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Halone Will Provide

Summary:

Had they been smarter, they would have used protection.

Notes:

This fic addresses themes of abortion, child death, incest, miscarriage, and pedophilia. Estinien also briefly misgenders her pre-transition self in her own narration, and, worth mentioning as it bothers some, Alphinaud being "child-coded" comes up in one scene.

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Sated, Estinien lets her head fall back, sweat-soaked hair plastered to her forehead. “That was good,” she says plainly. “You’re just full of surprises, aren’t you, Baelsar?”

Gaius laughs. “I’ve been fucking longer than you’ve drawn breath. It oughtn’t be that surprising.”

“Always heard it best not to… raise one’s hopes for the first time,” Estinien says, dry as the Burn. Loose hair a pool beneath her head on the bedroll, she drags a languid hand over her face. It unsettles her bangs when she tips her head back, letting out a soft gasp, open-mouthed; Gaius’ hand between her bare legs still, his fingers slide between the hot, swollen lips of Estinien’s cunt, teasing at her entrance. “Mm, no more. I’m too sensitive.”

“Suit yourself,” Gaius says, unbothered, and disentangles himself from his companion, wiping his fingers carelessly on her thigh, leaving a smear of spend behind him. Reaching for his tobacco pouch, he’s in the process of rolling a cigarette when the rest of Estinien’s comment makes it through the post-coital haze and he actually, properly hears it. “That was your first?” He finds himself equal parts aroused and alarmed.

Rolling onto her side, Estinien says, “Aye,” and plucks the cigarette out of his fingers, holds it up perpendicular to her face so that the tip of the joint is before her lips. With a curious flash, Estinien’s eyes seem for a moment to glow, and then she lets out an exhale that sets the tip of the cigarette to smouldering. Draconic magick, Gaius realizes—another thing Nidhogg left behind, along with the scales that wind their way up most of her body, the nasty scars on her arm and shoulder, the wicked talons she has where nails ought to be. “When, pray tell, would you have had me do away with my virginity? Before taking up with you I was working at a tourist trap in Kugane with a dragonet nipping at my heels. Not exactly a surfeit of occasions for it.”

Gaius has long since stopped listening, a single word enough to make his blood grow cold. “You’re a virgin?” he echoes.

Snorting, Estinien flicks a dismissive hand. “Well, no longer.”

Virgins are a thing of the past, in Garlemald—for nine hundred years, their order had stood as a proud symbol of the Republic, nearly as long as there had been a Republic. Amid the sack of that newborn city in the ice by the hyuran armies that had followed them there, a priestess of Gradia, goddess of war, made a pledge: for as long as she remained unmolested, so, too, would Garlemald. When the temple was overrun by enemy soldiers, to keep her oath she ran herself through on her sword. To take history at its word, this act turned the tide of battle—the hyur were run out of Garlemald, their fortifications were mended, and the women who swore their chastity to the preservation of the state ensured that never again would their people be conquered.

Solus, when he named himself dictator, called it a petty, barbaric superstition Garlemald should have long since outgrown, and dismantled the office. Gaius—though, being a child of the Empire, he himself is too young to remember the days when a virgin would be put to death along with her lover for breaking that vow of chastity—is inclined to agree. They had served their use, when Garlemald had little more than stubborn hope at its disposal, but magitek has long since seen to such savagery becoming obsolete.

Such clearly must not be the case in Ishgard, locked in a thousand-year war with a foe whose victory they’d turned even to stargazing in an attempt to forestall—that Gaius had never considered the Knights Dragoon, the Holy See’s foremost line of defense against the Dravanian horde second only to the auguries of the Dragon Star, might have taken those antiquated vows now seems to be terribly naive of him. How many times must it be proven to him that his fellow man do not adhere to the standards Gaius considers the bare minimum moral conduct of those in power? He cannot even claim shock at the idea, for he knows well enough of Witchdrop. “Will your friend shield you from consequence?” he asks Estinien. “I would mislike you coming to harm on my account.”

“Consequence of what?”

Gaius frowns. “Of breaking your chastity,” he replies slowly. “The Lord Speaker will keep you above the law, yes? Or has Ishgard done away with the death penalty as well?”

“The death pen—?! Seven hells, ‘tis not heresy! I’m neither a clergyman nor looking to marry; no one cares, and they certainly aren’t going to, to put me to death for riding your cock, van Baelsar.” Flushed, she looks the very image of the Fury. “Be assured, I would not risk my life for that.”

