Author's Note: This is the next (and last) in my Hellboy II AU series, that began with 'Unbroken'. It borrows a slight variance on Abe's backstory from the comics, because it just fits so well, and technically Abe's background is unknown in the movies so it may very well be the same. It's all AU anyway.
Anyway, been a while . . hope somebody out there's still reading. :)
The bullet enters just beneath her right breast.
She knows this later; in the moment, Nuala only knows that the man across from her - the President of the United States, reaching forward to shake her hand - looks startled. He isn't afraid, not in that first second - just confused. He pulls his hand back, reaches toward his face, toward the splatters of hot amber on his skin. There's no sense, no comprehension - just the thought of wrong, something is wrong.
Then she's on the ground, staring up at a blue, blue sky, turned into obscure and abstracted shapes in the snatches of it that she can see between the faces hovering over hers. She doesn't know who they are, the faces and the hands on her, confused, urgent, professional and grim. There are louder voices, inside her mind, familiar - one pained, one panicked.
It doesn't hurt; it's more like her body has been cut out from under her, like she is suddenly just a floating fragment of consciousness trapped in a burning machine. The pain isn't hers. The body isn't hers. It's just a thing, leaking, lurching in stilted attempts at function. The blue sky is going brighter and brighter, gray at the edges. One of the voices is there with her. The other is screaming.
There's one more second of clarity - a face swims into focus, and suddenly she knows who that is, that's Myers, shouting into his phone. She knows him. She trusts him. Nuala grabs for him, or tries to, but his face isn't there, or maybe her hand can't get there, and she thinks he might catch her flailing hand but she's not sure. His eyes are on hers, though, his fear spilling with her blood, and that's good enough. That'll have to do.
"The baby," Nuala manages to say. "The baby -"
And then nothing.
Miles north of Washington, DC and 12 stories underground, Nuada throws a Styrofoam table at the first man through the door, stumbling drunkenly, his blood splattering the walls. Unarmed and bleeding and weakened with nearly two years of captivity, it still takes six men to wrestle him onto the gurney. One of them suffers a broken nose; another, a dislocated knee. One of them is not a man at all, it's Liz Bruttenholm, nee Sherman, who runs there because Abe can't, Abe is collapsed on the floor screaming his wife's name, terrifying her children.
Her children are less than a year old, not talking yet, and they've already gotten good at patting her face while she cries because someone else has failed to come home.
Liz sparks and slaps him and his eyes focus on her. It's the second the guards need to get him down, and a nurse rushes in with a syringe. It takes her longer to pull the fire back and realize, crap, shit, fucking goddamn it, she left the babies alone.
No, not alone.
With Abe, who's watched them plenty of times.
With Abe, who she's not sure isn't going to die too.
Nuada isn't as out as they think he is; his hand shoots out, grabs the front of her, and the nurses and doctor and the guards who were strapping him down have to scramble back because she goes up like oiled paper, like gasoline and a match. It's all she's got not to go off like a bomb. Her babies are alone. Red is in DC, representing the BPRD at the treaty signing.
She can't remember if it was signed or not, before there was that unexpected sound from the TV - like a fuse going, she remembers thinking, damn it, Red, that's why you can't plug fourteen TV sets into the same power strip, we're gonna miss - but the picture was still there and Abe made this sound she never wants to hear again, but probably will, as soon as she feels comfortable leaving the babies with someone and going back to the field. Liz has heard a lot of people die.
"The baby," says Nuada, and Liz feels everything in her go stone cold, her blood like rain rushing into the gutters, carrying everything away - because that isn't Nuada talking. "The baby -" he says again.
His eyes close. His hand falls away from her, only a little red - she was burning, but not that hot, apparently. Candle flames. Liz prays to a God that even her reformed demon of a husband can't convince her gives a rat's ass - but she asks anyway. She grew up on the streets, in and out of foster care, of mental hospitals, of that rain-drenched gutter. It's what you do, if you're going to make it - you know no one gives a shit. You ask anyway, over and over and over.
Later, Hellboy will think that he should have been trying to get to her - to Nuala, to the woman who's damned near a sister to him, wife of the guy who's the closest thing he's got to a brother, and his first thought should have been to help her. That'd be the human, the Christian, thing to think. What Father would have done.
