Title: Ever After, and Then Some (pt 1)
Author: himitsu
Fandom: Howl's Moving Castle
Challenge #34 - Breathe and bath me, just be and save me
Length: 7502 (19 pages-ish)
Disclaimer: Still not mine... continuity a freeform blend of post-book and post-movie... see also notes on the first chapter!
Rating: PG-13

His wing was trembling with the strain, even as he tried so hard to pretend that nothing at all was wrong; Sophie fixed him with her best ninety-year-old-and-cranky glare, because some of the skills acquired with her artificial age hadn't worn away completely, and she said, "Stop that."

"Stop what?"

"If you strain your wing muscles that badly, how are we to get home when the rain lets up?"

"Who, me? I'm fine--"

"Not only are you the worst liar I've ever met, you're shaking all over." She reached up and tugged at a double handful of black feathers; his wing crumpled over her more abruptly than she'd expected, and she sighed a bit, and settled herself more comfortably against the glossy black warmth of his side, covered more closely by his wing when it wasn't strained into an arch to make it an overlarge umbrella for her. "There. Much better."

He shifted again, trying to flex his wing to shelter both her head and the tips of her toes; Sophie elbowed him rather sharply. "I said stop that."

"But your feet will get wet."

"That's what shoes are for," Sophie said, half laughing and half frustrated. "I'm not as fragile as Calcifer. Not even now. Rest your wings. ...I like it better when I'm all wrapped up in your feathers anyway," she added, a bit more shyly. "It feels like the warmest hug ever..."

"You should have mentioned that sooner," Howl replied, and fluffed out his feathers like a broody mother hen, and furled the wing carefully about her, to keep her as dry as possible amid the torrential Welsh rain. He lifted a feather-fringed face toward the sky and said, "Such a cruel country. If you can see the top of Snowdon, it's going to rain; if you can't see the top of Snowdon, it is raining. I shouldn't have brought you."

"I'm not made of spun sugar and I don't melt in the rain," Sophie replied tartly, snuggling into the warmth of his feathers despite the acerbic edge to her words. "It's a beautiful day anyway. There are a thousand different blues and lavenders and violets in the clouds... and you're so wonderfully warm..."

"And your feet will get wet," he replied, stubborn as ever. "If you catch a cold..."

Sophie reminded herself, not for the first time, that she'd known what she was in for. She'd already known that Howl was a melodramatic hypochondriac, a sulky brat, and a dreadful malingerer all rolled into one; the only surprise was that he was an equal-opportunity hypochondriac and malingerer, far more concerned with the slightest of her sneezes than she'd ever been.

"If I catch a cold," Sophie said, "then I'll have the chance to run you and Michael ragged fetching me juice and chicken soup and slippers and reading material. Turnabout is fair play, after all. I'm almost looking forward to it!"

"Sophie!" he protested, half laughing and half scandalized. "You have to be more careful with yourself!"

"Has the bird-shape given you bird-brains too?" she retorted, with a suspicious twitch at the corner of her lips. "You treat me as though I'm an egg about to break."

"But... cariad, you are."

"No, love," she replied, smiling. "An egg about to hatch, if anything. And it's not like I can drop the egg and break it if I sneeze. Relax, you silly goose."

When his bird-shape sighed, his feathers tickled her, and she laughed despite herself, settling in to enjoy the rest of the rainfall.

By the time it had stopped raining, it was nearly sunset; Howl spent the entire interval fussing at her with every wingbeat of the trip back to the door in Trehaven.

"...And when you catch a cold and sneeze too hard and slip on the stairs and fall down and hit your head and bleed all over the floor and it soaks into the wood and you slip on that and..." His voice spiralled higher and more hysterical on each round of worrying.

Sometimes, Sophie wished that someone attending their wedding had had the foresight to include a muzzle and a leash, or at least a muzzle. From her current vantage point of a swing-seat carefully held in his claws, there was no way she was close enough to his head to be able to shut him up. So instead, she pulled out a gift from her nephew Neil, a small white box that was enchanted to contain dozens of different musicians at once. Some of them were only considered musicians by virtue of making sounds, Sophie thought, but others were rather nice, and Neil had even taught her how to explain to the box which musicians she wished to summon at any given moment.

Sophie attached the little white vines to her ears and called up a gentleman named Rachmaninoff, who said nothing at all about colds and sneezing and blood on the stairs.

