The music acommpaniament to this piece was Pale by Within Temptation. Still on the theme track. Enjoy.
You watch, unnoticed, from the doorway as she examines herself in the mirror. A small, secretive smile makes her lips softly curl upward like the petal of a rose as her brilliant green eyes rest on her middle. She brings a hand to the slight protrusion and turns to the side, her smile broadening as the growing swell of her belly becomes even more defined.
Your breath is rapidly seeping from you as something tightens in your torso so that all you want to do is find a way to fold her into you, to meld her to you, into you. You're out of air when you realize that the child growing inside of her is a fusion of her and you and you nearly choke. But somehow you stay silent, mesmerized as her lips ebb and flow in a noiseless whisper.
Her eyelids flutter shut and her shoulders float downward in a sigh. One eyebrow arches and her head tilts slightly to the side. It's as if she's listening, as if she hears and feels the child's reply to whatever query or statement that she made.
A few months ago, you would never have predicted this situation and though you wonder if you're ready, you would not swerve from this…fate, destiny? Or are those words too great for this? Is this but one more repetition in the ancient cycle of life? It does not seem so. Everyone said that you both were foolish, bringing a child into this blighted world, even as peril swarmed around you, leaving a threatening sting that at any moment could swell to death. And though neither of you planned it, expected it, perhaps it was meant to be this way.
In the darkness of night, following the day that she had joyfully told you of your child, you lay awake regretting every act that had led to this path. As if sensing your fears, she had wrapped her arms around you and pulled herself to you, the softness and comforting weight of her body spreading and settling over yours, the satin of her hair draping over your shoulder. She had murmured that children were the opportunity to start over again, to right the great wrongs done in the world. Maybe you were meant to plant and cultivate the seed that could allow new growth. You told her that if that were the case, you would have to be planting a lot of seeds because there were too many evils for just one seed to handle by itself. She laughed at first and then cried, sobbed. As you held her, she wondered how she and you could protect just this one seed from the evil that was smothering the world. You had no answer and no lie. So you simply held her tighter and told her that maybe if you loved this seed enough, you could find a way to protect it. In the morning's savory light, she awoke you with a kiss and promised that no matter what, this was the most joyous mistake she and you had ever made. Among the many you had to choose from, you couldn't help but agree. Before she escaped your arms to ready for the day, her eyes had taken your heartbeat captive while she insisted that she, and nor you, could not doubt this child for there would be too many others in the world all too ready to do so. Faith, she had told you, is believing that love surmounts all.
The sunlight tangles in her red hair, as if garlands and strands of little fairy lights have been strung through it, and your heart pauses, almost painfully. Then her head lifts and her eyes open and she turns to meet your gaze, as if she sensed your presence.
She utters your name in a way that only she can: with all the tenderness that drew you to her and the barest hint of exasperation that she never quite lost after years of chiding you, yelling at you, and telling you to grow up. There's a spark in her voice that you can't quite place. For a few years you did not hear it, or ignored it, and then one day she spoke and you heard and felt something spread and unfold with in you, like a soft white sheet tumbling and unfurling from its neat fold when you hold it up. Sometimes when she speaks to you it's as if her words are penetrating to a part of you that only she knows, a driving something in you that you can only glimpse in your inner peripheral vision but can never quite bring into focus.
"James."
There's something new that she's woven into your name and something different, scintillating, in her eyes when she comes to you and presses your hand to her middle. You feel the slight swell; you can see the way your fingers curve slightly, no longer able to lay flat as they used to.
And you look at her helplessly, hopelessly, in the face of the most powerful magic you've ever witnessed. Her lips curve and her eyelids lower in understanding.
"It's our child."