But he doesn't think that, doesn't do that. He sees red.
He's at the front of the crowd though, surrounded by suits, all of them grabbing for blackberries while security swarms over them like somebody's kicked an anthill, and there are ineffectual hands pushing at his shoulders, Sir, get down. Sir, get on the ground, sir, we need you to get down, sir -
That's what coming out did for them. It got him called 'Sir'.
It got Nuala shot.
He should be thinking of Nuala, but what he's thinking is, guy who'd shoot at her for signing that treaty, guy like that'd take a shot at Trevor and Grace. And the world doesn't need a guy like that in it. That guy doesn't get to breath the same air as his kids, period, the end.
In the end it doesn't matter what he's thinking, because half the audience is Fae, and most of them have very good eyes and even better noses, and a small but significant percentage of them can fly.
Hellboy gets there in time to hear some Secret Servicewoman trying to explain, in tones of disinterested duty, that it'd be good if they could identify the sniper by his dental records. Her words aren't making much of an impression. He claps a hand - the lighter one - on her shoulder, and gets a gun in his face for his trouble, hastily lowered.
"Let it go," he suggests.
"Had to be said," she says, glancing over her shoulder and grimacing before turning back to him. Her face goes solemn again. "You were with the delegation," she realizes aloud. "I'm sorry for your loss."
It's ritually earnest - not meaningless, he knows that, he's said it himself more times than he wants to think about, but still impersonal. She's not dead yet, he wants to protest, but doesn't, because that sounds like denial, that sounds like what they all say, that reflexive no, no! - and he realizes that actually, he doesn't know that.
They fly her back to Trenton and the BPRD so that she can receive the attention of doctors and Elvish healers who know her, so that she and Nuada can be monitored side by side. It will be better for the baby, too, to be in the care of doctors familiar with his father's unique physiology as well, if he survives to be born.
No one expects that, though, despite how near to term she was. Is. Abe throws a tray of tools and dried flowers at a startled team of nurses and herbalists because they're already using the past tense, saying impersonal things like the pregnancy, when a week ago everyone on base was already calling his son by his name, despite his continued residence inside his mother.
Arland. It means 'pledge' - it means the pledge his mother made, laying in his arms for the first time. The world will change. The world will change, because she, they, will make it so.
Behind him a monitor beeps. The entire ward has gone quiet.
"Abe," Liz says, coming up and taking his arm. "C'mon. Let's go for a walk."
"No," he says, wretching his arm out of her grip. "No, she needs -"
"- calm," Liz suggests. "She needs to rest and heal, and she'll do that better if you sleep too. You know she gets frazzled when you're tired."
She's so calm, she makes it sound so reasonable, and he wants to hit her.
"You're drying out, Abe," Liz says flatly. "She told me herself that it makes her itch when you do that."
He laughs, only it's more of a sob, and Liz says, "You'd know if anything happened, to either of them. We'll only be two floors away."
It's because she says them that he lets her lead him away, towards a tank and food and sleep - because he's so damned grateful for that plural. For someone else who hasn't given up yet.
She needs me to believe, he'd been saying.
They never do find out if the shooter was aiming at Nuala or at the President. He calls, though, later in the day - the President. He speaks to Abe. He's decent, genuinely concerned. He recalls negotiations with Nuala, random moments of her candor and clarity and general saintliness - all of which sounds entirely right to most of Abe, except the part that thinks, that's how one is spoken of after death; death erases all wrongs. But she's not dead yet, and I will remember that she could be indecisive and willfully blind at times and that she was terrible with computers and would just expect menial chores to be done for her and . . and . . .
. . and he thinks of this other man's family, of the wife who will sleep beside him, the children he'll kiss goodnight, the whole, untouched unit of them, and as this good and decent man tells him stories that let Abe know he really did know and like Nuala . . . all Abe can think is, why wasn't it him?
Nuala sits in a green field, the grass so tall it reaches over her head, insects buzzing around and birds chirping overhead and the sky as blue as a robin's egg and as round. A vast dome of living brightness. Her swollen belly undulates with the swaying of the grass.
