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| Details |
| Author: | Athena |
| Summary: | As Winter begins, the cusp of the darkest, longest night of the year, House Fallon adds to its increasingly full house with two awaited individuals. Some things are the same, and some things are different, as the previously unfamiliar has become known. After all, she's done this once already, and now Avrenne knows what to expect. And this time, her seawall and sailor are there from the very start. So, she might as well get some work done, and a little political maneuvering, and do a little market business analysis, and -- Oh, right, give birth. 8600~ words. A birth story, lighter on the details this time around. |
| Rating: | T for Teen |
Chain: Siarenne
24 Hours in Six Parts of Four
One Sixth: 1:30am to 4:30am
It rained all day before, a softly misting flourish through the air, like a cloud spritzing perfume in the sky and letting it drift down to the ground, a coy hint of snow without being truly so, a flash of an ankle revealed before covered once more with a swish of a hem, a little promise of things to come all in good time.
When Avrenne wakes in the middle of the night, her eyes flickering open to gaze into the darkness of Siamus’ bedroom, her hand pressed against the curve of her belly resting heavily on the bed just above where Siamus’ own protective embrace holds her, her hair a wild golden toss across her pillow and nestled between that space of her and Siamus, she isn’t immediately sure why.
Something woke her.
But what? Movement from the boys, perhaps? It has been close to painful sometimes, the way they churn around in the limited space they have left, stretching and striking against her ever thinner spread skin. She soothes a hand over that skin now, wishing she could speak to them in ways they would understand, but knowing all too well there is a barrier between them greater than the physical, a lack of knowledge of shared speech, and there is nothing she can do.
Well. That’s not entirely true. She could get up, and walk with them – as Ery still likes herself, outside the womb – and rock them back to sleep in the swaying ship of her movement. But the room is cold, the snapping chill of this space between midnight and dawn pervading the air, and she can feel it on her face, and knows that if she was to leave this embrace of Siamus’ arms, the floor will be cold, and the air will rush at her to leech away the warmth with greedy fingers. Avrenne is not used to feeling cold, to not immediately reaching for the fire in her veins to halt any such sensations at the gate, and she doesn’t like it.
Maybe she can simply go back to sleep. Maybe the boys will take a cue from her. Maybe they will abide by their father’s command to treat their mother well and let her rest.
The minutes pass like drip drops of rain beading on the window and sliding slowly down the glass merging into each other and gathering a heaviness as they go, and there is no great movement from the boys. She feels a stirring for a few moments, but only that of a restless little shifting, and then they are quiet, peaceful, obedient.
She closes her eyes and starts to drift back to –
The contraction hits like a flash of lightning on the distant horizon, like the rumble of thunder soft as a cat’s purr heard just distinctly enough to know, even without a tidesage’s power, that the storm is coming, and Avrenne’s sharp inhale is loud enough to be a true gasp, as her body jolts to attention in the shock of realization of what it was that woke her before, and now wakes her fully in truth.
Siamus stirs at her back, a moment to cross the threshold between sleep and waking, but then he is entirely and keenly alert: the awakening of a man who's spent his life sleeping in shifts and rising abruptly at the first sounds of alarm.
"Pet?" he asks, and sits up to lean over her, his hand sliding to her hip. "What is it?"
"It's, oh," she breathes out, her fingers skimming now across the taut rounding, testing the waters. It isn't quite yet the rigidity and tensing yet to come, but the ripple of it is there, a truth undeniable of its nature. "A contraction. I need light, and a watch," she tells him, not moving yet from her place, a holding pattern of consideration.
He rolls away and is out of bed and on his feet instantly. There is the briefest silence and then the sharp scratch of a match in the darkness; a lamp kindles.
Siamus carries it over and sets it on Avrenne's nightstand, pauses to brush the backs of his fingers lightly over the hair at her temple, and then straightens to cross to and through the door that connects their rooms.
When he is back a moment later, he is carrying Avrenne's own watch, the one that Shine made for her.
He sets it gently — already open — on the nightstand beside the lamp and then sits on the bed's edge, still as tautly alert as a man who'd been roused by a lookout's shout rather than his wife's gasp.
He awaits further orders.
Avrenne sits up gingerly, reaching for the watch on her nightstand with one hand as the other sweeps her hair to fall against the bare skin of her back like a gold cloak, and she notes the time with a calm composure, a rapid calculation of a threshold of time. She looks up at Siamus, a small smile for him, as she moves to the side of the bed, her legs swinging down to not quite touch the floor.
"I should have my robe, and slippers. I need to walk, and wait. The first ones don't come as quickly as they will later, but they should be consistent within a set time. Each contraction must be longer than a minute, with less than twenty minutes apart, and they do not stop with movement like walking, to tell if it is true labor or false," she tells him, a repeated litany learned and spoken as an apt pupil who learned her lesson well. "But I expect it is true labor. It feels the same as before, when it started, if I recall it correctly."
She probably does. It hasn't even been a year since her last experience of it.
Siamus rises with the same crisp alacrity to collect her robe and slippers. The military efficiency of his manner is at odds with the fact that he's still stark naked himself, a state he seems entirely unaware of.