Taking a long drag off the cigarette, which in his concern Gaius had all but forgotten, he says, “I’m glad. A misunderstanding on my part.” He offers Estinien a smoke. “‘Tis not incest after all, then.”

“What in the Fury’s name does incest have to do w—” she begins with a cry, and then, “Do… do you mean ‘unchaste’?”

“Aye, something like. Incestum,” Gaius repeats. “What crimes are punished by nature, and not by the court alone.” In the far-flung past, they believed a virgin opening her legs to a lover would open the city’s gates to assault; a fantastical premise, perhaps, but less so when you are a society primitive enough not to understand the medical reason why, when a parent lays with the child of their own body, any issue shall be born unwell. Nature punishing injustice, it was thought. “I take it from your reaction the meaning has changed since your people left Ilsabard?”

Estinien takes the cigarette with a pained expression. “You’ll be the death of me after all at this rate,” she laments, smoke on her breath. “In Ishgard, ‘incest’ refers to relations between, well, relations, so I’ll thank you to never speak of such things again. Suffice to say, there shall be no terrible consequence of laying together, I swear to you. Now put your mouth to better use, won’t you?”


Somewhere in rural Ilsabard, Estinien Varlineau is vomiting into a bush—as she did the day before, and the day before that. She doesn’t feel poorly at all, save for the nausea: no fever or shakes, no exposure she can think of to anything either particularly dangerous nor unfamiliar, and the phials of all-purpose antidote do nothing to settle her stomach, as they typically would. ‘Tis terribly unfair, she thinks, to be beset upon so. But Halone is merciful, at least, in that her cycle, which for as long as she has had it has brought with it a day or two of terrible stomach cramps, is later than usual.

Rocking back on her heels, Estinien considers these two facts in conjunction. She counts back the days, weeks in her head. “Oh, bugger me with Gae Bolg,” she breathes. “I’m such an idiot.”


Never has Estinien been somewhere quite like the capital of Garlemald. In some ways, it reminds her of Ishgard, especially at night: the snow piled up in great heaps on either side of the sleeping city’s empty roads, her breath illuminated by the gleam of the streetlights familiar in a way that Kugane or Gridania could never manage… even as the buildings stretched seemingly into infinity in the darkness and those streetlights glowed not with the flickering warmth of an oil lamp but the cold, blue flame of ceruleum burners.

But the Ishgard Estinien knows is a land under constant siege—if not by dragons, then the ceaseless winter they had not known it would need to withstand. Its people starve and freeze in drafty apartments with grand old facades now crumbling and scorched by wyrmsbreath. Garlemald is nothing like this. Its grandeur comes from the sheer scale upon which the city is built, the skyscrapers themselves utilitarian and fairly plain. It has the look of one enormous castrum, the trappings of everyday life and the citizens going about their own coming off as strangely alien for it. Estinien and her fellows sit now in a public park outfitted with benches one might find in a holding cell, bundled-up children chasing each other around a playground that looks to her for all the world as though any moment now it might raise itself up on mechanical legs and sprout cannons. She keeps casting glances their way without meaning to.

She’s had children on the mind, of late. As a young girl herself—or a boy, at the time—she’d blithely assumed she would one day become a parent, for never in Ferndale had she met an adult who did not follow the same path, marriage and children and a plot of land to till. But Ferndale was a long way off, now, and it is only very recently that Estinien has begun to allow herself thoughts of a life beyond the war, what survival might look like. ‘Tis only since she realized she was with child, not but a fortnight past, Estinien has thought to factor potential motherhood into those fantasies.

She’s meant to be watching for a man in uniform—a high-ranking military officer, mal something-or-other, whom Gaius suspects to be involved in the revitalization of the Black Rose Project—exiting a nearby office complex, but with ten eyes between the four of them, Estinien’s daydreaming is not like to spell their failure. There is a part of her with romantic inclinations she’d long thought extinguished, but it has reared its head once more now that Estinien allows herself a future; this part of her watches the children bundled up in their winter clothes and imagines her child, this child playing with dragonets in the Firmament. The name Hamignant de Borel crosses her mind for only a moment before Estinien vanquishes it—there are dreams, and then there is stupidity, and for all that Aymeric cares for Estinien and she for him, it would be far too much to ask of him to raise another man’s child.

