The first thing I noticed, before I even counted his fingers, was his hair.
Most babies came into the world 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.
He blinked up at me with eyes too big for his face, and 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 way strangers would stop just to take a look at him.
The trouble started before we'd even left the hospital.
Nurses who'd 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. I watched people angle their bodies toward his crib, hovering their hands near him without asking, cooing over his face and his hair and his eyes.
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.
Aegeus, for his part, seemed largely unbothered by the attention— mostly because he seemed unbothered by most things, other than a few very particular exceptions.
He was a strange, wonderful, maddening child from the start. Placid for hours, content to stare into the middle distance with an expression of such deep concentration that Adam swore he was doing calculus in there. He stopped crying early and rarely started again— with one glaring exception.
I spent months trying to get him to say his first word.
"Say, mama."
"..."
"Maa-maa. Come on, say, mama."
"Mm hm," was all I ever got, 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 quietly, deliberately withholding it, entertaining himself at my expense. He would sit in his crib afterward, wheezing with silent laughter the moment my back was turned, like he'd 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 he let out a sudden, startled wail, sharp enough that Adam and I both went to check on him at once. He wasn't inconsolable, exactly, just thoroughly put out. I rocked him and talked him down the same way I always did, and after a while, whatever had startled him passed, and then he settled.
By the time he turned one, the staring had become a fixture of daily life, and I'd started to notice something else alongside it— he was growing fast.
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'd started to brace for it as a lifelong issue. It wasn't. It hadn't taken long at all for him to catch up and eventually surpass his peers
Nobody could point to the moment it happened. It just had.
The night of the cockroach, Adam and I were both exhausted, half-asleep before our heads hit the pillow, when a sound tore through the house that neither of us would ever forget— 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 the unmistakable sound of things being thrown, hard, again and again. I shoved the door and found my son on all fours in the middle of a wrecked room, crib overturned, toys scattered everywhere, hurling anything within reach at a cockroach that would not stop going for him.
He was crying. He was also glowing very 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, no thought involved at all, just 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 somehow still get him.
It did not. I took my slipper off my foot and ended that particular threat with a decisiveness that surprised even me.
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.
"What happened here?"
Aegeus finally opened his eyes, saw his fallen nemesis, and— I swear to you— looked almost sorry for it, before deciding, quite visibly, that it had it coming. Then he looked up at me like I'd hung the moon.
"How did you do that?" I asked him softly, still catching my breath, still feeling the ghost of that impossible half-second where my son had literally teleported.
"Magic~" he said.
"There's no such thing as magic, honey," Adam said automatically, patient, distracted— and then froze completely. "You talked?"
That, more than the accident, is what nearly undid him. He spent the next twenty minutes trying, and failing, to get another word out of his son, who had apparently decided one sentence was plenty of generosity for one evening.
Later, once the door was shut tight and Aegeus was tucked back into a hastily righted crib, Adam and I lay awake going over it.
After that, I'd 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 enormous concentration. Nothing happened, most nights. Some nights I noticed a toy would twitch, or roll an inch further than it should have, and he'd look immensely satisfied with himself regardless.
I never showed myself in the doorway. I'd just watch— half out of caution, half because 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. That felt like its own small, hard-won gift.
Then came Hermione.
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, serious moment, and pressed one finger very gently into her open palm.
By the time we flew 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. She spent most of the descent trying to climb the seatback in front of her and had to be redirected, firmly and repeatedly, toward the window instead.
Aegeus, seated beside us and thoroughly unimpressed with turbulence, 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, really, once she caught sight of the carrier. She took Hermione from me like she'd 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 but could never fully hide either.
It was my mother's other arm, eventually, that scooped Aegeus up against her hip, exclaiming over how big he'd 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 her blanket back up over her shoulder.
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TO BE CONTINUED
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