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| Details |
| Author: | Athena |
| Summary: | The wave that nearly destroyed House Fallon is gone, but at a price. Siamus reveals the bargain he had to make, and Avrenne offers what solace she has to give into a strange, newly empty world. Adult themes of character and romance RP. 9800~ words. |
| Rating: | A for Adults Only 18+ |
Chain: Siarenne
Avrenne enters her room through her bedroom door, and shuts it behind her. There's a brief pause there, before she strides forward to the bassinet, and sets Ery down carefully. The infant's arms go up and out for a moment, her hands balled into tiny fists, and then she settles back into the deep sleep once more.
Avrenne watches her daughter, and then sinks to the floor to her knees. Silent sobs wrack her body in violent shakes, her hands gripping onto the bassinet like a lifeline. It doesn't last for long. She halts it, drags both hands to her face to press down so hard she will leave marks behind. Then she gets to her feet, and brushes at her eyes wet but with the tears unfallen.
She crosses the room to the connecting door, drawing it mostly closed and wastes no time at all going directly to Siamus' unconscious side. Even before she climbs onto the bed with him, to huddle up against the scarred left side of his, she is already singing in her lowest, softest voice the Amhrán Na Farraige.
As she moves into the second verse, Siamus sighs softly, and shifts to wrap an arm around her. He does not open his eyes, but he is plainly aware and listening to her.
She keeps going until the end of the song, but the tenor of it changes at his movement, from a soft lullaby to a stronger assertion. Some of the clarity improves as she lifts her head from singing into his chest, to looking up at his face. At the last, she lets the note trail off into a whisper.
"Siamus." He can feel her hand moving up between them to touch lightly against his cheek. Her skin is no warmer than it should be.
"My mermaid," he says quietly, still without opening his eyes. "Am I awake?"
"All evidence suggests so, yes," Avrenne answers. Her tone is too tired to hit anywhere near playful.
"Ah," he says, and opens his eyes. He gazes straight upward at the ceiling. "It's strange," he says. Presumably he does not mean the ceiling, which is not doing anything out of the ordinary at the moment.
He turns his head at an awkward angle to peer down at her. "How is our minnow?"
"She is well. Asleep now, in the other room in her bassinet." She traces the shape of his cheek, then trails her fingers down to his chest to rest them there. "What is strange?"
A silence, and then he shakes his head. "Waking. I thought I was dreaming. It was… hard to tell, for a time." His hand moves, idly soothing, on her shoulder. "All the household is well?"
Avrenne flinches. "I — " She stops, tries again. "Everyone of the household who was here, is as well as can be expected." Her voice has that forced lowness, forced steadiness. Avrenne's shoulders shake. "I had Miss Coit summon the others, from Stormwind. Isla, Finley, and Ralaea all were able to make it here. Ralaea was wounded, but she will recover. Finley was…something happened to him, but he is well enough now. The rest… the… there was a wave in Stormwind. The Stormwind Harbor was hit, and the townhouse must have been —." Her voice breaks. "There isn't anyone else to…summon."
Siamus's hand on her shoulder freezes, and his arm tightens convulsively around her. "Ah," he says again, in the same weirdly nonchalant tone he'd used earlier to tell her that everything would be fine if she did exactly as he said.
After a further moment, he lifts his hand to lay it over his eyes. "Tides forgi'e me," he says heavily. "Who was at the townhouse? Barbour — Barbour would have been. Who else?"
Siamus has heard her use this particular way of speaking before as well, as she says with gravity and a pause between each name, "Sir Geoffrey Somer. Sophie Mercailles. Marten Croft. Milla Croft. Alys Gray."
He takes his hand from his eyes — they are dry, but closed again — and turns his face to put his lips briefly against her hair. "After everything," he whispers to her. "After everything else they came through. To this, now. Avrenne."
She makes small, pained sounds, tucks her head against his chest. She seems tiny, and fragile. "It isn't your fault. It isn't anyone's fault. You have to know that. You can't know that it will happen, or where. Stormwind should have been safe. But that is…always the way of it. It's always safe, until it isn't anymore. I should have kept us all together. I should have remembered that." Which sounds a little bit like she's sneaking some personal blame under the table, as a treat, despite her earlier assertion. "Siamus — Finley and Isla, they said there was a dragon, a black dragon, in Stormwind City, after the tidal wave. It damaged the city, something about the Park, and then it left. I don't — I don't have more details. But it might have been what did this all. It's mathematically improbable that it is not connected."
At that, Siamus lifts his face from her hair and opens his eyes. He gazes bleakly at nothing. "A black dragon. Wi' the wave."
He lifts his free hand to his eyes but this time only to rub at them tiredly. "I should have thought — tides forgi'e me, I should have thought of our people in the city. I didn't know it — I promised safe harbor, aye? I promised all of ye safe harbor, an end to running."
"We couldn't have known, not in time. But you still kept your promise, even this far. Isla, Finley, Ralaea — none of them had to keep running. They're here, back at home with family, back in your safe harbor, because you brought Miss Coit into our lives. You are why she is here. You found a way so that I am not once more left wondering what happened, so that they aren't still running blindly, alone. It's not the same as before." Avrenne's hand on his chest moves up to find his own, and the tone of her voice changes, something bleak replaced by something softer, the shift of grief to gratitude, subtle but audible.
"I didn't run," she admits. "Not after I saw you catch the wave. I knew what it meant. That there wasn't enough time. That you would die before you would break what you had sworn on your name. That even if you didn't think you could stop it, you would not stop trying until the very last second, the very last of what you had to give. That the safest place was here, because this is where you were, and that all I had to do was keep my faith in you. I didn't have to run.
