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Despite the ungodly early hour, Grandage Place - and almost everyone inside it - is awake. The deep blue of the night hasn’t yet faded to morning, but no one feels the need to rush the sun inside. The house remains complete and isolate, briefly frozen in time with all the joy it holds: everyone wishes for it to remain that way.
Ethan stares into the fire, exhausted but overwhelmingly ecstatic; Sir Malcolm sips at his brandy, looking tired but pleased; Victor reads Wordsworth and alternates between happiness and mild indignation that his help wasn’t needed. None of them are able to sleep.
Silence hangs over the room, unoppressive and easy. After the night’s marathon, everyone is at peace; the calm stillness after the storm is surreal and visible in the orange glow of the firelight, in the snapping logs, in the morning November chill that still winds itself, sharply, in the air.
The shadows in the corners, so often stark and steep and cliff-like, are soft and muted. Their hollowness recedes into the wall, spreads itself like water, and despite the hazy light in the room, everything is bright. The shadows are shallow and trickle down the walls like the raindrops falling against the window.
None of the men can sleep like this. Time passes by unhurried, or not at all, and the past few hours could have been days. The world itself has shifted on its axis, the absence of noise is somehow more deafening than the abundance of it. They all find it impossible to sleep; the impossibility of this, this almost-unnatural, undeserved contentedness is now a reality.
They are restless. Ethan paces in front of the mantel in a military rhythm, Sir Malcolm sits and drinks and taps his cane idly on the floor, Victor flips through his poetry at random and ruffles the pages against his fingertips while crossing and uncrossing his legs.
Not everyone is aware of the magic flowing through the house. Vanessa sleeps, wearied but victorious, after a long day and even longer night bringing Grandage Place’s newest resident into the fold. Claire sleeps beside her mother, tiny fists balled up, already prepared to fight in the two, maybe three hours she’s been on the earth. Claire has only been asleep for part of the time, refusing to settle - Ethan offhandly commented that it appeared she inherited his nocturnal tendencies, while trying not to fracture his face with the width of his smile - but even she cannot fight the rising tide.
The men sit upstairs in the next room, waiting for a sound, any sound. None of them want to break the spell that Claire’s birth has cast; a gentle, subtly pervasive thing. Ethan restrains himself from waking them, no matter how badly he wants to see his daughter’s eyes open, for Vanessa to hold her while he holds them both, but he can wait a little longer. Sir Malcolm and Victor understand that, while a part of the family, this is not for them, and know to step back when the time comes.
And the time does come - it comes when the rustle of sheets bends the silence, it stretches when the low sounds Vanessa makes while waking are audible from the room over, and the silence finally shatters with the muffled thudding of the door as Ethan rushes his way to start a new life in a new family.
The spell is broken.