The Joker is awfully domestic, in his way. He makes pretty clothes. Nathan's perfectly happy to be a clothes horse for his sartorially-inclined mate. Some of the clothes are distinctly feminine, and Nathan does not wear those, although the Joker could probably talk him into a kilt, even if that's not a Manx thing but only their neighbors.
And the Joker doesn't complain at all when his clothes are regularly ruined in the course of their sex life. If he likes something enough, he'll repair it by hand or by magic; if not, he'll shrug and throw it out.
It's after one such repair effort, a short white dress torn in half last night and now stitched back together with bright red thread, that the Joker holds the garment in his lap and strokes it contemplatively for a moment, and then—
"Huh. You know, I thought I was straight - albeit a pretty low-key kind of straight that wasn't getting much exercise since turning, but, you remember, the erstwhile wife and kids - till I met you, and then I figured I wasn't, and now I'm not sure what little box to check on the census form."
"Twins with matching scars," says Nathan, raising an eyebrow, "probably a little less likely to the neighbors' way of thinking than me having a weird scar fetish and having picked up two unrelated persons at a weird scar support group of some kind."
He picks her up and carries her to bed for further snuggling. "Well, you met the princess, you saw Henry. Half-vampires wind up with very rigid sleep schedules. Usually they crash sometime in the evening, but some of them are nocturnal or sleep mornings or something instead. They grow fast. About ten times as fast as a human till they're six months old and look five, and then it slows down till they stop growing when they're seven and look somewhere between eighteen and twenty. They don't age after that."
Nathan shrugs. "Vampires have no choice but to not-sleep all the time, humans have no choice but to do some sleeping but can do it whenever, that's how those traits happen to combine. Half-vamps are about halfway between humans and vampires in most ways, including speed and strength. They can drink blood or eat food, either one, they mostly like blood or the synthetics of it better though. They don't get sick. They heal about like vampires do, but they're more - biological, with heartbeats and needing to breathe and everything."
"She turned herself into a woman, we didn't think through the consequences of that, a few hours later she wanted French toast and I guessed, at this point we are pretty sure, she hasn't decided yet about having it but leaning towards yes," Nathan summarizes.
"I went with a variant on a name that appears on both sides of Elspeth's family," Bella shrugs. "Edward's mother was called Elizabeth and Isabella's a variant on the same. I don't know what that would leave you with, if Nathan even remembers any family members' names."
"Gonna be close to Henry's age, and if Rosalie gets her way, close to Henry's next little sibling's age. It'll grow past any wolf pups it meets but there's those around too," Nathan says. "Coven's full of people who'd look after a little half-vampire for a while. They make easy babies, they don't cry much, diapers are not called for, etcetera."
"Well, it might not actually take that long for an opinion to happen," Nathan says. "We could do that. But then I would expect a name like 'Superman' - or possibly 'Dracula'. I bet that's what you get when you let a week-old half-vampire name himself is a child insisting that his name is Dracula. Let's forestall that. I like Kerron and Aedyt."
Nathan addresses her midsection. "Your name," he tells it, "is not Dracula, and I will not take responsibility for explaining why everyone you knew in your childhood calls you that when you are trying to go by Kerron or Aedyt again and asking a cute wolf to sit next to you at the Ultra Olympics."
This surgery has historically been performed with a vampire tooth, but apparently Bella's been using her coins, as Rosalie is holding a scalpel instead. "So," she says, peering between the Joker and Nathan, "if she - he? - if your mate's not going to turn, how's this going to work? You going to magic the shell away or something?"
"Bella wished it away, but I wasn't being a human under it, I didn't have a medical emergency as soon as it was opened up," Rosalie says. "You'll need to be quick, or give someone else one of those coins - I can do it, or you can give it to Nathan, whichever."
"I think she'll be fine," Nathan says.
