Chapter 1

“Push!” ordered the doctor, his voice deep and rumbling. Galadriel wanted to slap him in the face – in fact, if her hands hadn’t been busy clutching the sheets, she’d have done just that.

“What do you think I’m doing!” she instead growled, gritting her teeth.

Mercifully, he didn’t answer. The pregnant Small was really one edge and she didn’t want to deal with more of this dumb doc. The screams of her first baby, a sweet girl with a head already full of ginger hairs, didn’t help her tried to keep her cool ; they were grating on her nerves, and sadly her husband had been forbidden from entering the room.

Mainly because he was just a man without medical knowledge and had no place being here, but also because, as a Normal, he would probably have ended trampled underfoot by someone at this point since all the staff was comprise of Smalls.

“Push!” repeated the doctor, his voice sounding somewhat tired and she did as he was telling her, if only to make him shut the fuck up.

A disagreeable sensation spread from between her legs and for a moment or two she worried that the second one would tear her open, something the first had already seemed to try, as far as she could tell.

Mercifully, it wasn’t the case and her new baby came out, howling as strongly as the older sibling, who seemed to dislike that noise a lot, since she started to scream even louder, making the young mother wince. She couldn’t wait to have them suckling on her tits, if only to make them be silent for some time. She relaxed as the nurses took the second baby.

“That’s a boy” said one of them, as if Galadriel hadn’t known for quite some time she was pregnant with two kids of different genders. “Weighting three hundreds and forty-five kilograms, for three meters and twenty-seven centimeters tall” she continued in a very professional tone. “A tad smaller than his sister.”

It was the understatement of the year, thought the new mother. Her baby daughter had been weighting almost five hundred kilograms for four meters sixty five centimeters, which was more than respectable for a Small newborn. Not that her brother seemed to be a runt; at his size he was definitively smaller and lither but it was somewhat usual for false twins and she knew from experience it’d probably mostly stay the same for some years at least – sometimes puberty did wonders on the smallest ones.

“Well, it’s almost over” stated the doctor, his voice less gruff now, almost relieved. “Just one more push to remove the placenta and we’ll be done Ma’am. It shouldn’t be longer than two minutes and then we’ll clean you, move you to your room and the babies will get to drink for the first time, okay?”

“Yeah, yeah” she replied, letting her head fall on the cushion which was supporting it at a somewhat awkward angle.

She felt her almost white hair matted on her head because of the sweat. She cursed softly but resisted the impulse to try and comb it now, it would have been futile. She was a mess and while she didn’t want Tristan seeing her like that, she knew she’d be a mess even more once she’d pushed the placenta out of her anyway. So she closed her eyes, took a deep breath and pushed, until she felt a huge sponge-like mass falling out of her. She let out a sigh of relief and opened her eyes with a smile.

This quickly faltered when she heard a distinct but incredibly weak wailing coming from between her legs. Mercifully, the two babies had been silent at just the right moment and not only her, but the doctor had picked up that sound and he quickly delved for whatever could have been producing it. Galadriel felt a sense of dread washing over her. It wasn’t possible. She wasn’t ready, even Tristan wasn’t ready for it! They hadn’t bought anything for… for whatever was screaming so feebly.

“Weight, 5,1 kilograms” stated the doctor after a minute or two, his voice still quite professional. “Height… damn it, don’t move too much little one” he grumbled. “Height, 49 centimeters. Congratulations Ma’am, you’ve got a second boy.”

Galadriel was horrified. That baby – that unwanted, unprepared for baby, was so pathetically puny! She knew her husband was small, especially compared to her, but it seemed absolutely unnatural for a Normal baby to be that small and weightless, surely? Tristan was a measly 1,96 meters tall, and she a little taller than average for a Small at 25 meters tall but that baby seemed far too minuscule for her. Was he even healthy? Shouldn’t she let him to the hospital for the time being?

“If you could relax a little?” asked a nurse who approached her with a tub full of hot water.

 “We’ll be cleaning you while the babies eat” she explained as another dropped the two Small babies on her, each of them weighing a lot.

“Well, the biggest two at least” said a third, who had picked up the smallest of them, who looked ridiculously minuscule in her hand. “This one will be fed with some tools we keep for the occasion, and we have staff trained – and sized accordingly – to make sure he’ll be well fed. If you feel the need to, we have peoples who would be happy to teach you how to deal with a different-sized baby.”