Sophie's hem was a bit damp when they finally arrived at the Trehaven door, and Howl set her down and all but chased her inside; he flopped in after her, trailing dripping wings behind him, and in the much smaller enclosed space indoors, he reeked of wet bird. Sophie decided it was kinder not to complain, since he'd gotten himself so drenched worrying over her.

On the other hand, Calcifer complained loudly. Of course.

Howl shook himself all over, drenching half the room and scaring Calcifer halfway up the chimney, before he leaned against the table and reabsorbed the feathers into a body that stretched and shifted into a human shape once again.

With a sigh, Sophie glared down at her now quite thoroughly dripping dress, and said, "Who was it worried about my catching a cold, again?"

Howl flinched guiltily from the combination of her glare and Calcifer's, and took a double-handful of her hem to try to wring it out. "I'll just--"

The log pile was close enough for Calcifer to reach, and so it was close enough for Sophie to reach too; she clocked her incorrigible skirt-chaser of a husband over the head with a stout branch, because he'd just bared her ankles to the entire room, regardless of the fact that the only other inhabitant in the room was a fire demon who would presumably be less than interested in a the scandalousness of a human lady's ankles. It was the principle of the thing.

"Not in public!" she said fiercely, settling her skirts again and turning toward the stairs, her back ramrod-stiff.

Laughing and wincing at once, one elegant hand rubbing the bump on the top of his head, Howl said, "How on earth is this public, cariad?"

"Calcifer is here!" she said, blushing, and feeling rather silly as she tried to make her way up the stairs without baring more than the tips of her toes as an example for him.

"And if Calcifer weren't here? Because I'm sure he wouldn't mind a vacation..."

"Then there would be your spiders, of course!"

Howl spent so long clutching at the railing and laughing himself light-headed that she managed to make it halfway up the stairs unmolested. Then, of course, he simply leapt over the railing and swept her off her feet with a flourish of indignant petticoats; and he carried her upstairs despite her thumping vigorously on his shoulders and demanding to be set down that instant.

Practicality was hardly the first word one thought of in reference to the wizard Howl, but had learned a sort of very peculiar variation of practicality from his wife. It had evolved from watching her give practical reasons to do things, and took an inevitable twist somewhere inside his convoluted and slithery mind. His conclusion seemed to be that practical excuses were somehow logically connected to practical jokes, and that practical excuses made the best excuses of all when he wanted to get away with something utterly outrageous.

At the moment, he wanted to get away with having both of them in the bath at once, despite Sophie's near scalding embarrassment and the fact that he'd thrown enough scents and powders into the bath that she set off in a sneezing fit despite herself.

"There, you see? I told you you'd catch a cold! We have to get you warm as soon as possible!"

"I'm sneezing on the bath kerfriffles, not a cold, you-- you--"

"You're the self-conscious one, you know. I'd be just as happy without all the bubbles and 'kerfriffles,' as you so charmingly put it, because without them we could see to admire each other properly; but since you turn such startling shades of scarlet whenever I make suggestions along that line--"

"Yes, I appreciate that you permit that fraction of a semblance of modesty, but--"

"Then if you're not objecting to the bubbles, what now? We're both soaked, and we should both warm up."

"Yes, but--"

"You know how Calcifer will complain if he has to fill the bath twice."

"Yes, I know, but--"

"And there are no spiders at all to watch us; you've chased the poor things out of here long since."

"Of course I did, but--!"

"Besides. It's more efficient this way. People's arms just aren't designed to wash their own backs."

"Yes, but-- but--"

"You're far too fond of that word, you know," he mused, fingertip to chin. "It seems I shall have to exert some effort to expand your vocabulary."

And then a twitch of his fingers had the laces of her dress dancing themselves out of her bodice, and the fabric slid loose most alarmingly; Sophie yelped and clung to it.

His palm was too deliciously warm against her newly-bared skin, and the protests she'd been trying to make were cut short when he brushed her hair aside from her throat and placed a kiss against the crook between her throat and shoulder. Sophie tried, she really did, because this wasn't seemly in the slightest, but all she could manage were a few embarrassed little squeaks.

The even more lethal variation of his well-polished excuse-making routine involved alternating stiff doses of vastly unfair charm and wistful-eyed sentimentality. He slipped her dress from her shoulders, and turned a devastating smile on her, and bent close enough to kiss her throat again, murmuring into the soft ticklish skin just beneath her ear, "I'm still a new father-to-be. And it's unfair of you to keep all the joys of your motherhood hidden away where I can't see or touch. Please, cariad? Let me hold both of you at once?"

Sophie felt as though her face was burning nearly as bright as Calcifer's. "You -- you -- incorrigible, manipulative -- you're not even supposed to notice! Let alone go around -- staring, and touching, and-- and-- it's just not decent!"