No. If she’s keeping the baby—and she’s far from sure of that—its upbringing will be up to her alone, most like. Although… she hasn’t told Gaius about her condition yet. He might want to be involved; though he rarely speaks of his children, Estinien is given to understand he is, or was, a father. He might not even be a bad one. She casts him a considerate glance—sitting on another bench some ways away, Gaius has put out his cigarette beside him, and he’s smiling kindly at a bundled-up child as he hands her back her wayward football. A girl, Estinien thinks, from the gaelicat appliqué on her coat. He looks… soft, if that is the right word for it, a tenderness about him Estinien has only seen before when he thinks no one is watching him, carrying on a quiet conversation with one of the black masks he wears on his belt.

“Gaius,” Valdeaulin snaps—a common name in the capital, which does not draw undue attention. Gaius acknowledges the call with a glance and raised brow, then bids the girl farewell with a hand upon her shoulder.

Joining the two of them—Estinien and Valdeaulin, both duskwight, being less conspicuous together in feigned conversation than loitering separately—Gaius asks, “Is aught amiss?”

“Only your conduct,” says Valdeaulin coldly, and Estinien follows his gaze towards the girl and her friends, kicking their ball back and forth in the park. “I will not turn the blind eye you’re accustomed to, should I find you’ve taken liberties.”

“I have done nothing untoward.” His voice is measured and tight.

Estinien cannot hear any more of this. Standing abruptly, she walks off until she is far enough away she can make out the men’s voices as they argue, but not the words. Gaius’ hand on that girl’s shoulder had seemed to her only a fatherly gesture—but how many could say the same of Alberic’s wandering hands? She had once thought his affections innocuous, and she was their recipient. And what did Valdeaulin mean, the blind eye Gaius is accustomed to? She thinks she might be sick, and it has nothing to do with her condition.

A few fulms away, Severa’s leaning back against the brick wall, which is painted with a chipping propaganda mural of what seems to depict the conquest of Ilsabard. In a pilfered uniform, she looks every bit the off-duty patrolman as she lights up. “You look a bit spooked,” she says companionably. “Did I miss a roader playing chicken with an impatient driver?”

Estinien has never been behind the wheel of an automobile, so she cannot say for certain, but she doubts the efficacy of magitek death machines keeping the roads safe. She shakes her head. “Nay.”

“What ails you, then?”

A loaded question. Estinien could tell her about Valdeaulin’s accusation, that Gaius would molest a child and has gotten away with it before… but Severa trusts Gaius, and has come to his defense as an honorable man on more than one occasion. Estinien does not need to tell Severa anything to know her answer to the claim, that Valdeaulin has ever held Gaius in the lowest possible esteem, and would no doubt like to frame any action he takes as suspect for the simple fact he so hates him. Perhaps this is even true. But what is to be gained by spreading those rumors? Nothing.

She could admit to her present conundrum: certainly complicated by the aforementioned, but the question of if she should want to have a child with the Black Wolf is a difficult one to answer even should he turn out to be a wonderful father, for what kind of future could he or she even hope to have, with parents such as these? But there is a vulnerability in admitting this that Estinien does not know she is prepared to show. Instead, she says, “Is it a bad place to get with child, Garlemald?”

Severa shoots her a curious look. “Depends on who you are.”

“The same as Ishgard, then,” Estinien says, and she knows the bitterness of her laugh does her secret no favors. “The rich always have their options, don’t they.” A lady from the Pillars, she could hire wetnurses and governesses, never so much as see her children if she did not wish it; she could charter an airship for a week-end holiday in Ul’dah to see a chirurgeon, and never have a child at all. A girl from the Brume, or one of the dozens of towns dotting rural Coerthas? Someone like Estinien, who has burned every bridge she’s ever gone over? What options does she have, stuck between a length of wire and a decade or more the sole provider for a child, someone who relied entirely on her care and good judgement? The last time a child depended on her—

No. She wouldn’t go there.

“Mm,” Severa hums doubtfully. “Rather the opposite, in fact. I once knew a girl from the nobility who enlisted just so she could come under her own power and have a termination. Her family’s patriarch would never have allowed it, had they a say.”