"Usually at this point you'd be hurried into the turning room, and now I'm not quite sure what to do with you," Rosalie says to the Joker. "Can you walk? Do you want to just go back to Nathan's room? I suppose he'll have to be moved into family suites."
Rosalie, meanwhile, pulls some coins out of her pocket to clean up the operating table - these are not the Joker's transparent-with-color-flecks, but a bright and glowing gold.
"Her Majesty's interdimensional nickname is Golden," Nathan explains, "and she's not the first one the Joker met."
He checks after seven hours, and says, "Forty-five minute warning, babe," at the next lull in activity.
Kerron wakes up right on schedule and says, "Eee."
"Morning, kiddo," Nathan says, scooping up the baby, narrowly avoiding getting bitten, and popping the end of a glass bottle of bubbly into Kerron's mouth. Kerron approves and downs the entire bottle in about a minute with a blissful expression on his face.
"Half-vampires don't become -" Nathan does a swirled-finger gesture in the direction of his own head. "Anything in particular in response to the taste of human blood, any more than human children do if allowed to eat cake. If that's what has you concerned and not something else."
"Amumumumum," Kerron says, still gnawing on his chewtoy.
"Why yes!" says Nathan. "That is your mum. Sort of." Pause. "What shall we have him calling us?"
"Maggie and Gianna have their kid calling them Mum and Mamma respectively," says Nathan, "if that's any useful guide. But you probably are going to spend a decent fraction of the time being more mummy-like than papa-like and maybe it'd be simpler to carry on with that regardless." He shrugs. "I can be Daddy."
"We could take him outside," Nathan proposes. "He won't sparkle, just sorta glow like he's an overedited ad for makeup, no particular security risk."
Inside the capital compound again, they run into Alice and Jasper, who are sitting together looking out the window with Alice's head leaning on Jasper's shoulder. "Hallo, Alice, Jasper," Nathan says. "Look what we made!"
Alice looks and says "Awww!"
Jasper looks between the parents and says, "...Made?"
Nathan hands Kerron over to Alice, and she laughs and tosses him into the air. "I haven't been able to see either of you for weeks, now, not that I was trying often before," Alice tells Nathan and the Joker. "Soon I'll have so many blind spots it'll make more sense to talk about where I can look."
"Maybe when there are enough hybrids and wolves getting in your way your power will say oh, for heaven's sake and let you observe them too," Nathan suggests.
Japser is now looking somewhat less guardedly at the Joker.
Alice looks momentarily curious, and then she makes a face and sits back down. "No kidding," she snorts. "You're definitely Stella's boyfriend's alt. She came and consulted me about turning him, and my exact words were that he'd have a 'disturbing amount of fun'."
"Jazz, honey, Kerron's theirs, not ours," soothes Alice.
"Are you going to have one too?" asks Nathan brightly.
"We're still thinking about it," Alice says, "we weren't pining for a century like Rosalie was, but we might, as long as we can now."
"I believe Cody knows that he was an accident," Alice points out. "And he's fine."
"It'd be hard to miss in his case. Kerron could've missed the memo if they hadn't said it," Jasper says.
"I can't see that far off when too many people's choices matter to the outcome, but even without that confirmation I hardly think it's inevitable," says Alice.
"Not so common, apparently," says Nathan. "Anyway. We've got a kid. We're pleased to have a kid. The kid will be fine. Won't you, kiddo?"
Kerron is waving patterns in the air again, especially a line leading in only one direction from Nathan to the Joker. "Ububv."
"That's right, that's baby Kerron," Rosalie says, her attention instantly trained fully on her son as soon as he speaks. "He's a little half-vampire like you! He was born yesterday."
"I was born last month," Henry says, nodding to himself.
"Yes, you were," Rosalie says with immense pride.
"I wanna hold the baby," says Henry.
"You'll have to ask his parents," Roaslie says.
"Can I hold the baby," Henry says to Nathan and the Joker dutifully.