"Decent? Decent! Cariad, when has anyone ever accused me of being decent? I must have a word or three with the movers of the rumor mill, really! 'Decent.' Hmph. Of all the indignities! My laboriously-maintained reputation as a ruthless and incorrigible scoundrel will suffer horribly if that little falsehood ever gets round the neighborhood..."

And somewhere amid that cheerful little diatribe, somehow, when she wasn't looking, he'd gotten them both undressed and into a bath so full of bubbles Sophie was buried up to the chin. But in some ways that was even worse, because the warm bath was so soothing, and his hands had much freer rein when she was seated in his lap and she couldn't see where he was going with them to try to smack them when he grew too unconscionably bold.

"By the way -- why on earth am I not supposed to notice?" he murmured into her hair, cradling her beneath the water in a warm and entirely-too-tempting embrace. "I would have to be blind not to notice."

Sophie ducked her head as much as she could manage without drowning herself in bubbles, and stammered, "Because it's unkind to comment when a woman is losing her figure! And I can't help it, I'm in the family way, of course I'm losing my figure, and I'm going to be quite misshapen soon, and that doesn't mean you have to tease me about it like everything else-- it's an inevitable effect, there's nothing I could do. And my condition is all your fault to begin with, you cad, so the least you can do is to be considerate and look the other way when I've grown awkward and -- and not up to your standards of beauty and perfection--"

"Wait, wait, wait," Howl said, struggling not to laugh at her; she could feel the tremble of it where her shoulders rested against his chest. "You aren't losing your figure in the slightest! To the contrary, you're distinctly gaining a figure--"

Humiliated, Sophie tried to elbow him somewhere in the vicinity of the ribcage and wriggle free, but he clung quite insistently.

"I mean it, cariad," he murmured, with a smile so rich in his voice that it was nearly as tangible as the warmth of the bath. "It is certainly not a loss of any kind. We're gaining a family. How on earth could that be a loss? And how could you lose anything in the process? To my eyes, you've barely begun your gaining, and as usual I'm quite an impatient scoundrel."

"Don't even try to tell me that you haven't noticed that I've let my dresses out! You notice everything about clothes -- particularly when it comes to how to get them off a person--"

"Oh, I've certainly noticed," he admitted gaily. "And I've appreciated the view! Sophie, you have nothing at all to be ashamed of. Nothing to be ashamed of, and everything to rejoice in. --If in Ingary a father is not supposed to notice when his child is growing, then I call that cruel and unjust rather than 'proper'. If the mother is free to notice, and free to love the child from the very first, why is the father not allowed to share her delight and anticipation?"

Eyes shut tightly, nose almost tickled by the bubbles, Sophie said, "How do you twist words around like that, so that the most improper thoughts sound nearly respectable?"

"Is that how it is in Ingary?" Howl countered, resting his chin against her shoulder. "A mother is to hide herself in shame of her child, and a father is to ignore her pregnancy completely? How is that not cruel to all three?"

"It's... just... it's a woman's condition, it's not something for men to concern themselves with. And it's so... so flagrant," Sophie murmured. "It makes known to the world what should be kept private between two people, it shows at a glance that... that we've..."

"We are safely and properly wed, you know," Howl said, affecting a great overabundance of innocence, complete with bright wide who-me eyes and all. (How on earth he pulled off radiant innocence while they were both birth-naked and entwined in each other shoulder-deep in a far too extravagant bath really needed to be chalked up as one of the great mysteries of the world, in Sophie's admittedly biased opinion.)

"Yes, but..."

He set a fingertip to her lips lightly. "There's that word again." With a contemplative glance down at the toes he poked out of the bubbles to determine whether in fact they were still there, he added reflectively, "I should think that after this many centuries of people marrying and children coming after, that Ingary's society ought not be so startled by the thought. It occurs often enough to have become less shocking an event, wouldn't you say?"

"What about Megan?" Sophie challenged, clinging to the one thing she understood of his world: that his sister Megan was far more respectable than Howl himself was. "Surely she wasn't shameless and public while -- while in a delicate way, was she?"

"The word 'pregnancy' really isn't profane, my love. Rather the opposite, in fact."

Beneath the cloud of bubbles, his fingertips were wandering about her recently- enlarging middle, as though to draw further attention to the point of the discussion. Sophie hid her face in both dripping hands, and managed to scold through a half-strangled voice, "Stop avoiding the question!"