Estinien frowns, untangling the unfamiliar phrasing in her head. “That must hardly be unique to the nobility,” she argues. Even back home, a knight had better luck finding sympathy—a sin her indiscretion may have been, but if Ishgard’s line of defense was the righteous alone, they would have no defense. You cannot man the battlements with an infant on your back besides—neither, Estinien imagines, can you pilot magitek. “The commonfolk cannot just… off to a chirurgeon and be done with it!”

“Why not? ‘Tis hardly a complex procedure.”

“But costly.” Chirurgeons are difficult enough to come by in lands where magic is commonplace.

Severa gives Estinien a look as though she’s suddenly sprouted a second head. “I understand you Eorzeans do not think highly of us, but please! What kind of dystopia makes people pay for basic medical care?” At Estinien’s silence, Severa gives a quiet, “Ah. Well. The clinic is free of cost here, should you want a termination, and you needn’t be married these days for your children to count towards your grain allotment, so they won’t starve if you keep them. Is—I’m sorry if this is insensitive, but is it truly so different in Ishgard? Gaius speaks highly of it.”

“Ah, well, if Gaius speaks highly of it,” Estinien says archly. She can’t help herself, when it is his fault she is in her current predicament. But the question is an earnest one, and Estinien quite likes Severa besides. Her lancework improves by the day, and her unfailing optimism reminds Estinien much of Aymeric at her age. Sighing, she admits, “I would not want to raise a child in the Ishgard I grew up in. I have a friend who hopes to make it a better place, and I believe he will do it, but…” Who knows when that will be? Or if Ishgard will even let him? Already Aymeric has gotten a knife in his back for it. She trails off.

Estinien wouldn’t wish to raise a child in the Ishgard she knows, no, but indulging in the fantasy of raising a child in Aymeric’s Ishgard, that sets her heart aflutter like a little girl’s. The question is only if it is possible. She fears it isn’t, and worries it is.

She should write him, but the thought of picking up the pen inspires only a dread not unlike the sickness that has recently plagued her. Whether he approved or not he would be unflinchingly polite, empty niceties that Estinien has ever found stifling. And it is wishful to think he would do aught but disapprove—she wishes he would instead tell her the truth as she needs to hear it, to metaphorically take her by the shoulders and insist she must take responsibility for her choices, then tell her what that entails, whether he thinks it her obligation to raise the child her impulsiveness has earned her, or that she is so terribly unfit to be a mother the right thing to do is do away with it. Surely Aymeric would have an opinion. But no, should she write him, even should she ask what he would have her do, like as not Aymeric’s only guidance will be to pray upon the matter. Estinien can do that without being told, thank you very much. In fact, she shall, and then when—if—she writes him, she can truthfully say she already has. She’d like to see what advice he offers then.

Hells, but she has no idea what to do.


Here is Estinien’s problem with prayer: for nearly half her life, she has been able to call upon a being greater and more powerful than herself and receive an answer—a real answer, alien thoughts taking up residence in her head, flames at her fingertips, a haze of distortion not unlike smoke suspended on the very air around her. When you are accustomed to Nidhogg’s song in your ears, Halone’s so-called answers are underwhelming. Why is the best answer one might expect from a goddess of war a sense of peace, if indeed She answers at all?

Misgivings aside, Estinien digs her gerberium and devotional scapular out from the bottom of her travelling pack. She does not keep an Enchiridion, nor even one of the slim prayerbooks many of her fellow knights carried with them, but, neglected as they are, Estinien would not feel right without these symbols of the faith her parents brought her up in. The gerberium is our weapon, and the scapular our shield, she remembers a priest telling her after Ferndale burned, and pressing the both into her empty hands. It is this same gerberium Estinien slides onto her finger and the same devotional scapular—one woven tapestry square the symbol of the Spears and the other an icon of St Reinette—she lays across her shoulder when she kneels before the window, searching for the Spear in the night sky, and begins to pray.

After the third night engaged in prayer—a pointless exercise, Estinien is beginning to think, as Halone’s silence resounds—she feels a sharp pain in her belly, worse than hunger, then a short while later wetness in her smalls. When she checks them to find a smear of blood and some thick, dark mass of tissue, she feels… small. Packing her emotions away before she may linger upon them, Estinien throws on her coat and leaves the safehouse.

Severa said the clinics here were free of cost, hadn’t she? On the street, the first woman Estinien can wave down she asks in stilted Garlean: “Ubi medicus? Medicus muliebris?” She thinks that is the correct word, mulier.

