Thankful that he'd not pulled it fully closed when he'd walked out, Claude kicked open the front door to the house and heard it hit against the inside wall, bouncing back almost to perfectly closed again. He chuckled and kicked it again, while his future bride in his arms, her hands laced behind his neck, stared lovingly into his eyes, an expression of pure bliss upon her face. "Didn't think I gave it that much force," he said as he stepped inside, carrying her carefully over the threshold of their home and setting her down on the other side. "Almost knocked you out with it, sorry about that."
"Only you'd kick the door so hard it could've knocked me out," Hilda replied with a gentle laugh, adjusting her skirt from how it had ridden up in his arms. "Plus, you could've done better with how you were carrying me, didn't you think to practice that before you went through with it?"
"Didn't think you'd want me to carry you in." Placing his elbow on Hilda's shoulder and leaning into it, Claude looked around the empty room they'd entered into, using the same foot he'd kicked the door open with to close it behind him. "So lazy you want the strong man to carry you inside, but how are you going to cope with furnishing this whole place? That's going to take some strength."
Shrugging dramatically enough to knock his elbow off of her and to cause him to stumble forward a few steps, Hilda spun around to take a look at the entire room before putting her hands on her hips. "Holst said he'd find a way for us to pay for anything we need, and after getting this place, we're definitely going to need that help. He's never going to believe his eyes when he sees how much space there is for us to fill."
"It wasn't that much to afford this place," Claude reminded her, conveniently leaving out how much help they'd gotten from his family in securing the funds for the down payment. "I wasn't anticipating it being quite as big, though. The listing online didn't make it sound nearly as big as it is."
"Who cares, more space equals more stuff we need equals more shopping!" Hilda bounced up, her arms flying into the air as she hopped to Claude's side, wrapping him up in the biggest hug she could manage. "I'm so looking forward to moving out of Holst's place to get in here, and I bet you're just about over being stuck living with Lorenz, huh?"
Their living arrangements over the past several weeks, between the lease on the home they'd been sharing being up and their upcoming wedding taking more of their money than they'd been expecting, had been rough at best. Hilda had gone back with her brother, who was willing to support her in any way he could, while Claude couldn't follow due to a lack of space, meaning he got stuck roughing it on Lorenz's couch in his home. But now that things were in order regarding the ownership of their new home, they were finally getting to come back together and get settled in before their lives as a married couple began.
As they walked through the empty house together, they found themselves holding onto each other in various different ways. Sometimes it was holding hands, other times it was grabbing other parts, and eventually Hilda ended up right back in Claude's arms as they finished going through the upstairs floor of the house with its two bedrooms, one for them to share and one for their guests. Down on the main floor had been the other bedroom, which was meant as a craft room for her and her jewelry-making materials that she insisted she was going to use to make some spare cash, as well as every other room a solid house needed. There was even a basement that, while unfinished, was going to offer a lot of extra space for inviting people over for parties and the like.
When he set her back down on her feet at the top of the stairs, Claude grabbed her arm and wrapped himself up with it, laughing when he caught sight of the puffed-cheeks look she was giving him for the act. "Come on, I did all that holding, now it's your turn to do the work," he teased, knowing very well that any work was too much for Hilda, which was part of the charm that he loved so much.
She didn't seem to find that funny and wormed her way out of his grasp, bounding down the carpeted stairs two at a time. "I think we're going to need to make a list of all the things we're going to need bought for us," she told him, her focus clearly on the shopping for furnishings and not on his affectionate behavior. "I'm thinking curtains in every room, new blinds in our bedroom definitely, and wall art for days. Ooh, do you think Ignatz could paint something for us to commemorate the occasion?"
"He's probably got something cooking for the wedding day," Claude replied as he followed her down, albeit with nowhere near as much enthusiasm as she had. "Can't say for certain, but it may be a portrait of the two of us. Don't tell him I told you that."
"Lips are sealed, honey," she told him, miming zipping a zipper over her mouth and tossing away the key behind her, which he mimed catching to throw right back at her. After undoing the action, she continued, "It'll do if that's what he's working on, though. Now, moving past that, we're going to need to fill our kitchen and our dining room and our living room and—"
"Slow your roll, Hilda, you're getting a bit ahead of yourself. Don't we already have furniture from our last place that we can reuse?" He was waggling a finger at her, trying to get her to stop jumping at the bit to make everything as flashy as she could. "I distinctly remember a couch and a bed and a table with chairs, at least."
"Oh, those old things?" Hilda seemed surprised to hear them be brought up, and the way she let a realization cross her face visibly was not lost on Claude at all. "I…may have told Holst we didn't need to save them, so he sold them to a friend of his to have some money handy for buying us new furniture. Not too bad of a turn of events, right?"
He hesitated on answering, weighing the possibilities between telling the truth and telling her what she wanted to hear. "I mean, it'd have been better if you'd asked me first, but I can't complain too much. New furniture's better than years-old furniture, when we're using it to fill the house we're going to be living in for a long time from now." He was masking the fact that he'd been perfectly content with the things they'd had in their previous home and that he wasn't thrilled they were going to be starting all over, but it was hard to be upset about it when he saw how overjoyed Hilda was to hear she was going to be getting her brother to cough up a lot of money for their home. There was just something impossible to ignore about her enthusiasm and her passion for building their life exactly as she wanted it.
"Okay, but you know what else we need?" she asked after listing off all of the items they'd need to replace that had been sold between their two moves. When he looked at her with uncertainty in the way he held his mouth slightly agape, his hand reaching up to scratch at the short stubble he had along his jawline, it made her stomp her foot down in playful anger. "Come on, Claude, don't be so dense, you definitely know what I'm going to say."
