Have you heard...?

It was March of 2021, and Kylie was becoming paranoid...

every night she swore to Gage that she heard stuff moving down the stairs but every time Gage had gone to check, he had found nothing but his dust.

So tonight, having gotten used to the aggravating regime of being dragged insanely deep from his sleep at the same time each night; Gage, with his eyes barely a centimeter open, rolled right out of bed holding aloof his Nike slide as soon as Kylie touched him.

Kylie moaned as she rubbed at her stomach. "Babe, I know it's late, but I—"

Alongside his reflexes, Gage dropped his slides. He allowed himself to drop back down to the bed and pressed his lips deep into her neck in a calm sensual kiss before retorting his next. "No love, I don't think you understand just how really late it is."

It was 2:16 in the morning and Gage had work in three hours; he was looking at a full 20-hour shift and he needed to salvage all the sleep he could get.

But the way things were looking, he might as well have stayed awake. It was afterall the third time Kylie had done this to him that night and Gage didn't know if he could take a fourth.

But he'd do anything for her so when she laid her little head on his chest, kissed his chin, and begged him to just check one last time, Gage found his resolution waning. and ignored the pair of Light hazel orbs gazing down at her. "Please, it will put me at ease."

She pleaded and rubbed her stomach for three minutes before He gave in. Gage always slept in boxers, and as he didn't want to be fighting an intruder in his delicates, he pulled on a pair of flannel pajama pants and a shirt before heading out.

He went slowly, sluggish. He was so tired! So much so, when he stopped at the stair railings and leaned his head against it, be dozed off for a good five minutes before being woken by her voice. 

"I know you're outside the door. Babe, can you please just check?"

"I'm going."

And he went, praying to god he fell down the stairs and broke his neck—at least he wouldn't have to go to work.

But Gage was going to check alright; he was going to go down the stairs, move around a few things like usual, come back up, and blame the noises on one of the dogs. Which? He'd have decide later, he was already eyeing Bambi though.

But unlike all the previous times, when he got there and heard nothing, he started going back—the. He heard voices. Oh that forced him awake so fast, he nearly got vertigo.

He started towards them with his slide back up in the air and sealing himself up for a fight. He followed the sound to the kitchen and soon as he passed the swingy door, the pressure in his stomach dropped.

"Stormtrooper?"

The sounds lowered to shushes. Gage round the part of counter before the fridge and couldn't believe his eyes.                                                                        

On the floor before the counter sat a three-year-old Stormi Webster and beside her, a terrible-two with short blond-brown hair curls matching Gage's eyes tit-for-tat. They were shoulders deep in a glass jar of cookies that Gage remembered having placed on the high counter himself. One that he remembered Kylie filling just earlier.

"Are we in trouble?"

The smaller girl said. "Two-oble!"

Gage was too relieved that it was them and not a crazed fan to give a damn. His dimples sunk in his cheeks as he curbed a laugh. "How did you guys get that down from the counter?"

Stormi's eyes immediately lit up, her curls bouncing as she clapped, she pointed at a chair that seemed to have been pushed towards the sweets counter and snitched. "Me and Baba got on it and did teamwork!"

"Where did you learn that then, love?"

"Dan-wool Twiger!"

Gage's daughter, Ibarra-Brynn had come to the world on November 10th of 2019. She had only just turned two and already she could speak and remember words so foreign, it blew Gage's mind. Not her Twin though, Al could barely say his own name.

Chuckling at that, Gage shook his head...something had just occurred to him. "Stormi, Ibarra—do you always come here at night for cookies?"

Stormi bit into a Macadamia nut and nodded. "Baba gets bad dreams, Cookies hurt bad dreams."

It was in asking about those bad dreams that Gage ended up becoming a milk bartender. Seated there beside them on the ground, glasses of milk in hand, he tried his best to get to the root of it and it was this, Ibarra was afraid of the dark.

So Gage told her that the dark was afraid of her too. She started laughing for that, her teeth flashed in the light and Gage nearly had a heart attack—they were covered in chocolate.

So after one last cookie each, Gage lifted them both up to the bathroom and had them brush those pearls. It was then that he dropped their punishment on them.  "Bedtime."

"No!"

They started giving him several reasons to support it, some that didn't even make sense and Gage listened. They were still protesting as he was tucking them in, Stormi protesting as she was yawning. "That's nothing, Gage. I'm not sleepy at all, I'm never sleepy—I could stay up all night."

Ibarra said. "Me too!"

Gage said. "I rebuke thee!"

"Can we have a bedtime story."

A severe milk-mustache in tow, Ibarra started chanting the word 'Story' like an activist. Minutes passed before Gage gave in. He walked further in and took himself a seat between their two beds.

"Alright ladies, have I got a good one for you tonight!" He rubbed his palms together, wiggled his eyebrows, and Ibarra giggled. "Ready for this?"

A chorus of excited yeses met Gage's ears.

"Alright. You've heard of Cinderella, Rapunzel, Rumplestiltskin but Have you heard...of how Poppa met Mama?"

As Gage progressed with his story, the slowly sun mounted onto the horizon, bringing with it an intermingled version of the the future and the past flashing by so quickly that nobody saw them. The birth of Nash's son, Asa, about two years ago flashed through there for just a second, showing Gage at her bedside and many more.

In the coming months, the impending new life would brighten and occupy the Karjenner clan's every waking moment. They'd slip it into their interviews, feeding the public just enough to keep the world interested but their lives safe.

Stormi and the twins would return to their private school in the fall and Kylie's business would boom.

All of this success would do nothing but bring the Jenner-Andersons specialized attention from the press and the more the patriarch of the Jenner-Andersons tried to keep everything secret and private, the more interested the paparazzi got in them so that almost every day, one or more member of the family was painted vividly across the pages of damn near every magazine in the world.

But the world would go on, life would go on...for wherever it was that people were...they always saw...always heard...and good too—

For who in the world hadn't heard of the Jenner-Andersons?

                                                                                            END~