The lady, who is elderly and an ethnic Garlean, seems to understand her meaning, because she corrects, “Obstetrix?” then points down the road going easterly. Tilting up her head to catch Estinien’s eyes, she raises two fingers, and says, firmly, “Duo. Duo,” then points down the road again.

Estinien bows to the lady—none of her travelling companions are the friendly sort, and she has not learned how to say thank you—and heads off in the correct direction. Sure enough, after the second intersection there is a building with its front door propped open by a stand full of colorful trifold fliers, most in Garlean but a few in other languages (Estinien sees the old Elezen tongue and what looks to be the Hingan script) and above the door a sign reads SANITAS MVLIEBRIS.

At the front desk inside the clinic, an Elezen girl young enough her cheeks still carry baby-fat is demonstrating for a woman with a baby tucked against her chest how to roll a rubber down onto a wooden phallus nailed to the desk; Estinien knows better than to stare, but it is such an unexpected sight, she cannot help but to. “Tibi opus est auxilio?” the girl says, and then in a more familiar tongue, “May I help you?”

Oh, but Halone is merciful. “Yes, I—I think I’ve had a miscarriage.” It is the first time she has let herself put her fears to words, now an hour or more since she began to bleed.

So saying, it is only a few minutes before Estinien is ushered down a hall lit by those eerie, humming ceruleum lights. The girl—“Procula,” she introduces herself, “I’m only a medical student, so while I can take your blood and vitals, an obstetrix will perform your examination. Is that all right? My supervisor, jen Decius, does speak Eschve, so you needn’t worry about that.”

“Take my blood?” Estinien repeats. “My humours are balanced well enough, I think. I’m not ill.”

Procula makes a curious face. “Ah, peregrines… I’ll be taking a small amount of blood from your arm so it can be tested for certain compounds that have an impact on your baby’s health,” she explains. “It is not a leeching. You shan’t even feel lightheaded afterwards.” And, “I’m sorry to ask again, but we require your consent to treat—is this all right?”

“Oh. Yes,” Estinien manages, her attention all taken up by the easy way Procula said your baby. She has given so much thought in these past weeks to raising a child, the general concept, wrapped up all in questions of her fitness as a mother in the abstract, and given no thought at all to the fact that the child would be hers. It sounds ridiculous, putting it in so many words, but there is a world of difference between the questions Should I raise a child? and Do I want my child? Sitting on the edge of an examination table, Estinien lets Procula measure the speed of her heartbeat, slip a metal rod beneath her tongue, wrap a band of stiff fabric around her upper arm which, by way of a tube and rubber bulb, constricts it for reasons unknown, and all the while her world seems to fall out from beneath her feet.

Should she have this child? Likely not, if Estinien is perfectly honest with herself. Will she have it? She does not know, but she’s afraid she will not. Not relieved to have a difficult decision taken out of her hands, but afraid the baby—her baby—will not make it. If this is Halone’s answer, Estinien will throw away her gerberium and scapular after all, sentiment be damned.

Procula unwraps the band from Estinien’s upper arm, replacing it with a tightly knotted cord. “Make a fist,” she instructs, then draws what is indeed only a small amount of blood into a glass phial, which she then caps off before untying the cord and tapping Estinien’s fisted hand. “That’s all for now. The obstetrix will be in shortly to examine you.” Kindly, she adds, “Best of luck.”


A stern faced older Garlean, jen Decius when she enters wastes no time before giving Estinien a flimsy cotton gown. “Open in the front,” she says, and turning her back to retrieve a few strange-looking tools and a pair of rubber gloves from the desk in the examination room is the most privacy she seems intent on affording her. “When was your last cycle?”

“Two or three months?” Estinien guesses. “Closer to three.” She hugs the gown closed around her belly. She thinks she would, counterintuitively, feel less exposed had she been simply told to strip and given nothing to change into.

Decius examines Estinien’s bloodied smalls, set beside her on the table, without touching them. Face inscrutable, she says, “I’m going to perform an internal examination and ultrasonus.”

“What is that?” It sounds like some sort of magick Alphinaud or that terrifying Lalafellin girl might use—but of course that cannot be the case. Can it? There are instances, Estinien knows, of Garleans successfully harnessing aether, but not… not normally, as she understands it. Not without the involvement of gods, or dangerous experimentation that surely cannot have found its way into an inter-city women’s health clinic.

