Content Warning: misogyny; childbirth; devaluation of women; reducing women to their body parts.
I own nothing.
They say that the first 'happiest day' of your life is the day you get married, and that the second is the day your first child is born. Obviously any successive 'happiest days' would be the days your next children are born. There ought to be no shadow hanging over any of these days, none whatsoever.
Obviously, the person who decided that has never met Ushiromiya Rudolf, who despite the normally joyous circumstances, is not having a good day at all.
They're both under heavy sedation, he's told, Asumu and Kyrie both, and won't be conscious for several hours yet. It was hard for both of them; they'd both been carrying big baby boys, and Asumu had had the issue of premature labor to contend with as well.
Rudolf sinks his head into his hands.
Premature labor.
A stillbirth.
And on top of that, the surgeon says that it's unlikely she'll ever be able to carry another child to term. What were the chances, he'd said? About twenty percent. That's all. A two out of ten chance that Asumu will ever be able to have a living child of her own flesh to hold in her arms and love.
His legal wife has had a stillbirth. His mistress has given birth to a healthy baby boy.
Oh God, this is a nightmare.
Since Kyrie told him that she was pregnant, Rudolf has been struggling to figure out how he was supposed to support two children by two different women, essentially trying to make the figures work out so he could support two entirely different families in two different locations. He had been able to tell himself that he would make it work somehow, that he would be able to support them both somehow. Yes, Rudolf did and does run around with a lot of women. But these were his first children, and even if the situation one of them was conceived in was proving to be horribly dicey for him, he didn't want either of them to want for anything.
But now he only has one child.
Kyrie could have handled it. She can handle herself through just about any situation with calm poise. Losing a child would have hurt her, Rudolf knows that, but Kyrie would have picked herself up again, just the same as she always does when hit with a setback at work. She's always looking towards the future, is Kyrie; I haven't got any time to worry about past mistakes, Rudolf, not unless they're threatening what we do here, she'd once briskly said. Asumu, on the other hand…
She had been so excited when she had told him that she was pregnant, even if she was embarrassed that they weren't married yet, and her excitement had been without any of the shadow of uncertainty that Kyrie's had had over it. Asumu has always wanted children; wasn't that what she had said to him on one of their first dates? She wanted a child, saw what she wanted edging ever closer towards her over the past few months, and now her child is dead, and her chances of ever being able to have another are slim, slim indeed. Her dream has died in the palms of her hands; she'll be devastated when she wakes and has to be told. She'll see an empty nursery, an empty cradle, and be reminded of it. What's worse, she'll probably blame herself, or at the very least think that he blames her.
And that's not all. Sitting on a cold metal bench in a cold, sterile hall, Rudolf feels that cold enter his veins and turn his blood to ice. No, that's not all of it. There's more.
Kyrie can handle herself. She can handle herself entirely too well, in fact. She's always known what she wants and will go to any extreme to get it. Rudolf knows that. He knows that what she wants is him, and she'll seize on any advantage she can find to get him. Well, here's a huge one.
Ushiromiya Rudolf's mistress has given birth a healthy baby boy, and his legal wife has had a stillbirth. In Kyrie's cunning, perceptive mind, this will have provided her with a huge opening to oust Asumu from a place she sees as rightfully hers. She'll press for her child's rights, pointing out that she at least has performed the part of a wife to perfection, that she has given him an heir, and that that is something Asumu has failed to do miserably. 'Don't you see how horrible she is as your wife, Rudolf? She couldn't even give you a living child! What is a marriage without children but a shaky contract filled with loopholes, without even a notary's seal on it? Your child by her was strangled on his own umbilical cord; she may as well have killed him herself! But I have your son right here, in my arms, and he's still alive…'
There's no doubt in Rudolf's mind that Kyrie will use the corpse of Asumu's child as the new banner of her campaign to separate the two of them. She might even go to Kinzo…
Dad. That bastard. I'm willing to be I know what he'll do if he finds out about this, and Kyrie tries to get him to help her.
Yeah, I know exactly what he'll do. He'll press me to divorce Asumu and marry Kyrie. He won't give a damn about the way that'll hurt Asumu, just like he's never cared when he hurts one of us. And especially not Asumu. After all, it's a "time-honored tradition" of the Ushiromiya family to regard the women who marry into the family, and the women the men take as lovers to be nothing more than borrowed wombs. It's not their faces, their personalities or their happiness that's important; it's their wombs, and their ability to have children. If they can't, well they aren't even good as a broodmare, are they, so what good are they at all?
Dad will approach it like that. I've got two 'borrowed wombs' in my possession. One of them gave me a living child. One of them gave me a dead one. The latter is obviously defective and good for nothing at all. She's a shoddy piece of merchandise, so why would I keep her? Dad doesn't care about love or affection. Asumu and Kyrie are 'borrowed wombs', and the only 'borrowed womb' worthy of the Ushiromiya family is one that can bear healthy children.