"Can't say that I do," he replied, making it very clear that he wasn't just feigning his confused look. "Go ahead and tell me what you think we need around here, so that it doesn't come as too much of a surprise when I walk in here and there's a…well, whatever you have to say."
"We've got all that room down in the basement, we need some exercise stuff down there so that we don't have to use the gym for our workouts!" Her answer really was something that Claude should have been able to guess on his own, given that they'd been in the habit of late-night workouts off and on since they'd been in school together; it didn't quite make sense as to why that was what Hilda was thinking about right then, but she was at least covering more bases with her planning than he expected her to initially.
"Do I want to know why you're thinking about us getting out workouts in?" he questioned, walking around her as she spun to match him at all times. "Something in particular on your mind, perhaps?"
She shrugged before giving her answer. "We're getting married in, you know, two months from now, we probably want to be saving more money and looking our best for the ceremony. Easy way to get both of those taken care of is to work out at home, after all."
"Two months…" he repeated, stopping his motion before sighing. "There's a lot we've got to get done around here before we're inviting people over here for the after-party for the wedding, and we're starting at square one more or less. You think Holst is going to come through for us with the furniture sooner rather than later?"
"Definitely, I know my brother and I know he'll make sure everything's exactly as it needs to be before anyone else steps foot in this house, especially for something as huge as that." Curling her hands into fists and placing them underneath her chin, Hilda tried to make herself look as cute as possible while Claude took the sight in, seeing her with her shining eyes and expressive face and radiant being standing right in front of him. "Don't worry at all, Claude, we're going to have everything going our way right away. We've got our giant house, now we're gonna fill it and live in it and I'm so ready for this new start."
There was something just so irresistible about how Hilda was posing that it took all of Claude's strength not to suggest they find some place to get cozy together, instead leaving that for whenever they'd have furniture in their home and they could make use of it together. He was rather hands-off in the whole process of furnishing the place, but he did help with some of the minor renovations that Hilda requested with several of the rooms, just to get things done faster. A week and a half after he'd first carried her over the threshold of the house, he was able to throw her down onto their bed in their room and shower her with love, and in that moment with their bodies intertwined, it felt like everything was going their way and that didn't seem like it was going to change.
Then…the world around them collapsed in the course of what felt like hours on one late-March (or Lone Moon) day. There had been rumblings on the news about some illness ravaging countries around Fódlan, but everyone had been playing it down as not being as bad as it was, until the illness breached the border and the people in the country saw how bad it was first-hand. Within the day of the first cases being announced, the church that governed the country shut their borders down to anyone on the outside wanting to come in, and anyone on the inside wanting to go out. That wasn't too terribly big of a deal for most people, but Claude had his entire family living in neighboring Almyra, and with the wedding now just over six weeks away, he was starting to suspect that their perfect plans weren't going to be able to be adhered to quite as well as they'd hoped.
"They'll open the borders back up in like a week or two, I totally know it," Hilda said to him with a smile after he'd addressed the problem with her, his hands fidgeting as he talked about it. "And if they don't, then we'll just have to reschedule the wedding for when they are reopened, no big deal."
"That'd be a huge deal, actually," he pointed out, "because think of everything we've already put into the wedding. Think of everything we've planned and bought and figured out and you're willing to throw all of that aside just because my family won't be able to make it when we originally planned for?"
She shrugged, playfully bouncing her long ponytail as she did. "I'd feel bad if my whole family was there but yours was nowhere to be seen. But it's not going to come to that, there's no way this closure goes on longer than, like, next week. Fódlan can't function without its contacts from other countries."
Flash-forward to three weeks later, when Claude and Hilda, sitting on the couch in their living room with her phone held out in front of them, had to record a message that they sent to everyone invited to their wedding that they were postponing things indefinitely, because as it was there was no way anyone was going to be making it to the ceremony. Even though she'd been open to the idea of rescheduling it before, Hilda was definitely the more distraught of the two as they were talking about how they hoped they'd be able to put the ceremony on at the same time the following year, but it depended on if people would be able to not just get into Fódlan, but travel through the different sections of the country. "We promise we're not going to do anything crazy and get married without everyone here with us," she choked out through violent tears, leaning onto Claude's shoulder while she spoke, him looking grimly into the camera. "That's something we want to share with all our family and friends, not just the ones in the immediate area."
"Right, and we don't want our memories of our wedding being about how small and boring it was," he added, trying to shake off the sadness with a flash of a smile. "So, we'll keep an ear out for what's going on and reschedule this as soon as we can."
The moment their video ended, Hilda gave a long sniffle and lifted herself up off of Claude's arm, looking at him with her eyes conveying all of her emotions without needing to say a word. He nodded at her, feeling just as upset but not doing as great of a job of showing it, and soon they were in each other's arms, just taking in their closeness and weathering the blow that what they'd had to record about had dealt to them. This wedding was something they'd been planning for nearly two years at that point, a date picked out because of its significance to their relationship (it had been the day when they'd gone on their first date, before they'd even officially gotten together), and for all of the intricate planning and organizing to have been ruined with just weeks to go, it felt horrible to them both. It was no fault of their own, however, and even though there was no wedding to be had that year, there was also no damage to their love that they shared and they at least were going to get to keep the other with them during the whole lockdown that Fódlan was going through.
The lockdown had them contained to their house, which was thankfully furnished to the point that it was comfortable to live there, as well as having many things that they could still be working on to pass the time. Neither of them really worked real jobs, beyond Hilda's occasional sending jewelry she'd made out to buying customers, and so being stuck at home without being allowed to work wasn't too much of a change. Their big problem came in the form of no social gatherings, no going out on the town or to the gym or even to get something to eat, which meant that they were ordering groceries for delivery because they didn't want to go risk being at the store. Just because they weren't having their wedding that year didn't mean they didn't intend on having it in the future, after all.