Nuada paces around her, behind her, beside her, just an unseen rustling. Like some stalking predator.
"You should sit," Nuala says, as ants crawl over her fingers and a lazy beetle explores the crevices of her toes. She can hear earthworms beneath her, making their slow, blind way. "Listen. Everything is in order here."
She hears him slashing at the grass with his hands. "Crawling blind things eating other crawling blind things while the world burns over the next hill," Nuada snaps. "We're dying."
"Death is necessary to life," says Nuala, and presses her hand over her turgid womb. She feels the sunlight on her head and the moist warmth of the dirt under her and the trickle of dew running down the blades of grass that swish against her bare arms, their rough edges almost cutting. There is a shadow of pain in the center of her, and she drinks in every ounce of life she can and feeds it in to her belly.
"Death is necessary to life," she repeats, softly, hushed. "Life goes on. That is the way of things. Life goes on."
"I need to check on the babies," Liz says, pulling away, when Red tries to kiss her. His yellow eyes glow in the dark, and she bites her lip at the expression on his face. She rolls over and swings her legs out of the bed anyway. "I'm sorry, I just - I can't, you know?"
"Yeah, babe," he says, gently, and leans across the bed to push her hair behind her ears with his huge stone hand - the brush of granite against her cheek, the familiar texture of it, is almost enough to make her cry. "Right. Of course. I don't mind. As much time as you need, okay?"
It's been three days. It feels like three hundred.
"She wouldn't want us to be like that about it," Liz blurts, contradicting herself. His hand cups her face. "I need to check on the babies," she repeats desperately, and flees.
The babies still share a crib - they scream bloody murder if separated, which is going to be an issue in a year or two, but not yet. Trevor sleeps like a kitten, loose-limbed and fearless - and with an actual cat curled up next to him, as it happens, at the moment. The big orange tom, Perseus. Grace is awake, lying on her back and playing with her toes. She's kicked the blankets away.
Liz looks down at her daughter in surprise; despite what she'd said to Red, she'd thought they'd both be sleeping. She hadn't heard a sound.
"Hey, bite-size," Liz murmurs, and dangles her fingers into the crib. Grace burbles, grabbing at her, catching one finger. Liz dances her hand around, murmuring a soft tune that's halfway between a waltz and Pink Floyd. So much for lullabies. The kids don't seem overly damaged about it, though. Grace just watches her, eyes as bright as her father's.
"What's news, huh?" Liz whispers.
Grace answers her with a squawk that makes Trevor frown in his sleep and kick a little, dislodging Perseus, who goes up over the side of the crib and lands with a thud, off in search of more peaceful lodging. Trevor doesn't wake, though.
"Mommy couldn't sleep," Liz says. Pauses. "Mommy's being a lousy wife. Falling back on street-kid instincts, here. Don't ever let anybody see you weak. Don't let 'em see you cry."
Grace watches, absorbing every word, Liz thinks, but hopes that's not literally true yet - hopes that all her daughter is getting is sounds, for just a little longer.
"Mommy didn't used to worry about being a lousy wife," Liz confesses. "Not very feminist of me, is that? But Daddy's a good husband. A good daddy, too. You're a lucky little squirt."
Grace waves her hand at Liz's face, fingers curling and clenching and uncurling, an expression of concentration on her small face.
"You cry in front of whoever you damned well please, when you grow up, okay?" Liz says.
Grace's fingers spark, just a little, and she smiles wide and gives an utterly graceless little baby guffaw of pure delight.
"Good," says Liz, wrapping her own hand around the tiny fist and sparking in turn; Grace doesn't burn, she laughs, until Trevor starts to whimper and Liz takes her hand away to run it, unlit, over his small shoulder. "Shhh," she murmurs shakily. Her tears make soft, crinkly splats against the sheets with the fire-proof, pee-proof mattress pad under them. "Shhh, little billy goat. Shhhh."
Trevor nestles his head with its tiny buds of horns down into the mattress, still frowning, but also still alseep.
Grace makes a tiny yip of sound, wanting Liz's attention back. Liz pulls her hand up, crosses her arms on the edge of the crib and just stares down at them. This seems to satisfy Grace, who doesn't appear to mind being cried on overly much. She holds her hands up in front of her face and the tips of her fingers light again, and she giggles.