"And I didn't have to stand there, and hold back the impossible, face what it might cost me," she tries to say, but her voice is breaking, becoming sounds between small gasps. "Because you were there to break it on yourself, like you always do."
Siamus gives a strange, shuddering breath and for a moment there is a bitter, bleak twist to his smile. But then it softens, saddens, and he gathers her closer against him. "My heart, my mermaid. Ye saved my life. I'd have seen ye away from this place, you and Ery safe, but ye stayed and saved my life. Your faith —"
His voice roughens and he stops abruptly.
"I would have never left you behind. I would have done something, had you summoned, and opened a portal to take our chances in Stormwind. But you turned back to hold to your promise, and that meant there was some earthly thing you might do. I looked at the whole of that wave before our house, and I knew you were greater than it.
"But so too did I remember the ending of the story of those tidesages who held back the water. The only one who survived, in the end, was Ery, because she had her mermaid. And so you had yours, whatever I might do. Because if it had cost your life to hold this ground, it would not have been worth it."
He exhales again slowly. After a silence, he says softly, "Ery died, pet. Her mermaid saved her by… bringing her back as something else."
He shifts onto his side to face her, still gathered against him, and kisses her forehead gently. "But aye. Her Halia brought Ery back. And my own mermaid, my little Halia, saved me as well." He strokes her hair back from the side of her face. "I would have paid my life, mo chroí. If that were the price for you and our minnow, I would have paid it willingly."
"I know. I would pay the same, for you and her." She raises her head up again to look at him. It's obvious she has been crying, and letting the tears slide out. "I could have opened a portal to Stormwind and held it long enough for everyone to go through. But I don't think I could do it and survive the casting, and I would not have been able to walk through it."
"I didn't give ye time," he says, his voice colorless. "I said… I told all of ye that there was time. But there wasn't. I misjudged it, for all of ye."
"I did the same thing, when we ran from the Scourge, in the Fall. I was sure we could clear the hill in time. I misjudged it; we were too slow, or they were too fast, and there wasn't time, not in the end. So I made there be enough time, and so did you. That's who you are. You saved all of us."
Siamus strokes her back wordlessly. At length he says, "I didn't… know if I could, Avrenne."
She searches his face, and there's the start of a smile to her expression. "I wasn't sure if you went to stop it knowing if you could, or could not do more than delay a moment. But I knew it wouldn't matter. I knew even if you knew, believed truly that you could not stop it, that you would try as hard and as fully as if there had been a real chance. You would have given it everything, because you promised me you would come back. There is nothing I trust in this world more than you doing everything to keep your word once given."
He closes his eyes. "Aye," he says in a rough whisper. "Aye. I did — everything I could. I'm a man of my word."
She moves in his arms, as if she's trying to get closer, or see him better. "The most extraordinary man of honor I have ever known. I am so proud of you, of what you did today."
"If I hadn't, mo chroí — if I wasn't able to…?" He holds her close against him, possibly so that it's difficult at her angle to see his face.
"Mr. Shine would have taken Ery, Brendol, and Otto through a portal into Stormwind, in the hopes that the chances of survival there were better than a non-zero. I was as far away as it would take me to open it, and have them go through. I would have tried to teleport, but likely be unsuccessful. And so you and I would have died there, with the children in danger in Stormwind to the dragon, but not gone in the wave." It's spoken with a mathematical matter-of-fact tone, the presentation of the end of an equation. "The house would have been lost, and everything in it."
"It was a possible ending," she admits. "Mr. Shine asked me why I would not open a portal sooner, and I told him the truth — that I didn't know what was on the other side, but I knew what was here, and I was choosing to believe in you, to trust that by your side was the safest place we could possibly be. I bet my life on it, and I have no regrets at all, only gratitude that all the choices of my life up until now led me here, to you."
She is definitely trying to see his face — there's a quality of her movements that suggests she's aware of the exact angle she needs, and she is actively moving into it. There's something in her voice as well, a thread of concern woven through the gratitude.
He is silent for a time, his breathing so slow and even that she would be forgiven for thinking he'd fallen asleep again. Eventually, though, he stirs. "My heart," he tells her. "I don't deserve such a trust, though ye honor me beyond words. I can't — all I want is to keep you and the minnow, all our people safe. I don't know that I can. We might…." He hesitates, exhales a dry, unhappy laugh. "I'd say we might go inland, find a safer place for ye, but wi' the events in the city, I can't say where in the Kingdoms would be safer just now."
"It's never a place. It's not the mountains; it's not the coast. It's not the cities; it's not the forests. It's always a person. It's you; it's me. It's all of us. We stay to — gether," she says, and her voice shudders, an inhale that punches in her chest. She tries again. "We stay together, and we will get through this, and the next, and the next. This world will not break us."
He sighs, and it might be relief or it might be grief, but either way there is a sort of loosening in him, a slackening of his hold on her. "Aye," he says softly. "We'll stay together, mo chroí. Through all of it, we'll stay together. I promise ye."
She remains there for a long moment, and then moves again, shifting upwards without pulling away from his arms, and using a hand to prop herself up so she can better see him. "I have not told the others, yet, about Stormwind City, about the townhouse. Brother Casker and Miss Coit know; they were there when Finley and Isla spoke of it. I can speak to Mr. Shine, and let the household know."
"For the best," he says tiredly. "For now, for the best. They've had a time enough without the news. If ye let Shine know, as ye say, he can —" He stops, his gaze drifting. "Ah, Barbour," he says, and closes his eyes.