He sets the slippers at Avrenne's feet and sweeps the robe about her shoulders like a cloak. "Are ye warm enough?"
Avrenne sets her feet into the cradle of her slippers, and settles into her robe, tying it off around her, before she reaches out her hand to Siamus to use to rise to an awkward, swaying ship heave-ho stand typical of her these days. With the other, she holds onto her pocketwatch.
"Oh, I'll warm up with the walking," she says, which is something of an answer. "It will be at least an hour, I expect. It's only just a little after 2 o'clock. In an hour or so, if there are least three contractions within it, we will know. Then I will… go back to sleep, I suppose. That was my mistake last time, you know, not sleeping in the early parts. I hadn't realized it could go so long. I won't make the same mistake a second time." One of Avrenne's personal mottos, after all. She sets the back of her hand still holding the watch against his chest, gazing up at him. "Will you walk with me?"
"Of course," he says, his dark gaze solicitous, a smile now softening the corner of his mouth. He offers his arm to escort her to the door, and then realizes he is not dressed. "… A moment," he tells her ruefully, and moves around the bed and into his dressing room.
It is barely a minute before he's back in simple linen trousers and shirt. He returns to offer Avrenne his arm again; he's still incongruously barefoot but that probably won't cause the same stir in the halls that nudity might.
The warm look she gives him, a trailing gaze like a touch, suggests that Lady Fallon might have preferred the direct view of him in a birthday suit, but that's all right; she knows what's underneath the clothes as they are and she can use her imagination. She might be using it right now.
But she holds to her course, after all, as is her nature, entwining herself with him, to make a first circuit along their rooms, not yet wandering the halls of the rest of the house, although it's likely she will.
It isn't as long as she expects, no more than five minutes since they started off as they make their way along the windows of her room, when she inhales a quick breath, her step hitching, as she brings the watch up to check the time in the dim light shed from Siamus' room into her own.
"Oh." She breathes, and she keeps walking, slower now. "That was not quite 11 minutes from the other, give or take a minute or two of variability. That might be a good sign. Dr. Alma did say it should take less time per birth. Perhaps this will not take as long."
He watches her gravely. "We can hope. I'm not sure I've stocked enough liquor to make it through another like the last. When should we send for the doctor? At true labor?"
She strokes a comforting line along his arm, a light touch. "Mm. No, after I am certain that it is labor at all. It's a little early still, though she did say that statistically this was the likeliest range for a start, but she has advised to call her at even the suspected start. We can send for her once I am sure, in another contraction or two, and she can travel while I sleep, and be close at hand should anything alter quickly."
She considers, as she walks slowly, barely the speed of a stroll. "Priscilla would, I expect, want me to send for her as soon as I know, but all I shall be doing is trying to sleep, and she was so exhausted last time staying up with me. I shall let her sleep until I wake fully, which hopefully will be in several hours," she decides. "And we can let Sintha know shortly after when we can be reasonably sure she has had enough rest herself."
Siamus nods, his head canted at an angle as he continues to watch her in that grave fashion. "And with Lady Priscilla in her… condition also, best not trouble her sleep too soon. Ta we can awaken at any point, she won't grudge it. But we'll see ye get your sleep yourself." He pauses, drops his gaze for a moment and then lifts it. "Are ye able to sleep, with the labor pangs? It woke ye just now, didn't it?"
"Yes, it was an oddity, outside the norm. Now that I know what it is, I expect it won't be any worse than when the boys decide that three in the morning is a perfectly reasonable time to practice being a tadpole in a tiny cramped and shared space," Avrenne says, her voice dry, but her expression fond as she looks at her belly like she can look through it see the twins in their womb apartment practicing their stomping like oblivious to 'quiet hours' neighbors. "Which is to say I doubt I will rest easy, but I am determined to try to sleep as much as I can, even if it's only in fits and starts."
"I'll see that ye do," Siamus says sternly, as though he has any power whatsoever over such a thing.
One Third: 5:30am to 8:30am
The morning has broken, but Lady Fallon’s water has not yet. Four hours have passed in fitful, interrupted sleep, but sleep nonetheless, a rest of stern motherly resolve, unyielding until she truly cannot sleep any longer, caught between restlessness and hunger as much as distraction from the increasing frequency of the contractions.
They are still nothing more than rumbles on the horizon, as ever present and faintly ominous as the dark clouds in the true distance, coming from over the ink blue sea, rolling towards Fallon House with creeping tip toes, brushing finger tendrils repeatedly over the morning sun until it winks mischievously at them of things to come.
Avrenne holds to routine like a captain at sea, logging her time with Ery brought down to breakfast, and eating through the contractions as a sailor might ignore the swells of choppy water, a hand periodically on her belly like a teacup kept from sliding off the table with each passing wave.
Dr. Alma and her assistant Medea (who does exist, even if Avrenne does not always account for the wallflower priestess), arrived an hour after Avrenne set to the business of sleeping, the physician smiling knowingly and with approval at being told of the Lady’s intention. She takes up the chair in Avrenne’s bedroom once more, propping herself comfortably within its cushions, her shawl wrapped around her shoulders, and her glasses tucked into a pocket of her warm, heavy knitted sweater. Medea sits at her feet, and crochets something tiny and intricate.
