*Rated "pW" for Previous Wielder. Deals with past lives. Based largely on conjecture, historical fact, and previous same-author fanfiction.
"Jack!" she shouted. "I need Jack!" She huffed with her demand, and the pain of quickening labor.
"Where's her man, love," she heard one Cockney voice say to another, only too late realizing they came from nurses at the foot of her bed.
"Taken by the war, no doubt, dearie," answered the other. "Ain't they all."
"Well, push there now, girl, push a good 'un," the first nurse encouraged.
"Jack!" Bronte screamed, until she thought the word would cause her throat to crawl outside herself in an effort to be heard. She pushed with all she had left in her.
She did not want to see this again. She did not need to see this again, to relive that day.
"It's a boy, it is, love, and a pretty thing he was," spoke the first nurse.
"Would you like to hold him a bit, then?" asked the second.
Bronte did not have to ask the obvious question. She did not have to incline her ears in hopes of catching the sound of a newborn's insistent cry. The child, her son--Jack's son--was dead. Made so, she did not doubt, from her grief at his father's death--only three weeks prior.
She did not know if she could manage to hold the baby. "Leave him here," she told them flatly from where she lay. They did as she asked, but she found she could not look. She could not face him, his tiny, quickly growing cold fingers. His never-to-rise chest. His unseeing eyes. She turned her face to the wall and wept, though three weeks of mourning Jack would have made any onlookers doubtful she could still summon tears.
The door to the room opened, and a stride she knew as Scott's entered. She could hear him pause, she assumed, to look at the child, his own dead nephew.
"Brigid," he spoke, his voice rich with Scotland, referencing his wife--Jack's sister, "Brigid sends her," his voice caught, "best." He paused. "She's taken Mabel with the boys."
"I need her," Bronte told him, spoke to the wall. "Now. Here."
"Of course," he agreed, though he could not have anticipated such a demand his voice nonplussed. "We can get her here within the hour."
Bronte did not answer, nor did she turn away from the wall. Moments passed, her ragged sobbing breath the only sound between them. When she had exhausted herself, she heard the light rustle of cloth against a tabletop, and she knew that Scott held the child in his arms.
"A fine pair of green eyes," he said, conversationally. "The lashes are a bit thick for a boy, though, I might think."
She said nothing.
"Had you a name?"
"No," she lied.
Sorry for the long drought between my posting sections. ;)
DISCLAIMERS: Elizabeth Bronte and the Witchblade (and additional characters that will make appearances in other chapters to come) are property of Top Cow and Warner Bros. I mean no disrespect, and am not making any money or profit out of their use here.
Any inaccuracies please chalk up to deliberate anachronism.
What happened to Elizabeth Bronte before Possession? Check out Occupation, posted here at fanfiction.net.
Neftzer 2003(c)
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