Avrenne reaches out her hand to his face, holding his cheek lightly, as if she can take on some of the weight. "I'm so sorry. I should have thought of it. I should have had us all here. I knew better. I did." Before she can further down that road, she halts herself in place, and shifts her tone. "Tam Barbour. He was your father's bo'sun on the Valley's Pride, if I recall correctly. Do you want to tell me about him?"
Siamus's eyes drift briefly closed, and then he tucks his face down toward her, putting his lips against her hair. "I don't remember not knowing him," he says quietly. "He was my father's man before I was born, and on every ship I sailed as a child. He was there at Crestfall when — well. Ye know." He strokes Avrenne's back in a wordless gesture of comfort, though for which of them isn't clear. "He was Fleet. He was family. Tides almighty, it —" The silence strains with unspoken feeling.
At last he says only, "It feels wrong, to say 'was.'"
Avrenne touches him lightly back, soft barely-there strokes of her fingertips. "I know," she says, so quietly the words are nearly lost entirely into him. Her voice strengthens. "He is remembered, and he will be so for as long as House Fallon endures."
"I'm so sorry, Avrenne," he tells her quietly, murmuring into her hair. "I'm so sorry about your people. Sir Somer and Miss Mercailles. All they went through with ye, all they were to House Esprit. Are the children — Finley and Isla are taking it hard, I expect."
Avrenne is silent. Maybe she's just resting her eyes. At last she agrees, "Yes. They all will. I don't know what they saw, how much. The look on Finley's face, when he arrived… I haven't seen him look like that since the day of the Fall, when he realized there was no one else alive but him and Daisy." Avrenne inhales sharply. "Oh, no, Daisy. I — " She halts whatever that sentence might have become, holds it back, curling her fingers in on themselves.
Siamus takes a deep breath and tucks her close again. "Where was she last, mo chroí? We'll find word of her. When we have rites for them — your people — will she want to come and pay her respects?"
Another thought strikes him. "Ah, and I don't know — the Crofts, Marten and Milla. We'll want Light-services for them as well, the pair of them. They came from Lordaeron wi'the Fall, and I expect they were wi' Lordaeron's church. I don't… know the arranging of that. Tides below, the poor children."
"I can handle it. Sir Somer and Sophie will need their own. They are — were — both of the faith." Her voice goes paper thin. "And I cannot even get them home. They shall be buried on foreign soil. The first of House Esprit to not be buried at the Great House. Oh." There's only the sound of her breathing, as she curls her shoulders into him.
"Shhhh, shhh shh." He holds her close, her head now tucked beneath his chin. "Avrenne. My love. They'll be buried in the Esprit Fallon lands, in the new home ye led them to." His fingers slide into her hair. "Will we — we've hardly had people of Fallon who wanted burying. Barbour will want —"
He clears his throat.
"Barbour will be given to the sea, as most of ours are. But the Crofts, and Sir Somer and Miss Mercailles — I suppose we ought to speak wi'the priest about setting aside some blessed ground here for a family burying-yard?"
"Yes, I — yes." Avrenne says. "I will…I will speak with him. Finley might know where Daisy could be contacted. She might have told him." The implication being that she did not tell Avrenne. She uncurls her fingers with what might be some effort, only to readjust the hold on Siamus' shirt. "I cannot tell you how grateful I have been that you have a priest on the grounds, the way he has been. That was one thing I never was able to have, before: a healer with us, so that no one will need to bear more scars, that there would be a second chance if they were to fall."
Siamus is silent again for a time, and then admits, "That was Ta's doing. I'd not have had a thing to do wi'the man otherwise, Kul Tiran or no. But I'm glad of him as well."
He shifts, rolling just slightly back from her so that he can lay a hand over hers on his shirt. "What time is it?" he asks. "I don't know… how long it's been, or whether I slept or no. I did, didn't I?" He turns his head to peer toward the window.
"Forty minutes or so since we came back to the house, if I have estimated correctly. I am not certain of the exact time. And yes, you were resting."
He exhales again. "It feels longer than that."
"Do you need anything? Cook has food and drink ready. I wasn't sure if you would want something here, or would prefer to go downstairs."
"I should go downstairs," he says, and does not move to do so. “To see to the household, to have a look at the damage. The stables will have to be put to rights. Most of the horses will make their way back, but we'll want to put word out to neighboring land holders just in case. And to see how they're faring, as well, if there's aught we can do." He rubs his brow.
"Lord Bertrand is assisting Thredd with the horses. They stayed together, and should be easier to settle now that the tremors have stopped." Avrenne hesitates, lifts her head up again to look at him. "Siamus, while you were asleep, did you dream?" It does not sound from her tone to be an idle question.
Again he's silent for a time. "I don't know," he says finally. "It was — a strange sort of sleep, but I don't know that I dreamed. Why d'ye ask it, pet?"
"Because you dreamt of a wave, a warning, and there was one. If there was another warning…"
He tenses again, staring at the ceiling. In a voice of very strange calm, he says, "Avrenne. If there is another wave… I won't be able to warn of it. We'll have no way to know."
Avrenne leans in closer, stretching up again to better see his face, as she sets a hand against his cheek with a light pressure, encouraging him without real force to look at her. "What do you mean? Is it the exhaustion?"
Siamus shakes his head. "No," he says roughly, and loosens his hold on her again, still gazing upward at the ceiling. "No. Avrenne. I had to… make a bargain. To save it all."
Avrenne rises up again, half lying on top of him now. "I don't understand. What do you mean, a bargain? What bargain? With whom, the Tidemother?"
He turns his head to keep from meeting her gaze. "The tides — aye. I don't know. It wasn't… I'd never met her in such a mood before. She — the wave wanted something of me. I offered — Avrenne, I offered it my life, and it… laughed at me.