As the morning begins to shift from morning to afternoon, the other messages are dispatched – the two newest additions to the House are on their way, and so those others of the House and associates are welcomed to come and await, if Priscilla and Sintha are ready. It’s only information presented in Lady Fallon’s efficient and understated way, without any direct order.
Which means, of course, that Priscilla Aspenwood arrives in a flurry at the very second that a person could have possibly covered the distance if all she did was leave the house wearing what she had been and having the carriage go at maximum speed.
Avrenne is where her routine would ordinarily place her, in Ery's nursery, spending some time with the child that was once occupied by nursing, but is now merely some of Avrenne's morning dedicated to being with the nine-month-old, sitting in the chair as Ery plays on the floor – not directly on the floor, of course, but on an expensive rug, because they are civilized and wealthy in this household.
The only thing different from the Routine of yesterday for Avrenne is that one hand holds onto a gold pocketwatch. She has on her Labouring Dress, a dark navy nearly black, with a kraken arm tie, her hair braided back from her face in a plait, lessons learned from nine months ago.
"Priscilla," she greets as the door opens to reveal her friend wearing her fuzzy pink sweater over a swishy yellow skirt, a honeycomb-shaped purse with bumblebee embroidery dangling from her arm.
"Renne!" Priscilla rushes to her side, reaching out her hands for a hello hand-clasp. "Oh, good, you've got your watch, I forgot to bring one. I came right away, of course."
Avrenne remains sitting, as she squeezes Priscilla's hand. Getting up out of chairs is an entire production now, and Avrenne has learned to avoid it when not necessary.
Ery, who had been busy gnawing at a wooden block and jolting her legs out in front of her in tune with her munching, periodically banging the block on the ground to perhaps test its impact strength, screeches her own somewhat indignant hello to Priscilla. She had not called for guests, but she supposes she will allow it, her black eye glare filled with the indulgence of a tyrant monarch for entertainment.
"Ah! Ah!" she greets, slamming a hand vigorously onto the carpet, and rolls over onto her stomach, and begins the task of getting herself into a sit. It will take a minute or two. She'll get there. Don’t stare at her. She’s working.
"Hello, Ery-darling," Priscilla greets the child as well, smiling.
"You needn't have rushed so. It is exactly like last time, where nothing is really happening, although it is labor. I will assure you now that I have already slept as much as I could. It started sometime earlier in the morning, likely around 1am or thereabouts, and I woke with it. I slept, as the pact demanded, but there was no reason to wake you then only to have you here, sleep disrupted, to go back to sleep. You must get your proper rest in your condition," Avrenne says, a motherly type of scolding advice. "But I am awake now, and things are unhurriedly proceeding."
Priscilla says, laughter in her voice, "I didn't rush that much. Look, I even put on shoes."
Avrenne, obligingly, looks down at the shoes. "So you did," she agrees. "So did I." Although, in Avrenne's case, they are very soft house slipper shoes, suitable for a lady, and already they are starting to pinch slightly from the swelling of her feet. Eventually she will need to take them off, but that is not now. Now is Routine. "Lord Bertrand is at home still, I take it?"
"For now," Priscilla says. "He'll be going to the show later, with the children."
Avrenne nods. "I see. I don't suppose that there is any point in attempting to convince you that you could also very likely go yourself, and return to find me still in the midst of things," she says with a dry tone.
Ery awkwardly throws her block away from her in an uncoordinated lurch of a toss before she starts to scoot herself on the rug, her latest attempt at moving around in the failure of crawling aptitude which she will master any day now, babbling in the pause after Avrenne speaks, to tell Priscilla, "Bah! Bah bah bah ah!" Which is a fine point to make, and an astute observation, but she doesn't have her mother's experience with Priscilla's stubbornness.
"No," Priscilla says, sitting down on the rug next to Ery. "Don't bother. I told you I would be here."
Avrenne doesn't seem surprised. "So you did," Avrenne repeats with a fond look at her friend.
Well, that’s settled then, at least between the grown ups. Ery makes no promises, and she lets out another wild sounding shriek with the sort of abandoned joy of a baby who likes the sound of her own voice loud and proud.
Now, while Priscilla is here… Ery points at her block. Obtain, Ery Vassal. Yes, Ery will throw it again, possibly after chewing on it some more as her teeth continue to bother her while they grow in. Yes, you will obtain the block for her again. That is your purpose. For now. She will be willing to discuss a schedule also of Peek-A-Boo after she is bored of the block game. Mother, pencil it in.
Sintha Fallon arrives at more leisure, though not much: her mist-silver mare emerges from the corridor of the forest road and onto the broad gravel drive at a long-striding canter not long after Lady Priscilla has been settled. She dismounts and hands Mistral off to the groom, then comes brisk and businesslike up the stairs, pulling off her gloves. She flicks Vane a cursory smile and heads without pause or further acknowledgement toward the stairs.
