Chapter Eighteen
January 1
st
, 2021
Most of the ladies had gone much harder at New Year's Eve than he had, and as such, he woke up relatively early at eight. He suspected a lot of them would wake up rather hungover and annoyed at themselves, considering several had claimed they weren't going to overdo it when it came to booze, and the majority had failed pretty heavily in that regard, with a few of them getting so rip roaringly drunk that they had threatened to scale the chandelier.
Christmas, just the week before, had been a relatively quiet affair, and presents were kept to small things, nobody putting together a list, with lots of books, CDs and vinyl changing hands as everyone was encouraged to introduce their partners to things they thought they might like. Presents were opened simultaneously and absolutely no one was expected to write thank you letters to anyone inside of the Team, although brief phone calls were encouraged to families.
Part of getting everyone's families familiar with a team was to focus on the Soon To Be Wives club first, with all the additional partners for later dates. Accordingly, Andy wasn't expected to remember
anybody
's name, but was doing his best to pick them up as he could, and he'd certainly found he got along with some of them better than others. Ash's brother Dermot had connected with Andy even beyond the Irishman's love of his books, and the two of them were often the ones who had to be corralled off the phone call towards the end, they got along so well.
But when it came to New Year's Eve, the women of Team Rook had been so glad to see the back of it that they threw the kind of rager meant shake the very top of the heavens, with the exception of Ash and Niko, who'd stayed dead sober, and Andy, who'd gone light, despite the
constant
prodding from various women around the house trying to get him to drink. (They'd also decided to let Asha and Hannah get drunk as well, but only since they were staying in the house.)
In the morning, when he'd woken up, he'd found everyone was still asleep and in bed, so he'd left a note saying he'd be down in his office if anyone needed him, so that nobody would panic when they woke up and found he wasn't in bed with them, like they had early in December.
Down in his office, the things he wanted to look at awaited him on his desk.
The day before, the last day of December, both Ash and Niko had been in to see the doctor, to get check-ups on the babies, and Andy had been more than a little taken aback by some of the news they'd gotten.
First, the doctors had revised the due dates for the two women. Niko's target date was May 5
th
, while Ash's was May 21
st
. It came as a surprise to everyone involved that Niko had gotten pregnant first, and that meant she was expected to be delivering first, even if it was just by a few weeks. Niko had been a little worried that Ash was going to take it as a slight, but instead Aisling had just laughed it off, saying she was fine with it, and it let her learn by watching Niko. Ash said it was fine if she wasn't first in everything.
The second surprise was the
number
of children the two women were to be having. While Niko had only the one, it turned out Aisling was carrying
twins
, which she immediately began to joke about how she was doing double the work and how Niko might've been first, but that she was still getting off light, compared to the labor Ash was going to have ahead of her. Niko said it was
fine
for her to stick with only one child making her world more complicated. It was too early to tell if they were fraternal or identical twins.
The last and final surprise was getting to know the genders - Niko was having a boy, while each of the children Ash was carrying was a girl. Ash had immediately scrapped all the names she and Andy had been talking about, and decided to go back to the drawing board now that she was having twins.
Niko had been absolutely adamant that since she was having a boy, he would be named Matthew, after Andy's late brother, something that made Andy smile from ear to ear even while his eyes watered up. Andy insisted they have some tilt towards her heritage, and she'd suggested they use the name of her reservation as the child's middle name, but neither was entirely certain that Matthew Rosebud Rook worked, so they'd revisit the middle name closer to the child's birth. But the fact that she was completely unwavering on insisting that their son would bear his late brother's name made him tear up a little each time he thought about it.
He'd put the two sonograms up on wall of his office, so he could see them whenever he wanted to look up and consider how quickly the future was running towards him. They'd told all the members of the house, obviously, and Andy had called Phil, which had resulted in a bit of information that had come as rather a surprise to him.
Boys, it seemed, were making up a smaller than normal percentage of reported pregnancies in those that had been vaccinated with the Quaranteam serum. The sample size wasn't enough to know anything conclusively thus far, but early reports had the male/female split in upcoming children to be something akin to 1:10. That wasn't normal, and that wasn't good for long term sustainability, but the science was what it was. It was yet another thing they would have to simply find a way to work with on the other side.