"It wanted power. And so I gave it — I gave it what power I had. That was the bargain. To spare all of ye." He lifts his hand from hers to put it tiredly over his eyes. "Not all of ye. I didn't think. But I gave it — I gave it."
Avrenne makes a strange sort of sound, something like a strangled sigh, and rests her forehead down on his chest. "Oh, thank goodness," she says, with audible relief, her arm coming around to hold him to her, as if he might be in some danger now of being pulled away. "If it wanted your life, if it had taken it…oh, tides." Her breath shudders in and then out again. "I would not have been able to even bargain for you back."
The silence this time is slightly mystified. After a few moments, he takes his hand from his eyes to rest it on her shoulder. "Avrenne," he says, pain in his voice. "I gave it away. My — it wasn't enough to hold the wave, except — in trade. I gave it — If another one comes, if something else… I can't tell us. I can't know. I can't… feel it. Anything."
Avrenne lifts her head again. There's still more relief than anything in her expression, a slight downturn of her brows the only sign of the questions she has. "You can't hear the…whispers of it all? You can't hear Her?" It's almost not a question. She starts to shake her head — and then halts the movement, blinks her eyes, and focuses back on his face. "Oh, Siamus. I'm so sorry. I cannot even imagine. It must be like it's torn out your tongue and taken your ears. I — Is that…part of a sacrifice a tidesage can make? Is that how they held back the water in Boralus before the seawall?"
He turns his face away again. "I don't know. I don't… I've never heard tell of it before. I've never heard of her asking a thing like it before."
He gazes dully toward the window. "The wind shifted the curtain earlier, and I was… startled by it. Avrenne, I'm — it's so quiet. I can't… feel anything."
She makes a helpless smoothing of her hand against his face, cupping his cheek, brushing her hand along his brow and up into his hair. It's not a substitute for what is missing, and she clearly knows it.
"Siamus, was it not Her who asked? Or did you bargain with something else? If it was not Her who took it, if She is the only one who can truly make such a thing, and She did not, then…I don't know. If it was a contract, and the other side had no right to take any trade at all, we could have it invalidated on those grounds. But this is…this is nothing I know of. I don't know the rules. Brother Eli might know more, or the others sages of the Shrine of the Storm, or even the shamans, perhaps."
She strokes back his hair. "And if it turns out to be done and done, then I am sorry for it, I am. I cannot imagine the loss you must feel. But I will never not be grateful that whatever took your offer of power declined taking your life. As long as you're still here, that's all that matters. You're still Siamus Fallon, with or without all the rest."
His laugh is a harsh exhalation. "Invalidation — I don't think we can send for a solicitor in this case, mo chroí. And if… I don't know what it could have been but Herself. She's just — never spoken wi' me that way before. But who else could it be? She is the sea, and I can't claim to know the whole depth of her."
He takes her wrist gently, still without looking at her. "I can't… I don't want to — talk of it. Everything's… strange, Avrenne. I can't feel anything." He draws a deep, steadying breath, closes his eyes. When he opens them again, his gaze is still tired but clearer, stern. "There's too much to be done. There's work needs doing, and I can't lie here."
There is something in the bleak, distant resolve of his gaze, in the set of his jaw, that lends him a stronger resemblance to the uniformed man in a portrait now presumably lost — with most of the townhouse's contents — to the Stormwind tides.
"I will be with you. We will handle what needs doing." Avrenne's own expression is softer, caught in between sorrowful and resolute. "Siamus. Will you look at me, please?"
He turns his face toward her first; it is a moment before his gaze follows. He meets hers steadily, his gaze black and opaque. "My mermaid."
Her expression softens further, some tension held within finally loosening, and there is a gentle brightening of a bloom of a smile on her face, even if there is still sorrow caught around her eyes.
"My safe harbor. My seawall. My one and only Siamus Fallon." That causes the smile to grow a little brighter, from a single match to a candle. "No matter what comes, no matter what has or will be lost, I am with you, at your side. Nothing has changed for me that way. Nothing. I sorrow for your loss, but you are as wonderful, as incredible, as admirable to me as you have always been, as you will always be. I love you." She leans in, to kiss him, even knowing that she will come up short, not quite able to close the distance on her own.
Siamus hesitates a moment, searching her expression warily as if he's waiting for something else, for her to add something more — but when it becomes apparent that she has nothing to add, he shifts and wordlessly bends his head to meet her lips.
What starts as a sigh against him grows quickly into an expression of some intense feeling, a breath of a whimper there and gone so swiftly to make someone doubt they heard it at all, and a grasping of her hands against him like she's trying to somehow pull him into her, or merge herself into him.
His reaction — an indrawn breath, a shiver of tension — suggests surprise, but certainly not aversion. "Avrenne," he says, and his arm around her tightens, drawing her breathlessly hard against him. "My mermaid, my Halia."
That is approximately how close Avrenne seems to want to be. She breaks off a kiss to press smaller ones over his jaw, his chest, his hand holding onto her wrist — this does not read as impatience, or even only desire, but something like desperation, as if she has only just now realized how close she came to losing him.
Tears are building up in her eyes, halted at the gates, but she isn't closing them — if she blinks, will he disappear out from under her?
Siamus does not disappear from under her; his gaze is black and intent, as though he is trying to decipher some deeper mystery in her behavior. "Avrenne," he says, and his hand tightens around her wrist. "Avrenne, my star. I can't… feel it. I can't feel… anything." His voice is almost plaintive, a child confronted with some frightening phenomenon beyond his comprehension.
(He does not, for the record, seem to be talking about her current actions. Those, he is feeling.)