"As a matter of fact, Megan was quite 'public'," he told her, wry, as he rested his cheek against the bath-damp crown of her head. "She worked as a receptionist at the local hotel when she and Gareth were first married, and everyone who passed through the hotel for several months could see quite clearly for themselves that Neil was coming. And neither she nor anyone else thought it a particular scandal."

Sophie opened and closed her mouth several times.

"Well?" he asked, mirthful. "If the ever-so-respectable Megan Parry considers it unremarkable to be seen in such a state, does that ease your embarrassment any?"

"Your country really is that much different, then?" Sophie asked, faintly. "I mean -- it's not just that you're trying to get away with making everything you possibly can into a walking scandal and trying to drag me into your scheming without even telling me because you know I'd never go along with such a thing -- if I asked Megan, would she tell me the same tale?"

"I'm hurt!" Howl declaimed, the dramatic effect of the wrist to his forehead somewhat impaired by the bubble-dripping. "Wounded to the quick--"

"You're also a shining paragon of dishonesty," Sophie retorted, on surer grounds now that she had felt out a moral high ground to stand upon.

"But I would never lie to you about something so important to your happiness," he replied, very softly.

And no matter how badly she wanted to convince herself that he was simply applying his charm again, Sophie couldn't find it in her heart to believe that he was toying with her this time.

But she also couldn't find it in her heart to become as openly wanton as her husband seemed to wish, not without a little more reassurance that perhaps by some other rules of civilization it might perhaps not be as wanton as she thought after all.

In a very small and sheepish voice, she asked, "If we were in Wales, then, it wouldn't be scandalous for me to go into town even when I've... when my condition is... more noticeable...?"

"Not unless you were planning to paint yourself pink and orange and spotted green in the process, and in that case I would call it appallingly bad fashion sense rather than a scandal." After a moment, he added thoughtfully, "Though perhaps the scandal would be how I had permitted a garment of that level of tackiness to be located anywhere within ten miles of either of us; that bit of speculation might cause a fair commotion about Porthaven..."

With a sigh, Sophie took the reins of the conversation away from his inevitable rambling analysis of couture, and dragged him back to the topic which concerned her. "What I'm asking is... is... that your country really is very different, isn't it? You were raised differently, and so that explains why you think so many odd things are perfectly normal?"

"Again I find I am disconcertingly close to honest when it comes to you, love," Howl replied with a rueful grin, "because even I can't let that stand completely uncorrected. In Wales as much as anywhere else, I am considered a shameful cad, a coward, and a shiftless good-for-nothing, as I'm sure my own family will inform you. At some length, and upon as many occasions as they can manage to catch your ear."

"I expected as much," Sophie said, trying to be as much on her dignity as she could manage while blushing and nose-deep in bubbles.

"But upon the topic of the delight of your pregnancy," he added, "and the way that even strangers will take joy in its evidence -- there I dare say I am not so immodest and out of step in my thinking. And if you wish to hear it from Megan herself, if you feel that her assurance on the matter would be more reliable than my own, I'm sure I can arrange a visit..."

"Could you?" Sophie asked, without thinking.

She felt his flinch against her back, and realized how seriously he'd taken it a moment too late. "No, no, no -- it's not that I don't trust you -- er -- not that I don't trust you about this -- not this particular time anyway -- that is to say -- oh bother--"

"Your faith in me is magnificently underwhelming," Howl said drily, keeping his voice light and his chin propped on the top of her head, so that she couldn't read the hurt in his face; but that little flinch had given away more than he would have wished, and it tugged at her heart more than any number of buckets of slime and histrionic wails could have.

"Howell Jenkins, that's not what I meant at all," Sophie said, distressed. "I believe you, I really do. I believe you when you say the customs are different in your country -- I believe you truly do feel it should be a joy rather than an embarrassment -- I just -- I'd like to talk to Megan as... someone who's been through this before, someone whom I can ask about... things to expect. I mean, I practically raised my little sisters, so I know about children, but... but I didn't give birth to them as well! And since I doubt you've made a habit of bearing children no matter how exotic the shapes you take might be... I just... wanted to talk to her, since she would know..."

Somehow, something in her stammering incoherence must have been close to the right thing to say; he'd relaxed a little, and his breathing had steadied, and when she twisted around to try to look at him, his smile was gentle enough to be real, even if it held a breath more mischief than was likely to be comfortable.

"So, we should go and visit Megan, so that you can ask her to verify the extent of my lack of morals under the cover of learning about prenatal care? How very devious of you, my dear; I think my bad influence may be rubbing off after all!"