Nor does she pause at the door to her brother's office; she enters like a sharp winter breeze, drops into one of the armchairs before her brother's desk, and turns to face the hearthside couches where Avrenne sits. "And?" she prompts, as though Lady Fallon's message had cut off partway through and Sintha has come to hear the rest.
She ignores her brother, who regards her narrowly from his side of the desk.
Avrenne finishes the line she was writing, completing the thought, the calculation, before she looks up, as calmly composed as any Friday near the end of Q4 could be. The only oddity is that she has a hand over her belly, clutching securely onto her pocket watch, the face exposed so that at any second she may glance down on it and see the precise second that it is.
"Sintha," she greets, and then, as though they had been just in the middle of a conversation and briefly interrupted, "And it is proceeding apace as last time, as was reasonable to expect." This is, after all, the second rodeo. Uncertainty has been banished back before at least a +1 Expertise. "An average of 8.2 minutes apart, lasting around 79 seconds on average, and not altering significantly yet from there, now nearly six hours in. All signs point that it will be another several hours before things pick up and move along to the second stage.
"To speak of the stage, though," Avrenne adds, as her eyes flick to the watch, and calculate the time. "I expect that by that point, you will be on yours, with the play's opening night."
"The play?" Sintha puts her head back and laughs with incredulous delight. "You cannot possibly expect I am going to put on a moustache and pretend to be King's Knight Number Two for an hour and a half while my nephews are being born? King's Knight Number Two is not exactly critical to the story."
"She's not exactly critical here, either," Siamus observes.
Sintha snaps her head around to skewer him with a look. "Are you going to the play?"
He sits back and folds his arms across his chest. "The sets are built. That's how they're staging a play with them, aye? My part is done."
His sister smiles sweetly at him. "Your part in this is done also, if I'm not mistaken."
Avrenne holds up a hand, a gesture she makes from time to time with Finley and Isla. "What you can do there, that you cannot do here, far more essentially to our purpose than Knight Two's own in the story, is stand as part of House Fallon in a visible way, and steer public opinion as needed before and after the play. As it is, Siamus and my absence will be noted, the seats in the box standing empty, and all too many might take it as a statement. Another of House Fallon missing, with little notice, will be another. Finley has not yet the skill to turn the public as it will need, and he will be absorbed in attention over Isla to prevent her from any over-excitement. We need you there, Sintha. It will take far more energy to attend to the damage of an unintentional statement of withdrawn support explained days after than what can be easily clipped off at first growth tonight."
There's a pregnant labouring pause before she adds, her eyes dropping to her ledger, her hand drifting down to set her fingers lightly on it, but they flutter in nervous fear. "And I will rest easier knowing the children aren't in the City alone, at a play, and what the morning might bring."
Ah yes. The last time this happened, the children going to Stormwind City to see a play, the next day was the Catacylsm, and they were there when the great wave came, and Avrenne miles and miles away. A repeat performance of the Cataclysm's circumstances is statistically unlikely, but not zero.
Sintha opens her mouth to make further protest. She meets her brother's warning look, glances to Avrenne again, and then catches up on the math. "Oh," she says. "Well. Hm. I suppose I might put a good face forward for the House." She reaches up to smooth a lock of hair back behind one ear primly. "And Isla would be dreadfully disappointed if I didn't come." She purses her lips. "I'll have Thredd arrange a carriage to take me back up, and we can all come home again together afterwards — Miss Coit as well, naturally — and we'll make a merry little party of it."
"Shine's going as well," Siamus puts in. This may be data for Sintha; it may be bonus reassurance for Avrenne; it may be both.
It works for Avrenne at least, as her fingers rest more steadily on the ledger, and she raises her gaze back to Sintha. "I am glad to hear it. If I — " She halts mid-sentence, the faintest ah escaping before she presses her lips closely together to halt any other sign of the contraction, but for her breathing becoming so deliberate, so measured. She talks through it, however, with the force of someone refusing to give in to this delay in the middle of her train of thought.
"If I go even half so long as before, it's likely you will all be back in time for the finale here. But there is no need to attempt to race the boys back. It will be best to not rush on the roads with the threat of the weather turning, with the early dark," she says, a motherly fussing that covers some of the pain etching its truth of her condition around her eyes.
"We will go very safely," Sintha reassures Avrenne. "Is there anything you'd like us to bring you back from the City?"
Siamus, meanwhile, has been watching his wife hawklike since that tiny exhalation.
"Mm? Oh, ah — " Avrenne seems partially at a loss, the truest sign of labor, that she's briefly unable to think of any response at all, her mind refusing to lock onto anything but things she has already considered prior. "Um, I…" She tries to buy time for a thought by slightly rearranging her ledger, as if perhaps she had been caught by some other Business Thought and not, actually, affected by the labor she's trying to ignore.
"No. Nothing comes to mind," she admits, finally. Is that because she actually doesn't want anything from the city, or is she simply unable to think well through the contraction and holding various numbers in her head and attempting to cover it with a lack of need? Who can say. "Perhaps Priscilla might like at least a token of the night, a spare program, perhaps. I could not get her to go and attend even if the play held the answers to immortality and the end of the Burning Legion all at once, as her mind has been made up already."