Avrenne's expression crumples in sympathetic response, as she shakes her head not in negation, but some helplessness of something she cannot fix. Still, she has never been one for hand wringing in despair, so action it must be. Her hand hovers over his face, stroking lightly, before she pulls herself free of his tighter embrace, and repositions herself, straddling him at his waist, looking down at him with love written so clearly in her eyes she might as well say it out loud again, guiding his hand up to her own face.
With her other hand, she unzips her shirt, revealing the small bra still in place, and a lot more skin. "Feel me," she tells him. "You can still feel me. You saved me, saved us all. I am still here, with you."
The woman revealed under the armored shirt is not the same woman who dropped her wedding dress nearly a year before. There are stark rippled white lines along her belly, stretch marks from the last months of pregnancy that Siamus missed, covering a stomach that is no longer taut and flat, but soft and oddly rounded still — not with the tightness of pregnancy but a looseness that folds over.
Her breasts are larger than before, caught behind the unusual presence of the bra — with a strange outline around the nipple, like there is a padded cloth held there.
She looks older, those marks of exhaustion that put her more firmly in her thirties than still with the last bloom of a woman in her twenties, dark circles and fine lines around her eyes. There are still faint traces of the darkening brown of dried blood around the creases of her nose and under her chin. She wears no cosmetics that could brighten her complexion, paler and drawn. She bears little resemblance to the bright lighthouse of the previous year's Thenedain's Lordaeron Remembrance Ball.
There is perhaps only one similarity that calls to mind that new wife on her wedding night — the look on her face. But this is not some faint vulnerability, but a heightened one, and a bracing behind it, as though she is expecting some sort of rejection, and offering herself anyway.
Siamus lays his hand warm against her cheek, watches her remove her shirt with a look of stricken need. "Mermaid," he tells her, and trails his fingers down the curve of her cheek, along the line of her jaw, down the side of her throat. "My star, my homeward star, Avrenne, anamchara. Please." He does not seem entirely certain himself what he is asking her for: Please, Avrenne, surely you know how to fix this.
He grips her hip with his other hand. "Make me feel it. I want to feel ye, Avrenne, I miss ye too long. I can't."
He is not making a great deal of sense, but neither is the world to him at the moment.
Her eyes flick from their hold on his to the light source of the room, pausing long enough for a thought, and then back to him. She doesn't turn off the light.
Instead, she starts humming, very quietly.
She sheds the armored shirt, tossing it over the side of the bed, and then unhooks the brassiere, carefully. This gets set to the other side of the bed, laid flat, for some reason.
Under the bra, her breasts are fuller, but the nipples are no longer a rosy gold — they're red, puffy and inflamed.
She doesn't pause, however, as she moves off his waist to the side of the bed closer to the floor, where there's the sound of two house shoes hitting the carpet. She unzips and strips off the armored pants with as much speed as she showed in getting them on, and these too are tossed over the side.
With either alarming, or perhaps by now expected efficiency, she is very naked, and when she straddles him once more she is much lower, at his hip, shifting her weight deliberately up and down, the humming growing louder now, forming into more distinct notes. It isn't any song specifically, not yet.
Siamus closes his eyes, fitting both hands to her hips now, his breath quickening as he stirs restively beneath her. "Sing — will ye sing, then? Ye sang for… before, mo chroí, ye sang, and it —" He opens his eyes; his gaze is wild, the look of a starved man confronted with a banquet. "Get — here, get this —" He seizes one of her hands and brings it to his shirt buttons. "Avrenne."
She leans in closer, tilting her head towards him. Both hands go to his buttons, her legs squeezing harder to hold her balance to keep her touch light. She isn't breaking these buttons, but there's enough urgency in her motions to make it unnecessary.
"My hair," she tells him, before she sings a single purer note out loud, followed swiftly by the rest. It's a wordless song he might recognize — she sang it to him behind a closed door in Wintergarde, that soft, yearning invitation.
He reaches up to slide his hands into her hair, feeling for the fastening that holds her chignon in place. When his fingers find the mignonette hair brooch, he draws it free, and with one hand drags loose the spill of her hair. He holds the brooch in his other hand and stares at it for a moment: I know this one.
His gaze returns to hers. "I gave ye that," he tells her, as though she might have forgotten. "Your birthday." Or maybe he's just demonstrating that he remembers. One never knows.
It brings a smile to her face, one that lingers in her eyes — still kept open wider, blinking less — even as her mouth returns to the shape of the notes, and she nods in agreement, a movement that seems deliberately chosen, as she brings herself closer to him, so that her hair brushes against his face; it smells stronger of her lotus perfumed oil than her skin does.
There are still those odder pieces in the front, where the fire from the Nightmare burned them away, but the rest is now a soft draping length, easily touching his face, neck, and chest as she bends over him, still singing. Her hands slide down and then up, pushing the shirt off his chest. She doesn't bother trying to free him from the shirt, having at least exposed the skin to the air, shifting her unbuttoning attention instead to his trousers.
Siamus inhales the scent of her hair and reaches out blindly with the hand holding the brooch, groping to find the nightstand where he can set it down.
That feat accomplished, he slides both hands back into her hair and shifts again beneath her, evidently attempting to offer better access to his trousers-buttons. "Ye sang it that night. At Wintergarde. And I knew. I'd never deserve ye." The admission is as raw and grief-stricken as it was that night when he'd first said it to Zath. "Avrenne, anamchara, ye saved me."
Avrenne's song falters at the words, her breath caught in between the notes as she looks at him.