...And he sounded positively proud of that last pronouncement.

"That's not it at all! That's not-- you know that's not -- now you're just being wilful, you--"

"What are you complaining about, cariad? We both agree I'm a rogue and a scoundrel who ought not be left loose in civilized company. It's only--" and here he gave an overdramatic little sniffle-- "only a little heartbreaking that I've married a woman of sufficient wit that she won't accept a single word I say without signed and sealed documentation from three independent sources to verify it..."

The lugubrious tone, combined with a startling mimicry of a woeful basset-hound's gloom and an enormous sigh, drove Sophie right past the edge of her self-control. She scooped up a double-handful of water and bubble-froth and dumped the lot over his head.

He shoved the now-thoroughly-drenched and bubble-glittering black mop back from his face, laughing at her with those vivid eyes shining, awash with all the blues and grays of twilight, like sunlight breaking through stormclouds; and she forgot how to breathe momentarily, caught fast in his charm even when he wasn't consciously trying to wield it upon her.

Something in her face must have spoken of her state of stunned-witless-rabbit-twitching-ness, because he tipped his head a bit to one side, and his smile deepened in a certain way that was only ever meant for her; and he leaned closer and kissed the tip of her nose, stroking her hair back from her face with damp fingertips.

"Rwy'n dy garu di, fy nghariad firain, fy anwylyd, fy nhrysor gwyn..." The melodic lilt of his native accent was thicker in his voice in his own language, and when he spoke words of magic, and when he spoke words of love; blushing, Sophie wondered which was the case this time.

"Somehow," she said, breathless, "you always make everything sound like an enchantment. What is that?"

"An enchantment, of course," he replied. "Let me translate." His arms tightened about her a bit, and he drew her close enough to kiss again, brushing his lips against her cheek and her brow and her throat by turns. She was about to ask him to translate properly, with actual words, but by that point he seemed more intent upon the kissing.

She really ought to have complained, of course. But his enchantment was quite effective, particularly the translation, and it kept her from protesting whether she liked it or not. Or at least that was what she told herself, so that she had an excuse for enjoying it.

Somehow, it made it more difficult to blame him completely for the two hours they spent in the bath; it seemed Howl's ways really were rubbing off on her. Sophie had never thought of a bathtub as somewhere that any reasonable person could possibly spend more than half an hour; but then Howl had never been a reasonable person, and his methods of persuasion were quite persuasive indeed.

Even enchanted bathwater went cold eventually, though, and the bubbles died away to the point where Sophie was squirming with embarrassment. Of course, she knew she had a body to be kept under her clothes, but that didn't mean she had to like the fact, since the existence of her body mostly seemed to serve as an enticement for her already-incorrigible husband to look at her and think of even more creatively scandalous ways to make her blush.

When it was time to get out of the bath, Howl decided the next blush-provoking tactic required soft fluffy towels and a great deal of rumpling that made her hair stand out in all directions, like a silvery-frosted hedgehog. She tried to button her nightgown, swat at him, and calm her hedgehog-hair at the same time; but there really weren't enough hands to go around, so she was a bit stymied.

His barely-muffled snickers turned the tide in favor of the swatting, and the towel extended her reach quite nicely; he yelped like a startled puppy when she stung his ribs with a towel-snap, and jumped into the windowledge for refuge... and then he looked at her head again and went back to snickering.

"Brat," she said, wrapping the towel around her head to try to hide the disaster area he'd made of her hair. "One can only hope the baby's temperament will come from my side of the family."

"Now that's a terrifying thought," Howl replied, brimming with glee. "Two sisters who decide to trade lives under their teachers' noses, and a third who runs off with the most notorious evil wizard in all the lands? Heaven forfend! At least from my side there's a half a chance of ending up with a Megan. I'm sure she was much easier on our parents."

"I'm sure she was," Sophie replied, finishing the last few buttons and brushing off the skirt of her nightgown reflexively. After a moment, honesty forced her to add, "I'm sure she was also dreadfully dull."

"She was," Howl agreed, and swept Sophie off her feet again before she could put a hand on the door. "Not in the least dashing or romantic or cavalier... so naturally I'm honor-bound to compensate the universe for that imbalance in the world's aesthetics; she is my sister after all, it's a family obligation--"

"--No you don't," Sophie interrupted firmly.

Howl blinked at her through a rumple of raven-dark hair that had gotten tousled into his face. "I don't?"