"Well she's going to miss a masterful King's Knight Number Two," Sintha says indignantly, and never mind that King's Knight Number Two had only a moment ago intended to resign her commission. "But we'll bring her a program of course. I would offer her my moustache for a souvenir, but naturally I must keep it until the end of the run, and then I thought I might bequeath it to Ery."
Siamus clearly has three or four questions but is holding them all, because he knows his sister.
Avrenne laughs, a delightedly warm sound, a sweet crackle of hearthfire on a cold winter day. "If I wasn't half certain she would try to eat it, I would love to see it, a little moustache just like her father. Perhaps when she's a little older," Avrenne says, vastly underestimating the period of time a child spends in the 'will try to eat it' stages. She'll get there with experience. Eventually. "But that is another thought of what she might have as a little treat to… distract from when the routine no longer holds under exceptional circumstances." Oh, right. The Exceptional Circumstances. Which may or may not involve screams of pain throughout the house at some point, if the Duchess cannot withstand the waves of labor when they come.
"Surely her father can distract her obligingly. She does have two parents, does she not?" Sintha gives Siamus a withering look. "But certainly I can bring a treat or two for my niece. I don't suppose she's allowed to have sweets yet, is she?"
"Oh, she may be. Emelia will know for certain," Avrenne says. For all her flaws with interactions with adults, if there is one thing Emelia does know a good deal about, it's care of very young children. (And only young children. Teenagers remain a mystery, and Isla baffles her. To be entirely fair to Emelia, that isn't that uncommon a response with Isla, though.) "Apparently she's too young for honey, as I have been given to understand." She glances down at her watch again, noting the time.
"Too young for honey?" Sintha seems nonplussed. "I shouldn't think honey would — " She shakes her head briskly, dismissing the tangent. "Well. I'll bring her something. Lollies, perhaps. I'm sure she can manage those. Or a toy." She looks sharply at Avrenne. "Now, I'm certainly not suggesting you need to draw the business out as long as last time. I'm sure my brother's delicate nerves won't take it. But if you would oblige us all in doing nothing terribly dramatic until after we return, I imagine we'll all feel easier for it."
Avrenne tears her eyes away from the watch to Sintha, both her brows raising because Avrenne cannot raise only one. "I do hear that some of the theater will say, 'all the world is a stage,' but I am not of the mind to think so myself. I can assure you that if I have any control over it, I shall endeavor to ensure that all dramatics remain the purview of you all set to perform tonight." There's a playful note that slips into her voice, as her eyes flick from Sintha to Siamus. "I make no promises on whether or not I will have anything to do with a moustache on my face throughout the evening, borrowed or not, however."
Sintha recoils. "Stars above, now I shall be too ill to perform." She flaps a hand in dramatic semblance of waving something unpleasant away.
Siamus laughs and laces his hands together behind his head.
One Half: 9:30am to 1:30pm
The house is quieter within for having partially emptied out through the doors and into a carriage bound for the city and the stage, but it also quieter without – the sense of a held breath is all around in the cold freeze of winter, a pause that trembles on the edge of something happening like a maestro’s hand held up before an orchestra, waiting on his direction to fall into an explosion of sound.
Lady Fallon has a similar air to her, despite her efforts to maintain a normalcy of routine. She is elegant in her poise, but as the contractions grow closer together, and begin to rob her of her speech, the sense that she is but one small push away from an edge of things truly beginning has grown steadily in the quiet until the anticipation is a silent roar.
There, in Siamus’ office, she has been pacing restlessly for the past hour, while studying the latest calculations of fluctuations within the market of metals from Northrend through various means of transportation, and their influence on local Azerothian markets in short and long term. Periodically she halts her pacing by Siamus’ desk to make another calculation – it is likely that this particular place has been selected by design, an opportunity to have him watch her at her maths, and to be nearer to him for her own comfort – and she is thus halted when the next contraction hits that she doesn’t manage to keep entirely contained, a pained exhale lifted out of her throat into the quiet air.
Siamus has been doing a creditable job of attending to — or pretending to — his own work. At the moment, he is seated at his desk in his shirtsleeves, pen in hand and head bent diligently over a draft of his proposed budget rider to increase pay for the Stormwind Guard. If Avrenne were not so absorbed in her own labors — both kinds — however, she might notice that he has apparently been reviewing page 2 for going on forty minutes, and his spiky margin-notes stop halfway down that page.
Siamus is not a slow reader.
He is, however, fidgeting incessantly with the pen in his hand, walking it over and over between his fingers and occasionally stopping to tap a restless staccato on the desk.
At Avrenne's soft sound of distress, he looks up sharply and then rises to his feet. "Pet?"
Perhaps most telling of all, Avrenne doesn't respond, although her mouth opens for the attempt, before she closes it on a bite, and closes her eyes on a squeeze, as she makes a small, helpless sound in her throat, and reaches a hand out blindly for his, the other clenched tightly on the edge of his desk, the pocketwatch looking up at her with its open face, the numbers currently unheeded.
