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Samantha Maroun had difficulty paying attention to the book that she had brought with her from her apartment to the safehouse. Between the harsh thunderclaps rolling outside and the occasional wince and breathing from Amanda, it was hard to focus on anything. Both Carisi and Nolan's head lifted from the game of chess that they were playing at the coffee table each time she had a contraction. She had no doubt that Captain Benson would, too, if she weren't upstairs with Detective Stabler.
Even though Sam hadn't yet been pregnant, she felt a twinge of sympathy for Amanda each time. Her pregnancy seemed to be going smoothly when compared to her pregnancies with Jesse and Billie, only for a wrench to be thrown in when she was so close to her due date.
It had started when the mother of one of Billie's friends at preschool was gunned down in a drive-by-shooting during pick-up. Violet had found out that the vehicle had been registered to a woman named Nia Papa-- the sister of the gang BX9's founder, Oscar Papa. The 2-7 coordinated with SVU and OCCB, and found out that Nia had been assigned by her brother to go after the family of the man who prosecuted him after he had greenlit Captain Benson.
During Nia's trial, Nolan and Sam were sent anonymous threats that were suspected to be part of someone's attempt to revive the gang on Papa's behalf. The threats against Carisi and Amanda's family continued, while new ones were sent to Captain Benson and Detective Stabler. Eventually, WITSEC had to intervene and place all six of them in a safehouse. Jesse and Billie were staying with Carisi's parents in Staten Island, while Captain Benson's son Noah was with his half-brother Connor's adoptive family upstate.
All of their devices had been confiscated, and the only phones were two landlines or walkie talkies that went to the police detail that was in front of the house. And as if God or Fate or whatever wanted to mess with them, Amanda began having contractions during their first night in the house.
They had continued over the past three days, but they were very far apart. Amanda told them that she wouldn't even qualify them as her being "in labor," and that it was closer to Braxton-Hicks. Either way, they all went out of her way to try to make her feel comfortable; Sam had offered her room to Amanda and bunked in with Nolan (living out a real-life It Happened One Night, she had observed when they elected to share the bed, but keep one leg hanging off of the mattress), Carisi was constantly offering back rubs, Liv-- sorry, Captain Benson-- helped her breath through the pain and distracted her with some print photos of the girls that she had brought, and even Detective Stabler would help her up and down the stairs.
Thunder rumbled loudly outside-- possibly the loudest one yet. It was loud enough to remind Sam of the first and only time that she had been to a concert-- the ringing ears, the inexplicable vibrating feeling under her skin...
Sam jumped to her feet, Amanda shot up with a gasp, while Nolan and Carisi jolted back with a start as if they were waking up from a bad dream. The overhead lights and the reading lamp that Sam was using flickered once before going completely black.
"Dominick?"
"'Manda, I'm here-- we're all here-- Nolan, you good?"
"Yeah-- Sam?" Nolan turned around, making his way over to his friend. "Are you okay?"
"I'm-- I'm fine, Nolan," she told him. "Just a little startled."
She was almost startled again by the sound of footsteps coming from upstairs.
"What happened?! Everyone okay?!"
Even in the darkness, Sam could make out Detective Stabler's figure as he and Captain Benson ran down the stairs, skipping two steps in sync with each other.
"Yeah, we're fine," Sam told him.
"We shoulda figured that the storm might get this bad," Carisi remarked.
"We're already being hunted in a game of cat and mouse with a street gang that attacked me in front of Noah-- were we supposed to prepare for a derecho, too?" Captain Benson pointed out in a rhetorical question.
"She's right, Carisi," Nolan said.
"Dominick..." Amanda was barely able to say, her hand running over her belly.
"'Manda, you okay? Somethin' wrong?" Carisi asked.
"The-- that last clap of thunder scared me enough," she told him. "My water broke."
Sam's eyes widened and she looked from Amanda, to Nolan, and then back again. She remembered hearing when her cousin had her baby that either when the contractions were five minutes apart, or when the mother's water broke, was when the mother had to go to the hospital. She could hear Carisi taking a deep breath to try to settle himself so that he could be calm for his wife.
"Okay-- Nolan, Sam, you call 911," he requested. "Liv, Stablah, you go tell Norris and Hoopah what's goin' on."
Both Nolan and Sam rushed over to the downstairs phone. Nolan was the first to pick it up from the charger and tried to dial the numbers, but frowned when he put it to his ear.
"Phone's down," he said as it put it back on the charger.
Captain Benson and Detective Stabler were looking out the window, trying to
"A couple of trees fell down-- it's blocked us off from our detail," Captain Benson reported. "Even if that didn't happen, there's no way we could drive in this weather."
"Let alone walk three yards to the cars," Stabler added.
