#Jee's doghouse anyway

[alchemistc]

Felt the urge to add a little something to this ficlet

Jee hates the baby.

It's glaringly obvious and has been for weeks, and Maddie can tell it's breaking hearts.

Buck and Tommy look like they haven't slept in a month, which she's very secretly pleased about mostly because they're always so good at taking care of other people's kids that they've gained a sort of muted awe among the rest of the group - how easy they get kids down for bedtime and how rested they look when parents show up, how sweet and kind and polite the kids always are at handoff and how the kids keep up that out of character behavior for at least half a day for their parents, too.

The baby is a game changer. The baby is making her brother and his kid-whisperer husband human again.

Maddie should probably feel bad that she's taking such private glee in watching them both down a fifth cup of coffee and go a little pale when the baby monitor set up next to the couch kicks up noise. She should probably feel bad that when Tommy swings up out of his seat with a hand curled around Buck's shoulder, his knees and back snap crackle pop their way into an upright state. She should feel bad about the tired sigh that escapes Buck's lips as Tommy shuffles off towards the baby's room they'd spent months laughingly arguing about as they grinned the grin of first time parents who'd never actually had a reference for how on-call they'd be once the kid was born.

Tommy hums his way back down the hallway with a fussing bundle and gives them both an exhausted smile as he shuffles past them into the kitchen, and Jee glares daggers at his back.

Oh, she should absolutely not take any pleasure in that.

It's just -

Buck has given her way too many details about the shit they got up to after a weekend taking care of Jee. Cheeky grins and the unsubtle widening of eyes and the implication that if either of them could get pregnant...

And Jee, in turn, spending days after reciting the things she'd done with Tommy like Tommy hung the goddamn moon and the stars, how sweet it'd been the first few times until she'd started to get annoyingly jealous of Tommy and how easy it all seemed for him.

Buck, at least, she knew got overwhelmed sometimes by the sheer amount of energy Jee had. Buck at least had the courtesy to look a little frayed around the edges on day three when Jee was swinging off his arm and trying to weasel an extra day of Buck and Tommy time.

Tommy always just grinned indulgently and looked a little sad to be going, like he could stand another few months of Jee screeching before he felt the slightest inclination to give her back to her parents.

Serves him right, actually, Maddie thinks, and then levers herself up off the recliner to go do the dishes piling up in their sink because they're too damn tired all the time to get to them.

---

Jee hates the baby.

Chim has watched her working her way through those feelings for a month, now. He's watched her put on a brave face at the sight of baby Kinard's squalling, wrinkly newborn face - watched her scowl at the bundle in her uncle's arms every time Tommy gets all doughy and enamored with something as simple as a tiny little hand reaching up for his chin - watched her throw herself a nice little fit when it was Athena and Bobby showing up to babysit for Date Night instead of Buck and Tommy.

She's a strange, mercurial little monster, and she hates a fucking baby. He should maybe check that.

It's just -

Her scowl is a new expression, and it reminds him so startlingly of her mother that every time he sees it he gets a little misty-eyed about it.

He's throwing a casserole in the oven, the baby monitor for once prised from Buck and Tommy so that they can take a nap while Chim tidies their living room and cooks them dinner, when Jee tugs at his pant leg and all out glares at the noises coming from the little device. It's just little snuffles, at this point - certainly nothing too dangerous, nothing that's gonna wake her exhausted parents in the next room, nothing that should bother Jee-Yun at all, except there she is, grimacing away as Chim watches the grainy video feed for a moment just to make sure the baby isn't gonna turn sideways and stick her head through the bars of her enclosure like Buck had apparently done once.

They don't talk very often about baby Buck, because baby Buck had been a miserable bastard screaming his lungs out because not only was he a tiny little thing with a mother who neglected him but he was usually in some type of discomfort and pain, those first six months. But it's a story Maddie remembers distinctly, and one that doesn't actually feature the Buckley parents actively ignoring their kid, so.

Jee protests when he swings her up into his arms, and protests some more when he tries to set her down in the living room five minutes later so he can start clearing away the various piles of baby crap taking up space all over the room. He remembers what it had been like, that guilty feeling of leaving for work with stuff just taking up space everywhere, and he remembers how it had felt to return to find Mrs Lee bouncing a near catatonic Jee in her arms, humming some Korean lullaby as she wiped down the kitchen counter, and Chim realized that all the stuff was back in it's place, his apartment looking tidy for the first time in what felt like months.

He remembers trying to work up the energy to feel guilty about someone else picking up his messes and being unable to do so for how damn grateful he felt instead.

Chim tries the cleanup song to distract Jee but she wanders off with something tucked into her fist and he knows, he just knows he's gonna end his tidying up with scrubbing some crayon graffiti off one of Buck and Tommy's walls.