Siamus drops his pen and reaches out to take her hand immediately. He steps around the desk's corner to put his other hand gently at the small of her back. "There we are, mo chroí, I have ye. Breathe. Breathe. D'ye need to sit?"
Avrenne shakes her head in fine, jerky movements, and squeezes his hand hard enough that if she didn't have her dump stat as strength, it might have caused actual pain. As it is, her knuckles go white with it, and her fingers tremble, and she does breathe, in fits and holds and starts.
A minute and a half in action hardly feels any time at all. A minute and a half of waiting, of silence, of watching someone stand as a wave of pain breaks over them, helpless to do anything to lessen it, can seem an eternity.
But at last, it does end. Her eyes open, flicking to the watch, and the tension in her releases. "Three or four minutes apart." The imprecision is telling. "It's… it's time," she tells him, breathless. "I should…"
She lifts her head to look up at him, her eyes wider as dark pools, studying his face, and whatever other thought she had intended is lost or set aside. "It isn't, you know." That's an odd thing to say, ambiguous. But she doesn't leave it there. "Your part in this. What Sintha said, about it being done. It isn't. I need you here. I need you."
Siamus has been gazing down at her dark and intent, his brow creased with concern, but at her words his expression softens. He doesn't quite smile, but the warm light in his eyes serves the same purpose. He leans to kiss her hair. "And so I am, and will be. It's my privilege to be here with ye, and I'm grateful that I can."
He draws back, that tender light still in his eyes even if his expression is sober. "Shall we go to your room? And would ye like me to collect Lady Priscilla?"
Avrenne's math on an extended market for steel is half done, the formula half filled, but it might as well have evaporated into the aether. Her only focus is on Siamus, and on the watch, as she straightens up, shoulders squaring and chin lifting.
"Yes, I think that would be best," she agrees. She moves gingerly, like someone who has been scrubbed with a rough towel too vigorously and is now trying not to aggravate her sensitive skin by too quick a motion. But for all of it, she doesn't seem daunted, or fragile. She closes her hand over the pocketwatch with the deliberateness of a captain taking the helm of a ship he knows is about to ride directly into a storm, the possibility of being broken by the storm denied, the defiance made with foreknowledge and experience and an iron will.
Siamus — still holding her hand, his other hand still on her back — shepherds her toward the office door. He lets go of her only to open the door, and then takes hold of her again at once. His hands are gentle, solicitous: He makes no effort to usher or direct her, he's just physically, reassuringly There. "I'll go and fetch Lady Priscilla when you're settled, and come back to stay with ye again myself until ye send me off, aye? Shall I fetch anything else for ye?"
She makes it as far as sitting on the edge of the bed, already prepared with other linens over the sheet, the usual comforter removed and set aside, before the next contraction hits and she clenches his hand through it, unspeaking.
In the chair by the window, Dr. Alma comes alert, without any haste, rising to a stand as placid as an old horse, so many rodeos along in her career that very little has the power to alarm her through a unique circumstance, and this is not unique. She waits patiently, her shawl set over the chair, and her glasses unfolded and put on.
Medea lurks in a corner by the chair, watching with wide eyes, as she sets her crocheting down, squirreling it back into a small basket.
Once the contraction has run its course, leaving Avrenne breathing in heavier exhales, she continues on her intended path to lie down, at least for now. "Yes, Priscilla. I don't need anything else. I have the second basin," she tells him, as she looks to confirm that is, in fact, there within an arms reach.
What… what is the second basin for? Although, you have to be careful with some questions. The answer might be Unpleasant business. Maybe it's Lady Mysteries.
Siamus ponders the existence of the second basin for the length of a couple of bemused blinks, and then visibly files it under Lady Mysteries, and has no further questions.
"I'll be back with Lady Priscilla in just a moment, then," he promises, and takes his leave.
Two Thirds: 2:30pm to 5:30pm
Avrenne paces. Avrenne sits. Avrenne walks. Avrenne waits.
And all the while, Siamus is there at her side, and Priscilla at the other. Two supports for two babes incoming; the math works well, a balanced equation.
It’s already black as midnight outside, the coming of the solstice swaddling the house in winter’s bleak darkness, the stars blurred by heavy clouds inching closer, the open arms of a waiting embrace of the deepest cold this season can bring.
She has barely uttered the words to ask if she might now go into the water, that she thinks she needs the water, ready to beg for it to be time for the water, the pain of the contractions and the heaviness of the pregnancy of twins skating her out onto the edge of tolerating the labor enough to not scream out in agony – for she won’t give in so easily, not with Ery there in the house, and she is not so tired that she cannot yet hold it back – when her own water breaks. Another balanced equation: water for water.
By the time she is in the tub, naked and undone, the door separating her from Siamus’ hand, and the water separating her from her pocketwatch, she commits herself fully to the task before her. She knows this now, this moment, and she paces herself through it. These are the hours of a woman’s work, a labor of love.
Her hand is steady on the wheel. Her will is steel.
Avrenne endures.
And behind the door, as true as north, Siamus endures with her.