'Asumu is unworthy of us', he'll say. 'She's failed you', he'll say. 'She's good for nothing; cut your losses. Get rid of your defective wife and marry the one who actually kept her promises to you. Do it, or you can consider your place in this family forfeit.'
Disinheritance means losing his share of the inheritance come Kinzo's death. It means losing any of the money his father has given to him before now. But there's a more devastating loss to be had. If Rudolf is disinherited, he will lose the prestige of the Ushiromiya name. He will lose contacts and associate, find his chances plummeting, his fortunes turning against him. He'll be a nobody—no, worse than a nobody, he'll be a disgraced son of a prestigious family. It will ruin him.
But Rudolf knows that this is what it will come down to, if he lets things play out as they are now: drop Asumu and marry Kyrie, or lose everything.
Kyrie is a smart, intelligent woman. Rudolf knows she could still make her way in the world as a single mother with a bastard son; she's not the sort to let setbacks drag her down. And all the same, if she knows that she holds in her arms the means to oust Asumu from her position once and for all, she will not rest until she's done it.
Asumu is sweet, and kind. She's forgiving of his faults and accepts him for the person he is, flawed and pathetic as he may be. She looked up at him out of jade green eyes, the day she told him she was pregnant, smiled radiantly, and said 'We're going to be so happy. I'm sure of it; we're going to be so happy.' She is sweet and innocent, not unintelligent, but without the cunning or the ruthlessness needed to make her way on her own in the mire of the Ushiromiya family politics. Rudolf wants nothing more than to protect her from the brewing storm that is inevitably going to strike at them all.
If he leaves her unprotected, she'll be swallowed whole by his unkind, unforgiving family, and he'll never see her again.
Can I even protect her?
Rudolf would like to be able to say that he wouldn't divorce Asumu even if it meant having to beg on the streets of Tokyo. He would like to be able to say that he loves her enough for that—because while he's still not sure just what it is he has with Kyrie, he knows that he loves Asumu. After all, she had said 'for richer and poorer' and meant every word. Why shouldn't he?
But I don't. I didn't. Here's the sorry, ugly truth of it. If it came down to staying in his father's good graces, or keeping Asumu as his wife, if there was no other way to get out of it, no third option, Rudolf knows what he would choose, and it wouldn't be his wife. He'd cave under the pressure Kinzo put on him, and divorce Asumu and marry Kyrie, making their child his legitimate heir.
And what would happen to Asumu after that?
She'd be humiliated in front of her family, in front of the world at large, that she was cast away like so much deadweight because another woman had given her husband a living child, and that she had not. It's too much, Rudolf supposes with a grimace, to hope that when this happens, she'll consent to becoming his mistress instead. Asumu isn't going to settle for second-best in his heart or in his bed. She's forgiving, but even she won't be able to forgive being thrown away like trash over something utterly out of her control and completely not her fault. I don't blame her for this, but she'll think I do. I don't want her to think of me like that.
Asumu knows what she deserves, and she'll know that she deserves better. When that happens, when her beloved husband throws her away, she'll walk away from him, back to her family or on to a new life, and she won't look back. Not at him. Not even once.
What do I do, what do I do, what do I do… Rudolf feels as though his heart will pop out of his mouth; he feels ready to rip all of his hair from his scalp. One of his children is dead before he ever had the chance to know him, and he'd like to be able to be a father to the one still living. He wants his living child close, and he wants his wife close. He wants them both. But he can't have them both.
Or can he?
It's a desperate plan that enters suddenly into Rudolf's mind, desperate and risky with a high chance of failure. But he is desperate. Desperate enough to try to make it work.
-0-0-0-
Kyrie won't look him in the eye, still. It's been three months, and she won't look him in the eye. She is sicker and sadder than he has ever seen her, weary and grief-stricken over the loss of her child. Rudolf feels guilt every time he looks at her, and sometimes, a lot of the time, he thinks that maybe Asumu shouldn't have been the only one he was trying to protect.
Asumu will look him the eye, and sometimes, Rudolf feels a wave of guilt and fear wash over him at the way she'll look, narrow-eyed, into his face. She holds Battler in her lap, playing blocks with him, and she'll look over the baby's head and stare at him, and Rudolf will think she knows, that she's uncovered the deception. But if Asumu does know (and the longer this goes on, the more Rudolf thinks that she has figured it out), she says nothing. She loves Battler as her own son, and has no idea that the child on her lap is a cuckoo in the nest.
Rudolf knows he has no right to do this. He knows that he has no right to deprive Kyrie of her son, any more than he has the right to foist his bastard child on his legal wife. He's hurting all three of them, Asumu, Battler and Kyrie, lying to them and forcing them into a false life. This is all going to come crashing down eventually; that's the way with secrets and deceptions, Rudolf's learned to his cost.
It's all going to fall apart, and Rudolf will be surprised if any of the people he's deceived will be able to forgive him when they find out.
But for now, he sits down on the living room floor with his wife and child, and tells himself to be happy now, so he can have these memories to hold, when they know the truth.