When their planned wedding day came around, they'd been stuck there in that house with each other for three whole weeks, with no contact outside of calls and texts with their friends, and they were beginning to get a little stir-crazy. "You know what I keep reading about?" Hilda asked that morning as they lay in bed on their phones, Claude setting his down so that he could give her his full attention. "It's crazy, honestly, but I keep reading about how people think they're gonna come out of this lockdown not fitting into any of their clothes they have at home. Like, how bored do you have to be to eat that much in such a short amount of time?"
"Hey Hilda, how long did they say we'd be kept in our homes?" he asked in return, waiting for her answer but merely getting her huffing and rolling her eyes. "Just saying, they told us this wouldn't be long and yet here we are, much further into it than they'd ever said we would be, with no signs of it letting up. Maybe people have ran out of things to do except taste-test every meal they have in their kitchens."
"Ugh, but reading about that makes me worried that it's going to happen to me, and I was already doing so many workouts with, like, no results so what's this going to add to that?" Their gym routine had unfortunately been something they'd had to scrap when the lockdown hit, and with their home exercise equipment still being nothing more than a dream, they were forced to relegate themselves to workout videos that were more annoying than helpful. Hilda really was raising a good point, but she was ruining the quality of her argument with some of her dramatics. "I don't want to think it can happen to me, but you'd tell me if I was starting to get a little rounder around the edges, wouldn't you?"
"Nah, I'd let you figure it out on your own," he replied after giving it some thought, not wanting to be the guy who earned the rage of the woman he loved by pointing out any changes in her weight. "Which, by the way, don't think you'd actually let that happen to you, you're too good at keeping up with your cardio for this lockdown to do anything."
"I suppose you're right about that, but I'm going to make sure it doesn't happen to me. I'm not coming out of this whole stupid situation wearing brand-new clothes that won't be as flattering to my figure as what I already own is." Hilda went back to her phone, looking through more posts and articles that were clearly scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of content, given that all of Fódlan was stuck in their homes, while Claude got up and stretched himself out next to their bed. He was shirtless, having slept in nothing but a pair of pajama pants covered in little deer antlers, and as he was arching his back and making sure he got all of the kinks out, he felt a hand brush against him, before tugging down on the back of his pants.
"Careful there, Hilda, you don't want to take those off right now," he cautioned, looking back over to see her with a reddened face as she stared at him. "Unless maybe you do, but I really think you—"
"Claude, I'm sorry to interrupt you by probably turning you on like that, but I just had the greatest idea." She was on her side, phone lying next to her like she'd discarded it before grabbing his pants, and when he merely raised his eyebrows she went on to explain. "I read something about how people are getting married during all of this anyway, and while we can't really do that because we don't have the legal means to do it, I was thinking, maybe we should stage a wedding before, well, you know."
He reached behind himself to carefully pry Hilda's fingers from where they were still pulling on his pants, before deciding to address what she was getting at. "Before you suddenly give up on working out and become, as you said before, 'rounder around the edges'? Because I'm sure you're not going to let that happen, like I already said."
"Oh, I'm not worried about myself in that regard." She took one of her hands and poked Claude in the side with a single finger. "More worried about you losing your firm body in all of this and no longer fitting in that old suit of yours. Would really hate to see you have to go buy a new one when all of this is over."
"Please, that's nothing really to be worried about at all," he assured her, being more confident in his ability to adhere to the workout regimen than her ability to do the same. "But if you're so worried about it, let's stage that wedding. I'm sure we can get some great shots without there being anyone here to take pictures for us, and it'd be nice to get dressed up with nowhere to go."
Smiling at him, Hilda finally retracted both hands from their various assaults on Claude's body and brought them together underneath her chin. "I know my family's going to be so angry that I let you see me in my dress before the big day, but I waited this long and I don't want to wait any longer. This stupid lockdown can't take everything I've dreamed of from me, after all." She seemed so thrilled with her plan that Claude knew going back on his suggestion of following through with it would be impossible, so he merely grinned and played off his growing apprehension towards the idea (in regards to her family's reaction) like it was nothing more than a joke.
They spent the next several hours not just getting ready with the other's help, but finding the best way to get pictures of them together to show off with anyone who'd care to see them. The moment she'd pulled the dress out of the closet she'd hidden it in when they'd moved, Claude understood why Hilda really wanted to get to wear it; that understanding only doubled in strength when she had it on and he could see her silhouette in its fully decorated glory, the train of the dress longer than she was tall and beaded from its end all the way to the low-cut back of the dress itself. "Have I ever told you how lucky I am to be marrying you?" he asked her after she'd pronounced herself fully dressed and was admiring herself in the mirror. "Because let me tell you, I'm the luckiest guy alive."
"Aw, thanks!" she replied, puckering her lips at her reflection. "I'm pretty lucky to be this gorgeous, and you're definitely lucky that you're the one I fell in love with. Now are you going to get ready too, or are you going to just be ogling me all day?"
He looked at himself, in the exact suit that he'd been planning to wear for the occasion, which had been purchased a few years prior for a formal engagement he'd gone to in Almyra with his family. "I'm already ready," he pointed out, gesturing to the tie that he'd even tied on his own around his neck. "Were you too distracted by how great you look to notice?"
"Please, I'm just playing around with you, I knew you were ready." Reaching for her phone, Hilda took the first picture of the occasion as a rather cheesy selfie, not even making sure that Claude was fully in it because she wanted herself to be the star attraction. "Let's find somewhere to pose like our lives depend on it, because we've put in all this work to look this great and we need to show something for it, don't you think?"
