09-08-2021, 05:13 PM
This pain reduces her to a tangle of thought and feeling - all of it short-lived and unresolved as she writhes in the grass beneath a black, sleeping sky. She thinks of their son, Obsidio, of the way he is so perfect when both of his parents are entirely broken pieces forced back together in a mask of fortitude. He is so whole and so without flaw, and just the very image of his dark, delicate face bobbing gently in her mind behind the blackness of closed eyes is enough to make this pain somehow more bearable.
Another one? She is aware of Obscene’s voice, though she has no energy to open her eyes and search for him in the dark - she can feel him there anyway, curled around her back like a mountain range shielding her and their son. It is a comfort she does not try to name to have him here, a gift that he stayed, that he nearly snapped at her apology to stop. It didn’t feel unkind though, it didn’t feel like fury or anger or wrath directed at her. It felt like the tangle of pain she had been trying to unwind in her own chest for months without him, and she cannot help but wonder now if it would have been easier to do it with his help.
She wasted so much time, so much opportunity, and it’s as if in the haze of birth she cannot remember that he is more than the man who faced death beside her so that she wouldn’t face it alone, more than the father of the boy curled so near her belly. She forgets that he has purpose and place, and that none of it is her. She forgets in her exhaustion, what this is.
It is that change in his eyes that she clings to now as she battles her own body, that flash of red brighter than any fire, like a lantern in the dark to guide her back. If she were someone more arrogant, she might’ve even thought that look to be something like happiness, a glimpse past the wards he maintains so well.
Revelrie groans, and her steely skin is so dark with sweat that it looks almost charcoal in the starless night as she strains. There is nothing that feels different than it had moments ago, nothing to warn her of the pain that waits with fading eyes to greet her as she gives one last heave to bring a second child into the world. There is joy in her chest, a feeling of fullness and elation, of exhaustion but not depletion. It feels fitting that she would have twins, that like she and her own twin, these children would have a mirror in life to share everything with. A someone, no matter what.
She is smiling when she tries to rise, dark with sweat and sides heaving, but a light in her eyes that better matches the ancient silver of starlight. Except as she turns to meet their second, a little girl grulla like her mother and gold like her father, she realizes something is not quite right. Revelrie struggles in the matted grass, careful not to jostle the boy who is suddenly so still, his infant face turned to his sister like a flower towards the sun. For a moment their daughter is mirror to their son, her head lifted and her face turned to his, a stillness that is almost peaceful flowing between them.
And then.
And then.
There is a sound that shouldn’t be there, a ragged little gasp, a wet sound that Revelrie cannot make sense of until she sees their little girl go rigid where she lay. “Obscene?” She asks, and her voice is the soft that comes before panic, the whisper before the horror that unfurls so readily inside her chest. Their girl rasps again, and again, until the sound is a constant wheezing that forces Revelrie unsteadily to her feet, stepping over Obsidio to reach for their girl, to touch her face and her neck and that pulse in her chest that hardly beats at all. Her wings unfurl with an audible snap, the flash of molten under-feather like some strange golden aurora gleaming above their twins.
“Please,” she says, because even though she cannot fathom what this is, she knows innately what it means, what will happen, “please, I’ll do anything.”
Another one? She is aware of Obscene’s voice, though she has no energy to open her eyes and search for him in the dark - she can feel him there anyway, curled around her back like a mountain range shielding her and their son. It is a comfort she does not try to name to have him here, a gift that he stayed, that he nearly snapped at her apology to stop. It didn’t feel unkind though, it didn’t feel like fury or anger or wrath directed at her. It felt like the tangle of pain she had been trying to unwind in her own chest for months without him, and she cannot help but wonder now if it would have been easier to do it with his help.
She wasted so much time, so much opportunity, and it’s as if in the haze of birth she cannot remember that he is more than the man who faced death beside her so that she wouldn’t face it alone, more than the father of the boy curled so near her belly. She forgets that he has purpose and place, and that none of it is her. She forgets in her exhaustion, what this is.
It is that change in his eyes that she clings to now as she battles her own body, that flash of red brighter than any fire, like a lantern in the dark to guide her back. If she were someone more arrogant, she might’ve even thought that look to be something like happiness, a glimpse past the wards he maintains so well.
Revelrie groans, and her steely skin is so dark with sweat that it looks almost charcoal in the starless night as she strains. There is nothing that feels different than it had moments ago, nothing to warn her of the pain that waits with fading eyes to greet her as she gives one last heave to bring a second child into the world. There is joy in her chest, a feeling of fullness and elation, of exhaustion but not depletion. It feels fitting that she would have twins, that like she and her own twin, these children would have a mirror in life to share everything with. A someone, no matter what.
She is smiling when she tries to rise, dark with sweat and sides heaving, but a light in her eyes that better matches the ancient silver of starlight. Except as she turns to meet their second, a little girl grulla like her mother and gold like her father, she realizes something is not quite right. Revelrie struggles in the matted grass, careful not to jostle the boy who is suddenly so still, his infant face turned to his sister like a flower towards the sun. For a moment their daughter is mirror to their son, her head lifted and her face turned to his, a stillness that is almost peaceful flowing between them.
And then.
And then.
There is a sound that shouldn’t be there, a ragged little gasp, a wet sound that Revelrie cannot make sense of until she sees their little girl go rigid where she lay. “Obscene?” She asks, and her voice is the soft that comes before panic, the whisper before the horror that unfurls so readily inside her chest. Their girl rasps again, and again, until the sound is a constant wheezing that forces Revelrie unsteadily to her feet, stepping over Obsidio to reach for their girl, to touch her face and her neck and that pulse in her chest that hardly beats at all. Her wings unfurl with an audible snap, the flash of molten under-feather like some strange golden aurora gleaming above their twins.
“Please,” she says, because even though she cannot fathom what this is, she knows innately what it means, what will happen, “please, I’ll do anything.”
REVELRIE
it feels like falling, it feels like rain,
like losing my balance again and again