Shadow Unit Scandal: The Commander's Omega-Chapter 211: Frederik

Frederik Frasner arrived with all the violence of a military event and none of the courtesy.

Rafael would later say, with deep personal bitterness, that this was unsurprising. The child had spent months using his body as a siege site. It was only natural that his actual entrance into the world should be loud, difficult, and entirely too committed to the point.

Marin, dry to the end, had informed him afterward that both Rafael and the baby were healthy, stable, and in excellent condition.

Rafael, sweating, exhausted, and profoundly unconvinced that language should be allowed to do that much lying in a medical setting, had stared at him and asked whether ’excellent condition’ was the clinical term for feeling as though one’s bones had been individually abused.

Marin, whose sympathy had always come dressed as irony, merely adjusted his gloves and said, "You did it again, so evidently your standards for survival remain unreasonably high."

Gregoris had remained beside him through all of it.

That, perhaps, was the detail Rafael remembered most clearly in the hazy hours after the birth - not the pain, not the exhaustion, not even the first stunned moment of hearing his son’s cry, but Gregoris’s hand around his.

He was there through every contraction, every quiet command, every breath Rafael had taken in fury and pain and stubborn refusal to break in any way that would later be embarrassing.

Then Frederik had been there.

Marin put the bundled child into Gregoris’s hands and told him, with the dry authority of a man who had already survived one birth and had no intention of supervising emotional incompetence as well, "Give him to Rafael."

Gregoris, still standing close to the bed, raised a brow at that.

Not because he objected. He would have handed Rafael the world if asked plainly enough. But Marin was not sentimental, and Gregoris knew him well enough by now to distrust any instruction delivered in that particular tone.

So he looked down... and froze.

For one suspended second, everything else in the room seemed to fall back. The movement of attendants. The quiet rustle of linen. The metallic scent of blood still caught beneath the sharper notes of medicine and ether-cleaned tools. Rafael’s breathing, still uneven from exhaustion. Marin removing his gloves somewhere to the side. All of it blurred at the edges against the simple, devastating fact now lying in Gregoris’s arms.

The child was very small.

Warm. Wrapped tightly.

Angry only moments ago, now reduced to a damp, red-faced, deeply offended silence after the exhausting indignity of being born.

And he looked exactly like him.

Gregoris did not move.

Marin, who had clearly been waiting for this precise reaction, said nothing for a beat. Then, with exquisite lack of mercy, "Yes. I noticed."

Rafael, half-collapsed against the pillows, exhausted beyond elegance and still somehow clinging to the remnants of it by force of will alone, narrowed his eyes. "Why," he asked hoarsely, "do you look like that?"

Gregoris still did not answer.

His gaze remained fixed on the infant’s face, on the pale ash-blond dampness already visible against the child’s head, on the tiny features still soft from birth and yet unmistakable in the cruelest, most immediate way. Even the lashes looked light. The little mouth, furious and compressed. The shape of the brow. It was like watching some impossible, miniature echo of himself placed in his arms without warning.

Marin folded his arms. "Commander, if you continue staring at him as though he’s a tactical anomaly, Rafael will have to wait longer."

That broke whatever silent spell had seized him.

Gregoris lifted his head.

Rafael was watching him from the bed, skin still flushed, hair disordered, beautiful in that raw, wrecked way that came only after battle and birth and survival. There was sweat still at his temple. His lips had gone pale with strain. He looked exhausted enough to sleep for a week and sharp enough to insult anyone who implied he should.

Their son gave a soft, indignant noise from the blankets.

Gregoris looked down once more, and the shock in him was dangerously close to awe.

Then he crossed the remaining distance to the bed.

Rafael shifted one arm free from the blankets and sheets with visible effort. "Well?" he muttered, his voice frayed. "Are you planning to keep him, or may I see what all the fuss is about?"

A faint sound escaped Marin that might, in a lesser man, have been amusement.

Gregoris bent at once and lowered the child carefully into Rafael’s arms.

The moment the weight settled against him, Rafael’s whole body changed.

It was subtle. Gregoris doubted anyone else in the room would have understood the scale of it.

Frederik fussed once and then settled.

Rafael stared down at him.

For a few seconds he said nothing, which by itself would have alarmed half the empire and all of Gregoris’s household staff.

Then, very softly, "Oh."

Gregoris watched him.

Rafael’s fingers trembled once where they brushed the edge of the blanket back from the baby’s face. Not from weakness. Not from fear. From the sheer force of having reached the end of pain and found this waiting there instead.

Frederik blinked slowly, his eyes still unfocused from the newness of light and air and the world itself.

Silver.

Rafael closed his eyes.

"Unbelievable," he whispered.

Marin moved nearer just long enough to check Rafael’s hold and the baby’s position, then stepped back again, clearly satisfied that both parents were, for all their dramatic tendencies, technically competent.

"He is healthy," Marin said. "Loud, strong, and extremely determined to announce himself. Which unfortunately suggests he will fit in here."

Rafael opened his eyes again and looked up at him with weary offense. "I have just given birth. I should not be attacked in my current condition."

"It’s not an attack," Marin said. "It’s a prognosis."

Gregoris barely heard the exchange.

His attention remained fixed on Rafael and the child in his arms.

Rafael looked wrecked.

His strength was still there, visible in the way he held himself upright even now, in the sharpness that survived pain and blood loss and exhaustion. Yet his body had been pushed to its edge, and Gregoris knew it. He had watched every moment of it. Every breath Rafael had dragged in through clenched teeth. Every contraction he had endured with fury and pride and the kind of cold refusal to fall apart that had made Gregoris want to destroy something just for forcing him through it.

And now Rafael was looking at their son as though the world had cracked open and placed something impossible in his hands.

Rafael glanced up.

Gregoris had not realized until that moment how close he was standing or that one of his hands had come to rest against the bedrail hard enough for the metal to complain faintly under his grip.

Their eyes met.

Rafael, still pale with exhaustion, still breathless, still holding the infant with that reverent care, looked at him for a long second.

Then his mouth moved.

"He looks exactly like you," he said.

Gregoris said nothing.

Rafael let out the faintest laugh, no strength in it at all, only disbelief. "I did all that work," he murmured, looking back down at the baby, "and apparently the result is another Frasner."

Marin, traitor to bedside neutrality, said, "A remarkably efficient one."

Rafael turned his head with slow outrage. "Leave."

"You’re stable enough to insult people. That’s an excellent sign." Marin gave Gregoris one last glance, the ghost of dry satisfaction crossing his face. "Try not to drop either of them."

Then he withdrew, taking the attendants and the last of the clinical energy with him, until the room quieted around the three of them.