fighting_mad | [OOM] Eiattu

"Make me proud, Isplourrdacartha," Rial says, whispered so softly into her ear. "Show me how strong you are."

Goading her towards the prize now that it's in sight. Now that this is more real then it's ever been and the pain in his hand where she's gripping, the sour smell of fear and sweat, her screams are all that he can feelsmellhear.

"Push push push push-- that's a girl, Princess," praises the doctor calmly, at the tail end of Isplourrdacartha's agonized, ragged yell; one that'll leave ears ringing. "We have a head. Don't push until I tell you to."

Rial can feel how Plourr's shoulders tense at that, but he doesn't say anything because this is it, the big finish, and he can't distract her now.

So he just looks up at the ceiling, at where the sky would be if he were outside, at where the constellations would be shining and bright, and he closes his eyes to make a wish on falling stars that he can't see.

Holy fuck, her baby has a head.

Innocuously, Plourr's second thought is an exhausted-and-dying-but-furious, 'We have a head.' The first chance Plourr gets, she is informing Dr. Wilen that no, they don't have a head; she has a head sticking out of her--

She shrieks with the contraction and she tightens her grip on Rial's hand, gasping, nearly sobbing, to breathe, but she doesn't push. Not until Wilen gets the first two letters of the word out of her mouth, and then Plourr is pushing because this ends now.

Rial almost yelps as his hand gets squeezed even tighter because kriff, even exhausted and giving birth his wife manages to have the tightest grip he's ever felt only then he gets a little bit hung up on the actual giving birth part. Because the head's there, apparently, and more then the head oh yes that's faintly disturbing and very cool at the same time and Plourr is making little gasping noises with each inhalation like she would be sobbing if she had the breath and this is the end.

He will have a daughter and he tightens his grip on Plourr's hand even as she crushes the life out of his own, and he will have a daughter and he mutters "My princess" without even realizing that he's speaking out loud.

One last, ringing scream, the sound raw and wild and uncontrolled, muscles in her neck and shoulders standing out tight and corded with that last push, and then –

An answering wail, thin and high and furious.

And immediately, Plourr coughs and is speaking for the first time in what feels like forever, her voice hoarse, "Is that--"

"Yes," says the doctor, and then she’s briskly directing for the empress to be gently but quickly helped back further into the bed, propped up against the pillows. Despite the care they’re taking, it kills, and her face is dead white-red blotchy and sweaty, hair matted to her head, and she has never been so exhausted in all her damn life -- but Plourr is asking again.

"Here we are, Empress," says the doctor, not allowing her to finish, and she carefully sets the wrinkled, red, squalling baby, covered in blood and Force knows what else, with her misshapen head and her scrunched-up face, on her mother’s abdomen.

Ianna Estillo-Pernon is screaming her head off.

Plourr stares at the baby, transfixed and frozen -- and then she reaches out and touches the child's head with hesitant, cautious fingers.

Rial can't seem to look away.

His daughter is smaller then he thought, sort of small and red and squashy and she seems to be taking after her mother in that she's letting the entire world know just how distressed she is to be finally in the world. Full-on wailing, demanding that someone correct the injustice of it all, giant hiccuping sobs of anger and frustration.

And yet she's the most beautiful thing he's ever seen. And Plourr, next to her, exhausted and sweaty and with tears still running her cheeks, is reaching out to touch her carefully and somehow, Rial finds that there's something like a tear threatening to force it's way out of his eye. So he reaches out too, to cover her hand in his own, to brush his fingers through the damp dark hair on his daughter's - his daughter's - forehead.

"You did it, Isplourrdacartha Estillo," he says, as Ianna continues to protest her arrival and the nursing staff hover around them. "You did it. You're a mother."

Plourr is not crying. Plourr will suckerpunch the first person who says she's crying.

This is her daughter. This is their child, who has been kicking her for what seems like forever now, who Rial's been reading to and Plourr has been talking to when she thinks that no one is listening, and it seems utterly impossible that she exists at all, much less that she is on the outside of Plourr's stomach instead of on the inside.

But the high, thin wails of a newborn baby are a thing hard to deny, and so is the steady weight resting on her, and Plourr says hoarsely,

"Hey."

She touches one small cheek, fingers clumsy and wondering, as Ianna cries on. Plourr's mouth tilts upward, tiny and pained and shaky.

"Took you long enough."

The medical staff seem to take that as an unspoken cue; a nurse sets to wiping down and cleaning the baby, trying to keep moving her to a minimum, and clearly trying to stay out of the way as much as possible.

"Your Majesty, when I tell you to push, you push," says Dr. Wilen from the foot of the bed, and from her voice and the use of Plourr's proper title -- she may even be smiling.

Plourr nods tightly, but the brief frown passes from her face as she watches Ianna fuss at the top of her lungs, red face twisted with the effort, one little fist twitching.

"She is," says Plourr reverently, in rough, husky-voiced awe, and her smile is steadying by the second, "the ugliest thing I have ever seen in my life."

She looks up at Rial, her eyes bright.

It takes Rial a moment to realize that Plourr's looking at him, a moment before he glances up from staring at his new daughter like she'll vanish if he looks away.

It takes another second for her words to sink in, and when they do he half-snorts (a highly undignified sound) and reaches over to wrap his arm around Plourr, pressing a kiss to her forehead.

"I've seen worse, my princess."