"That is the plan for this, after all," he laughed, giving the top of her head a quick peck, as she looked up at him (reflection still visible in the mirror) to attempt to watch the act. "I'd suggest going out into the yard, maybe even the front yard, to get the pictures done. It'd be nice if a neighbor happened to look out and volunteer themselves to help us."
"Uh, sorry, Claude, but I'm not walking in this dress through the grass. Do you really think that I'm going to want to pay to get grass stains out of the train? You're crazy if you think I am, that'd be super expensive and we're already paying so much for everything else in life. One big expense like that is not going to be appreciated." That was a huge flaw in their plan, because the nicest-looking place they could've taken pictures was out in the front yard, in front of the flowers and bushes that naturally grew on their property. While there were places inside that could do the trick in a pinch, they were already bordering on the overdramatic by staging the pictures in the first place and choosing not to go big just felt like a cop-out to Claude. There wasn't much he could do to change Hilda's stance on the matter, though, and she raised a valid point about the cost of cleaning out the stains.
That was how he ended up laying out plastic tablecloths they'd stockpiled in preparation for the reception, covering the grass so that Hilda could walk out onto it with her train on full display without ever actually touching a blade of anything green. She found it quite amusing that the floor for their pictures had gone from being something natural to something pale pink, but it was keeping her dress clean and she wasn't going to complain about that. No, there were other things she could take issue with—from the lighting not being exactly what she wanted, to the flowers not being perfectly in bloom behind her, to no one coming down the street to offer to help them out.
When all was said and done, they'd spent more time than they should have on the pictures and they could both come away from the day wishing it'd been spent the way they'd been planning to spend it initially. But lockdown was a beast neither of them could tame, and while their wedding day ended up being without any wedding at all, they'd forever have the pictures of them having fun as if the wedding was happening, and nothing would be able to strip them of those memories. Something would, however, be able to strip them of those clothes and have them spending the night bare in each other's arms, and that was the same love that had motivated them to take pictures in the first place.
The positive things about the lockdown were few and far between, especially when rumblings started coming through the news that countries surrounding Fódlan were not handling the entire situation as well as they somehow were. It didn't mean that the people of Fódlan were going to be able to spring right back to normal any sooner than the people around them, but it did mean that the lockdown had a definitive end in sight, planned for the end of the current month, which at that point was the Garland Moon (of the church calendar, June otherwise). That seemed like a good thing, until everyone realized that the month was only a week in and there was plenty of time for that so-called definitive end to be pushed back if things got worse.
With something to count down to until they could start going out and beginning to live their lives once again, it made living together in the house just a tad easier for Claude and Hilda both, even though their newlywed period had come to an abrupt halt long before they'd even had their fake wedding to take the pictures with. Both of them being stuck there with nothing to do, no places to go, had left them at each other's throat at time, growing annoyed with the behaviors they'd never noticed the other partaking in until there was nothing else to notice. Hilda was clearly dependent on spending time outside of the house with her friends, as she had taken to doing a lot of online shopping (although the things she purchased were few and far between), whereas Claude was missing getting to go out and get his hands dirty with random projects his friends would rope him into doing. With only the other as their in-person social contact, they were quickly starting to understand that perhaps their personalities didn't mesh as well as they'd once thought, and being able to leave the house without fear of being in trouble for breaking lockdown was something they both were looking forward to.
Their one reasonable escape from the lockdown, from the very beginning, had been going to the store to pick groceries up; ordering exactly what they needed without seeing what the store had in stock had been difficult from day one, because they'd always find that there was more they needed than they'd be thinking about when the order was placed. Sometimes it was that their necessities were unavailable and they'd have to get refunded for the inconvenience, while other times it was merely that they didn't order what they actually wanted and got something completely unnecessary instead. There was even a time or two when they'd get over to the store and find that half of their order had been substituted for other things because what they'd asked for was out of stock, but the substitution wasn't quite what they were looking for. Even though she wasn't the greatest of cooks, Hilda wasn't going to be able to make a miracle happen in the kitchen and replace one cut of meat with something completely unlike what she needed without screwing up the whole meal, and even though they'd laugh about it in the moment, the store's failure to fully complete their orders did drag on them.
"Someday they're going to fail us on the worst possible thing and we're going to be completely out of luck," Claude said after the store had substituted every vegetable they'd ordered with something else, meaning that instead of having the peppers and greens for the stir-fry and salad they were going to make, they had a suspicious amount of cucumbers and squashes. "Like, we're going to ask for pasta sauce and they'll just give us raw tomatoes instead. Make it yourselves, they'll tell us, and we'll be screwed so many ways."
"I hope that doesn't happen, all I know how to do with tomatoes is slice them or boil them, and neither of those sound like good ways to replace pasta sauce," Hilda replied, crinkling her nose as she thought about the mere idea of boiled tomatoes in her pasta. "If they try something like that, I'll just have Holst write in with a complaint. That'll get them to shape up, I think."
"Definitely, something about the Goneril sibling everyone's scared of writing in will get them working hard to fix that mistake." Laughing as worked to put the groceries away while Hilda sat by and watched, Claude opened one of the bags and immediately closed it, turning to look at her with the bag in his hand with his arm outstretched in her direction. "Hey, I think they added some extra things to our order too, because I definitely don't remember putting any of this on the list."
Tilting her head to the side as she tried to come up with what he could possibly be referring to, Hilda snatched the bag from him and opened it, finding several glass baby food jars inside of it. "I don't remember ordering this either, but I don't even know what they could've replaced with these, they're so tiny and probably gross."