Both Carisi and Amanda looked nervous, but Amanda's expression twisted into a familiar one of pain.
"'Notha contraction?" he asked.
Amanda only nodded, but was able to give him a look that could clearly be translated to, "What do you think?"
"You wanna lie down?" he asked her.
"No, I'm-- I'm more comfortable standing right now," she told him through her teeth, clenched with pain.
"Okay-- when Hooper was giving us a tour of the house, she said that there's an emergency kit under my bed," Captain Benson said. "There's a first aid kit, flashlights, a crank radio--"
"I'll go get it," Nolan said, running upstairs.
Sam watched as Nolan left her line of sight, turning all of her attention to Amanda. "I can put the cushions on the floor if you need it later--"
"No, we're not gonna need it latah," Carisi insisted. "The powah's gonna come back on, and we'll get 'Manda to a hospital, right, 'Manda?"
"Carisi, it's unlikely that the power's going to come back on so quickly," Captain Benson tried to keep him grounded in reality.
"She's right," Amanda told him. "Even if my water didn't break right now, my contractions still have been getting closer together."
Fear was etched across Dominick's face as it began to fully hit him.
There was no power.
A derecho was raging outside.
And his wife-- his partner and best friend-- was having their baby.
"This baby... is coming now," Amanda said. "And he's not gonna wait."
As Nolan returned with the emergency kit, Sam began to lay the couch cushions onto the floor, flipping them onto the other side after the up-facing ones had been stained with Amanda's amniotic fluid. Captain Benson grabbed three throw pillows to help prop Amanda up, and Stabler retrieved towels from the downstairs bathroom.
"Does this house have a gas stove?" Nolan asked as he and Carisi helped Amanda to the makeshift bed.
"I think so, why?" Carisi answered.
"Good-- then we need to boil some water to clean the scissors-- and we need something to clamp the cord with," Nolan
"Wait-- you're delivering the baby?" Stabler asked incredulously.
"No, Amanda is," Nolan said dryly. "I'm just helping."
"But you don't have any medical experience," Stabler pointed out.
"I was in the delivery room when my sister-in-law had her second," Nolan told him. "I may not be a doctor, but I'm not as squeamish as you'd think I'd be. And besides, you and Benson have been trained for this kind of situation, right?"
Stabler and Benson looked at each other, as if recalling a memory from their complicated past that Nolan and Sam didn't know much of, and Amanda and Carisi were still trying to figure out.
Stabler turned back to Nolan and nodded. "Yeah, we do-- Liv, more so than me, but yes."
"Good," Nolan said firmly. "Now go boil the water, bring me some scissors and something to clamp the cord, like I said."
Elliot nodded again, going into the kitchen to start his work. He looked over his shoulder, watching as Nolan began to help coach Rollins through her contractions. His chest began to tighten with that familiar regret-- the kind when you realized that you had misjudged a person completely just because you refused to see things from their point of view.
Just as he had judged Benson as a baby-faced rookie when they were partnered up back in the 90s.
He was beginning to realize what Nolan told him that day in front of the courthouse was right.
He didn't know Nolan Price.
"Amanda, just lean back against Carisi-- you can hold Sam and Captain Benson's hands," Nolan told her.
Amanda began to settle into Carisi's arms, her back against his torso with her ear against his heart. Each hand gripped onto Olivia and Sam's hands with a vise-like grip, with her nails digging into their skin.
"You're doing great, Amanda," Sam assured her, though she was feeling a little out of her depth.
After all, she had never seen a live birth before. Sure, she had seen them on television and in movies, but to see it in person...
It wasn't that she was grossed out; after all, she herself was a woman and she was very comfortable with her body, not to mention proud of what it could accomplish. But it was daunting-- the fact that someone was trusting her with not only her life, but the life of her baby.
If Nolan was feeling the same way, he didn't seem to show it.
The next four hours passed so slowly that all six of them would have thought it had been a full day. But thankfully, by the third hour, Amanda's labor began to progress a little more quickly. Nolan would ask Stabler to help him check her dilation, as he had more experience in observing a birth than him.
"Jealous, Liv?" Amanda had quipped with a teasing smirk the first time it had happened, making both Olivia and Nolan blush, and Elliot pretend not to hear.
"She's at ten," Nolan announced at one-fifteen AM. "She's ready to push. Okay, Amanda... one... two... three, push!"
Amanda grunted, bearing down with as much force as she could. She gasped out a breath, throwing herself back against Dominick.
"Keep goin', Manda," he encouraged. "You can do it, you can do it. You've done it before, you can do it again..."
Ten minutes passed as Amanda continued pushing, her eyes making tears involuntarily from having to give birth without any medication. She cursed herself for letting herself get complacent from getting an epidural during Billie's birth.
