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 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.