"Has to be a mistake, just some extra things that got lumped in with our order." Claude was willing to shrug it off as extras, but Hilda wasn't as convinced, especially after they'd discovered the vegetable fiasco. She set the bag down on the table beside her and pulled out her phone, checking their exact order to see what could have been exchanged for baby food jars. The next several minutes were spent with her naming things off and him seeing if they had them, which turned up to be completely pointless as the food really was given to them in addition to everything they'd ordered, a fact that Claude felt somewhat smug about.
"How does something like this happen, though?" she asked after reading through the entire list again and still finding zero inconsistencies beyond the ones they already knew about. "That's a whole-ass bag of baby food we've ended up with, and it's not like we're suddenly going to be interested in eating," she opened the bag to read one of the labels, "creamed peas and carrots in a chicken broth puree. Sounds disgusting."
"Sounds like the things we'd have been fed when we were babies."
"Doesn't mean it doesn't sound disgusting." She pulled a sour face, complete with sticking her tongue out. "In fact, just the idea of eating real creamed peas and carrots with chicken broth sounds disgusting, so blending it into a puree? Absolutely nasty. You couldn't pay me enough to get me to open that thing."
"All right, so whenever kids happen, we'll stick to the fruits and less meals with their food, got it." Even though he said it as a joke, unable to keep a straight face as he'd said the words, Claude got the reaction he'd been aiming for out of Hilda, her staring him down and telling him that it'd be a long time before they had children so he better remember that the whole time. "Yeah, yeah, that's what you say, but you've never struck me as the kind of woman who wants to be an older mom. You've always given off the air of being a young, fun mom."
She pursed her lips together, resisting the urge to throw the bag of baby food at him. "And you sound like you've put way more thought into this than I'd have expected you to. What are you doing, thinking about kids?"
"Planning for the future. All this lockdown nonsense has made me realize that we've got a lot of free time to fill, and what's a better way to fill that than create a being we've got to care for constantly for the next eighteen years?" Again, he was joking, but Claude's words were not landing well with Hilda. She looked like she was on the verge of snapping, so he backed off from the topic and finished putting away their groceries until it was just the bonus bag that was left.
That bag had not left her sight, and she found herself going through it again, fingers running over the brightly-colored labels of foods that were borderline inedible for someone with any sort of taste. "I don't know if we'd be cut out for raising kids," she admitted after letting the whole situation rest on her mind a while. "Okay, restarting, I don't know if I'd be cut out for raising kids. You'd probably do fine at it, you're a go-getter who actually does things with your life, but me? I'd just let them sit and cry, I think."
"Eh, don't think too much about it, I'm not planning on approaching that topic for real with you for a long, long time." Now Claude was being serious, his genuine feelings shining through with his smile, and the fact that she could tell he was giving her the honest truth was what led Hilda to set the jar down and cast the bag aside totally. "Right now, we're young and in the prime of our lives, saddling ourselves with a kid would just throw a wrench into everything we've got going for us. You really think we'd be out there conquering hearts and wallets if we had a baby along for the ride?"
She couldn't help but chuckle at that, because Claude was speaking nonsense with the sole intention of raising her spirits. "If you're going to put it that way, no, I don't think we'd be able to do any of that with a kid, but we're not really doing any of that right now. We're just…locked in our house for the most part. Not much to do."
As her eyes met his, he hopped down off of the counter and got to her right as she rose to her feet. "Except each other, you mean," he reminded her, reaching over to poke her gently on the tip of her nose. "Which, if that's what it'll take to get you to stop being so sour, I think I'll gladly make that sacrifice." Hilda scrunched her nose when it was under Claude's touch, but she wasn't going to argue against his offer for anything, and he knew it. "Come on, let's turn all the lights down low and make a night of it, shall we?"
"Oh, Claude, you really know how to get right to the point, don't you?" Feeling her face beginning to light up in a blush, Hilda gladly and willingly went into his arms and let him lead her to their room, each light along the way being dimmed or shut off to create an illusion of a romantic setting. Really, there wasn't any need for such a display, as by the time they were to their room they were both in the mindset of getting into bed with the other, but it was a friendly reminder of what they'd done when they were next out of the room.
That was just one of many nights over the course of the lockdown that they'd ended up entangled in a pile of blankets, long hair, and various body parts, but it was the one that came rushing right to Hilda's mind several weeks later, in the last days of the lockdown. She was cross-legged on the bed, hair all askew and tangled in the straps of her nightgown, her underwear missing from the previous night's endeavors and her phone in her hand, gripped tightly like it was going to disappear from her possession if she loosened even a finger. When she'd woken up that morning it had been in a mental fog, bad enough that she'd snapped at Claude when he'd offered to get her breakfast and demanded that he get a proper pair of pants on before trying to talk to her further. He was downstairs in the kitchen getting her food anyway, and even though she was sure he wasn't bothered by her behavior, she certainly was disappointed in herself for it.
The thought of having to eat something whenever he came back up was making her stomach turn, and as that wasn't a new occurrence she had a sinking feeling that something wasn't quite like she'd like it to be. Coupled with the fact that, according to her app on her phone, she was now several days late for her cycle, and things were beginning to look grim. There was one slight problem with confronting her suspicions, however, that being that lockdown was still in effect for a couple more days and she couldn't get out of the house undetected long enough to run down to the store to grab anything. That was where her phone came in, her one lifeline in the whole situation, and as mortifying as it was to have to consider letting anyone else know what she was wary of, she felt like she didn't have much of a choice.
Her go-to person whenever she had a scare of this nature was Marianne, who was always so calm and understanding when it came to walking her through things; Marianne had been informed of these situations several times before and approached them the same way each time. In fact, she was the first person that Hilda ever talked about it with, and she was the only one who actually knew that there had ever been a time before then that her friend was concerned that she might be pregnant—mostly because she was able to keep herself levelheaded even when Hilda couldn't do it herself. All of those other times had turned out to just be scares that didn't need to be discussed with anyone else, but they'd also happened in the gym bathroom and not in her bedroom at home.