Plourr leans against his side in a controlled slump, one careful hand dwarfing Ianna's back and the other roughly wiping her own face, and she tosses him a look--dulled of its usual bite by exhaustion as it is--that says, quite eloquently, 'And how many newborn babies have you seen?'

Also robbing the look of its virulence, though, is the tiny smile that seems to have taken up permanent residence on her face.

The next few minutes pass in a flurry; the afterbirth is delivered smoothly and Plourr manages to resist the urge to kick Dr. Wilen as she messes about between her legs. Ianna is taken from her, but only long enough for the umbilical cord to be cut and tied off, for her to be measured and weighed (when she is pronounced 'exceedingly healthy, especially for a premature birth,' Plourr grins with something like fierce pride; 'Well, her lungs are certainly functioning,' says Dr. Wilen, dryly) and wrapped up in soft green blankets. The nurse starts to carry the newborn back over to the bed, but Plourr gives Rial a shove.

"Go get her, champ."

Rial does so.

He walks toward her slowly, almost hesitant, like she's not sure if she's going to bite his head off or not. But the nurse offers her over and quietly reminds him how to hold her (although he remembers, vaguely, and there's a moment of slight shock as he realizes that he's held this kid's mother when she was born too). She's both lighter and heavier then he would have thought, and he stands still for a moment to stare at her.

Her eyes open for a moment, as she takes a deep breath so as to continue her protests. She may be small, and scrunched up and red but, he decides, seeing those eyes, she's also beautiful. Absolutely beautiful.

"Ianna Estillo-Pernon," he says, watching her seriously. "Today's your lifeday."

Ianna screams. Rial has to laugh and moves back towards Plourr, offering her out.

No one who has ever been on the wrong end of a fight with Plourr Estillo would believe how soft her face is as she watches Rial hold their daughter. Ianna's existence is still terrifying, especially now that she's here, now that she's tangible -- but Plourr desperately wants to hold her, and she reaches for her when Rial silently offers.

She takes her carefully, so carefully; the transfer from one parent to the other is ludicrously slow, as if the crying princess could be dropped and shattered like glass.

"Okay," Plourr says quietly, finally getting a good handle on the slightly-flailing bundle of blankets and limbs. "Okay, okay." She shifts the warm body up higher into her arms, holding her close and smoothing two clumsy, wondering fingers across her mottled cheek.

"Hey. You're alright. Got nothing to cry about, you little monster."

Lost in a world with two occupants, Plourr watches her with something that starts out as stunned apprehension, but slowly--as she reaches for the little hand that fights its way out from under the blankets and Ianna almost curls her hand around Plourr's thumb--begins to morph into something else, something fierce and proud and bright-eyed.

"Nothing," she says, her voice low and the words nearly stick in her throat, "is ever going to happen to you."

Rial could say something smart, there, along the lines of that'll be a very boring life, but somehow he knows it would cheapen the moment. So he stands back, instead, something twisting and changing inside his chest like his heart is wiggling and becoming just that much bigger, changing to accommodate the fact that now there's two people in the world he loves beyond a shadow of a doubt, two people he knows he would die for.

It's a new feeling, a curious one. He's protective of Plourr, sure - hells, he's punched people over her - but there's always just been this knowledge that she can take of herself. That she's lived on her own and kicked ass without anyone at her back and doesn't technically need him to defend her honor.

(in fact, his ass might be the one being kicked if he phrased it that way)

But this is something new. This is a baby, all small and purple-pink and splotchy and she definitely can't leave Weequays in bleeding heaps at the back of cantinas. She can wail like no one's business, sure, but that's no help in the world at large. So Rial decides that this feeling, this twisting urge, like an ache inside him that makes him want to cry and grin at the same time, is protection.

Plourr's already said it. Rial doesn't need to repeat it out loud but he watches his daughter waving her fists, crying subsiding to a sort of hiccuping sob, he smiles and doesn't try to hide the way his eyes are too bright.

Nothing's going to happen to you. You're going to grow up the way Plourr should have, with two parents to make you eat your vegetables and send you to bed and sign permission slips and pin your drawings up on the wall. You won't know what it's like to see people die or how to shoot a blaster in anything but self-defense.

Ianna Estillo-Pernon, I'm going to protect you.

And it's cliché as hell, it's stupid and overused and it's not like he's even said it out loud, so no part of her brain will ever remember it - but godsdammit, Rial thinks it just the same.

I'll protect you.

The nurses are bustling around behind him, doing whatever it is they should do. Dr. Wilen is watching them, leaning against the wall with a satisfied expression on her face that Rial can't see. From outside the closed door, his parents are waiting, Gror with his hand on Synna's shoulder, silent and together and proud the way they have always been. In the palace, the servants and lesser nobles gossip quietly about the new princess, the higher nobles sweeping past them and pretending they're not listening intently for some new tidbit of news even though it's only been minutes.

And farther still, the announcements ring out. The people of Eiattu hug and smile and cheer in their homes, mark down the princess's birth on calendars and settle back with their own families, holding their children tightly. Maybe somewhere there's another woman and another new daughter, smiling and exhausted and continuing the cycle of life that will go on forever.

But in this little room, there's just Rial and Plourr and Ianna, together. A family.

Forever.

(I'll love you forever,
I'll like you for always,
As long as I'm living
my baby you'll be)

[OOM] Eiattu - Royal Palace

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