"I will never leave you. I have told you that. If you fall, then I will fall with you, and I will slow it. I am always by your side. I would never abandon you, not to any fate." Her hands make quick work to free him, and that seems once again sufficient for her purposes. She resumes the song, the music soaring in that peculiar soprano of hers, dark and bright at once as she slides back over him slowly, the soft pressure of her body against his, to bring them face to face, not yet taking him into her.
This time when the song halts, it's intentional, so she can speak once more.
"There has never been a question of deserving," she tells him. "There is nothing to earn. Don't you know what you are to me? It's like I have been looking all my life for you, for the answer to the equation written for me, of all I am, and at last come to the most mathematically elegant solution. You fit me perfectly; you always have, you always will."
That is punctuated by her reaching down to his cock to set it at her entrance, and press down slowly onto him, as she sings out a long, drawn out note roughened from its pure tone into a breathier yearning.
Siamus sucks in a sharp breath and then lets it out with a soft groan, his eyes falling closed. "Avrenne," he breathes. "I miss ye."
And then his eyes fly open as he remembers something, and he gazes up at her with dark uncertainty. "Is it — can we? Pet? Is it — too soon?"
He is already moving beneath her in a way that suggests he really, really hopes it isn't.
It's not as easy progress into her as before — a tightness from either changes or not as much lead up — but the rest, the intense heat and the welcoming wetness, those are the same. Avrenne hums, her eyes half-closed, moving more insistently against him, rocking her hips. It takes a moment for the question to register.
"Safe four weeks since the birth," she says. "That is today." Sort of to the exact day, but that's precision math, isn't it? Who doesn't love precise numbers?
Siamus nods breathlessly, his gaze fervent. That's good enough for him. "Avrenne, mo chroí, I need ye," he tells her hoarsely. As he is at present already inside her, this may mean something more complicated.
She settles herself fully on him, stretching up to set her hands against his face, and the way she leans in to cover them both within a golden curtain of her hair suggests it is purposeful, this sensation of soft touches and scent. She's close enough to see that her lashes are thicker, tears that have been caught in them, and denied the right to fall.
"You have me," she tells him, the words coming out sung as notes, part of the song. "All of me. Everything." There's something in her eyes, a stirring of some emotion, but she closes the distance to kiss him, making it impossible to see what might be in them.
Whatever Avrenne conceals in her gaze, Siamus does not catch that glimpse, lost as he is in his own strange maze of feelings. He kisses her back ardently, lifting head and shoulders from the bed and wrapping his hand around the back of her neck to impress his urgency upon her.
He breaks away only to rasp, "Mermaid," wild-eyed, and then kisses her ferociously again.
She's more like a siren than a mermaid at the moment, still singing in her throat, the sound catching against his mouth. She's lost the smooth, even notes of before. This is a wilder tune of bits and pieces of songs she knows — a phrase of the Amhrán na Farraige, a few notes of Into the West that drop into the vocalizations of the old Lordaeron opera, then she soars back up into the chorus of Proudmoore's Blood and shifts immediately away into Wayward Lass before it drifts over to Lordaeron Faire and spirals away into something else.
It's obvious that she cannot hold a single song in place, that her attention is lost in the sensations of her body, and she pulls at Siamus in those desperate ways, clawing at him, her nails scratching against his skin. She might very well leave marks behind if she isn't careful, and she does not seem particularly mindful to be careful at this time.
Nor does he want her to be. The way he moves beneath her and the sound he makes as her nails rake him cannot be described as discouraging.
In the next moment, he surges upright and seizes her by the hips again to hold her with him as he rolls them both over, fitting himself atop her. He drops his face against the side of her neck, breathing the scent of her skin and hair. "This," he says against her skin. "I could drown in ye."
"No. You could never drown of me," she says, an echo of another time, a celebration of the news of their first child, the same quiet intensity behind her insistence. "I am your mermaid." The words are breaths, punctuated by sounds of her growing pleasure.
"I will always dive into the water with you. Hold onto you with all that I am. Be at your side, sharing my breath with you." Another day, another echo, from a lighthouse, as she tells him, "No water of all I am will ever be a danger to you."
She's losing the ability to sing, at least musically, her words breaking, but the song she is starting to sing is a familiar one to him, the first start of rising notes, sharper breaths, a growing tightening of her body like a bow being strung.
He lifts his head to gaze down at her face, dark eyed and ferociously intent. "Good," he tells her roughly, encouraging. "My good girl, my mermaid, my Halia. Ah, I missed ye, my heart, for months I've missed ye." His own words are growing breathless, his tone distracted as he moves more urgently within her. "The smell of ye and the taste of ye and the shape of ye and your precious tight cunt —" Oh, there's our boy back again.
"Sing for me," he tells her; he does not seem to mean the actual thread of melody she is losing track of. "Show me how ye missed me."
She seems to take it as either a challenge or perhaps a Direction, because the intensity of her actions shifts from something welcoming and desperate, to something approaching a violent storm.
He's felt the pressure of her nails before, but now beneath his shirt, she tears lines down his back, leaving small beads of blood drawn behind. The other hand she buries in his hair, pulling tight into a fist as she turns her face into his shoulder. She thrashes under him, bucking her hips with bruising force to meet his strokes.
He hisses at the rake of her nails, and seizes her by a hip to shift her beneath him, arching her up into his answering fury.
Every motion, every choice, speaks of trying to somehow pull him into her deeper, a maelstrom of desire. She throws her head back to catch his gaze in her eyes, dark pools glittering with unshed tears, surrounded by that rose blush across her cheeks and down her throat.
The sounds she makes are not organized enough to be musical, but they're a form of a song all the same, demanding cries that rise in pitch, sharpen with each breath, touch a sound of his name, and shatter finally in one longer note — held tightly in her chest, in her hands, in her cunt. And then softens in a shuddering release, a breath of a sigh.
