Generation 1, Chapter 5

During those nine months, I spent most of my time with Dylan. Lee avoided me when we weren’t in bed together, and Sam spent most of his time holed up in room painting.

I was fine with it, though. Dylan was good company. He might only be a toddler, but he was smart enough that sometimes I forgot he wasn’t older. He was my special little boy, and I always reminded him of that.

He really was a smart cookie. Lee had bought some toddler books that we both read to him on occasion. Well, one day I walked into his room to see him reading one of those books on his own! Apparently, we’d read them to him enough that he could match the words we said to the words on the page. After I told Lee about it, he bought Dylan some more books to read on his own. He really seemed to enjoy them.

Dylan adored his peg box, but it seemed like he had pretty much mastered it by the time he was four, so Lee surprised him with a new block table. It wasn’t really new, of course. It was a hand-me-down from one of Lee’s coworkers at the science lab. I was a little bit reluctant to take it, but Dylan loved it so much that I couldn’t deny him his fun. Sam sometimes even played with him when he wasn’t doing homework or painting.

Sam did love his younger brother, of course, but they were too far apart in age to ever be really close. Sometimes I thought that Sam might resent me -- and by proxy, Dylan -- for not letting him have friends over. He didn’t understand the danger that letting strangers into our house would open us up to. He had been too young to remember when his mother was taken and killed, and Lee and I agreed that we wouldn’t tell him about it until he was a teenager. But for the time being, he resented me.

Both boys loved their father, though. At times I was jealous: why did I have to work so much harder to make them love me? All Lee had to do was show up and smile, and they would do anything for him.

Then he smiled at me, and I melted. How could I judge the boys when the same thing was true for me?

Anyway, I didn’t really know what to do about Dylan. Lee and I were both smart enough to get along fine, but I knew that Dylan would pass both of us up someday. But what to do about it? We couldn’t afford any sort of specialized tutoring or a different school or anything like that, and I didn’t want all those strangers around my baby anyway.

I asked Lee about it one day. By that time I was heavily pregnant, and he’d pretty much stopped avoiding me. He agreed with me that there wasn’t really much we could do, so we decided that we would let Dylan learn however he wanted and get him the things he needed. Once he started school, his teachers should be able to help him. They would want to help him realize his full potential, we assured ourselves. Neither of us had enough education to help him with that.

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My pregnancy was progressing quickly, and I still had no idea how to make Lee stay with me after the baby was born. It was true that he didn’t seem so distant lately, but I knew it was only a matter of time before he decided I was a lost cause and left.

I just couldn’t come up with any ideas! It was almost depressing. I had always been so good at planning, but my mind was a complete blank when the only thing that mattered to me was on the line. He knew I loved him, and if he didn’t love me after all this time, there wasn’t much I could do about it. The only hope I had was that he knew I couldn’t survive without him. He was a better person than me: he would never let someone die when there was something he could do about it.

I took a break from my worrying for Sam's thirteenth birthday. It was honestly a little bit disturbing. I still felt like a teenager most of the time, and now I was expected to parent one?

While we ate our cake, Lee asked Sam what he wanted to do to celebrate.

“It would be nice to be able to show my friends my house, but since that's obviously not going to happen, I'll settle for going out with my friends and pretending I have good parents.”

 He slouched off, leaving the two of us staring after him in shock. Lee shook his head. “And to think I was even worse than that as a teenager… I almost feel bad for my parents.”

“Almost?”

“About half of my angst was over them splitting up when I was a kid. That was entirely on them.”

He went back to eating his cake, unaware that he had just made me the happiest woman alive.

He would never leave me, not as long as the kids were young enough to be traumatized by it. I patted my stomach, silently thanking my baby for giving me that much more time with its father.

Finally, the day came for the baby to be born. I was better prepared for it this time, but I was still relieved when it was over.

I named my little girl Ayla, and celebrated that her father would stick around for long enough for her to grow up.

Author's Note: I need to go on a little bit of a rant here. First, here are toddler CAS pictures of your two candidates for heir.

Dylan

and Ayla. 

They are both mutants. Dylan got that awful greenish-brown hair, which I changed to Nyx's father's hair color (dark brown, in case you don't remember/didn't read the prologue) and didn't even feel bad about it. I figured that the other kid would have black or red hair. Then Ayla was born blonde, and I'd already saved, so I just quit the game in frustration. I cannot stand the ridiculous mutation genetics. Almost every child born in my game who does not have four living grandparents gets them. After this particular incident I installed a mod that allows for advanced genetic blending and reduces the mutation chance, but Ayla is still blonde. I suppose I should just be glad that they're not clones. Other than the mutation hair, though, I think they have potential. So far Dylan is a clumsy genius and Ayla is a perceptive light sleeper. 

I'm excited to write some actual plot that isn't just Nyx's domestic angst. Speaking of which, I think this is going to be the last chapter in first-person point of view. Honestly, it's not the way I normally write, but I gave it a shot. I don't think there's any way I can really do the sort of plot I want to do for the kids if I'm limited to Nyx's POV, so I'm not going to try. The rest of the chapters of the first generation will each focus on a single character. If you want to see more of any character, comment to let me know and I'll try to take your wishes into account. Sorry for the novel, but I thought it was important. Join us next time for an experiment in point of view!