"Not the karmic balance of melodrama, just the bedroom," she said. "We're both as close to squeaky clean as people who aren't dishes can get. --And no, I don't want to know about people who are dishes. What I want is for you not to take us into that room where there's an inch of dust on all the knickknacks because you haven't let me clean for a month. My hair is already gray enough; it doesn't need to have a layer of dust on top of it for finishing touches."

"Your hair is silver," Howl said.

"And you're still not taking me in there damp and ready to pick up dust from everything."

"Picky, picky..." He shivered a little, his back arching, and Sophie realized he was transforming beneath her, still holding her in his arms; for a moment he balanced her in the crook of one wing-soft, claw-handed limb, and ran the other hand through his hair, and came away with a glossy black feather; and then he collapsed into himself again, and winked a purely human eye at her before he bent towards the door.

"Copynnod bach, hidia befo! Y dewines glanweithdra sy'n dwad!"

"What are you on about now?"

"Just warning the poor little spiders that the Witch of Cleanliness is coming," Howl replied; then he brushed the feather back and forth lightly under the doorknob.

The keyhole twitched.

Howl tickled the doorknob again.

The keyhole made horrible wriggling faces and then gawped wide and gasped, and the entire room bulged and convulsed and sneezed a huge cloud of dust out the window.

Sophie blinked in astonishment as Howl patted the doorknob lightly and murmured, "Sorry, old friend." He opened the door to a sparkling-clean room where the various pinwheels and dangles were still spinning madly, and a crop of utterly terrorized little spiders clung for their lives to the inside of a bobbing and dangling watering-can.

"If you could do that all this time," Sophie demanded, "if you could clean this place that easily, why on earth don't you?"

"How do you like being tickled until you have to cough up a lung?" Howl asked mock-indignantly, carrying her over to the bed; a twitch of two fingertips had the bedcovers unfolding themselves primly, and he settled her in with a care at odds with the amused exasperation in his voice. "I should imagine it's no more pleasant for the room, to say nothing of the trauma to the spiders. And if I tried it with the whole castle? I'm sure it would feel like a vastly unpleasant case of purgative influenza -- not to mention the chances that it could blow Calcifer out completely! I may be wicked, but I'm not cruel!"

"Well, if you cleaned more often, maybe you wouldn't have to put the place through convulsions in the process--"

"I'll think about it."

"Of course you will," Sophie said with a sigh. "Mostly to think of a way to get out of it."

"You know me far too well, cariad."

He summoned up a ridiculous pile of floral-embroidered pillows from somewhere in the variegated baroque mess of the room, and settled Sophie into the bed with vast gentle care, settling the fleur-de-lis comforter over her lap, calming the wild bristly silver-hedgehog of her hair with a few careful strokes from graceful fingers, and smoothing her nightgown over the still-slight curve of her middle.

With the little bulge curving the front of the white nightgown, her midsection looked like nothing so much a baker's loaf of bread rising softly beneath a tea-towel, patiently waiting to grow round and full enough to earn its turn in the oven. Howl stretched out beside her and bent his dark head close, nestling his cheek against her fullest place, for all the world like a child listening at a door that held mysteries on its far side.

Sophie looked down at him, and couldn't find the words to protest the impropriety of it; so instead she let herself stroke his hair smooth, working out the bath-tangles with her fingers, and smiling to herself when he wriggled like a playful kitten and arched his head toward her palm.

"Mmmm..." He was half a breath away from purring at her, even.

"I find it astonishing that you could ever transform yourself into a dog," Sophie said, "considering how completely and totally feline you are. Mercurial, indolent, and far too aware of your own beauty and charm -- definitely a cat type..."

"How fortunate for me, then, that you seem to be a bit of a cat fancier," he replied lightly, still cradling the curve of her middle with warm and gentle hands. "Can you be still for a moment? Hold your breath a little?"

Rather puzzled, she took a deep breath and held it, stilling the hand that had been stroking his hair. He was raptly focused on her middle, both hands cupped to the soft rounding, his body bowed like an arch as he rested an ear ever so lightly against her; then he shifted a bit, and then froze motionless.

Sophie couldn't help gasping for breath after a long minute, and glowered at him. "Excuse me, I'm rather fond of breathing--"

"I can hear his heartbeat," Howl whispered, looking up at her with shining eyes, and this time it wasn't just his smile that caught her breath away.

"...what?"

"Two heartbeats," he said, with sheer joy shining out of him nearly bright enough to burn. "Yours and his -- his is lighter, quicker-- ah, love, don't ever say to me that you should be ashamed!"

"I want to hear it too," Sophie said, in a small voice, because she wasn't supposed to admit such a thing to herself, let alone to her husband.