Nathan hugs back. Henry marches in circles, carrying Kerron, who finds the entire scenario utterly hilarious. Eventually he hands off Kerron to the nearest adult - "Here, Aunt Alice, you hold him!" - and runs back to his mother, who picks him up and sits him on her shoulders.
"Is she still? That's a pity," sighs Rosalie. "It's not as though we'd feel like she loved us any less if we had a baby brother or sister who was naturally hers."
"Try telling her that," says Alice. "But I don't think it's that, I think it's about the one she lost, I think filling the void with us adoptees was one thing and having a new baby would be another."
"I think - this isn't something I'm seeing, just me knowing Esme - that she'll decide yes," Alice says. "For Carlisle's sake partly, at first, but of course she'll fall in love with it the first time she feels it moving."
"Of course she will," Rosalie says serenely.
"Everybody's reproducing all of a sudden," says Nathan.
"There's finally a way for us to do it," says Rosalie, "of course some of us want to."
Alice has taken Kerron to her room, where she is just now finishing reading him a storybook. Kerron - or somebody - has bitten a corner off this book, but it's still readable less the page numbers. "The end," she says, as Nathan and the Joker appear. "Hi guys!"
"Maybe he's run through all the phonemes he's heard so far and now he's trying his hand at imitation," speculates Nathan.
But the next thing Kerron says is "Ludigamifrax!", which sounds nothing like anything that has been said recently.
Kerron manages to go without meeting Addy until he is two weeks old, walking and uttering simple sentences.
The instant he sees her, he runs up to her and hugs her leg, beaming up at her.
"Oh, wow," exclaims Addy. "Aren't you a tasty little combo platter?"
"...Excuse me?" says Nathan.
"I'm helpful!" Kerron beams.
"What's my magic taste like?" Kerron asks winningly.
"Pineapple and coconut," she tells him. "The pineapple is the ingot part."
"Mummy can I try those tastes?" Kerron asks, looking away from Addy and at the Joker.
"Sure," he says, and snaps his fingers, and there is a glass of thick, pale yellow juice in his other hand. "Or did you mean separately?" And he steps up and does the pulling-a-quarter-out-of-your-ear trick, except that instead of any kind of coin, he extracts from thin air a divided plastic bowl with slices of pineapple in one half and chunks of coconut in the other.
But this is not their room, this is Milliways.
"Huh," Nathan says. "...We could spend days in there and Kerron wouldn't even miss us."
Right behind them, there is a person in a terrifying, expensive bat costume of negligible festiveness, stumbling in and clutching a gut wound!
"Work-release program. One of my alts' staff did this inconvenient irrevocable-love-at-first-sight thing with him so I let her take him home so her employee wouldn't be eternally despondent. My very best guess is that he won't be terrorizing Gotham from there. Why, is he here?"
"Well, I'll give you your three wishes, howabout, and if you run into him in your own world again - I don't expect it, he looked pretty happy to go with Golden - then you'll be more equipped to handle it? I can't unmint him, that's not something wishes can do. But I can tell you my emergency mint containment protocol."
Stella squares off three restricted hexes from her bandolier and hands them over. "These will do anything normal hexagons can do except I don't want people in worlds with no Bells making new mints willy-nilly so they don't do that," she says. "That's stuff on the scale of granting someone a new permanent magical superpower. The mint-containment protocol is: you can only make a wish if the coin is in contact with your skin. They appear that way, but if you wish a coin-repelling envelope around somebody, they can't make wishes. He can make all the coins he wants but won't be able to do a thing with them. Sound like a plan? And please only do this if he makes trouble for you at home. Golden's got him handled in her world, and he could come here even when he was on his asteroid."
"Look, I don't like him any more than you do - actually, no, I probably do like him more than you, but I don't like him - but I trust my precog and I trust my alt," Stella says. "And his template is really useful as a mint. Golden's probably going to be able to save more lives with him in her employ than he ever took, not that that erases the initial crimes."