Chapter Text
Eight years ago, the first time Maya sat behind the Captain’s desk of Station 19, the endless paperwork that crossed her desk was the part of the job she had the least patience for. Her ego back then enjoyed being the youngest promoted into the position requiring her to deal with it, however the thrill was in commanding a scene and the authority that came with the rank.
Now, 18 months into her second captaincy with a son in kindergarten and a daughter in preschool – paperwork hadn’t gotten any more exciting than before but at least her door was closed and the last 90 minutes of her shift was ending in silence. B Squad was already in the building. Even if the klaxon sounded now, her team wouldn’t be the ones to respond.
Maya’s iPhone screen lit up with a text notification over the wallpaper of Liam and Andrea at the bottom of a slide having landed tangled together and laughing. The photo made her smirk every time she saw it. She could still hear how loudly her wife was laughing at the top of the slide even though she wasn’t in the photo.
CARINA: Are you close to home? Or should I feed the bambinos?
As much as Maya loved the evenings the four of them actually got to sit down for a meal together, she was also very familiar with how quickly things went downhill if dinner got too late. They’d tried moving meal times around whenever it looked like there was the potential for them all to eat at the dinner table like a “normal family”. It led to whiny kids without a routine and the realization that when one mom is a firefighter and the other is Chief of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Seattle’s most prominent hospital – “normal” was never going to work for them. Eventually they found something that did.
MAYA: I’m about to leave…but feed them and yourself!
Maya quickly double checked her report of the last call of the shift – a grocery store stockroom fire - attached it to an email to the Chief, hit send, and packed her laptop into the backpack on the floor behind her. She closed the blinds to her office, locked the door on the way out, and stopped at the desk where B Squad’s probie, Evan’s, was starting his shift.
“Hey! Did you guys get the puppy while you were off?!” Maya often stopped to talk to whoever was taking over the desk as she left for the day, and for the last month Evans had been telling her about a Husky puppy he and his fiancé were adopting from the humane society as soon as it was old enough to go home with them.
“We did! And you were right.” Evans laughed while pulling out his phone to show the Captain a photo. “When you bet we’d only get four hours of sleep or less…I don’t even think we got three. He might actually be needier than a human infant.”
“He’s super cute though. That’s how the human babies win you over too.” Maya joked while looking at the photo on his phone. “Have a good shift. Hopefully you’ll get some sleep here!”
The Captain was still shaking her head and smiling to herself about the dog as she stepped up into her black 2027 Ford F150. She’d asked Carina for a dog once, when the kids were toddlers. Maya thought it would complete the whole “married with kids, living in a house in the suburbs” vibe. Carina talked her out of it based solely on the inconsistency of their work hours. They weren’t putting two kids AND a dog in daycare. Just hearing about Evans’ first week with a dog, Maya had never been so happy to have been on the losing side in a discussion with her wife.
Maya stopped at the mailbox before pulling her truck into the garage next to Carina’s Porsche Cayenne. Entering the laundry room from the garage, Maya barely had her backpack hung up before a small body crashed into her side.
“Mommmmmy!” Andrea exclaimed while doing all she could to climb Maya before Maya finished taking off her SFD coat and hanging it next to the backpack. “Playing Agna-Tiles with Liam! Come look.”
As far ahead as Andrea’s vocabulary had always been she still skipped the beginning of words in the most adorable way that Maya knew she’d miss hearing once she grew out of it.
“Yes! I’ll get my food and watch. But first I want to put on some comfier clothes.” She tickled Andrea as she finished her sentence and Andrea laughed in her arms. Maya didn’t want to be in her uniform at home any longer than she needed to be.
“Ok me coming with.” Andrea stated very matter-of-factly.
Maya carried Andrea out of the laundry room meeting Carina with a happy and relieved smile in the kitchen as she rounded the corner to head upstairs to change. Even after having been married as long as they have, being around each other after long shifts still immediately relaxed both of them. It’s one of Maya’s favorite feelings.
“Hey babe.” Maya leaned toward Carina to kiss her while still holding Andrea with both arms. When Carina let the kiss linger longer than the peck Maya had originally intended Maya shifted Andrea onto her hip and bringing her right hand up to Carina’s jawline, pulling the kiss in deeper for a moment before ending it with a brief hug. Or, what was meant to be a brief hug.
“Me in the hug too!” Andrea informed her moms as she threw her body weight toward the hug, causing Carina to have to catch her upper body while Maya still held her legs.
“Careful, piccolina mia!" Carina warned lovingly as she adjusted Andrea back to Maya’s arms so the three of them could complete a tight hug between all three of them.
“We’re going upstairs to change then we’ll come hang with you and Liam while I eat. Oh, also I tossed the mail on the table, there was something on the top from the school but I didn’t open it.” Maya said as they finally separated the hug.
Maya ran up the stairs with her daughter giggling all the way up, changed quickly into a pair of Seahawks sweatpants and a Grey Sloan zip-up hooded sweatshirt, and then ran them just as quickly back down the stairs. She stopped in the kitchen for her plate of dinner while Andrea ran off to join Liam with the box of Magna-Tiles.
“How was your shift, Bambina? It seemed to get busy, yes?” Carina asked as she pulled her legs up onto the couch making room for Maya to join where she could still be facing her while Maya ate at the coffee table.
