something beautiful about keeping certain aspects of your life hidden

[rhinemaid]

Who: Ilde Decima, Shrieky, and open to the public.
What: River monsters.
Where: The Gross Tar River; primarily but not exclusively in the Raven's Gate area.
When: To...day.
Notes: This post is mostly intended for waterweirdos to catch up, but if your character has yet to meet their nymph quota for life, please feel free to set up something - a rousing game of 'spot the naked fairy' is often enough of a hook to start something off, but if you need more to work with, lmk and we can come up with a scenario! I enjoy your tags. ...Also there's no polyvore link this time because nudity.
Warnings: Nudity, Ilde existing, discussion of childbirth. I will add as I go if need be; let me know if I've missed something that should be warned for.

Getting into the river and not changing her shape is something that Ilde is still finding odd; the lack of an impulse to do so, even more. She sheds her clothes and her glamours, at least, but there is something she finds vaguely irritating about having toes in the water. Her tail is better, and this is a less than ideal shape, and it adds a little to how increasingly ungainly she feels as months and weeks progress. She doesn't feel like she's glowing with maternity (although the pearlescent sheen of her skin still catches the light and ensures that at least in the literal sense it is, actually, true), or like she's suddenly become one with the world via her uterus. Mostly she just feels like she'd quite like not to have to see her feet in the near future, and yet stubbornly they remain.

Shape-shifting with a baby on board is not a very good idea. She can't, doesn't and won't until after she's delivered. It's still annoying.

-but Conway is not annoying, and especially with Wolfgang gone now, it seems important to reestablish their bonds. It's practically a family tradition to acquire family by declaration, so Conway is family and she missed him while he was gone, and it seems easier to get into the minutiae of how she managed to get pregnant with an undead and sterile partner in person. It's not that she's making any effort to keep her pregnancy a secret, it's just- that it's not something she's inviting commentary on from every arsehole with a network connection, either. She's not even sure she wants the commentary of people she's close to, half the time, much less unsolicited opinions and advice...

She stretches out on a rock cropping up out of the river, too lazily to be said to be imitating that famous statue, and closes her eyes to wait. Or sleep. He'll probably wake her up when he gets there, if she's sleeping.

Comments

[rhinemaid]

It's something that Ilde understands- that she looks for in other people, that frightened her so badly when Wolfgang didn't recognize her or remember the conversations they'd had. It wasn't that she thought she should be the most important thing to someone she'd, at the time, barely known; it was that blankness, the idea that she could be utterly meaningless, a lingering child's terror of being forgotten.

She wants to stitch herself inside the people she cares about so they never forget her name or her face or the way that she holds her head. Conway is not ever going to forget her, so she settles under his arm and taps him lightly on the nose with her index finger. “I wanted to tell you about the baby. That I'm having.”

[wontturntofoam]

Shrieky blinks, reflexively, when she taps him on the nose, "Baby? What kind of baby?"

Like a baby duck? A baby lion? Oh no wait, like a baby Ilde?

He sits up, looking at her with a renewed interest. On a purely biological level he is kind of... fascinated and baffled by this news. He knows about the birds and the bees, but only from first hand observation, and really, it was more like the birds and the fish than anything more diverse.

"Will you... Can you lay an egg?"

He's imagining it already, Ilde carrying a speckled egg around with her, wrapped in a blanket and slowly warming it up to hatching point.

[rhinemaid]

Ilde laughs, and it blends with the sound of the water rushing nearby them; for a moment it's only like the tone of the river changes, not a separate sound. “No- no. The phrase is 'live birth', so when the baby's born, there's just baby.” And blood and fluid and other things that are less likely to get their own comfy, cosy blanket. “It's not for months yet. But it's baby, not cakes.”

Here, she means, patting her navel.

[wontturntofoam]

Shrieky actually manages to look more concerned, not less, at this revelation, "Does that mean you're going to hatch?"

He touches her stomach, then glances up from it to Ilde, with a pretty significant frown on his face. A baby would be all well and good, but if Ilde herself if the egg that needs to crack for it to come out, then they need to have a serious conversation about what Shrieky would do with a baby and without a river monster.

[rhinemaid]

“S...ort of,” she says, thinking inescapably of some of the horror stories that she's heard about childbirth and uncomfortable words like 'vaginal tearing'. After a moment, “What do you know about a vagina?”

...if anything, given the circumstances.

[wontturntofoam]

"Nothing." Says Shrieky, and he's sort of visibly bristling as he passes on this piece of information. He's not self conscious at all, but her conceding that she will "sort of" hatch has him envisioning terrible chest-burster scenario's, and every single fibre in him thinks that this is a bad idea.

"Can't you just evict it now and let it incubate somewhere else?"