"I can see the top of the head," Nolan commentated before looking over at Elliot. "He looks suspiciously like you, Detective."
Despite initially looking like he was walking the line between indignant and just plain pissed-off, Elliot had it in him to laugh along with the others.
Another twelve minutes had passed before Nolan announced, "One final push, Amanda-- just one big push-- come on."
With a final sobbing grunt, Amanda felt her and Carisi's son finally leave her body. Nolan caught the baby in his arms, using the nasal aspirator and rubbing the infant's chest to clear his airways before a wail overcame the thunder outside. Both Amanda and Dominick began to cry with joy as Nolan laid the baby atop Amanda's chest, using two towels to clean off the blood and amniotic fluid.
"Oh, he's here!" Amanda cried it. "He's here."
Sam helped Nolan try to clean the baby, smiling at both what she had just witnessed and what she was seeing now. Elliot and Olivia shared a smile with each other before turning their attention in the newborn in Amanda's arms.
Soon, the afterbirth was delivered (Dominick cut the cord, as he had done with Jesse and Billie) and put in the cooler that had been brought up from the drive (Amanda and Dominick had researched cord blood banking during this pregnancy and decided on donating the placenta).
Nolan carefully lifted the baby into his arms. "I think it's time for your first bath. Sam, you think you could give me a hand with that?"
Sam smiled. "Sure."
It was more difficult than Nolan thought, trying to set up a bath setting for a newborn whose umbilical stump had not fallen off; he remembered from both Mackenzie and Hudson's births that until then, it had to be a sponge bath.
"Sponge... sponge... I thought I saw one earlier at dinner," he mumbled to himself, trying to be careful with the baby as he looked around the kitchen.
"Nolan?"
He turned around when Sam tapped him on the shoulder, seeing that she was holding a sponge in her hand. He sighed with relief.
"Thank you."
"You're welcome."
The two of them washed off the leftover fluid that the baby was covered it as the little one made occasional squeaky coos and a few cries at having been pried from his home for the last nine months. Even though Nolan knew that the baby couldn't understand him, he still talked.
"We're gonna try and see how much you weigh next," he whispered. "And how long are you-- I'd say tall, but it's a little confusing, huh?"
Sam giggled, feeling the newborn tightly grip onto her pinky with his chubby little hand. "Uncle Nolan talks a lot, doesn't he?"
"I admit, I do," Nolan conceded.
Sam's gaze lingered on the sight of both Nolan and the baby, though her mind's eye showed her a different scene. While it was the same as the one before her, the context was completely different.
Nolan seemed to notice, and even though the storm had also knocked out the air conditioning, she could feel her face growing hot.
"Thinking about something interesting?" he asked.
"Just... you'd make a great dad," she told him.
"Well, that's looking increasingly distant at the moment-- don't want to admit that it's unlikely, but that just makes it all the more so," he lamented.
"You could adopt, like Captain Benson did," she pointed out. "If that's what you want."
"I would like to adopt at some point," he agreed. "But... seeing Carisi and Amanda with their girls-- and now, with this little guy-- I've been wanting that for a while now. It's just a matter of..."
"Finding the right partner," she finished for him.
His kaleidoscopic eyes stared into her jewel brown ones, in awe of how she seemed to get into his mind and untangle his thoughts.
"Yeah," he said with a small smile.
After the bath, they weighed Baby Boy Carisi (eight pounds, fourteen ounces) and measured him (20.4 inches), and swaddled him in a thin, breathable blanket that had been in the storage space within the couch, placing him back in his mother's arms.
"Hi, darlin'," Amanda whispered, her Southern drawl coming in clearly in her exhaustion. "Hi... I'm your mommy."
"And I'm your daddy," Dominick whispered, running his fingers over his son's fuzzy head. "And you got two big sistahs-- Jesse and Billie. You'll see 'em for the first time soon, but I think you'll know their voices. They talked to ya a lot when you were in your mama's belly. And you got a lotta of aunts and uncles and cousins and your grandparents and your godparents who are gonna love you like crazy."
"Speaking of..." Amanda lifted her head to look at Nolan and Sam. "I talked to Liv, and she doesn't mind sharing the honor with the two of you."
Nolan and Sam looked at each other before turning back to Amanda, smiling.
"Really?" Sam asked.
"Sami, I don't know what we would've done with you and Nolan here," Amanda said. "And Nolan... thank you so much."
Nolan's smile turned a little shy and he ducked his head a bit. "I'm glad to have done it. When the storm lets up, we'll be able to get you both to a hospital."
"You decided on a name?" Olivia asked.
"Well, we already had his first name picked out, and while we had an idea for his middle name, we changed our minds," Dominick answered.
Amanda adjusted the baby in her arms so that the others could get a better view. "Say hello to Oliver Nolan Carisi."