghetti hands away.

Once they were in the bathroom, however, it was a losing battle for Jason. Aidan splashed and played while Jason sat down at the tub side and tried to wash him clean, getting as much of a bath as his son did. While Aidan played for the last few minutes in the tub with a couple toys, Jason sat on the edge of the tub and glanced around the room. He’d had time to straighten up even. With Fiona not home, Aidan sleeping through most of the night, and Jason on his usual schedule of working a few and then have a few off… he’d kept busy with the house.

Well… the house and bills and reading. He’d gotten some interesting reading material the last time he stopped at a local muggle bookstore, and was fascinated with some of the barbaric things that had been common practice in muggle healing over the centuries. That had caused a few loss of sleeping hours… In the end, that was his type of history. All the other things that Fiona enjoyed… Jason could brush it off. Healing Arts, however, were his thing.

Blinking back to his son, Jason started to clean up the toys, washing the little boy clean of suds. Grinning as he helped him stand up, Jason leaned forwards and picked up the blue towel before wrapping up Aidan and picking him up quickly, making him giggle as Jason tickled him and bundled him up under an arm. “Where’d Aidan go?” Turning around in a circle, grinning as the muffled giggles came out from under the blue towel, he swung the little boy up in the air. “There he is!”

Setting him on the counter near the sink, Jason stood in front to keep the wiggle worm from finagling his way off. It was a far way down for the growing but still short man. With his little toothbrush and a little paste on it, Jason leaned in front of his son and started to brush his teeth. It was a bit of a struggle, though.

“Heeeeelllooo-hoo!”

A muffled sound made it through the door and Jason paused in what had become an art the past few weeks they’d started brushing Aidan’s teeth. Frowning a little, somewhat surprised, he tried to recall if he’d gotten an owl from her. Maybe she’d forgotten something for the office… or had asked him to find something. She complained that his cleaning had in fact made more of a mess of her things. He called it organizing and alphabetizing…

“-Boys, where are youuu?”

Raising an eyebrow, he leaned over, still standing in front of Aidan, and pulled open the door. “We’re in here!” Glancing back to Aidan, who was now trying to get down, Jason put a hand on the boy’s chest. “Hey, hey, clean your mouth out first.” Helping him rinse, against Aidan’s wishes, Jason had no choice but to set the boy down. He ran out of the bathroom, and it was about then that Jason realized he’d forgotten his little blue towel.

Jogging after him, Jason let out a groan. Aidan had almost made it to the stairs when Jason caught up to him, scooping him up before wrapping the towel around him, finally taking the stairs down towards Fiona. Giving her a smile, that look of curiosity and questions in his eyes, it quickly fell as he looked her over. Slightly confused, he glanced out the window. Had she forgotten an umbrella, or a parka, or something? Nonetheless, he leaned over and kissed her lips. Aidan pushed on his dad’s arm, grunting as he tried to lean towards his mum, arms outstretched a bit. Glancing from Aidan to Fiona, Jason held him out. The boy did have a towel on… which looked like Fiona could use. Come to think of it, Jason could probably use one as well. “I just got him ready for bed… except for his pajamas.”

A small smile came over his lips, happy to see his wife, even if he hadn’t expected it. It always happened that way; she’d be gone for a while, but when she got back, it picked up where it had left off. “How have you been? There is spaghetti, still warm if you’d like. And I might’ve saved you a beer…”