Niall
"Chloe? Would you come and get your breakfast?"
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"Chlo?"
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"Chloe. Breakfast."
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"One minute more and it's going in the bin."
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"Right. Fine."
Standing up from his spot at the table, Niall grabbed the plate of toast that had been sat on the table for half an hour and, true to his word, emptied the toast into the bin, dropping the plate into the sink with a satisfying thud. At any other point, he might have felt ridiculous for being so over-dramatic, but, given that this was how things with Chloe had been ever since he'd told her about the baby, he refused to feel guilty about anything other than chipping edge of a plate.
After three days of her being awkward, sulky and generally off with him, Niall had called it quits and had decided to stop tiptoeing around her. He was also point blank refusing to apologise for disturbing her life the way the news of the baby had, since this...the baby was something he and Liam wanted, and things were never going to go back to the way they had been before, and so he and Chloe were at a standoff.
It turned out that Niall actually did have a course of action as to how to respond to Chloe's less than positive reaction, all of his worrying aside, and that was to not put up with any of her bullshit. Not anymore, at least. The first day or so, he'd tried to understand that it was sort of a shock for her and that she might not have expected it, but three days of tolerating an admittedly impressive display of churlishness had pretty much exhausted his supply of understanding and patience.
Three days of a tantrum that had quickly lost any novelty had also cured Niall of any anxiety or panic as to what the hell he and Liam would do, and meant that he'd stopped feeling as his world was going to crumble in around him and was beginning to feel merely bored with his daughter's reaction. At least, that was what he was telling himself. He was also telling that to Liam, if only because he thought hearing it might make Liam feel slightly better. The first morning after he'd told Chloe, he'd woken to a phone call from Liam where Liam had suggested that he fly home, to hell with the rest of the tour, and whilst one part of Niall had been shamefully delighted to hear such an idea, the slightly more clear-headed part of him had won him over and pointed out how shortsighted and rash such an action might be.
Meaning that Liam was still half a world away and Niall was stuck at home, with an eight-year-old who was blithely ignoring him to the point where he'd thrown her admittedly cold breakfast away and was yelling at her, and shouting at Chloe was a rare enough occurrence that it unnerved him slightly. Not that it stopped him, because Chloe only emerged from her room when it got to the point where he was shouting and using her full name, and Niall didn't have it in him to ask nicely anymore.
As it was, Chloe finally emerged from her room an hour after he'd originally called for her and answered him only with a shrug, being more difficult than he could ever remember her being before, leading to Niall's decision to indulge her just a little.
Chloe seemed determined to act like this change was a bad thing, that their life before was better, whether it was only the most recent change — the baby, tiger engagement he hadn't actually told her about, told anyone about yet — that she objected to, or all changes since September nearly a year ago, and so Niall figured he'd let her pretend that things hadn't changed, and hat they were still living as they had been in Brixton. He'd given up their flat when they'd moved in with Liam for good so he couldn't take her all the way back to how things had used to be, but Jessica would probably oblige him and give Chloe a reminder of how things had used to be, letting the eight-year-old decided if the changes were really so bad.
That lead them to be stood on Jessica's doorway, in their old estate, with Niall dropping Chloe off they way he had done millions of time before so he could go and work a double shift, with Jessica perfectly willing to act like the past few years hadn't happened, especially when Niall explained why he needed her to act like things hadn't changed.
Okay, so Niall wasn't actually leaving her so he could go and work for sixteen hours just so that they could afford rent or TV or a rare takeaway pizza and was actually going to go home, take a bath and call Liam, but still. Semantics. His plan would either work, and Chloe would see just how drastically things had changed for the better and so would realise that this latest change, the baby, would be a good thing, or he'd at least get a few hours to himself without feeling like the world's shittiest parent.
And it was almost nice, having a few hours to himself. The bath turned into a long, drowsy haze that anyone else might have called a nap and only ended when the water turned cold. He got to tidy up a bit, beyond the normal rushed round he managed in the mornings, and he eventually found himself stood in the doorway to one of the guest rooms, the one used least, that had just a bed and chest of drawers in it, and the bed could easily be replaced by a crib.
It was then that Niall began to understand why Liam had been so caught up in the idea of buying furniture and getting the place ready for the baby, even though they had months in which to do these things, and it took him a moment to forget the impulse, closing the bedroom door and wandering away, suddenly at a loss as to what to do with himself.
He ended up tidying Chloe's room, careful to avoid the latest Lego monstrosity she was working on — he thought it might have been the result of mixing the bricks for a fairy castle with a prison-themed kit — but tackling everything else was fair game. All of the clothes left lying on the floor went in the wash, he was sure she hadn't worn most of them but they were all so wrinkled that washing them would be the easiest method of dealing with them, before he turned on the stacks of books, cartoons and sheets of drawing paper.