* * *

Tristan was a nervous wreck. He had to wait in the normal-sized section of the hospital, waiting for his wife to give birth to their children without being allowed near them at any time of her travails it was nerve-wracking for the anxious man.

Not for the first time, he felt a pang of regret at marrying a Small. They were already so much out of his world that he sometimes felt more like a pet than an equal, even if Galadriel was extremely kind and considerate of him and his opinions. It didn’t help him feel better pacing in this lonely room however.

“Mister Martin?” asked a voice, as a Normal nurse opened the door. “You’re children have been delivered safely! If you could put their names down on those papers while we are preparing your wife? Then we’ll brought you to them.”

He simply nodded and took the leaves of paper and he started to look at them. They were pre-completed, with the size and weight of the babies. He knew all Smalls didn’t deserve such an ironic name but seeing newborns far taller and heavier than he was, he felt a pang of dread. How would they ever respect him as children? Let alone as teenager?

He felt as if he was starting down a road toward hell. Still, he completed the forms. The elder daughter he named Valeria, like his wife wanted, the boy he wrote down Arthur as he had convinced her to accept.

“Excuse me, you gave me a third form, for a Normal baby” he said, waving it at the nurse. “I think it’s for someone else’s baby” he added, chuckling weakly as if to try and wave away his worries. “I wouldn’t want to put a bad name here, you know?”

“No, no, it’s yours” replied the nurse, sounding somewhat tired. “Your wife gave birth to a third baby, a Normal like you and me.”

Tristan felt his eyes bulging out of their sockets. Galadriel had did what? It wasn’t possible! They had never, ever, considered that possibility. It was absolutely horrible, the young father felt responsible for bringing some poor little guy into this world in a family where he wouldn’t have much to look up for.

He had agreed to have children because he was convinced they wouldn’t have been Normals, and Galadriel wanted some so much… but now he felt that it had been a terrible mistake.

“What should I call him?” he asked the nurse, completely dismayed. “We never discussed such a thing! Can’t it wait until after I see my wife and the babies?”

“Sorry, but procedure demands the kid be named now” replied the woman, who seemed too tired to care about his predicament.

“Fuck” he swore softly, as he picked up a pen and wrote down a name; it’d have to do, and he suspected that his wife wouldn’t really care one way or another, even if she had some gripes with “unique” names, of course. “Here, the name’s Dragos” he said the nurse as he handed her down the papers, as he had wrote down the first popping in his head.

He hoped he wouldn’t be berated for giving such a strange name to their second son, but he felt the little boy would need it. A unique name would help him set apart from his sibling in a different way than his size would, and perhaps it’d help him forge a special link with his mother, even if Tristan was doubtful of that.

He knew he was an exception when it came to his wife, who had mostly contempt for Normals, as far as he could tell at least, since she never displayed any interest in any – save him of course. In fact, he doubted she ever had a Normal friend in all her life and wouldn’t have married one if he hadn’t been so smitten by her that he had courted her with more persistence than he had ever suspected to have,

* * *

Galadriel was looking at her three children. Valeria was suckling her tit greedily, drawing more milk than her two brothers combined. Arthur had started almost as strongly but he had turned out to be full a lot faster than his sister and no effort from her part had enticed him back just yet.

He seemed far more interested in the Normal nurse making his younger brother, whose name she couldn’t guess, drink from a feeding bottle which had been filled with but a drop of her milk, as far as she could tell.

He didn’t seem to be misshapen and in fact, in the nurse’s arms, he looked perfectly proportionate. Which made her jealous of that nurse. How dare she feed her baby like that, so easily when she’d struggle to do the same?

That she wouldn’t ever have been able to do that with her other two babies was little comfort for the mother, who felt a sudden urge to protect that little thing from the world. She’d have to make sure her bigger children wouldn’t hurt their little brother.

“Gal!” yelped Tristan, startling her and making Arthur cry a little, until her mother could convince him to get back to drinking, while Valeria didn’t even stop her suckling for one moment. “How are you?”

The Small mother looked at her husband. Not for the first time, she wondered how she had ended with such a handsome if little man for a lover. She didn’t really care about Normals but Tristan was different.