As her climax crashes over her, he drops his head and sets his teeth into her shoulder savagely, as though he means to hold her in place by this animal expedient, as though he fears she might get away and he has to hang on to her by any available means.
When the throes have washed over her and she slackens beneath him, he lifts his head again. "Avrenne," he says. "Tell me ye love me."
There's a blissful surrender to her now, although not entirely calm — choppy waters of breath and movement, as she wraps her legs around him, keeps hold against his back pulling him towards her. The smile she gives him is a soft glow, cheeks flushed and eyes drowsy, aftershocks running through her body.
"I love you," she whispers in a sigh. "You are the heart in my chest. The water for the fire in my veins. The light in me. I love you." The words are breaths, secrets spoken into his skin as she arches her body into his. "When the world breaks, you are the shelter I run for to stand in. It's in you I trust over all things, the faith I hold. I love you. I would know you anywhere, from the smallest sound or the lightest touch. It's you I turn to, never away. I love you."
He cries out, shuddering, clutching at her hip as he buries himself deep inside her, rocking against her. Abruptly, he lets go of her hip to splay a hand on the bedclothes beside her, to catch himself from collapsing completely atop her. Instead he manages a sort of ungainly half-collapse, draping himself heavily over her. He puts his face to her shoulder again, kisses the marks of his teeth there gently, apologetically. "Avrenne," he says, and sighs, a weird, wavering sound.
Rather than try to push him off or to the side, Avrenne holds onto him gently there, her hand on his back skimming smoothly and slowly across his skin in that particular light touch of hers, a contrast to the violence only moments before.
"Siamus," she says in that tone of deep satisfaction, pressing her own, not entirely elegant, kisses to any part of him within reach — an edge of his ear, a bit of his shoulder, the side of his neck. The hand in his hair is relaxed, moving in little petting motions, with a touch of thumb to her fingers like she's savoring the way his hair feels in her hand.
"I love you," she repeats in a whisper. In a slightly different tone, a touch of that playfulness of hers, a little golden thread of a tease woven into her voice, a particular shimmy of her hips, she adds, "And ever grateful for your exceptionally strong heart, no matter the circumstances."
There is only the sound of his uneven breathing for a moment, and then he exhales a short, silent laugh against her skin. "Aye, well, it's anchored to strong ground," he says, and kisses her shoulder again.
He sighs and shifts reluctantly, slowly off of her, drawing away to one side, leaving an arm draped across her. "Thank you," he says after a slightly-stilted pause.
She turns with him onto her side, smiling sweetly, her eyes on his face, flicking from feature to feature like she's taking notes of them for later — there is the tilt of his eyebrow, there the line of his profile, there the curve of his lips below his moustache — and brushes her hand back along his hair, smoothing it away from his brow.
"Isn't that my line?" She asks, still gently teasing. But her tone sobers into something a little too serious to sound playful. "I am a blessed woman."
Siamus closes his eyes at the touch of her hand on his hair. "Avrenne," he says without opening them. "My heart, anamchara, mother of my child." He is silent for a moment. "It may be… I think it may be that our Ery — has the gift. I pray she does. If in giving mine away, I can't pass it any longer….”
A tension goes through her, a held breath, before she brushes her fingers through his hair once more, trails her fingertips down along the side of his face.
"It is not too soon to know? She has not even yet been introduced to the sea, with all that has happened." Her fingers curl into themselves, but she brushes the back of hand against the line of his jaw. "If you cannot pass along the gift any longer, then has anything changed? Because for me it hasn't. I want your children, yours, the children of Siamus Fallon. That is the gift that matters to me.”
Siamus opens his eyes to stare at her. "It has — of course it's changed. It's… what I have, Avrenne, what I'm meant to pass on. It's… my legacy, my responsibility, as much as the Fallon name is. If I can't… see to the future of the Fallons that way, then I don't —" He hesitates, shakes his head, bewildered.
After a moment, though, he says softly, "I think she felt it, though, our Ery. I can't be sure, as ye say, I don't know it. But I think it may be why she howled as she did, and why she stopped when she did. I think she was feeling… what I was."
His gaze unfocuses bleakly. "I hope she was. That I've secured at least that much."
Avrenne withdraws her hand, pulling it against her chest, and looks away. Her face has gone rigid, and forced into that look of composure. "And if she is not?" Avrenne asks, quietly. "If she is not, and you cannot pass on the gift, then you don't what, Siamus?"
"Then I don't — I don't know, Avrenne." He closes his eyes again wearily. "I'll have — the chain of it will have stopped wi' me."
He reaches blindly for her hand. "Ye know it's not… ye know I don't mean to love the minnow any less for it, whether she is or no'? I promised ye that from the start, and as it is, I don't know that I could love her any more. It's not a flaw in the child, or in her mermaid mother." For a moment, he falls silent. Then he sighs. "I'm no' talking a straight line right now, Avrenne. I can't — it's so quiet, it's so strange. Everything's echoing nonsense in my head. Forgive me, my heart."
It's telling that she doesn't reach back for his hand until the last — is her skin warmer than it was a moment ago? or is his hand cooler than hers from the room, and hers warmer from his hair? — but in the end she grasps his hand back, bringing it to her face to kiss his fingers, as she moves in closer to him, tucking herself up against him.
"No, of course. There's nothing to forgive. This is…we can discuss it later, at another time of more normal circumstances. Everything is unsettled at present." That might have to go into the running for Understatement of the Year. "Let's just focus on tonight, right now, on the order of operations for this evening. Downstairs, food, rest, together. I can sing to you, tonight," she offers. "If it helps. I know it is not the same, not a replacement, but if it's better than silence. I can sing for hours."