“A bunch of small stuff. Busy. But nothing crazy. Big grocery store stockroom fire though. Started in the receiving area.” Maya stopped to take a bite of her mashed potatoes. “Incorrectly used extension cords, leaking water, sparks, a lot of cardboard…you get it. Decent size fire but didn’t take long to get out. No injuries. Probie kept saying on the ride back how much the burning food smelled like dinner.”
“How’s he been fitting in with the team? Other than the helmet incident.” Carina leaned forward and grabbed the pile of mail she’d brought with her from the dining room. She started looking through it while glancing over at Maya for her response.
Maya shook her head with a mostly silent laugh. The probie, Isaac Watts, had left his helmet on the barn floor on his very first call of his first shift at 19. They’d gotten all the way to the scene before he realized it was missing. Vic had yelled at him so much while they set up the triage area together.
“He’s actually turned out to be a good firefighter. Hardworker. Has a lot to learn but is willing to learn it from the guys. Hearing the team yell ‘HELMET!’ as he climbs into the engine before every call has to be getting old for him though.”
That got a full laugh out of Carina which caught the attention of Liam – who until then had been fully enthralled in the motorcycle track he was building with his Magna-Tiles. He gave his signature shy-but-charming little smile and silently waved Maya over. Liam was quiet but observant. He was comfortable in the presence of the people he knew well, though it took effort to get him out of his shell.
“This is where my motorcycles race.” Liam told Maya in his soft voice.
Just as Liam had started to demonstrate his track to Maya, his sister loudly crashed a toy ambulance through the castle she’d built a few feet away from them, sending pieces flying across the carpet.
“At least she did it to her own tower this time. Earlier she wouldn’t stop running into my stuff.” Liam told Maya while rolling his eyes. “She got in trouble though. In Italian.” Maya smirked because she could hear exactly what Carina would have said in her head, but she didn’t say anything in response to his statement.
Liam drove his motorcycle over all the colorful tiles and over the jumps he’d made again and again while his mom watched. Maya took a turn of her own when he’d ask her to, and made sure she did a dramatic flip with the motorcycle off every jump she hit. She sat between the two kids interacting with their very different usages of the same creative toys and eating her dinner until her attention was brought back to her wife.
“Wow…” Carina said under her breath, trailing away at the end. She had a piece of mail open in her hand that Maya couldn’t read from across the living room. “I guess it has been five years.”
Maya couldn’t have guessed the emotion the reaction was expressing if she tried, which surprised her. So, she stood up and went back to the couch, sitting down next to her wife. “Five years…? Is everything ok?
Carina lowered her voice to a near whisper. The kids weren’t paying any attention, but both moms had learned the hard way that those little ears hear more than adults think they do during conversations. “It’s a letter about the remaining three embryos. Remember how much cheaper per year it was to just pay to keep them frozen for five years at once instead of one at a time? It’s been five years. Honestly, I hadn’t thought about it in forever. Is that awful?”
“No…It worked the first time, and suddenly we were very busy.” Maya said pointing at the two kids still playing on the floor. “What does it say our options are?”
“Continue to pay to keep them frozen, donate them so another couple can have children, or we had talked about donating them for research if we didn’t use them, remember? It’s not immediate though, looks like it’s a notice and there’s a few months to contact them.” Carina kept talking, as Maya appeared to be thinking through the options and hadn’t spoken yet. “We didn’t end up needing any more of them. We have our bella, Andrea. We don’t have to figure out which of the other two options we want to do tonight. We have time to discuss what we’re comfortable with.”
Carina set the folded paper back on the coffee table and continued to go through the rest of the mail. The last couple hours of the night were a bit of a blur to Maya. The kids played until it was time for bed and she and Carina had easy conversation while hanging out with them. But Maya’s mind was stuck on the letter about the embryos. She hadn’t forgotten about them. The five years went by a lot quicker than she thought they would, and she could admit that she didn’t realize how close their contract was to ending. But she hadn’t forgotten about them.
Maya didn’t fault Carina for not having thought of them in years. They’d adopted Liam, Carina had given birth to Andrea couple years older than she had intended to, and Maya knew there was never a chance of Carina carrying another baby. Maya thought maybe she might, though. She didn’t ever talk about it. She’d told Andy once, right before they found out Carina’s first IVF had been successful, that if Carina couldn’t get pregnant maybe she would try. It had become more than that for her over time, though. Experiencing Carina’s pregnancy was exciting, difficult, full of joy, full of stress, and magical in so many different ways. It was one of the most thrilling, yet scariest things she’d ever experienced…and she’s a career firefighter. Carina once said she wanted three kids, and Maya’s pull toward carrying that final piece of their family had grown suddenly after Andrea’s birth.
None of Maya’s circumstances had changed though. She was still a firefighter. At the time, she had still hoped to get her captaincy back. Now she was Captain, and her responsibilities had increased in the last year. The team was still short a member, a position she needed to fill. How would it look to be the newly pinned, female captain who benches herself on purpose a year into her captaincy? What would a late thirties pregnancy do to her body? Could she perform the same way after recovering? Her interest in being pregnant had changed – not a single one of her fears had. Also – Carina skipped over that first option to keep them frozen on the letter entirely. She said they’d discuss which of the other two they felt comfortable with.
Maya pulled the letter from the discarded mail before heading upstairs to bed. She folded it back up, put it in its envelope, and sighed as she snuck it into her back pack while taking her water bottle out. She’d known she’d eventually have to make a decision; she just wasn’t ready for that decision to have a deadline.