The phone vibrated in her hands and Hilda was able to bring herself to look at Marianne's response to her plea for help: I can get you anything that you need, but you'll have to pick it up outside your door. Father will have my head if I go inside to see you. It was a fairly standard response from Marianne, with the added layer that she could only not come inside because of the lockdown rules and her father's protectiveness. A moment later, the follow-up came sliding onto the screen. Will you place the order and tell me where it's for, I'll be over with it as soon as I can get it.
As helpful as it would've been for Marianne to place the order herself, Hilda understood that she couldn't do that without raising suspicion on herself, and with her father's overprotective nature that would be nothing short of a disaster. Naming her as a trusted pick-up person for the order that Hilda placed herself really was the only logical option if she was going to do the picking up in the first place, and so that was exactly what Hilda went through with doing. She quickly let Marianne know where it was for and told her when it should be good to be picked up, and from that moment the whole situation was out of her hands and into the hands of her friend.
That waiting game was one that Hilda wished she'd never needed to play, as she sat there in anticipation of Marianne letting her know when she'd be dropping off the delivery, but she knew that this bout of waiting was going to be nothing compared to the one coming a bit later. "I really hope I'm just being stupid about all of this," she muttered, laying back on her side of the bed, crossing her legs as she did. "I'm not sure what'll happen if those tests come out as anything but a negative."
She laid there for some time, taking deep breaths in and letting them out slowly, thinking about what she'd done to get herself into this particular situation in such a difficult time. That was when she thought about the night with the extra bag of groceries added in with their order, about how they'd gone from snipping at each other about how disgusting baby food was to romping around in their bed with nothing but the other's company to speak of. It almost seemed too perfect that it was such a conversation that directly led into them potentially needing to buy more of those nasty little jars, which even though she was merely thinking about them, were still making her scrunch her nose in disgust.
"Why are you still up here?" she heard Claude ask, and she lifted her head to see him standing in the doorway with a plate in his hand. "Thought you'd have come downstairs to eat by now, so I decided to bring it up here to you. Pretty nice, right?"
"Uh, yeah, definitely nice," she replied, kicking herself up and watching as Claude's eyes quickly were drawn to somewhere on her body that wasn't her face. Blinking as she tried to figure out what was going on, she looked down to see that her gown had ridden up and she was more or less completely exposed, something she awkwardly adjusted to fix while Claude coughed to play it off like nothing had happened. "Come on, it's not the first time you've seen that part of me before, stop acting like a horny teen about my body."
"Sure, I've seen it before, but never this early in the morning. Forget to put something back on last night after we…" Claude's voice trailed into nothing as he gave Hilda a suggestive look that told her what he was leaving out, and she laughed it off, smoothing the creases in her nightgown slightly. "Don't play innocent with me, we both know what we did."
She grimaced as she could feel nerves beginning to build in her stomach, her body instinctively clenching to try and keep everything exactly as it was. "How could I forget? Hearing you moan my name is always something I look forward to when we've got the time to make it happen but—" She was cut off, perhaps mercifully, by the sound of her phone getting a message, and she jumped to see what Marianne had to say.
"Huh, can't remember the last time you had someone texting you this early," he remarked as he sat down on the bed next to her, his eyes staying far away from the screen of Hilda's phone even as he was offering her the plate of breakfast he'd brought with him. She had wanted to make some sort of off-handed comment about how she was allowed to text people as early in the day as she wanted, but a whiff of the food came strongly into her face and she gagged, feeling like she was about to throw up right there.
"Please, get that plate away from me," she demanded, her voice shaky as she was trying her best to repress the contents of her stomach from bubbling up. "I'm sure it tastes lovely but I can't do it right now, I'm so sorry."
"Y-yeah, you're not looking so great." Setting the plate aside (but not far away enough, in Hilda's opinion), Claude moved a bit closer to her, just so that he could place a reassuring hand on her shoulder. "You need anything? I'd think we've got to have something that could help with whatever's bugging you. I mean, didn't Holst make sure that we were stocked up when we moved in?"
The temptation to play everything off as a mere stomachache that wasn't caused by her body trying to build something—or the anxiety of that possibility, whether it was real or not—was there, but a voice in the back of Hilda's mind was telling her to be a bit more honest about what she was doing. "Nah, I checked already, Marianne's going to get something for me since she was already out at the store. I'll be fine once she gets here and I can take something."
"Hey, whatever works, I suppose!" Giving that shoulder a strong pat, Claude hopped off the bed and grabbed the plate, watching Hilda give a tiny lurch as the smell of the food hit her again. "I'll just take this downstairs, get it out of your sight, you know the drill. I'm sure it'll still be good when you can eat it."
"I'll eat as soon as I can, promise." To Hilda, that meant as soon as she knew what was causing her to feel so sick, but to Claude, that merely meant once Marianne was by to drop off her delivery. As he was heading down the stairs, her phone went off again and she checked it, seeing the words I'm outside, I'll be dropping the bag off at the door. Hope you get the result you're looking for, I'll pray to the goddess for you on the ride home. By the time Hilda had scrambled to get some underwear on and was at the bedroom door, she could hear Claude downstairs opening the front door, calling out a greeting to Marianne that probably had a response that she couldn't hear, followed by the door closing and footsteps, hard and fast, thundering back up the staircase.
"Here's Marianne's special delivery," he proclaimed, seeing Hilda waiting for him in the doorway, her eyes wide as she looked between his face and the bag he was holding out to her. "She seemed kind of spooked when she saw me open the door, but that's a pretty typical Marianne thing so I wasn't thinking too much of it when it happened."