His short auburn hair, his grey eyes and his great laugh had mellowed her heart and she had been the one going after him more so than the other way around. That he’d never score as much money as she did was of no consequence for her then, and it still wasn’t now, even if he could tell he was worried about a lot of things recently.

“I’m fine honey” she replied softly, being more than thankful for the little wash the nurses had given her. “And as you can see the little ones are fine too.”

“Well, two of them at least” he darkly said, not having noticed the baby in the nurse’s arms apparently.

“The three of them” she said, pointing at the youngest of their three children. “By the way, what’s his name? The nurses told me you had to pick one to come here. Nothing too bad I hope. It better not be Aragorn or Boromir, I already told you I don’t want it or any Lord of the Rings names.”

“It’s Dragos” he replied almost meekly and while she huffed and rolled her eyes, she didn’t said anything – it wasn’t a LotR name, after all.

“What do we do now?” she asked him. “We’ll need you to go shopping for stuff his size. It’s a good thing Normals don’t require a lot of maintenance, right?”

“Yeah, I guess” he muttered and looked away, which worried Galadriel, since she knew her husband was somewhat prone to have mood swings and, more importantly, had some form of self-loathing for his kind she had never really understood.

Not that she respected the little things a lot, but she had to admit they had some fortitude, still going with their lives in a world where they were by far the bottom of the pecking order without apparently too much complains. And one of them had made her fall in love with him, in the end.

She wouldn’t have been to do that. Almost all Smalls wanted to achieve positions of power and prestige after all, and she wasn’t different, being an important lawyer in Gigantopia proper, but starting to branch out outside of the borders of the nation.

Other countries, where Normals were the crushing majority even after the cataclysms caused by the Great Growth Era – or any other name it had been given – were lagging behind the Old World in term of scientific advancement and knowledge that they were starting to try and forge bond with it, and it was exactly what she wanted, to make more money and accrue more power. Perhaps someday she’d even move to another country, where she would be seen as an absolute colossus.

“Hey, it’ll be okay, Tris” she told him, trying to lift his spirits. “You shouldn’t be so dejected. He won’t be taking much place at home and you’ll get to share with me the joy of feeding a baby” she chuckled.

“Yeah well… I’m not sure I’ll be a great father for him… or any of them...” he told her frankly, which surprised her.

Galadriel knew he hadn’t really wanted children and it was more the idea that they’d be Small and thus he wouldn’t really have much to do with their upbringing – at least that what he thought but she had other plans about that! – which had convinced him to give in.

Now, he seemed to almost regret it, and she’d need to work around that and make sure he understood that all was for the best. And she had a general idea about where to start, she realized with a grin.

“Come here”, she said, extending a hand to capture him and unceremoniously drop him between the two oldest newborns. “Can I have my third one?” she asked the nurse. “My husband will finish feeding him.”

“Gal” he started but he was interrupted by a loud burp from Valeria, who finally stopped drinking to look at the little thing next to her, and giggled innocently when she saw her father for the first time.

“See, she already loves you! And Arthur’s just too busy looking at his brother” she stated as the younger Small lifted a hand and tried to grab the nurse with her brother, who was approaching now, having already stopped to drink from her. “Careful sweetie” she gently chided him, bringing his arm back to her. “Dragos’ coming, don’t worry!”

The nurse approached as much as she could and gently dropped the baby on the palm of Gal’s hand, and the feeding bottle next to it. It seemed that Dragos was, proportionally speaking, as much of a drinker as his sister because he started to cry as soon as he couldn’t suck on it. And of course, Arthur did the same, which produced far more noise, enough to convince Valeria that something was happening and she couldn’t be left out, so she wailed with the other two.

“Well, I hope they’ll calm down fast” winced Tristan who picked Dragos with some difficulties and started to feed him again. “I’ll be deaf before long if they scream like that.”

“Well, you haven’t turned deaf yet and I’ve screamed louder a number of times” chuckled Galadriel, who let out a roaring laugh when her husband turned a bright shade of red and turned his back on her, mortified. “You’re just too cute not to tease Tristan” she said, caressing his back with one finger, as tenderly as she could.

“Yeah? Well you’d better not be unhappy with my choices for Dragos’ clothes and toys then!” he stated, but his wife could tell he was feeling a bit better at least.

“I’ll make no such promises” replied the giantess.