Nuala stands hip-deep in a still pool, the water clear as glass, and below her feet a ledge drops off into a vast, descending spiral. A blue figure swims down there, appearing and disappearing as he tries to make his way through an endless maze of dead-end tunnels and dim alcoves. He is lost, trying to reach her, but he glows. He shines with power, here, with the truth of what he is.
She can feel the same potential within her, in her child, where he floats inside her - a power that could call tides if given the chance, but is so weak now. So weak.
"Look," says Nuala.
"This was a volcano," says Nuada. "This was the realm of a dragon, once, sister, do you remember dragons? Gods of fire, sister, and they slaughtered them all."
"Look," Nuala repeats, and presses a hand to her restless womb. Of course she knows where she stands, what she stands in, feels the ghosts of more gods than the one who died here swirling around her. And Abraham - Abraham would not recognize the way she sees him now.
"Look at what?" Nuada demands. "Your slimey little plaything, who can't even navigate a dream? He failed to protect you, sister."
"No," says Nuala, and shakes her head. Somewhere, in some other world, she feels a hand in hers. It is too dry, that hand, it clings too tightly, she can feel the wrinkled wrongness of its skin. "No, he didn't. Look, brother."
Nuada sighs explosively and throws a rock into the water; it sinks, bouncing soundlessly down. Abe looks up.
The hand on hers tightens, in that other place. In this one, the child in her womb wriggles and tries to turn, though it lacks the room anymore. Maybe that happens in both places.
Nuada does not look, but Nuala feels all the surging life of oceans trickling into her veins from the exhausted man slumped at her bedside. She lives - they live - because he wills it so.
"He did not fail? Then why are you dying?" Nuada demands. "Why is that thing in your womb dying, if its father is such a wonderful protector?"
"He, brother, he is not going to die," Nuala says, her voice low and certain. "He will live to be born." But Nuada is shaking his head.
"He is dying with you, sister," Nuada says. "With us. I feel it, and so must you."
"No," Nuala growls. She takes what Abraham gives her and gives all of it, every drop of him and her, to the life inside her.
All logic would suggest that it is more important that she preserve her own life, the work she is doing, the world she is building. She is a queen, and she is desperately needed. Nuala has thought, with pride and with terror, that she was born to do the work that she is doing - that some true, full god must yet remain, to have put her in this place and time.
But then there was also a man with a gun, and between guns and gods and kingdoms, for once, Nuala chooses for herself. Odd that it is the same choice she made at the beginning of this; she can still live with it. Die with it. It's oddly the same.
"You are not a god, and the child is dying," Nuada insists, but then he stops. He watches her a long moment, and something in his face changes. "Sister . . " he seems to trip over the words. "Sister, I am sorry."
"He will not," says Nuala argues desperately. "He is unharmed, he only needs to be born. If I die, they will cut him from me. It is the human way."
Nuada's face twists in disgust at this, and she sees how he sees it, yet another example of human violence - always, always he sees death, and not life. Nuala snaps, "Why do you mourn, brother, for the spawn of your whore of a sister and her disgusting amusement? Why should his death grieve you?"
"Would you have us at odds to the last?" Nuada asks, and for once, he is the calmer of them, his disgust slipping easily away into simple weariness.
She wants to snap, yes, but the word catches in her throat. She struggles to bring it forth, but it won't come, and her face crumples, her tears falling into the water all around her. "No," she blurts. "No, brother, I would not." And she reaches out toward him.
Nuada takes her hand.
"We have to let go," Nuala whispers. "Now, soon, before it's too late."
"I'm not the one clinging," Nuada responds. "What have I to cling to, sister? It's you who holds us here."
He's wrong; it has been years since their link was what it had been when they were young. He is wounded, but not so badly as she. She can feel the life left in him, stronger than what remains to her. It flutters across her mind to wonder if he might live, when she dies; if she's succeeded that that far, if she is that much her own - if her death, at least, will be her own. But he's right too - she is the one bound, holding on for all she's worth to the distant sensation of a hand holding hers, to the force of life that bond feeds into her.
"I'm afraid," Nuala confesses, barely audible.