Five Sixths: 6:30pm to 9:30pm
It’s the worst of it, these hours stretching onwards, stretching Avrenne on the rack of contractions, endless hours and hours. There are times she knows she lets a scream slip from her fingers, an involuntary cry of pain, but so many more she chokes with a mother’s unyielding protection before they can escape.
Awareness shrinks to a pinpoint. To a basin. To a hand. To a decorative shell. To a memory inside herself that reminds her that she will not break. The end of this torment will come. She knows it.
Above the house, unknown to its laboring lady, the clouds reach their destination, blanketing over the Fallon lands, and slowing their path from off the restless sea. They hang there like curtains to lift for the show, waiting knowingly, with the coy tease of forces left most often to their own capricious elemental wills.
One Whole: 10:30pm to 1:30pm
By the time the household returns to the house – everyone intact, with no personal or global Cataclysm of an unwanted encore – some cheeks still flushed with the thrill of the stage, others with the snapping cold, it is obvious that the end of labor is in sight.
At least, it is obvious to those in the room, as Avrenne begins to push, and a destiny has been decided. The dice of who will be first born of the twins has been rolled, and now it awaits only for the outcome to be observed, and truly known.
It is past midnight, just a moment before 1am, in the first footsteps into the Winter Solstice, the Longest Night of the Year, the Time of Rebirth, that Elliot Simon Marius Parrish Esprit Fallon passes through his second waters and takes his first breath, his cry as loud as a sonorous warcry, the pure power of projection of an infant of two people capable of great loudness, as he announces himself to the assembled.
Above them, the sky spreads its clouds out in a flourish, and snow first drifts and then flurries, a white storm drawn down as if by some unknown gravity at just this moment, a burst of a blizzard sweeping and howling alongside the infant.
But it is not over.
It takes half an hour before the second son claims his own due, Eamon Shine Markell Parrish Esprit Fallon arriving with his mother’s determination that he might be delayed, but not halted. As the hearths roar hotter in the house, fed by the staff to stave off the blizzard’s chill, Eamon opens his eyes, crying out his own initial thoughts and feelings about the world he has emerged into (his opinion may be as blunt as his brother’s, but one has to admit that they both make a convincing argument for the unpleasantry of the change of scenery).
Laid side by side in their swaddles, the Twin! Boys! are difficult to distinguish between in many ways. The shape of their faces, the set of their eyes, the pout of their lips, are all so close to identical that no one looking between them could see any discrepancies. They share the same little tuft of hair so dark a brown it seems black as the night around them. On each little cheek is their mother’s mark, a birth mole dotted just below their left eyes. Neither brow bears the other mark.
Perhaps it is just their smaller birth weights that lend such a similarity of their features to their mother’s rectangular ones, their cheeks less filled out than their sister’s were at her birth, their bodies so much smaller, so much so that a man with large hands might hold each in one hand alone. They are fragile little things, just a little over five pounds each – 5lbs 2oz, and 5lbs 3oz as those who prefer specifics will want to know – and only just 16 inches long, two large sized pineapples with the fronds.
Yet, there is one clear difference between the twins, visible even in the murky newborn features, as if some sort of swapping or sharing had passed between them in the womb, so that neither should have the whole of either: each boy possesses one brown eye, and one blue eye. For Elliot, the brown is left, the blue is right; for Eamon, the brown is right, the blue is left.
Their mother sports her own single color dark eyes, but with some color as well, though maybe not as she would like, of deep purple smudges, and pockets of red where straining burst the blood vessels, the rest of her skin a sickly pale from blood loss and hours of pain that culminated in not one, but two rings of fire to pass through.
Still, as the last of the birth passes, and the blood and water drain away, it is obvious that soon all three of the most important people of the production are soon to emerge. A man can be forgiven for a degree of impatience, having needed to wait not one half hour after the first cry, but two, but his lady is nothing if not punctual and efficient, and thirty minutes after the second cry, the door is opened, and the room revealed.
Priscilla opens the door for Siamus, looking weary and cheerful both, cozy within a borrowed bathrobe, and she lightly taps Siamus' arm as she says, her voice a little scratchy with exhaustion, cracking from use of repeated encouragement for hours unceasing, "Tag, you're it." She yawns hugely, as she strides past the Vice Admiral like a guard surrendering the shift to the next. "Good night."
There is still the heavy coppery tang of blood in the air, but the physical evidence has been removed, or folded away for laundering later. Avrenne is dressed once more in her inky navy laboring dress, the kraken arm tying it securely around her shrunken but still heavy belly – it makes her seem even paler, but she stands upright, chin lifted high to the sky, and shoulders squared with rigid force.
And there, waiting to be picked up from their weighing table, are Siamus’ sons.
Siamus, with an uncharacteristic lack of courtesy, fails to acknowledge Priscilla at all. He is standing by the doorway with a peculiar frozen poise that says he may have just stepped back swiftly from the door itself when he heard Priscilla's hand on the doorknob, so as not to fall into the room when the door was opened. He's holding his silver pocketwatch in one hand, resting open on his palm; he may also have been watching the second hand sweep toward the exactly-thirty-minute mark.