“A process that turns sound into a picture,” jen Decius tells her, “so I can examine the fetus.” This does not make it sound any less like magick. Seemingly disinclined to explain further, the obstetrix changes the subject: “Is the father known to you?”

“Yes.”

“And his race? Is he another Elezen?”

Perhaps it is only her manner, but Estinien cannot shake the feeling jen Decius will judge her for the answer—or, if not her, then Gaius for being interested in a savage. “Does it matter?”

“The rate of fetal development differs between the races. And then there is the matter of expected size. Complications are also more likely to arise in the case of interspecific pregnancies.”

“Oh,” says Estinien. She hadn’t considered any of that. “He’s Garlean. One of the tall ones?” She doesn’t know if that matters.

There is a small terminal built into the desk reminiscent of those Allagan contraptions in Azys Lla, with a screen that responds to touch; jen Decius copies Estinien’s answers down into a file on the terminal with an uninked quill, as Procula had earlier entered whatever information her strange tests had provided. “Have you experienced abdominal pain?”

“This morning. The bleeding started shortly after.”

“How would you describe the pain?” jen Decius asks. All of this she copies down. “Dull, throbbing…?”

Estinien considers. “Sharp. Fast. ‘Twas most like a bullet wound, I would say. The pain grew dull quickly after the first spike.”

“Does it linger still?”

“A bit,” Estinien answers.

This seems to satisfy jen Decius, for she makes one last entry into the terminal, then comes to Estinien’s side at the examination table. Pulling on the gloves she had earlier retrieved, she says, “I’ll be taking a look now,” and taps Estinien’s chest with the back of her forearm, leading her to lay back on the table. “Legs here,” the obstetrix continues, indicating metal contraptions welded to the end of the table. They are not unlike the stirrups on a chocobo’s saddle—Estinien needn’t guess as to their purpose.

She leans back on her elbows and, sitting at the table’s edge, she lifts one and then the other of her legs to come to rest in the stirrups. At first she keeps her thighs together, but a moment’s consideration—the obstetrix can hardly see what she needs to like this—and she lets her knees fall open. Her cotton gown necessarily open as well, she is well and truly on display. This much she could tolerate, if she must (and she must), but worse is when she lets herself down from her elbows to lie flat, and can no longer see what’s going on between her legs. Chill air on her bare thighs, Estinien feels terribly exposed, but dutifully lying here so open and vulnerable as jen Decius takes up a place between her legs. When Gaius had gotten her on her back, legs apart so he may lie between them, she had made quick work of getting on top.

If jen Decius notices her discomfort, she makes no comment. Estinien hears the clink of metal as the obstetrix takes up one of her instruments, then feels her gloved fingers parting the lips of her cunt. She thinks it’s strange, the rubber, but then something cold presses in between them, slick and easy, like nothing she has ever felt before—not that she’s a connoisseur, only having been fucked the once, and besides that having taken only Gaius’ tongue, his fingers and her own. Not even Alberic, who knew her more intimately than anyone, has touched her like this; the few occasions he fingered her open were long before she came in possession of a cunt.

The cold metal goes up inside her, deeper and deeper still until there must be no more space for it to take up; she feels full already, the pressure of the metal less yielding than fingers or a cock. Inside of her feels tight, like when she puts fingers inside before she’s wet enough, but there is a strange pressure which slowly increases—the instrument prying her open, putting her on display for a stranger’s eyes. There is nothing for her to do but let it: to hold her thighs dutifully spread apart, to resist any futile urge to push out against the instrument, to let it open her cunt and hold it open for the obstetrix to look inside. Even recognizing the necessity, Estinien hates it.

“You aren’t dilated,” jen Decius says after a few moments. The pressure lessens, and the instrument is pulled out of her. It has taken all of a few seconds in total. “You can sit up for now.”

Estinien gladly obliges, wrapping herself up once more in the thin gown and her own arms. “Is that,” she begins uncertainly, “is that good or bad?”

Putting the instrument which had been inside her in the bowl of a metal sink and peeling off her rubber gloves, jen Decius says, “Neither, really. You aren’t in miscarriage, but the body has been known to miss these things. If ultrasonus cannot find a heartbeat, in the coming days more blood tests shall have to be performed to determine if aspiration is needful.”

“What does that do?”

“It pulls the dead tissue out of your womb,” jen Decius explains, “if indeed the fetus is dead.”

