Now to the reviewers!
To Agent Silver: Another one night stand? Ye gods, no! The brown-eyed boy is in fact Harry Octavian Osborn, first mentioned at the end of Chapter 1. Keep reading.
To moonjava: Thanks.
To psychospiff: Probably not. I think I have serious relationship issues myself...fortunately nothing like I put in my stories.
Read and review, ask questions, comment, give compliments and criticism! Tell me what you like and what you don't! Flames will be returned with a sarcastic answer. Now get to it.
Chapter 6: Her Vestal Livery
"Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,
Who is already sick and pale with grief,
That thou her maid art far more fair than she:
Be not her maid, since she is envious;
Her vestal livery is but sick and green,
And none but fools do wear it; cast it off."
--William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
(Author's note: This chapter should have a rating equivalent to pg-13 for...uh, adult themes. You have been advised.)
"Just call me the ice prince," Austin had said to May on their honeymoon night. Austin had refused to consummate his marriage to May. He wanted to hold and cuddle her; but that was it. He even refused to take off his green silk pajamas, a wedding gift from his aunt Laufey.
May's poor, dear husband was self-conscious; he thought himself disfigured and deformed. He was embarrassed by the steel band that encircled his midsection from his lower chest to his hips; the artificial spine that extended from the bottom of the harness to the nape of his neck; the pink scars that surrounded them both; and most of all the long, pincered tentacles fixed on the middle of his back.
But every day May had looked into his big brown eyes and told him that she loved him and that he was handsome, no matter what he looked like, whom his father was, or what was attached to his body. Gradually, Austin came to believe it too, and he gradually warmed up, so to speak, and that most pleasurable of all marriage duties became less unpleasant.
However, after try after try, the couple still could not produce a child, which they both wanted dearly. May worried that the mutations in her genes that gave her the famous spidey-powers were causing all the problems. Austin eventually suggested trying artificial insemination.
"A test-tube baby?" May had asked.
"Don't make it sound so negative," her husband said.
And after the fourth try, the twins Ottoline Mary and Parker Marie were born.
It was the oldest trick in the book: Noreen had become pregnant to hang onto Austin. She knew that May had had trouble conceiving, and their twin daughters were from artificial insemination. Noreen also knew that May had become pregnant again a year after the twins were born. The son who would have been Austin Benjamin Smith was stillborn.
How did she know?
Because her long dead grandfather told her so, from the mirror in the closet. He also told her what she had to do.
Nobody at the fertility clinic quite knew what to make of it. Most of the graveyard shift employees were either unconscious or dead, and there were fragments of little orange balls strewn about. The smell of smoke filled the air. Strangely, nothing else was damaged, and all the vials of sperm samples were soon accounted for, except one, marked with the initials A.O.S. It appeared that whoever was the culprit, they knew what they were looking for.
And after she had impregnated herself with the stolen sample, Noreen had undergone amniocentesis and several genetic tests. Not because she was concerned about the genetic mutations caused by the formula she had taken so long ago; because if the baby had been a girl, Noreen would have it aborted. It had to be a perfect boy.
She was giving Austin the son he lost. And he would owe her for that forever.
The boy was going to be as strong and as beautiful as his mother and as brilliant and powerful as his father. He would have big shoes to fill but he would fill them; Noreen would see to that.