Another thing that was already starting to be visible about the fetuses being carried by women with Quaranteam serum running through their veins were that they were in
incredibly
good condition, free of health problems. It was almost like the Quaranteam serum was doing what it could to improve the health of anyone it encountered. All the pregnancies had, so far, been remarkably problem free, with chances of problematic or inherited weaknesses or deficiencies at apparently 0%. Many of the things that neonatal screenings were invented for had simply not shown up in any of the pregnancies that had happened in the post Quaranteam environment.
The future only knew what other generational surprises lay ahead for their children, but Andy and Phil agreed they'd do the best they could to take them one day at a time.
After spending a few minutes looking at the ultrasound images, still trying to wrap his head around how he would be a father of not one but
three
children before the end of summer, he started futzing around with the collection of ideas he had puttering around with in the background while starting up the next Druid Gunslinger novel. Most of them would likely just litter around on his hard drive as he pecked at them in between working on actual projects. They were usually under just concept headings like "A Colorado Collegiate Werewolf" and "Merlin's Mayhem" and "The Unlying Bracelet" and "Born of Dragons," but every so often he'd dust one off and see if he could pull anything interesting from it. He was considering whether or not a story he'd started a while ago called "Family Is Hell" was worth picking up again but had decided to put it back where it was for the time being.
If he was working on anything
other
than the next Druid Gunslinger, he suspected his agent and his publicist would try and string him up, especially with the movie going into production in just a few short months. They wanted to have yet another book ready to go, in case the sales bump from the movie was putting things through the roof. He'd tried reassuring them that even if the movie's filming went spectacularly, with the amount of effects that would be needed, the film itself couldn't possibly be out before Christmas of 2022, and more likely summer of 2023. But the folks at the top always wanted it now, now, now, and once they had it, the creative folks could wait, wait, wait.
He was still in the middle of a great debate about whether or not the Druid Gunslinger books should acknowledge the apocalypse that had happened because of DuoHalo, and still hadn't come down on either side of the fence yet, although he was starting to lean a lot more towards just having the six-to-twelve months of the pandemic happen off-stage in between books, and starting a Gunslinger book down the way with something like "Over half the world died in less than six months. But I don't wanna talk about that. I wanna talk about what the world looked like a year later." It would be a nice, simple, effective way to acknowledge that the world, both real and fictional, had changed, and still not linger in the pain and misery too long.
Sometimes putting your head down and hiding in fiction was easier than trying to make sense of the real world all around you. At least, it felt like that helped him keep a handle on things.
And then there was the upcoming wedding, in less than a month's time.
In that regard, he felt like he'd basically done everything that he could, which was mostly just to stay out of the way of everything and everyone. All his partners had their opinions on what things "had" to be in the wedding and where all the conflicts lay, so he was basically happy to let them hash all of that out without him. He would show up where they told him to, say what they told him to (and probably add some of his own words along the way), respect whatever traditions he was supposed to and invite whomever they thought was necessary.
Fiona, Moira and Aisling would have liked for there to be a Catholic priest present, and for the ceremony to contain at least most of a Catholic marriage ceremony, but Piper, Emily, Sarah and Niko had differing opinions, and so the compromise that had been reached was that it would be a non-denominational Christian wedding with a local priest from a Unitarian church handling the service, which would touch on elements of both Catholicism and Protestantism. Andy's one insistence was that it not be "a three-hour epic" and that they keep the ceremony under an hour, even with the unique challenges their wedding was going to present.
The biggest problem was going to be attendance. It wasn't the first time nor would it be the last time that he thanked Nathaniel Watkins for giving him so much money, because the invites alone would've broken anyone else. The decision had made that every person
involved
in the wedding could invite 50 people each, with Sarah and Emily being given exceptions and being allowed to invite twice that, for professional reasons. People were expected to bring only small numbers of their own Team to the wedding, so each person who was invited could bring up to 3 members of their Team with them. It didn't sound like a lot of people when you were talking about it, but if everyone invited had RSVP'd with 3 addons, it would've been 1,500 people.
One of the things they'd learned from the invites, though, was who was alive and who'd died, and that was chilling on its own. Many of the invites had bounced back as "recipient deceased." They had hired a service to send the invites and to process the replies, and once a week since they'd sent out the invites, the service would send back a list of who'd accepted, how many they were bringing and who had passed away.