Estinien splays the palm of her hand across her belly, which is still almost entirely flat. “Oh,” she says softly.

The obstetrix glances over at her. “It may yet live. Do not grieve yet.” She enters a great deal more information into the magitek terminal. “In a short while, I’ll return to perform ultrasonus. One of the girls will bring you water in the meantime. Drink all of it. It will be unpleasant,” she warns, and then, without further ado, she leaves.


It is, indeed, unpleasant. Estinien spends the better part of an hour squirming, her bladder uncomfortably full and forbidden to relieve herself, before the obstetrix returns to her room with a… rolling contraption beside her. It is the approximate size of Aymeric’s wine cabinet, all gleaming metal, wires, tubes, and blinking lights. Estinien distrusts it.

“If you would lie back again,” jen Decius tells her. “Legs down this time.”

As Estinien does as she is bid, jen Decius rolls the magitek console into place beside the examination table, then with a spatula spoons out an ample amount of a curious, faintly blueish gel from a glass jar on the desk. Parting the two sides of Estinien’s open-front gown to reveal her naked belly, the obstetrix smears the gel across the lower part, between her navel and mons. It is cold. Estinien hisses through her teeth.

The magitek complains to be turned on, a long, high pitched beep. Attached by wires to the larger console is a handheld device jen Decius unsheathes from a space on the side of the machina. It looks like it might shock her to the touch, the wand, and as it’s brought near Estinien finds herself tense; but it doesn’t feel like anything besides the cold. She forces air into and out of her lungs.

There is a monitor on top of the device, which when switched on produces a fuzzy sort of image, black and white lines in indistinguishable shapes. They move in tandem with the noise the machina seems to be producing, the sound itself low and unclear, rolling through a series of close pitches like the rhythm of the tide. “It’s early still,” jen Decius warns, “but with any luck we may be able to find a heartbeat.” She digs the wand into Estinien’s belly, the blunt end of the device digging uncomfortably into her bladder. Estinien tenses her core muscles, her knees reflexively tucking slightly up and to one side, affording her, if not more security against the threat of accidentally relieving herself, then the illusion of such. It is a truly miserable sensation, and Estinien longs to be done with this.

But then in the fuzzy image on the screen, she sees the outline of a figure take shape, and all other concerns fall away, even as jen Decius digs the wand ever more sharply into her belly. “Is that…?”

“Shush,” jen Decius chides, and then—if Estinien’s ears do not deceive her—she hears it. The quiet, unmistakeable sound of a heart beating away in that tiny chest, swaddled by the noise of the ultrasonus. Hushed, jen Decius points to a section of the monitor and says, “Baby’s head.”

Wholly and utterly transfixed, Estinien finds herself without words. If this is not magick, it is something even greater.


The clinic sends Estinien home with a second appointment scheduled a sennight out, a fuzzy image of the baby printed out from the ultrasonus machina, and a little bandage over the site of an injection meant to help keep it safe.

She spends the walk back to the safehouse trying to figure out what she’ll tell Gaius. She has no idea what to tell Gaius.

“Where did you run off to so quickly?” he greets her as she opens the door.

Underprepared, panic has her in its grip, and Estinien says the very first thing on her mind: “I’m pregnant. It’s yours."

Well, that was that.


Gaius’ heart skips a few beats, and when it starts up a rhythm again it is pounding. He stares at Estinien for a long moment, uncomprehending: looks between her face and her belly and back again. “You’re with child?” he echoes.

“No,” Estinien snaps, “with beast. Yes, you dirty old bastard. And you needn’t act so shocked. You’ve been fucking longer than I’ve drawn breath, after all! Surely this can’t be the first time you’ve had this conversation.”

Collapsing into a seat, Gaius gives a short laugh, his mouth dry. “It is, as a matter of fact. If I’ve sired a child before, the mother never told me.” And if he ever had suspicions, he kept them to himself. “My children were all adopted.”

Truly, if anything, he’s surprised Livia had never confronted him with the news—once she was of the age, the worry had always lingered in the back of his mind, not the least because he knew how pleased she would be to bear him a child.

“How many children do you have? I don’t rightly know.”

“Six,” he says. “One—my eldest daughter—is dead, and I know not of the rest.”