"Of death?" Nuada asks, tilting his head at her in confusion - of course, he can sense that it isn't so. It has never been so. She shakes her head.
"That they'll be too slow," Nuala says. "That something will go wrong. That I'll take the child with me."
"How's - ah -" Manning gestures awkwardly into the infirmary, then shoves his hands in his pockets. The Royal Guard stand watch a few paces behind him, just out into the hall, and it makes him twitchy. He tried to make it policy that they had to remove their masks, but he got voted down on that one. Damned stupid, if you ask him. How things like this, this mess here, happen. Letting things like that slide. Bad security procedure.
The gunman wasn't masked, that he can remember, but that's not the point.
Myers holds up a spray bottle by way of answer, not moving from his post slouched against the door. "If he wakes up, you never saw this," Myers says, and nods to where Abe has collapsed forward, asleep, on the side of Nuala's bed. "She'd want me to, though. Hell, he'd want me to, if he were in his right mind, somebody's gotta be there for -" And Myers stops himself.
Somebody will need to take care of the baby, Manning finishes inside his head, and nods. If the baby lives. You don't say that, though. He's not the best with people, he knows that, it's not his strong suit, but he gets that much. Handed out enough flags to get that.
It's dim and quiet and empty in the infirmary now, just one nurse doing something quietly at a station in the far corner. She stands in a pool of yellow light and ignores them, lets them keep their watch. Nuala and Nuada are the only patients - unless you count the baby, with its own set of monitors and beeping things, little noises like crickets filling in the silence.
The tableau before him makes his stomach go sour in a confusion of revulsion and regret. He knows these people. He likes them, he does, he knows they're good people, it's not the good part that's the problem. It's the people part. The forms of the beings before him are still fundamentally alien - blue skin or paper white, too large eyes, the faint gurgle of the collar that covers Sapien's damned gills. Gills, damn it. Manning thinks it's got to be some sort of instinct, something hard-wired into you to be scared of things like that. They're not human. He can't be expected to react to them like they're human.
But they're his people, still. He looks after his people.
He looks sideways at Myers, who looks ready to fucking tip over. There's no confusion on his face, just a dogged lack of emotion, a soldier's resoluteness. Loyalty, in its most helpless extremity.
And Manning thinks maybe it's time to give this job to someone else.
One of the monitors beside Nuala's bed begins to sound an alarm.
"It was you who tried to tell me that all things must pass," Nuada says. "Perhaps I've come to believe you."
"Not my son," Nuala shakes her head frantically. "It is not his time."
"Think of the world he'd be born into, sister," Nuada argues. "Think of what they did to the forest god."
"No!" Nuala snaps, and then lashes out, pushing him away so hard he stumbles. "The world will change! I will change it!"
"No, sister, you won't." Nuada shakes his head, his words full of a terrible, inexorable gentleness, and for the first time, Nuala can see the shadow of their father in him. He re-approaches her slowly, but does not touch. "You won't, sister, because whether the child is born or no, you are dying. You will change nothing more."
She has nothing to say to that but, brokenly, "I could have. He could have."
And she realizes she's not standing in water, in that dead volcano, anymore. They stand in a glittering cavern - in the silent tomb of the Golden Army.
"You truly believe they could change? When they have killed you, you still believe so?" Nuada presses, his voice full of doubt.
"One of them killed me," Nuala argues. "One. Only one."
"It was enough," Nuada points out.
"Yes," Nuala agrees, hand on her belly.
It infuriates him, despite that he wants - she can feel that he truly wants peace between them. He is so tired, so tired, and yet incapable of rest.
"You know that thing you bed is partly human," Nuada breaks, and lashes out. "He reeks of it - human and gods only know what else, but it bears their taint, and so would your child. It would not be so mortal as to die with its mother, otherwise."
"I know what he was," Nuala insists, feeling his anger and his exhaustion and his desolation in her veins, and she just is. She doesn't know why she should argue, what it can matter anymore - only that it does. "Abraham - he was born of an accident, a terrible act, but he is good, and kind, and wise - that is what you should see, that through their lust for power and their violence and their cruelty there is still life. A child. My child. We continue. They continue. And the gods are reborn, always."