Fortunately or unfortunately, Howl cared as much for "supposed to" as he cared for "polite," "cleaning," and other similarly mundane words, which was to say he cared not in the slightest. There were times when Sophie felt rather guilty about the way that she could count on that fact, but over time she was learning to ignore the guilt; really, he was rubbing off much too thoroughly.

Howl hopped off the bed and began poking through the wilds of his collection, tossing aside a handful of bright scarves, a smattering of jewelry, a kaleidoscope, what appeared to be the mangled innards of a clock, three peacock feathers, a child's model plane, a jar full of several different colors of sand, a piece of driftwood, and two turtle shells before he came up with a picnic basket and a purposeful glint in the eye. The picnic basket was the next to be disassembled at random; over his shoulder went a hand trowel, several packets of seeds, a pinwheel, a handful of bus tokens, a delicate golden cameo-necklace, some kind of child's toy on a string, and a piece of sun-crazed, sand-etched float-glass before Howl made a sound of delight and came out with a perfect oyster shell.

He was already fiddling with it by the time he shuffled his way through the pile on the floor to return to her side; Sophie couldn't help staring, because the patterns his fingertips traced left a glowing trail behind upon the surface of the shell for a moment before fading away. He carefully separated the two halves of the shell, and placed one piece to her ear and the other to her middle.

"I'm not completely sure if this will work," Howl admitted, boyishly rueful. "It seemed a good theory, though -- two halves of the same shell, accustomed to cradling the same pearl of treasure with each other, and the symbolic affinity between shells, the ocean, time, tides, sound, and whatnot--"

"I hear the ocean," Sophie said, surprised. "I thought that was only from the bigger shells?"

"You're hearing a different ocean than you think," Howl said, and brought the listening-shell to his own ear for a moment, seeking an echo from the other shell as he moved it slowly over the curve of her stomach. "You're hearing the ocean within yourself -- the child floats within your womb, rocked to sleep in the lingering embrace of the eldest sea; what you hear is the sea within you. When the child moves, it can be tricky to find a place to hear the heartbeat again... not to mention the technical and aural difficulties with an utterly improvisational mage-wrought shell-stethoscope; just a moment..."

Somehow, even when Sophie was fully dressed and covered with a sheet and watching her mad genius of a husband guide an ensorcelled seashell over her rounding middle, it felt even more intimate than when they'd shared a bath without a stitch of clothing between them. Perhaps it was something to do with the shell-magic -- it almost seemed as though his fingertips left a trailing shadow of warmth behind, where the shell touched her; or perhaps it was simply his own magic, because she'd always been hypersensitive to his hands, and his voice, and the warmth of his breath upon her shoulder whenever he bent to murmur something particularly mischievous into her ear. In any case, the bath's bubbles had let her console herself that at least the impropriety wasn't visible; but the little clan of spiders was still blinking out at them from the questionable shelter of the watering can, and Sophie wanted to shout at them to mind their manners and look somewhere else.

Then, of course, she realized the foolishness of shouting at spiders about their manners, because if spiders had any manners they wouldn't take up residence in a married couple's room anyway.

"There," Howl said, and offered her the listening-shell again.

Or, of course, the foolishness of shouting at spiders about their manners might have something to do with the fact that they were only spiders, but the fact that Howl had conversations with them made her tend to discount the only-spiders theory a bit more than she should have for the sake of general sanity and--

oh...

"Oh," Sophie said, and tried to calm her suddenly madly beating heart, because it came close to overpowering the sound of the small, quick, delicate counterpoint that was her child's heartbeat. His child, their child -- suddenly it was real to her, real as a person, not just as an embarrassing medical condition to be concealed, or an awkwardness of figure requiring too-snug skirts to be loosened -- because medical difficulties or overindulgences certainly didn't come with a separate heartbeat of their own.

For the first time, she wondered what it would be like to hold their child in her arms, and see her own baby look up at her. She wondered if it would have Howl's beautiful stormy-twilight eyes, or her sister Lettie's candlefire-bright hair. She wondered what its name would be, and then realized that they would need to decide that, since the baby wasn't likely to wake up one day and tell her, even if it was an entirely different person growing inside her middle, which was an unsettling enough thought by itself.

She meant to ask, really, but her lungs were caught somewhere around her throat and her eyes were prickling with tears for no rational reason whatsoever, but the emotional reasons were close to rolling her over and washing her up to dry, and all she could manage was, "Oh..."