He drops the watch into the pocket of his unbuttoned waistcoat and steps into the space just vacated by Priscilla, and then two steps further into the room. His gaze takes the scene in, searching.
It settles first on Avrenne, and he breaks into a broad, radiantly relieved smile and moves toward her, and then he sees the weighing table and his smile vanishes, his eyes widening. He changes course to go to his sons.
Medea fades back from the table, blending in with the towels and the wallpaper. Pay no attention to the priestess in the room. (Not a difficult task for Siamus.)
Dr. Alma remains where she is, to one side of the weighing table, wiping her hands clean with no hurry — only water at least — as she gives Siamus a tranquil smile, unbothered by the long evening. "Congratulations, Vice Admiral. Two healthy boys. Fraternal twins, not identical, but very close I think. We have here on left, Elliot, 5lbs 2oz, and here on the right, Eamon, 5lbs 3oz. Both 16 inches long." Numbers! The Fallons’ favorites.
Although those are really different numbers from Ery. Much smaller. Is that…bad?
Avrenne starts to speak, and has to clear her throat first. Her voice sounds ragged, frayed all around the edges like a torn sail, for all that she was quieter this time. "Normal," she tells Siamus. "It isn't unusual."
"That's right," Dr. Alma confirms with a slow nod. "Very normal for twins to be born around this time, and this size. It's no indication of anything amiss, or the size they'll be when grown. They'll catch up to their sister."
Siamus nod nod nods. He is hovering, gazing down at the boys uncertainly. A slight, arrested hand movement makes it clear abruptly that he isn't sure which one to pick up. There are two. Quel dilemma.
"Elliot," he says softly. "Eamon." After a moment's silence, he looks toward Avrenne; his face is aglow, his eyes shining. "They have your mark, mo chroí. They have your look about them." He turns back to the pair. And then he bends closer, startled. "Are their — the eyes. Are their eyes… meant to be like that?"
"The different colors? The heterochromia is rare, but it's not anything to be concerned about. Medea did a thorough check, and there is no other sign of anything unusual beyond the appearance. They may stay like that, or they might change after infancy, or into childhood. Eye colors can shift in the newly born," Dr. Alma answers. "Many a babe is born with blue eyes that shift to brown within days or weeks. Time will tell."
Avrenne steps to Siamus' right side, reaching to pick up Eamon, the second son, cradling the small infant to her chest, gazing down with a deep adoration. "My mother's eyes," she tells Siamus, and perhaps also Eamon, her voice a threadbare scrape barely above a whisper. "She had blue eyes, this same color."
Siamus turns to slide a gentle arm around her; he lifts his other hand to lay it on her arm that cradles Eamon, as if in support. He kisses the side of her head. "They're beautiful. Avrenne, anamchara. A pair of beautiful boys. They're perfect. You're perfect."
And then, Avrenne having solved his dilemma, he releases her now to bend and lift the elder twin carefully, tucking him into the cradle of his arm. He gazes down, star-struck, shimmer-eyed. "Elliot," he says hoarsely. "Elliot Simon Marius. My boy." He gives a short, helpless laugh and casts a shining look at Avrenne.
She gazes back up at him, exhausted, drained, but steady on her feet, in no danger this time of collapse, a soft shining of her own starry eyes through the veil of the weariness of a battle fought and won, a smile as warm as a hearth fire, an echo of his laugh in her own chest of a humming.
"Here they are. Our sons. Safe and sound, arrived at home, at last," she says, pauses in her speech as she sighs out her words. "As promised. A vow kept."
Outside, the blizzard swirls the snow around the house, a winter storm of power and potential. Inside, the fires hold the cold at bay, undaunted and unyielding.
Siamus lifts the baby in his arm and bends his head to kiss the infant's tufty crown. He closes his eyes and inhales. He looks up at Avrenne again, still glowing with that profound inner light. "A lady of her word, and my family safe in harbor. Bhaile mo chroí, jewel of the House."
To Elliot, in his arms, he says softly, "Little solstice child, blizzard-born. The pair of ye, bringing the snow and the sun both." He glances to Eamon and smiles. "Ah, they have so much of your look, Avrenne. I pray they'll keep your mother's eyes." He looks back down at Elliot. "One eye for their mother, and one for hers."
Avrenne raises her head to fix her eyes on Siamus, more aware of him and the children than any other in the room; in her eyes, they may as well be the only people in the world at the moment.
"May they have their father's temperament. Perfectly angelic, two officers and gentlemen from the cradle," she teases, an echo of another time.
Siamus laughs. "Aye, lads, your sister's already chosen to play the hellion — eldest's prerogative." He bends closer to Elliot and confides, "But if ye like, as there's the pair of ye, perhaps only one of ye needs to be an officer, and the other a gentleman. Aye?"
The infants squint and glare out blurrily in disgruntled newborn, with their unfocused, mismatched eyes finding no easy and certain purchase as their sister did so many months before. They may take their father's advice as given. Or they might split each archetype down the middle, half of each part, a whole only together, some agreement between them of their heritage and destiny.
But that is only for the twins to know.
For now.