It is old litany, like breathing, but it is no comfort now when the shining possibility of it becoming literally true is in the midst of being denied.
"No gods are reborn into the world the humans have pillaged," Nuada says, punctuating his denial with a slash of his hand, backing away from her. "And your child is mortal, more human than not. You know it yourself, it is why you grieve."
"He could still live," Nuala says.
"But you don't believe he will," Nuada replies.
Hellboy isn't asleep when the phone rings.
"Get down here," is all Myers says, and Liz rushes into the room holding a bleary-eyed Trevor as he stumbles out of bed.
"No," Liz says, shaking her head, her eyes swollen in a way that tells him she's been crying for hours. "No."
But it's quiet; it's not disbelieving. It's just what you have to say, to have said it, to have tried. He doesn't answer her, he just looks for his pants and tries not to think more than five minutes into the future. Put on pants, put on shoes, everything else later.
"You believed you could save the world," Nuala says, her voice hollow and despairing, as she turns and looks out over the great hulking shapes of the Golden Army, now forever somnolent.
"I could have," Nuada snaps.
"No," Nuala shakes her head. "I know more of them now, of their weapons. You would have slaughtered many, before you were stopped. They would have suffered and lost. But stopped you would have been, and once you'd made it so clear that we were enemies to them, they would have obliterated us utterly."
"The Golden Army -" Nuada starts to protest.
"- are a sad child's toys, compared to the weapons they weild," Nuala cuts him off. "They have studied the workings of the tiniest fragments of being and learned to rip into the very fiber of all things. They can harness fire like the burning of stars, brother. One by one they are weak and mortal, but in the whole, they are nearly gods themselves."
"And you forgive this," Nuada scoffs. "You choose to breed with this."
"No," Nuala shakes her head. "I chose to have a child with Abraham, whom I love. I didn't choose them. I chose him. As he chose me."
"He was a fool manipulated by lust," Nuada dismisses it. "He would have traded his species for the chance to bed you, sister - my, how proud you must feel."
"You don't know him," Nuala insists quietly. "You know nothing, see nothing, but your own hatred."
"I see more clearly than you," Nuada argues, "who would make friends of those who make a study of tearing the world to pieces. Is that how your pet abomination was made, sister? Some accident of their science?"
"I thought you did not want us at odds, brother," Nuala points out, "at the end."
"I have tried!" Nuada explodes. "That you should care for the child you bear is only natural, but that you defend them, even now, when they have put cold metal in your chest - I have tried but I cannot - cannot -"
"Gods know what else runs in my Abraham's blood?" Nuala suddenly interrupts. "That is what you said, isn't it, brother? Gods know? Here is a parting gift for you, brother, another insult you may fling at me - you may now call me oathbreaker, for when Abraham learned of his heritage, it distressed him so that he could not bear for any but me to know it. He made me swear I would never reveal it."
"As if you could make me loath them more!" Nuada threw back. "Tell me, then, if you must, about how your poor dear Abraham is some sad mating of a human and - what? A fish?"
"A god," Nuala says, and the words drop heavy as stone into the room.
"Sir - sir you have to let us -"
But Abe throws the nurses, then Myers, then Manning off, and every pipe in the walls and the ceiling around them suddenly bursts, and the earth around them - six stories down - groans. The lights sway and spark and half of them die.
The monitor on Nuala's chest gives a low, continuous whine. Nuada's whines and then jumps and then whines again, here and then gone and then here. Arland's monitor is still beeping. Abe hears the words triage and c-section and not much time, and he hears water rushing by his ears in the dark as he's - she's - he's sinking.
Nuada is silenced. Then he snarls, "You lie."
"You know I don't," Nuala replies, holding his gaze. "Will you believe me if I tell you it was every bit as horrific as you imagine all humans to be? Rape and murder, brother - they tried to steal the power of a god, but something went wrong, and the god died, but so did the man. And in their place was my Abraham. The son of a god."
He has nothing to say to this, and for a triumphant moment Nuala glowers triumphantly. It is only a moment, quickly fading. Everything is fading. "Perhaps it does not matter now, and I should have kept my promise. I thought that you should know." Her hands go to her belly, to the small, fading life trapped within. "The gods are reborn. Always."