[rhinemaid]

“All right, well- I can't, no, that isn't how it works. It's going to be fine, though, women do this all of the time and it's fine.” Frightening maternal death statistics are not something she feels the need to share with him, in this moment, when she's trying to reassure him that sort-of-hatching is not going to be a problem. Practically a breeze, surely. “What sort of happens, is-”

How she reached the point in her life where she's trying to teach a mermaid about where babies come from, she isn't sure, but she discovers she has a new respect for her father's method of waiting until she probably already knew about sex and pregnancy and then giving her pointers and making sure she had access to birth control. ('Try not to laugh at his cock, I know they're odd looking but we're very delicate, men are, you might hurt his feelings terribly' had been some of the advice Emery chose to bestow on her.)

“What happens,” she tries again, “is that that part of me's going to- stretch. Enough to let me push the baby out through it. Which is going to hurt a lot, but then I'll be all right, I'll just have to recover afterwards. Or if anything does go wrong, they can cut the baby out instead, but it isn't preferable.”

There are so many things that can go wrong, but she doesn't want to seem scared; not in front of him.

[wontturntofoam]

Realization seems to dawn on Shrieky, and he reaches out to pop his index finger on her belly button, with a suddenly knowing expression.

"It's this, isn't it? I knew they had to do something. All the other holes do something..." Then, almost as if now that Ilde's safety seems assured the rest of his brain has processed what she was saying, Shrieky turns in slow motion to stare at her belly. There is a baby in there. A tiny miniature version of Ilde. It'll be like the goats, and like the manticore, needing her to provide it with affection an sustenance, but it won't vanish and it won't go away. It'll grow up and be a person, just like they are.

And because it's mother will be Ilde, and it will be born in Baedal where there is a long and wide river full of souls? It'll be happy. It's whole life will be happy.

"Gods, you're making a baby! You've already made it, even! Ilde, that's incredible!"

And Shrieky will murder anyone who tries to stop it from being happy.

[rhinemaid]

It's inarguably the most positive response this news has got from anyone, so far, and for an almost awkwardly long moment she isn't sure exactly how to respond. Eventually, she says, with the oddest little smile- “Belly-button. The baby hasn't got one yet, that's- that's where we're connected, inside. They'll cut us apart after birth; that's where I used to be connected to my mother.”

And thinking about Anne Sauvageon is always complicated, at best. She's never going to see her again, and in some ways that's easier than never seeing her father - in other ways, much harder. She'd had time with her father in a way that it feels she didn't really get with her mother. She's carried resentment for years, misplaced hurts and little things, and the more she begins to let go of that, the harder it is to live with the fact that she has to live with it, now. There is no going back, and there is no fixing it. No forward, for them, just memories that she can't be sure she should rely on.

She wonders what Anne would think of this. She decides, without dwelling on it long, that she probably doesn't want to know.

“I really want it to be good,” she says.

[wontturntofoam]

"They cut you apart?" Shrieky stares at the belly button with more concern now, "So, it's a scar, really. Not a hole at all." He leans forward and tries to peer into her bellybutton, but finds it's murky depths reveal nothing of Ilde's inner secrets. "I don't think I can understand that. The next time we are in the vicinity of paper, you may need to draw it out for me."

He resists the urge to poke his finger in to see if he can feel the little baby living in her, and instead, redirects his attention towards Ilde's face, "It will be good. It'll be like a little piece of you, and it will grow up in a wonderful place, and it will be happy and it will be good!"

[rhinemaid]

“I'll draw it for you,” she agrees, complacently - Shrieky's buoyant approach to her news has her inclined to be agreeable, as satisfied as a cat with a half-dead bird. She'd worried, a little, that he wouldn't like something she paid attention to instead of him, particularly in a familial context; they don't spend all their time together, but it feels like a meaningful bond, the first even-as-much familiar kind.

Her father taught her that the people you choose to love are the most important; you're allowed to choose the people who're your blood, and you're allowed not to choose those people, too.

“We're having renovations done at home - so we can have a freshwater pool in the basement. Somewhere safe.” The baby will spend a lot of time in the water, like Ilde does; it'll be the river, sometimes, but not only.

[wontturntofoam]

Shrieky folds his hands under his cheek, and drops his head down to rest it on the warm rock beneath it. Honestly, it hadn't yet occurred to him that the baby would be something he could see himself as being in competition with. Perhaps when the idea did arise, he'd become less pleasant about the incoming child, but for the moment, it was as if the soon to arrive infant was in a completely different mental compartment to him.

"That sounds wonderful. Being able to give her something like that."

Yes, Shrieky has chosen the gender of your baby. You're welcome, Ilde. He goes back to staring at her belly.

"How long will it take to come out?"

[rhinemaid]

“About four months, give or take. Sometimes they come a little early-” she tries not to sound too concerned about that, “-or late. Babies aren't too concerned with other people's schedules. Anyway, I'll get bigger between now and then.”

She runs the flat of her thumb around the edge of her navel, absent-minded, and runs through a mental list of things that haven't gone wrong so far. It's more comforting than thinking about how low the likelihood of something else might be - more concrete to focus on things that certainly haven't happened than things that just probably won't. She worries too much and has seen too many untimely catastrophes to listen to her own good sense.