"Yeah, pretty typical…"
"Oh, no, don't repeat what I've said." Claude's tone had gone from more lighthearted to serious as he dropped one side of the bag, the contents shifting around inside of it as it came open between them. "I'm not even going to say I'm mad about this, because…well, not mad at all, but why couldn't you just tell me that you were sending her to buy all this stuff? I could've gone to pick it up, might've saved her the embarrassment and judgment."
Her heart sinking, Hilda opened her mouth to say something but felt nothing but hot air come out, her gaze focused solely on the clearly-visible couple of boxes in the bag. In retrospect, she really should have thought through her plan a bit better before roping Marianne into it, because anyone picking up an order for a pair of pregnancy tests and a box of medicine for upset stomachs would definitely be judged. "I think if she was scared of being judged, she would have said something to me about it…"
"No, because Marianne would do whatever it takes to make sure you're happy." Closing his eyes, Claude shook the bag gently in her direction. "Go ahead, do what you've got to do. Now that I know that this is what everything's been about, I'm kind of interested to see how this goes."
"That's not the reaction I was expecting from you," Hilda admitted, her worry that she'd be chided if not completely fought with for this whole situation evaporating into smoke. "I thought there'd be some yelling, maybe some threatening me about what might be going on, but never this sort of acceptance. You don't…" Her face scrunched up as she snatched the bag from him, clutching it close to her chest. "You don't want this, do you?"
Claude was staring straight at the bag and how Hilda's hands were wrapped so tightly around it. "I don't know what I want, other than some answers. You've not been feeling right the past few days and I want to know why that is. Whether the answer's something small or something huge, as long as we get it, that's what matters to me." He nodded, confident in his words. "And then once we have that answer, then we can get into how I feel about it. Not saying I'm opposed to, you know, a kid in our lives right now, but I'm also not saying I'm all for it either."
"Yeah, I feel the same way." Actually, Hilda wasn't really sure how she felt about matters, just like she hadn't been sure the first time she'd been in this situation. That time had ended in her favor, as her body had righted itself a day or so after she'd taken the tests and had them come back negative, but she wasn't certain that would happen this time as well. For all she knew, she was just as likely to get the previous time's result as she was to get a result that would lead them into a great unknown, and one of those options was definitely a lot more appealing than the other.
Slowly, as if she was dreading every step she took, she headed from the doorway to the bathroom, with that bag tight in her hands, occasionally looking over her shoulder to see what Claude was doing. He didn't go further than sitting on the edge of their bed, taking a seat to give her the privacy he felt she deserved in such a stressful time. Her stomach felt like it was doing flips when she walked into the bathroom and closed the door behind her with her foot, taking a deep, shaky breath as she stared at herself in the mirror for a moment, setting the bag down on the counter in front of her. She looked tired, the stress of not having been feeling her best resulting in deeper-than-usual bags underneath her eyes; on a normal day, lockdown or not, she would be in there to throw some makeup on to conceal those blemishes, but there were bigger things to deal with than just some perceived imperfections in her current appearance.
This wasn't foreign territory for her, and she at least wasn't fighting against her nerves and her inexperience on what she needed to do, but the nerves were still quite a beast to contend with. Something about knowing that Claude was out there waiting for her to have an answer, rather than it being just Marianne there hoping for the best, was making her even more anxious about what was going to happen. If the tests were negative, then they'd have to sit and talk about the possibility of having children in the future; if they were positive, then their talk wouldn't be anything hypothetical and would come laden with a deadline in the much nearer future. Fear, anxious fear, was beginning to tear at her as she opened those boxes and stared at the directions for how to use those particular brands of tests, inwardly and outwardly wanting the outcome that left fewer questions for her.
Taking those tests was easy, and after washing her hands and setting them on the sink to wait the couple minutes for their answer, Hilda found herself wrapping her hand tightly in her hair as she paced back and forth. She wasn't married—engaged, yes, and supposed to have been married but not having been able to go through with it legally—and she knew that the moment it came out that she was having a child out of legal wedlock, it would put a stain on her family's name. It didn't matter that she was in her twenties and was already supposed to be married, people would only look at the big picture instead of the details that made it up. She could already hear Holst's disappointment in enabling this for her, him having helped them get this home set up before she'd married Claude, and she didn't want to have to break the news to him until there was nothing he could hold against her with it.
Her eyes caught her reflection in the mirror again, the panic and worry clear in how she was clenching her jaw and standing with her shoulders so tense as she paced. One of her biggest prides as a person had always been her clear complexion, minus those pesky under-eye bags she'd get whenever she'd stay up too long, but in that moment she was picking out every minor flaw that her skin currently had, whether it was an inflamed red spot or just a splotchy bit of skin. She'd fought against ever using any sort of hormonal birth control her whole "mature" life to keep her skin how it was, after hearing horror stories about how the medicines could wreck a woman's face for life (in addition to some of the other side effects), but while in her current predicament she couldn't help but wish that her vanity hadn't gotten the best of her over and over again.
She glanced at the two sticks on the counter and saw them still without answer, so she took the opportunity to crack the bathroom door open and speak out into the room without the door hampering her volume. "Claude, would you still love me if I wasn't always this cute?" she asked, knowing that she had a lot of meaning behind those words that would be lost on him. "Totally serious question, by the way."
"What is it with you and thinking I'd suddenly stop loving you for any reason like that? Come on, Hilda, you should know me better than that." He was right, she should, but he was merely hearing the exact words she'd asked and not the layers of meaning she'd given them. He had no idea it was her vocalizing her fears in a way that focused on her appearance, giving her vanity yet another chance to be made obvious. While she could have tried explaining herself better, she heard him get up off the bed and that was when she closed the door once again, locking herself in the bathroom with nothing for company other than those two sticks and her deflating sense of self-worth.
