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To say Chimney was freaking out about becoming a dad would be an understatement. Maddie was seven months along and he just felt more clueless the more he researched. If he’d had a good role model growing up, he still probably would have been petrified, but his lack of a relationship with his own father made him feel even worse.
As he walks through aisles of baby clothes, he wants to scream. How is even picking out clothes for his daughter hard?
He hears Buck snicker behind him. “Why are looking at the clothes like they’re about to eat you whole?”
“Because they are!” Chimney whines. “How am I supposed to know what my daughter is going to like? What if she hates pink, huh? What if she doesn’t want to wear bows and ribbons and glitter?”
Chimney is too distracted by all of the pink and glitter in the aisle to notice the look go from teasing to soft on Buck’s face, but Maddie notices it right away.
“Hey Mads, we should get going, Chimney is going a bit cuckoo.” Buck grins.
“Alright, alright, just let me use the bathroom and then we’ll go get some food, alright?” She rubs Chimney’s shoulder and smiles brightly at her fiance. “Be right back!”
“So, wanna tell me why you’re freaking out?” Buck smirks. “I’m about to be your brother in law and the best uncle to your daughter, you might as well start accepting it now and let me be a good brother in law.”
Chimney scoffs. “Don’t remind me.”
“You want Maddie, you get me, too, brother.” He laughs. “Are you having pre-birth jitters?”
Chimney groans. “How am I going to be a good dad if every part of this freaks me out? I don’t want my daughter growing up resenting us because she hated her outfits as a baby? What if I hurt her by accident by putting her to bed, or wrapping her, or bathing her? It should all seem simple but it’s not simple. I was okay being Denny’s godfather and babysitting him, but this my baby, I don’t want to ruin her.”
Buck whistles. “Wow, okay. Man, trust me, as long as you listen to what your daughter wants when she’s old enough to have an opinion, you’re already doing better than my folks, okay?”
Chimney gulps. “Yeah?”
“Yeah! As for bathing and swaddling her, you’ve got a great teacher in Maddie. She used to bathe me when I was a baby.” He grins fondly.
Chimney raises an eyebrow at that. “Wasn’t Maddie eight when you were a baby? Why didn’t your parents do that?”
Buck sighs, brings a hand behind his neck and rubs the nape of it awkwardly. “Yeah. My folks weren’t really interested in, ya know, parenting me. Maddie pretty much raised me.”
“I’m sorry, man.”
Buck shakes his head. “Don’t be. Maddie’s raised a baby before, when she didn’t have to, so don’t worry about your daughter not growing up the way she should. You’re both gonna be great parents, okay?”
The advice makes Chimney feel better about being a dad, but it doesn’t make him happy. He thinks back to the times where he’d make fun of Buck for not knowing how to do simple things, or his relationship with Bobby, and he feels bad. He knows better than anyone how shitty father’s can be, and to think Buck grew up almost the same way makes him sad. Now he knows some of why the Buckley siblings don’t talk about their parents, why Maddie said they were bad parents.
He figures it shows on his face that it upsets him because Buck clears his throat. “When I was two and Maddie was ten, she set the bath for me and got distracted by some movie on the TV. She only remembered the bath when it overflowed so much it flooded the entire bathroom and the hall. It’s my earliest memory, I think, because I remember her covered in the bubbles she’d put in the bath beforehand and-”
“I was ten, don’t judge me!” Maddie cuts in. “I was distracted by Leo DiCaprio, okay, you can’t blame me.”
“Don’t let her get distracted, or she’ll flood that new house of yours, Chim.” Buck laughs as Maddie hits him. “She won’t get distracted if it’s your daughter, though, okay?”
“Thank you.” Maddie rolls her eyes. “Enough stories, I’m starving and so is baby Han.”
With Maddie by his side, Chimney can’t be too scared.