Chapter Text
Prologue
It was the second miscarriage that broke Autumn. It was Marjorie that put her back together. The rest of the world just had to fall apart first.
It started in the nursery, again. Autumn knew the signs by now, had spent the last few months studying them again and again despite Winter trying to draw her away from her phone at night. Fear was something that Autumn Fortune-Knight was intimately familiar with; it was imbedded in her skin like invisible tattoos covering her in the lessons of her past. The ability to stare fear in the eye and make it break under her will was Autumn's very first super power. And she'd grown into a person who was able to take what had been used against her her entire life and turn it into a weapon to be used at the right time for the right reason rather than just unleashing destruction like she had been taught to, like she used to...
But seeing the word 'pregnant' in bold letters on that stick shot a bolt of fear through Autumn that not even Roger could stir up in her. Night after night she would curl up on her side and flip through the saved tabs on her phone; signs of miscarriage, ways to ensure a healthy pregnancy, signs of late term miscarriage, best diet for fetus health...she would move from page to page, reading and rereading each article until she could recite them from memory.
None of it made the realization that she was losing another baby any easier when it started.
"Marjorie?" Autumn was sitting behind her desk, cramps twisting her insides, typically stoic eyes wide and full of panic. "Something's happening." The manager, for all of her previously inept attempts at perception, could see it in Autumn's face before she had a chance to elaborate. Pulling Winter from the baby room was easy enough; with a new sickness sweeping through the nursery it left them far better than in ratio for days. It did however strip the management staff to the barest of bones.
Reece insisted on driving; he hadn't been there the last time and he refused to sit in the office staring at paperwork while his mind was on what was happening at A&E. With Janice and Siobhan at headquarters 95% of the time and Deliah on holiday it left only Marjorie to handle the rest of the management tasks while Agatha handled everything she could at the desk to keep anyone from going into the office unless absolutely necessary.
Word of the incident spread through the nursery like wildfire, especially with Autumn as far along as she was. 18 weeks was late to lose a pregnancy, but why else would Reece be ushering his sister out of the nursery and into his car with Winter at her side without any notice?
Being the last manager standing it was hours later that Marjorie even thought to work on cleaning up Autumn's desk for her, though once she started Marjorie wasn't sure if she'd made it any better. Autumn was the epitome of organization and all Marjorie had been able to do was shuffle together the handful of papers that'd been strewn across her desk into a pile in the middle. The blood on Autumn's desk chair had nearly gone unnoticed. The sight of it made Marjorie's stomach turn and she was hunting down cleaning products before she knew what she was doing.
No way would she leave that for Autumn to find when she eventually came back to work.
'I'm taking Autumn and Winter home. I've asked Mia to get back to town as soon as she can. I've never seen Aut like this.'
The text message flashed on Marjorie's screen at just a few minutes after six thirty, drawing her attention away from her project of sitting on the floor scrubbing at Autumn's chair. No matter how hard Marjorie tried to remove the painful sight she couldn't clean the now dried blood stain from the desk chair, a permanent reminder that Autumn's life hadn't been quite hard enough, the universe needed to deliver her one more swift kick to remind her that the world was a cruel place to try and survive.
Thinking about it made Marjorie scrub all the harder; watching Autumn go through a crash course in how much her father had truly influenced her choices growing up despite how hard she'd tried to pry her way out from under his thumb had been hard. Mia's admission of not driving a wedge between Autumn and Reece for the fun of it but having done so at the insistence and financial loss of their father had been awful, but watching the three of them try to grow together had at least been a comfort over the last year.
Even if after all this time Reece was passive to a fault, even if Autumn's first instinct was still to smash something, even if Mia's razor sharp tongue was still her most dangerous weapon.
The Knight siblings, Mia included, were growing and it took everything in Marjorie not to keep a pack of gold star stickers in her pockets at all times to give out every time Reece spoke up for himself, every time Autumn closed her eyes and took a deep breath rather than reaching for her bat, every time Mia paused to decide if it was worth making someone else cry, or if she should just float in her own happiness.
"Marjorie?" Char was the only other person in the building getting the last of the preschool room cleaned up and her voice caught the manager off guard. Marjorie's head snapped up faster than she could slide out from her spot hovering under Autumn's desk and her head cracked straight across the top of her skull.
"Christ!" Marjorie's voice echoed throughout the office and Charlotte let out a little hiss of sympathy pain as she rocked on the balls of her feet.
"Are you ok?"
"Yeah, yeah, I'm fine. Did you hear from Mia?" Marjorie's voice was as soft as it could be as she crawled to her feet, peeling the gloves she'd found off and tossing them in the nearest bin. Her eyes rolled in her head as she tried to shake off the pain radiating through her skull, bouncing from ear to ear and settling in her back teeth.
"Her flight lands at six tomorrow morning. The girls are with their dad tonight through the rest of the weekend so I'm going to pick her up as soon as she lands and drop her off at the house to see Autumn and Winter. I might be a few minutes late in but I'm on the late shift this week so we shouldn't need any coverage."
"That's really sweet of you, my love. Just keep me updated and I'll cover myself if I need to. I'm sure Autumn will appreciate having her big sister around." It took some time to make it to her feet, and her head wobbled a little as she got her bearings. "Reece is takin em home now. I'm gonna give the three of them some time; the last fing they need is my mouth in the middle of all the feelings." Marjorie admitted, offering up a weak shrug. Autumn didn't like people in her space as it was, something that had been made clear a very long time ago. She remembered the last miscarriage, the blank look on Autumn's face as she tried to navigate through the feelings she couldn't put into words. Adding herself to whatever was already happening was the last thing Autumn needed.
"I can't imagine what she must be going through..." Charlotte's eyes faded off into the distance as she thought of her own pregnancies, her journey in becoming a mother. What it must feel like to have such a loss without ever having anything more than hopes and dreams for a future... It made her shudder.
"Why don't the two of us head over to the King's Arms?" There was no way that Marjorie was going to get any rest tonight, not until Reece was home and in bed with her and probably not after that either. "Just one. For Autumn." Charlotte's eyes closed slowly before she nodded, hiking her bag up higher on her shoulder.
"I'll meet you over there."
Autumn's chair ended up sat outside near the bins waiting for garbage collection by the time the two of them left the nursery. With the corporate card Marjorie ordered Autumn a new chair for when she came back to work and then Marjorie ended up with Char and a glass of red wine. They'd get through this together. They'd done it before. They'll do it again. In the last two years they'd become family and none of them would be left to deal with anything like this without support.