---

Mara is a little obsessed with the baby.

Things are stable enough now that she feels comfortable in it - in watching the baby lift her head and cry her eyes out and giggle when one of her dads blows a raspberry into her stomach.

Mara begs to be taught how to support the baby's neck and how to angle her bottle to feed her and how to change her diaper and swaddle her, wants Tommy to wrap the baby up against her chest in the baby bjorn and only pouts a little when Tommy solemnly informs her that they just don't have the right size wrap for Mara.

Mara sits primly next to Buck on the couch and peeks over the blankets in subdued awe when the baby yawns, or farts, or smacks her tiny baby lips after finishing her bottle.

Mara is doing everything she can to convince Jee that the baby is actually a good thing but Jee isn't fucking having it.

---

It's not like Tommy hasn't noticed it. He'd have to be blind deaf and dumb not to notice that Jee hasn't dropped an Uncle Tommy since the day they brought Charlie home from the hospital.

He's just got no idea how to bring it up without sounding like a crazy person.

He already feels half insane from sleep deprivation, and he can't justify bringing it up to Evan when Evan's under-eye bags have gone from sensible purse to checked luggage in the span of a month and a half, the same as Tommy.

So he sits in it and he stews and he burps Charlie while across the room he can feel Jee burning a hole into his back with her eyes.

The thing is, every other child-adjacent human in this extended family loves Charlie a stupid amount. Mara has to be bribed away, and Harry and May have already offered up their babysitting services with gleams in their eye. Denny's spent hours just watching her through tummy time, and Chris will talk to her like she's a proper little adult who has any idea what he's saying and isn't just enamored with the inflection in his voice.

Jee full stop hates Charlie, and Tommy isn't an idiot - he'd love to have the energy for a piggy back ride or a Bluey dance party or literally anything more than ruffling her hair when he greets her and Chim or Maddie at the door.

He's just so damn tired.

And Jee clearly thinks that means her Uncle Tommy has been stolen from her by the loud, stinky, fussy baby.

---

California's paternity leave situation is...better than a lot of the rest of the country. They've had a solid two months to watch Charlie grow, and eat and sleep and work her little facial muscles until Buck can convince himself she's smiling at them.

He'd gone back to work first. It'd made sense for them to switch off, once they reached a point where they could sleep a solid four hours in a row, and as reluctant as Buck had been to miss a single milestone, he'd known that six weeks from his return he'd be the one allowed to take advantage of their family leave to watch his kid gurgle and roll from her tummy to her back while Tommy got behind the controls again.

The door clicks open and Buck blinks at the new graffiti decorating the space beneath the hook where they hang their keys. He'd thought they'd cleaned all of Jee's latest attempts to show her displeasure at the existence of her cousin.

There's something savory smelling wafting from the kitchen, and when Buck swings in to greet his husband he instead finds his sister, back to him while she holds her phone out like she's recording something, camera aimed over the couch in the living room.

His first few steps on the tile startle her, but she recovers quickly, one hand raised to indicate he should stay quiet while the other gestures him closer.

Tommy's passed the fuck out on the floor next to the couch, which vaguely pleases Buck because he's been a little worried Tommy would forget to rest while Buck was on shift, but it's the rest of the tableau that has him yanking out his own phone as he putters to a stop next to his sister.

Tommy's got company. Jee, half asleep herself, fighting consciousness like only a kid really can, is tucked into Tommy's side, and she's got two fingers being held hostage by Charlie

Charlie coos, and giggles, and flexes her hand, and Jee blinks and yawns and the side of her mouth quirks, just a bit, exactly like her dads does when he's trying to hide a smile.

Buck makes a noise that has Maddie turning to him with a lecture already forming in her mind.

It's just -

When Buck had told Tommy he wanted kids, he'd sort of always assumed the plural was understood, but Jee's blatant dismissal of Charlie as anything other than an inconvenient distraction has been giving him pause.

Except.

Except Tommy's passed out on the floor with his niece half tucked against him and a baby Jee purports to hate has her completely tuned out to everything else in the entire house, and Buck's got that itchy feeling running up his spine again.

Maddie snaps a few more pictures and drags Buck further into the kitchen to point a finger at him.

"You promised Tommy you'd wait at least a year," Maddie reminds him in a hushed voice, and Buck sighs. Runs a hand through his hair. Tries to take another peek at his niece finally finally warming up to Charlie.

"He's gonna be so pissed if she calls him Uncle Tommy while he's sleeping," Buck announces, and fully ignores Maddie's stern look in favor of flipping through the dozen pictures he'd captured himself.