If those showed a positive, she was going to lose everything she'd worked so hard to have in her life, her appearance, her freedoms, and her place in society as a good girl. If they showed a negative, she'd drop everything the moment lockdown was properly over and find a doctor to put her on some sort of birth control, any unwanted side effects be damned. She froze exactly where she stood, realizing that she'd need to find a doctor regardless of what answer she got, and in one instance waiting any longer wouldn't be an option. All the more reason to want those two sticks to show their negative results sooner, she thought.
Now she was intentionally keeping herself away from seeing what came up, and despite knowing that remaining in ignorant bliss would make her happier for the time being, she had someone else waiting on those results and she couldn't deny the man she loved the answer he was looking for. Before she approached the counter, she unlocked the door and jiggled the doorknob, so that Claude would know he could open it without facing any resistance from her, and open the door he did, coming inside to meet her right as she blindly grabbed the two sticks by their handle and held them up, her eyes focused on the counter and not what was in her hand.
"Moment of truth, huh?" he gently asked, pressing himself up against her from behind to remind her that he was physically there, and when she gave a murmured response he reached around and grabbed her arm, holding it steady from its trembling. "Go on, no matter which way this goes I'm here for you."
Calming herself the best she could with a shaky breath, her chest rising and falling with the motion, Hilda looked towards her hand and turned the two sticks so that the results were facing her. Whatever miracle she'd expected to happen there in that bathroom, she wasn't sure if it was what happened or not—the two font styles both reading one word instead of two was enough to get her jaw to tremor for a moment before she was crying, throwing the sticks down onto the ground. "I didn't ask for this," she sobbed, leaning back into Claude's body with enough force to cause him to stumble a bit. "I don't know what I asked for, but it wasn't this, it wasn't this…"
He hadn't seen the tests for himself, so he was making an assumption based solely on her devastated reaction, and soon he was covering the top of her head in kisses. "It's all okay, everything's going to be fine, we're in this together, yeah?" he reminded her, as she tilted her head back to look at him with her tear-filled eyes, causing him to choke up as well. "I promise that I'll love you as much as I do now in all of this, and you've got permission to choke me, punch me, hurt me if you ever think I don't love you."
More dangerous words had never been spoken in such a situation, but they were just enough to get Hilda to break down into heavier crying, her wriggling herself out of his grasp and past him to go into the bedroom and flop down on the bed. "I don't even know how to handle what's going on right now, and you're making this about you?" she asked, voice teetering on a crying scream. "All you did was get at me without wrapping it one too many times, and you're going to act like I'm supposed to care about what you do? I need to care more about what I do!"
He turned and stared at her from where he was still standing in the bathroom, understanding her frustration but also not appreciating how she was blowing off his offer to let him have it if she so desired. "Okay, so you're going to pin the blame completely on me for this, that's fine. Here I was, thinking about offering to forge some papers to make it look like we're married to cover our asses, but since you don't want to care about what I'm going to do…"
"No, do that!" Lifting her head off of the bed to meet Claude's stare in her direction, Hilda hadn't even thought about there being some deceptive way to get around the way they'd accidentally screwed up. "Make it look like we got married the day we were supposed to, we…we've got the pictures we can use as proof! That way no one's aware that we've been doing things long before we were ever married and my reputation can be salvaged!"
"If you think that people aren't already aware we've been sleeping together since even before we moved in here, you're wrong, Hilda. Kind of got some loose-lipped friends, they heard we got it on one time and told the world, so that's no surprise." He came out of the bathroom but stayed closer to the bedroom door, almost as if he was about to leave to do something. "I can see what there is out there for me to make, see if there's any convincing marriage licenses and certificates I can create while here at home, until we can get a legitimate one and just never show anyone the date on it."
"You're so smart when it comes to telling lies to make us look better," Hilda remarked, rolling over onto her back and staring at the ceiling, listening as Claude chuckled before heading downstairs. Once she knew he was gone, she sat up and retrieved her phone, texting Marianne with the not-so-great news. You need to keep this secret, though, she made sure to mention, because I don't want this getting out until we let it get out.
Always reliable, Marianne replied that she would keep it to herself until she was told she could talk about it, and knowing that she had that kind of friend in her corner made Hilda feel marginally better about what was happening. She wasn't thrilled, but she wasn't going to make any rash decisions and curse the little clump of cells growing inside her for existing when, at the end of the day, that wasn't anyone's fault but hers and Claude's. "I don't think I'm ready to handle any of this," she said, fidgeting with her phone in her hands, "but it's the choice I made and I'm sticking to it. Besides, I've got all sorts of time to get ready for having a baby around here, I'll just have to…actually get ready for it."
She stayed upstairs a while longer, until finally some semblance of hunger got the best of her and she went down to get something to eat, just to keep her stomach from feeling sick and like it was starving at the same time. Wherever Claude was, he was bound to be working on his newest arts and crafts project, so while she snacked on a couple of crackers, she used her phone to look up highly-recommended doctors to go visit as soon as she could. The thought crossed her mind that she wasn't going to be able to get an appointment anywhere due to the lockdown and everyone being super careful due to the illness going around (which didn't make her feel very comfortable in needing to go to a doctor in the first place), but by the time she'd finished eating enough to settle her stomach, she'd found somewhere that said they were accepting new patients for as early as the next day. Scheduling that without any input from her other half, Hilda found herself coming to better terms with what was happening now that she wasn't running on no food, but she was still scared deep down. This was not going to be something fun and easy she was about to go through, but she wasn't going to back down from the challenge and take any easy ways out, no matter what curveballs the world was going to throw at her.
