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“Babe.” A slender finger poked her right below her hip. “Rach.”
The brunette lifted her arm, scooting herself closer to her wife, and trapped her, laying her head on her chest. Her alarm hadn’t gone off yet, and the kids were still asleep, and Santana knew she slept in on the theatre’s dark days, and…
A hand pinched her side, and Rachel squirmed. Her brow furrowed as Santana pinched her again, whispering something.
“Mm?”
“Do you hear that?”
Rachel woke with a start, propping herself up on her hands to stare down at her wife. “Hear what?”
“Shh. Listen.”
There was the sound of metal on metal, somewhere near the front of the house, and Rachel stared at the wall, trying to place it. It kind of sounded like someone was scraping the wall with a fork, or a knife. There was another hit, louder this time, and then a thud, and Rachel only had half a second to process the fact that someone was in their house with their kids before she was climbing over Santana in an effort to get out of the bed.
She had her hand on the doorknob when Santana whispered her name, pulling her out of her thoughts.
“You can’t just go out there! You’ll get yourself killed,” Santana hushed, her worry betraying the anger she tried to instill in her voice.
Rachel was handed a baseball bat (Christ, did Santana have a shiv?) and rested her trembling hand on the doorknob, leaning back against her wife as she whispered out a half-baked plan.
“You go to the girls’ room, and then Mateo’s. I’ll make my way downstairs. Go. Now.”
Rachel wrenched the door open and tiptoed her way to the room directly across the hall. She made sure to open the door quickly and shut it behind her twice as fast, effectively drowning out Santana’s curses as she hit her knee on the corner of the “damn baby gate.”
The toddler beds were empty, blankets disheveled and pillows thrown on the floor. Toys had been discarded on the floor, and there were numerous articles of clothing in front of the adjoining bathroom, which had its child lock still intact, but no children. A quick look under the girls’ beds confirmed they weren’t under there either, and Rachel tried not to panic.
Maybe they’d gone to Mateo’s room? It wouldn’t be the first time they’d tried to get out of their bedrooms. But none of the triplets had ever succeeded, and it had always ended with Rachel finding the girls speaking to their brother through their bathroom doors, or Santana scooping them all into the same bed once she’d gotten tired of Marin crying for her brother.
(Rachel had told her they weren’t ready to be in separate rooms yet. Santana had insisted that two months away from three-years-old was old enough.)
The brunette quickly undid the child lock, sweeping the cabinets for a sign of any of her babies, and walked across the jack-and-jill bathroom to Mateo’s room. The boy’s room was pleasantly neat, save for a single stuffed bunny sitting in the center of his own disheveled sheets. But still no Mateo. Not under the bed, not in his closet, nowhere.
Rachel wiped at her burning eyes, pushing down the bubbling sense of straight fear, and leaned against the door, racking her brain for all of their hiding spots. She was missing one, she knew.
“Rachel!”
She jumped at the shout, and flung the door open, tripping over both of the baby gates in an effort to reach Santana. “What? What happened?”
Her wife stood at the entrance to the living room, sporting a huge grin. “Come here.”
Rachel hobbled over to the woman, pausing to rub at her shin, and didn’t bother to hide the waver in her voice as she spoke. “Where are they?”
“Look.” Santana pointed at the couch, and Rachel exhaled at the three tiny heads sitting on the couch.
She dragged her wife around the corner to stare at them, dropping the baseball bat as they each glanced at her, in perfect sync, before looking back at fucking Law and Order.
Marina, sat criss-cross in the center, tossed the remote she was holding to the side, and grabbed at Mateo’s. Her thumb stuck out a bit as she pressed a button, and Rachel huffed out a laugh as three faces lit up, and the familiar sound of Peppa Pig and Suzy Sheep filled the room.
“Hey,” Santana called out, and all three faces looked at her, giant brown eyes staring her down. There was no malice as she spoke, but Rachel still elbowed her for her language. “What the hell happened this morning?”
“‘e woke up!” Marin supplied, clapping her hands together.
Mateo leaned over the edge of the couch as he spoke, pulling up a box of graham crackers. “An’ we wanted Peppa. But Mama ‘as sleepin.’”
“How’d you get out of your rooms?” Rachel asked, moving to the couch to sit in between Marina and Mateo. The weight of him leaning into her calmed her hyperactive heart, and she grinned at Santana.
Marin shrugged as though it was simple, and Santana rolled her eyes, but picked the girl up anyway, tugging her onto her lap. “Ina and I played, and t’en we got Teo, and t’en we opened the gate, and we got the ‘motes, and… t’en we watched Peppa Pig!”
Santana poked the toddler in the middle, smiling as she laughed. “What do you have to say about all this, Rina?”
“Mommy, ‘at’s what happened. Teo got crackers.” Marina nodded as her brother offered her one, before leaning over so her head could fall into Rachel’s lap.
“So, basically, one of the world’s greatest mysteries,” Santana murmured, turning to Rachel. “We’ll never know.”
Rachel smiled softly, tilting her head. “I think it’s time to take the baby gates down.”
“No shit.”
It was silent for a minute, and Rachel’s brow furrowed as she tried to figure out how, exactly, a potato lived in the same environment as a bunch of animals. Santana seemed to come to the same question as she did, and sighed loudly.
“Can we go back to Law and Order?”
“No, Mommy,” Marin whined, burrowing further into Santana. “Peppa.”
“Don’t any of you want to be lawyers?” Rachel tried, her mouth turning up as the resounding shouts of no! reached her ears.
Santana groaned, turning her head to avoid the tiny hand trying to cover her mouth. “What was the point of having three of you if none of you guys were going to do what we wanted?”
“Maybe we should try for another,” Rachel murmured, hesitating as she looked in Santana’s direction. “One that would do your bidding this time.”
Santana stared at her like she was slightly crazy, and maybe she was, because she literally just finished freaking out over the fact that her triplets might’ve been kidnapped, when really, they were just smart enough to outsmart their mothers, and the Lopez family really didn’t need another insanely smart child for Rachel and Santana to chase after. But… she wouldn’t mind another baby to love on… Maybe a mini Santana, this time, to rival the three mini Rachel’s (two of them being literal carbon copies).
Santana seemed to be off in her own dreamland, but a couple well placed kicks from Marina brought her back, and she laughed a little. “We haven’t even gotten used to being outnumbered by these little freak shows.”
Rachel ran a hand over Mateo’s hair, nodding. “True.”
They sat in silence for a few more minutes, long enough for the kids to start their own unintelligible conversation about the zoo. Rachel had almost forgotten the subject (okay, half-forgotten) when a hand grasped her own.
“Ask me in a few years, okay?” Santana smiled, her eyes holding some sort of promise that Rachel acknowledged with a grin of her own.
Santana was right. They’d see in a few years.