Chloe probably had left enough sheets of paper lying around to wallpaper the entire room, and most of them were covered in scribbles and the wobbly animals and trees Chloe specialised in, and Niall reasoned that it was probably safe to dispose of most of them, given that they looked as though they'd been trampled on for weeks and discarded.
The less tatty sheets were put on one side for Chloe to go through later, and he would have left things at that, though a few of them caught his eye. Chloe had been drawing Liam, or her own imagined version of him, pictures of him on tour and on stage (Niall was assuming and interpreting the pictures as best he could, given that the stage appeared to be a shaky black line with stick men surrounding it), along with a few attempts of drawing Loki that were just about recognisable, but it was one drawn in pencil rather than the big, blocky felt pens that outlined all her other attempts that Niall ended up taking from the pile.
It was more or less the same as her other drawings, a questionable drawing of Liam (the hair was what made Niall so sure that it was Liam), a blob of colour that was supposed to be Loki, and then two more additions that Niall took to be himself and Chloe's attempt at a self-portrait, though she looked more like a warrior queen and far more effort had clearly gone into it than the other shaky figures. All four of the figures took up the whole of the space on the page and Chloe had titled it 'My Family'.
There was a slight possibility that he was reading too much into a drawing, but it niggled at his mind and he ended up texting a photo of it to Liam. It was probably the middle of the night wherever Liam was, and Niall didn't expect to get an answer straight away. He didn't quite know what there was for them to say about the drawing, but it seemed to mean something. And if they weren't reading too much into it, it helped to explain Chloe's reaction a little better.
The drawing was still bothering him when he went to pick Chloe up from Jessica's, and he was torn between bringing it up or simply pretending not to know about it, but he was saved from having to decide when Jessica's front door opened and Chloe tackled him into a hug.
It was such a novelty to not be faced with a sulky, silent child that Niall let the hug drag on, running his fingers through her curls and rubbing circles into Chloe's back. When she finally pulled away, Niall tried his hardest not to seem too shocked, but ended up raising an eyebrow at Jessica anyway as he noticed the faint red tinge around Chloe's eyes and the slight tremble of her bottom lip as she looked up at him.
He didn't ask outright but once Chloe had been sent to collect her jacket and put her shoes on, Jessica confessed that she and Chloe had had words. "I hope I wasn't overstepping the line, or anything, but we just had a chat. I...I might have told her that some people don't have siblings, or don't have them anymore and that it's not a bad thing to have someone else to care about. I...I think she gets it a bit better now."
It would have been impossible for Niall not to have noticed the wistful quality in Jessica's voice and her frequent glances to the photos of herself and her sister, who Niall remembered Jessica telling him about, including mentioning all the months she'd spent in hospice care, not to reach her eighth birthday.
Niall ended giving Jessica a rare hug and was reminded for what was probably the millionth time that finding Jessica to be a childminder for Chloe had been possibly the best stroke of luck he'd ever had. He was slightly less grateful when Chloe came back with a different jacket to the one she'd brought with her but he decided to let that one go out of fear of disturbing whatever peace Jessica had managed to bring about.
This new harmony lasted for the remainder of the evening, all throughout dinner, when Chloe stuck around to actually help, and past her bath time, right up until bedtime. Then the weird, fragile peace dissolved into nothingness as Chloe decided to speak. "I'm sorry. Jessica said I had to be. I- You're happy, she says, and I shouldn't make you unhappy about this. So I'm sorry."
"Well, thank you, Chlo. And that's part of it, yes, but- You- You're going to be a big sister, Chloe. You- you shouldn't hate that idea. That's what Papa and I are...worried about." Niall sat uncertainly on the end of her bed, watching Chloe with a hesitant look on his face, mildly concerned by what Chloe had just said and wondering if he should probably have asked Jessica for slightly more details regarding the discussion she'd had with Chloe.
Chloe shrugged at that, though, and settled back amongst her pillows, pulling the covers up over her before she asked Niall to turn out the lights. As he was leaving, she called out, "I don't...hate the idea."
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And we're closer to this magical, fluffy, happy ever after that looms somewhere in the vague, distant future.
And this week, I feel like asking you guys what your opinion on Twilight is.
I rewatched the films recently and can't decide how I feel about the series, so feel free to argue your opinion.
Who liked Twilight?
Who didn't?
And who thought that Carlisle Cullen was a beautiful cinnamon roll, too good for this world, too pure?
And if you have no opinion about Twilight whatsoever, tell me your thoughts on the chapter.