"I would like that," he says. He opens his eyes; they are dark and opaque, troubled. "Something I said upset ye. Forgive me; I'd never mean to. I'm… tired, mo chroí, and not myself. I need ye, Avrenne. Forgive me whatever it was."
She kisses his hand again, and shifts along his side over the bed until she is face to face with him to meet his eyes. Her gaze is warm, and as loving as ever.
"Siamus, mo ghrá, there isn't something to forgive, but I forgive you. Of course I forgive you. Listen to me," she says, pulling their linked hands up to press his hand against her cheek. "You have been wounded. Not physically, but deeply all the same. Everything looks and feels strange, and no one could think well after such an experience. You have done extraordinary, incredible things today, and you have done all I have ever asked of you on top of such feats — to come back to me. Even altered from before. You are still my Siamus. I am proud of you. Grateful for you." She turns her cheek to kiss his hand, her eyes on his.
"So you can trust in this," she tells him firmly. "I will be right by your side. Your heart is safe in its home in me. Breá liom tú."
"Breá liom tú," he tells her fervently, and shifts toward her to kiss her forehead, lets go of her hand to draw his fingers down her cheek. "Ye save me, Avrenne. It's twice now, my mermaid, mother of my minnow. It's no' many ladies can say they've saved their husband's life twice in a year of marriage. And given him a fine firstborn daughter in the bargain."
There's a look of confusion at the numbers. Twice doesn't seem to be Avrenne's accounting, by her standards.
Still, she smiles at him, a tired but warm expression, and touches her hand lightly to his wrist. "Even with the best of accounting, I don't think I could count all the ways you have saved me, Siamus. From ruin, from war, from unhappiness, from death. You are, and always will be, the most extraordinary husband I could ever have had the privilege of marrying. You must know that, with every step you take, how I admire and love you."
His expression sobers. "And it's only ever my wish to keep it that way. I'd never like to disappoint ye in anything, Avrenne. Ye must tell me, if I go astray of ye."
"You could never disappoint me, Siamus," she says, and strokes her hand along his arm, holding her gaze steadily on his face. She makes no mention at all of whether she could disappoint herself, or her own worthiness. "And you must know too, even now, even altered, just as I am still your mermaid to you, that in every way that will ever matter to me, you are still my tidesage."
He flinches almost imperceptibly, hardly more than a flutter of eyelashes, and then summons up a smile for her. "Anamchara, home of my heart. I should — see to the rest, aye? The household? There's… work to be done, and changes to be made, and they should see all as normal as possible."
The answering brief sorrow in her own expression, swept as swiftly aside, is the only sign that Avrenne's caught the flinch, and what it might mean. That she only nods — a slight movement of her head — speaks more of her understanding of Siamus. Business first, feelings later, possibly very later.
"Of course," she agrees, leaning forward to press a kiss to his cheek, and then draw away, reaching for the last place she knew her bra to be. "I will speak with Mr. Shine, and the children." Presumably that means also the adults who have been designated as children as well. Carefully, she picks up the bra (with two pads on the inside, an oddity for those who have never nursed before), to set it on herself, though not yet hooking the back closure. "I don't recall that one. Anam…chara? What does it mean?"
Siamus sits up himself and combs both hands back through his hair. He looks faintly abashed. "It's — a name ye call a person when…." He pauses. Dammit, Avrenne, he just finished having feelings and you gotta make him talk about mushy stuff?
"It's the word for the one whose… soul fits together wi' yours." Super nonchalantly, he begins to button his shirt again. "The kaldorei have a word, 'shalan.' It's… alike."
He's rewarded for this mushy stuff by Avrenne pausing in her arrangement of her undergarments, turning her head to look at him, and there it is — that smile. That glow that suffuses her face, lights her up brighter than a lighthouse of the most cutting edge technology. That smile that so few people ever see even once, and he sees most especially.
"Oh." She gives a little laugh, a warm effervescent sound like a gentle pop of a soap bubble. "That's beautiful. Anamchara."
Siamus glances up from his very serious, very intent shirt-buttoning to smile back at her faintly. He is probably still trying for Nonchalant, but the actual effect is closer to bashful. "Well, and so are you." See? He's still smooth.
Avrenne's expression flickers at the compliment, but she keeps some of the smile on as she turns her head back away, and focuses on closing the back to the brassiere.
He rises from the bed himself to reclaim his trousers. "Will I go and look in on the children from the city, or d'ye think they're best let be tonight? I will go out and have a look at the stables, and walk the back property wi' Larabie."
"Very well. As for the children, best let be tonight. Tomorrow will be soon enough and they will have had a rest," she says. And if she says it mostly because she thinks Siamus should also be resting, particularly after that look and walk, that doesn't need to be articulated.
She brushes a hand along her shoulder, fingers probing gently at the mark left behind by his teeth. It is definitely going to show. She rises to a practiced elegant stand, both brows lifted because she cannot raise only one, reaching for her clothing with a conspiratorial smile, and a teasing tone. "Lupine, dog rose, and tussilago. As always, a man of his word."
That brings a genuine smile to his face. He finishes buttoning his trousers and moves around to stand behind her, resting his hands at her waist as he bends to kiss the mark. "Ah, ye've only seen the beginning, now that you're back wi' me at last."
She leans back into him, fitting herself against him, tipping her head to allow him better access with an inhale and soft sound. She says something, very quietly, a whisper of sounds that might be I am always with you. But what she says louder is, "Shall I send for some chamomile for the next few days?" Chamomile being energy in adversity and also a tea. "I have been asked to show you how I have missed you, and I have quite a lot to show you."