She wants to believe it will happen again, in some other age, through someone other than her - she wants to believe she didn't fail the whole world. Only Abraham. Arland. Herself.
The chamber of the Army is fading around them. Everything is drifting away, and in the cool, bright nothing that is her and him and them, Nuada reaches out and places a shaking hand on her belly.
"Fetal heartrate is 70 and - "
" - line is blown, somebody get me another -"
" - forget the anesthesia, just -"
There is six inches of water on the floor. They've let Abe through, mostly because they can't stop him. As long as he stay up by her head, they'll let him be.
Red holds the wide-eyed babies while Liz burns quietly in the corner, filling the room with heat and fog.
Nuala runs, barefoot, through a tangle of forest. She is so young that she doesn't know her own age or have any concept that she will ever be other than as she is now. There is moss, soft beneath her feet, and the sun glints through the trees, and she can feel the low hum of life all around her small body like a comforting song. It isn't all pleasant, some of it is things being eaten, but it's also things eating and full bellies and that's just how it is and she's sort of used to it, even if it is sometimes sad. For now she is happy.
Nuada catches up a moment later, running around and behind her and tugging her hair, making her squeal, even though she knows he felt the tug too. She dances to the side of him and does it right back, though her scalp stings.
"Still got you first!" he cries.
"Got you last!" she retorts.
So he tries again and they're off, brambles parting and tree limbs lifting from their path as they run, the beloved prince and princess. She remembers. She remembers.
She is nowhere. Around her, everything is bright.
"You bear a god," Nuada says, and his hand on her belly shakes. "A god will be reborn. Through you."
"God," says Nuala, "and human, and Fae, brother. And my son. Arland. He would have been named Arland. But maybe you're right - or I was right, in the first. It doesn't matter. Perhaps the time of gods is gone."
"No," Nuada shakes his head. "No, this - I didn't believe such a thing could be."
Nuala smiles, sad and resigned. "What can be done now?" She can feel herself drifting, falling away, the bond she shares with Abraham stretched taut and thin. Something pulls at her, an inexorable new gravity.
"They killed the forest god," Nuada says, eyes still on her belly. "They're cruel and vicious, sister. They always will be. I cannot forgive it. I cannot learn to walk among them. I . . I cannot change them. A child . . a child of the Fae, of gods, left to their care . . they would twist him."
"Then I suppose you think it better that they won't have the chance," Nuala says bitterly.
"No," Nuada says, shaking his head, and suddenly his eyes meet hers. "I think . . I remember what I said to you, when we were only children. How . . how I threatened you."
"I could make you go away," Nuala whispers. "I could just be both of us." It's been so long, and she's fought so hard, and here it is the day she dies and every syllable of inflection is still clear in her mind.
"Did you ever think that there really should have been only one of us?" Nuada asks, his lips quirked up to one side - not an apology, but something. Something. "I felt so, sister - felt sometimes like I was only a piece of you that had been cut away. Like some day, you might come along and your hand might brush mine and I'd just be swallowed up again, and cease to exist at all."
He takes his hand away from her belly. His fingers wrap around hers while she is still trying to comprehend that he, he could have felt that way. Nuada leans in close and whispers in her ear, "We should have been you."
There is only one moment for her to understand what he means. "Brother -" she says, and it's not I love you or I forgive you or no, don't leave me, it's just one word.
He lets her go.
There is a push.
Something within her, something that is her, snaps - like a rubber band pulled taught to breaking, it settles back inside her.
A rush of strength, the smell of earth and sunlight and Nuala stands again in the wood where they played as children, before they knew what war was - stands there grown. Pregnant.
Alone.
Her womb contracts.
Nuala wakes. Nuada never does. Arland is born into water and fire and darkness, and when he gives his first cry, Grace sparks and claps like it's all been a great trick.
Two months later, Abe rolls Nuala, still recovering but determined, up to a modified podem in a wheelchair to sign the first official treaty between the Kingdom of Bethmoora and the United States of America - the first treaty of any kind between the Fae and a human nation since the time of the Golden Army. She holds her child, pale blue and wide-eyed, in her arms.