Twisted Frame (VA Fanfic)

Fifteen: Is This Picture Perfect?

RPOV
The room finally cleared of the chaotic audience, Hans approached the stage where the Moroi Council had gathered around the Monarchical candidates and aforementioned candidates' quorums.
"As Head Guardian I address the Moroi Council and request that Council support and confirm the reinstatement of Miss Hathaway and Mr Belikov as Guardians."
The stunned Council remained speechless for a brief moment before gathering—Lissa finally brought into the fold and her rightful status finally acknowledged—and whispering heatedly. What felt like hours later but couldn't have been longer than fifteen or twenty minutes after Hans made his request, Council faced the Head Guardian. With guarded expressions, one-by-one each member responded.
The Badica, Conta, Ozera, Dashkov, Voda, Drozdov, Zeklos, Szlesky, and Dragomir representatives gave Hans their support and confirmed both my reinstatement and Dimitri's. Effective immediately. With such a definite majority, not even a Monarch's double vote could have stopped Dimitri and I receiving our Guardian titles once more.
"Welcome back, Guardians," Hans nodded at us.
With that complete, the remaining Moroi left the room, having decided to resume the election process tomorrow morning.
"Jill?" I asked as she made to leave the stage.
"Yes Rose?" she smiled tentatively.
"Do you want to accompany me in the NICU and meet my daughter?"
The tentative smile was swiftly replaced with a hopeful and excited grin. "Absolutely!"
So, with Dimitri on my left and Jill on my right, I made my way back to the hospital and into the NICU.
Dimitri held me close as I introduced my daughter.
"Oh Rose, she's absolutely precious!" she sighed before babbling on and on about just how adorable my baby is and how lucky she is to have Dimitri as her daddy and me as her mommy.

"You can have your first cuddle now," Annabella's doctor announced after Sonya had retrieved Jill an hour later.
"Really?" I asked in disbelief. Whilst my daughter had always been strong enough for caresses and massages, she hadn't yet been cleared for cuddles outside her incubator. At three weeks old, she had finally made it to the point where she could be removed from her incubator and held. I almost cried from the joy and relief that flooded through me when the doctor responded to my question with a nod and smile.
"Do you want to hold her first? You haven't seen her in over a week."
Dimitri shook his head. "No, Roza—I was the one who got to caress her first. She should have her first cuddle with her mother, it's the only fair and right thing to do."
"Okay," I smiled tenderly and lovingly, completely overwhelmed by just how much this man and our family meant to me.
The nurses helped arrange me in one of the NICU's gliders and prepared me for my first cuddle with my baby girl, strongly advising skin-to-skin contact. I hastily agreed; I wanted to be as close to Annabella as I could get.
When she was finally in my embrace, the dam burst; my tears flooded down my cheeks and tender words poured from lips, my heart overflowing with affection for the tiny creature created from the love Dimitri and I shared, a physical, tangible manifestation of the most important, intangible thing I had ever felt and believed in. She made the impossible possible. And I would never ever be able to get enough of her.
"Oh Roza," I heard Dimitri sigh affectionately beside me, but I could not tear my eyes away from my daughter in order to see my emotional response being mirrored in his eyes, though I knew it was without needing the visible confirmation.
"She's perfect, Comrade, absolutely perfect."
"Yes she is. Because she's ours, Roza."
"We have a daughter, Dimitri. It finally feels real. We have a daughter."
"We have a daughter, Roza." I felt his lips on my forehead, placing a gentle kiss there before whispering in awe. "We really have a daughter. We made a new life. We made a miracle, Roza."
"So we did, Dimitri. We absolutely did. It's amazing, isn't it? She is."
"Mhmm."

"Your turn, Daddy," I murmured about an hour later.
We switched positions with the help of the nurses.
Seeing my badass Russian battle god holding our tiny daughter against his chest so carefully had me falling in love with him all over again.
"She's still so tiny," he whispered.
"She is. It's hard to believe that she was about half this size when she was born. It's crazy that she's doubled in size in less than a month. She's put up one hell of a fight to do so, and I don't think she's going to ever give up."
"She gets that from her mother," he grinned at me.
"Comrade?"
"Yes Roza?"
"Let's get married right here, the moment Annabella is one month old."
"That's just a few days away!"
"Exactly, Dimitri. I don't want to overthink it. I don't want Lissa able to make a big production of it. I just want you, me, and Annabella. I just want to make us official. I want to make sure that Annabella will never have to contend with her legitimacy being questioned. If we wait until she's old enough to be a flower girl and remember witnessing her parents getting married she's going to be old enough to understand that people doubt that her dhampir father is her legitimate, biological father. I can't have that happen, Dimitri, and neither can you. She's been through too much already—I can't have that on my conscience too. I love you both too much to let that happen."
"And what if she didn't exist, Roza? Would you be in such a hurry to marry me?"
"No," I confessed quietly, thoughtfully. "But I would still marry you, Dimitri. Just as quietly. I'd probably even push to go to Vegas, tacky as it is, just to avoid Bridezilla Lissa planning my wedding for me and not listening when I tell her no. If we didn't have Annabella, I'd avoid being an engaged teen, and a teenaged bride. If we didn't have her, I'd have liked to settle into our life together first, iron out the kinks, then get engaged and married, formalising it all. But we do have her, and she changes everything. She's meant to change it all. I'm a teenage mother, barely an adult and out of high school myself. I have a family of my own I never dared dream about. I never even thought I'd find true love, but it found me, so I never considered myself having a life outside of being Lissa's Guardian. But I do, now. And I am not prepared to have any part of it in question. So yeah, any previous notions and concerns I had or would have had that would result in me delaying our engagement and marriage until I was in my twenties became petty and insignificant in light of our daughter's birth. My priorities have changed, Dimitri, and that's not a bad thing—it's a good thing, a really good thing."
"I'm not going to lie, Roza. It hurts hearing you admit that you wouldn't even accept my proposal until you were twenty if we didn't have Annabella, let alone marry me any earlier."
"I sense a but."
"But I know that we'd need time to figure out how to overcome all we've been through, for you to trust me again, for you to place your trust in us, for me to be able to forgive myself truly and completely, and for me to understand how you already have even before I do or say something stupid that hurts you and breaks you. I know you well enough by now Roza to understand that without sorting through all that first, you couldn't in good conscience agree to marry me. Not to mention, you're still so young that it'd be unfair to you and wrong of me to put you in that position in the first place, no matter how much more mature you are than others your own age."
"I love you, Comrade."
"As I love you, Roza."