ad astra per aspera

Baby Beluga,  Baby Beluga. Is the water warm? Is your daddy home? With you so happy?

Jim pauses in the doorway of the playroom, the stars on the ceiling the only light beside the Enterprise shaped night light someone had plugged in. 

The brood is under the fort, stretched out in various positions and nearly all on top of each other. 

Jo lies against a bunch of pillows, her eyes heavy lidded, George on the opposite end, head rested on a couch cushion. Between them, Maddy curls up around her Teddy on her belly, her cheek rested on the soft sheet below. 

Bones voice drifts from where he sits in the rocking chair directly in front, Davie's head positioned on his shoulder. The baby is fast asleep. 

It's been a long week. The brood was out sick with a stomach flu and was miserable. Jim panicked, a hand on the comm to call for an ambulance when Maddy sobbed that her stomach hurt too much, or when George turned so pale while sleeping that Jim woke him up every hour to make sure he was okay. 

Bones was a champ, as always, reminding Jim that he knew what he was doing, of course. Keeping them fed on a healthy BRAT diet, hydrated with water and comfortable in the fort (which they refused to move from). 

Tonight it seemed that the fevers had broken and the general malaise had subsided. Jim could breathe again, knowing that his kid's were able to hold down the toast and rice Bones had given them for dinner.

And now, the lullaby. 

If it was possible to fall in love with his husband again, he did in that moment. The gentle rocking, the soft voice, slightly out of tune but so so gentle and loving. 

He watched his kids' eyes dip and a dreamy look come over them as they fell asleep. 

"Hey darlin'." Bones noticed him as Jim stepped into the room. Jim leaned down and kissed Bones on the head, running a hand over Davie's downy baby hair. 

"I like the song."

"I'm glad."

Jim went into the fort, careful not to disturb his kids, to kiss them and feel their heads for a temperature. 

It broke. 

Even Jo, half awake and leaning into the touch, was no longer flushed and clammy. 

"Night Daddy," George said, rolling over after Jim kissed him on the forehead. 

"Night buddy," he said and stepped quietly away with Bones to put Davie down in his crib. 

That night Bones kissed his own lullabies into Jim's skin, a comfort that Jim couldn't remember experiencing when he was young. He slept better, knowing that he and his family was safe and loved. 

It wasn't something you brought up in pleasant conversation but oh Leonard's ex-wife tried. Every charity dinner they went to at the hospital, every time he drank too much, or worked too hard, she blamed it on Tarsus. 

He regretted telling her. 

When he became Bones, slipping from Tarsus survivor, alcoholic, divorcee to best friend, cadet, doctor, he tried to put it behind him. 

But the kid has his own secrets and reason to drink until the past was forgotten. 

Jim never tried to talk to him about it. He would just slip his hand quietly in Bones and squeeze or let Bones hold him until the doctor could shake the feeling of holding an emaciated child in his arms as she died, choking on food she couldn't taste. It never went away. But holding Jim made him forget the way the sky looked as the fields burned or how Kodos' gravely voice sounded as he announced their imminent deaths. 

Jim never questioned him. He just knew. And for Bones that was enough.