Howl stared at her in rapidly growing dismay, and waved both hands madly. "No no no no no, don't cry, I didn't mean it to frighten you or -- or whatever this is -- I'm sorry, I shouldn't have -- I'll never do it again -- I'm so sorry, cariad, please don't cry--!"

She shook her head a little, and scrubbed the heel of her hand across her eyes, because the tears were escaping despite her best efforts, and she couldn't stop gasping around the ache in her chest long enough to explain.

The top half of Howl vanished over the side of the bed abruptly, his feet sticking up at odd angles as he dug around beneath the bed for a moment; but unlike the seashell, this treasure-unearthing took only a few seconds, and then he turned right-side up again, peering cautiously over the edge of the bed to see whether she was still on the verge of crying. His eyes were more cloudy-gray than twilight-blue now, storm-wracked and almost frightened, like a child; she wanted to apologize somehow, except that his distress upset her further, and she choked on a sob.

He set a fluffy, round-bellied teddy bear on the edge of the bed, and a little twitch of a fingertip had it putting its paws down and standing up and stumping across the comforter towards her; it put a soft little paw on her arm, bright button-eyes sparkling up at her, and Sophie scooped up the bear and cuddled it to her chest and burst into sobs.

Howl flinched smaller behind the bed, only his eyes and fingertips visible above the edge of it now, watching her cry, helpless and miserable. "I'm sorry," he whispered. "I promised you a happily-ever-after -- what did I do wrong...?"

"Nothing!" she managed to choke, clinging to the bear's soft plush warmth and sniveling quite embarrassingly. "I'm happy, I'm terrified, I don't know what I am-- I'm sorry I'm crying--"

"...You're not angry?"

"Of course I'm not angry--" She hiccuped on tears, and scrubbed the back of her hand across her face, and her voice squeaked and caught short as she said, "Why on earth would I be angry? I'm delighted and scared witless all at once-- there's another entire person inside me, someone I don't even know, it's astonishing, I have no idea what to do, but why would I be angry?"

"...Because I promised you a happily-ever-after, and yet you're crying," he whispered.

"Oh-- oh, silly, no, that's not it at all--" She set the teddy bear aside and reached over to catch his hands, and tugged until he'd hesitantly crept close enough for her to cuddle him instead of the toy. "You silly darling," she murmured, nestling her head against his shoulder and closing her aching eyes. "Happily ever after doesn't mean you never get upset."

"It doesn't?" he asked, warily. "Isn't that the contract? Happiness, and forever--"

"The world does come in shades, you know," she said, with a small giggle. "Sweetling, my sweet silly love, I adore you to bits and pieces, but you're so terribly overdramatic -- everything is black and white with you, the heights of joy or the slimy depths of despair, nothing in between! But for most of us, there really are different shades of happiness, and some of them are a little bit terrifying. That's all. I'm so happy at the thought that I'm having your baby, I almost fear my heart might burst; it's so much too full right now that it aches..."

"Oh," he said, tentative, and dared to touch her cheek to brush away the lingering tear-streaks. "Does that happen? I mean -- I am not precisely reaccustomed yet to having a heart; it's been a long time..."

"Trust me," she said, and snuggled closer to him. "Sometimes you can be so happy you're scared you'll explode. And the scare is just as real as the happiness. But to the best of my knowledge, no one's ever died of a heart bursting from happiness yet!"

"How very strange," he murmured, and rested his head lightly against the still-damp silver-rumple of her hair. "But as long as you're happy, then I'm satisfied." Then he opened one bright blue-gray eye and asked, just to make certain, "You're sure you're happy?"

"Positive," Sophie assured him, listening to the slow strong beat of his heart beneath her cheek. "And I'm just as positive I'm terrified. But I'll think of something to do. One of us has to be the practical one around here, really."

After a moment, Howl murmured sleepily into her hair, "If you're tired out with the practicality, I could try to be practical for a while."

Sophie laughed; she couldn't help herself. "Would you even know where to start?"

He thought about it for longer than should have been necessary, before coming up with a somewhat sheepish-voiced and tentative offer. "I could make sure the castle sneezes itself clean at least once a season? And... well... brown is a terribly practical color; I could..." He shuddered a little in reflexive distaste, but gamely made the offer anyway. "I could dye all my suits brown. And paint. I can paint things. Brown and gray. Dingy drab colors are quite dreadfully practical, aren't they?"

When she trusted herself not to burst into shaking hysterics and mortally offend him in the process, Sophie managed with an almost steady voice, "Love, just let me be the practical one. It's less traumatic for both of us that way."