Estinien paces another step, and then turns to look at Gaius, incredulous. Gaius does not need to possess the gift of the Echo, as so many of Estinien’s compatriots do, to recognize her disgust as the full weight of this statement settles in. “You ‘know not’?” she echoes, her voice raised nearly to a shout. She pinches the bridge of her nose. “How can you be ignorant of if your children still live?” After another moment: “Tell me they’re grown, at least. You didn’t abandon actual children, did you?”

Gaius averts his gaze. “The youngest will see her fifteenth summer this year. I am a poor father,” he cuts off Estinien’s protest, raising his own voice to be heard over her. “I will be the first to say so. I failed Livia both as her father and as her commanding officer, and after the Praetorium fell I was so caught up in grief and vengeance I failed the rest of my children. The best I can do for them now is to put right as many of my mistakes as I can and give them a wide berth so they cannot be tempted to die for me as their sister did.” He puts his head in his hands; voice muffled by his palms, he tells Estinien, “Trust that whatever you think of me, I think worse of myself.”

Gaius feels the couch shift as Estinien takes a seat beside him, sighing as she does. “I suppose,” she admits dubiously, as if the very words are being dragged out of her throat, “I would be a hypocrite to judge you.” The self-condemnation on her voice is familiar to him. “The people I care about most in this world forgave me when my selfishness nearly laid waste to all of Coerthas, and I—” she laughs a miserable little laugh, “I climbed out a window rather than face them after. Cowards, the both of us are.” After a long moment, the both of them languishing in sorry, entitled self-pity, Estinien says in a voice which brooks no argument: “You must find your children, though. You’re their father, you have an obligation to them. To keep them safe, if they do still live.”

“And your child?” Gaius looks at Estinien out of the corner of his eye. “What is my obligation to it?”

She doesn’t return his gaze, staring out straight ahead of her instead, looking at nothing at all. In her lap, she fidgets with an odd-looking ring on her thumb, tarnished silver with protrusions all around it. “I don’t know. But I’ve seven months to decide, don’t I?”

“Whatever you decide, I’ll go along with it.”

Estinien scoffs. “Magnanimous.”


They stay in the capital another two weeks—time enough for Estinien to make her follow-up appointment at the clinic. Gaius and Severa take the same time to break into his own home in the city, which was rarely enough occupied when he was not a dead man, and has since developed a fine layer of dust over every surface and offers no hint to the whereabouts or wellbeing of his younger children. “The safe in my office was emptied, at least,” is all he has to say after the excursion. A part of him had feared they never made it out of Ala Mhigo in the chaos of his replacement.

“Unfortunate for us, though,” Severa grimaces.

With Estinien and the baby receiving a clean bill of health from the obstetrix, and no sign of the Baelsar children in the capital, the Shadowhunters have no reason not to follow the engineer they’ve been tracking, once he leaves for a military compound in Corvos. Estinien cannot say she has missed living in tents, and certainly not now that Severa and Valdeaulin have chosen to bunk up with each other and give ‘the happy couple’ (said in the most dubious tone Valdeaulin could muster) their privacy. Gaius reeks of cigarette smoke and cheap liquor, and his hands wander nearly as much as his eyes; but worse is that she doesn’t even mind it.

There are a thousand reasons Estinien should tell him to sod off, or should simply abscond herself as she’s done so many times before, but a part of her—and no small part, either—loves the way Gaius looks at her, can’t keep his hands off of her. Clinging to the past is a fool’s errand, Estinien knows this, but Gaius’ attention reminds her of the time she most coveted with Alberic, before he lost interest in the thing he had broken.

A fool she was then, and a fool she is now, making excuse after excuse for men who will never be worth the effort. Estinien recognizes the concessions she’s making for Gaius even as she makes them, the concerns she keeps on burying, and she knows herself well enough to be sure she’ll carry on like this unless—until—he does or admits to something so far beyond the pale that no amount of empathy nor forgiveness will let her sleep at night.

Three months on, Estinien’s pregnant belly has begun to show through even her winter coat, small but unmistakable. Gaius’ hands often find their way to her bump—a protective arm wrapped around the back of her waist when they pose as a provincial couple in towns or stopped on the road by legionary patrols, or reverently touching her naked belly while he kisses bruises into her neck. He gets off on it, having knocked her up—that much is obvious. Murmurs praise into the shell of her ear, how beautiful she looks fat with his child, how she takes his cock like her gods made her for it. Says, “I hope it looks like you.”

Estinien hopes so too.


There is a laboratory in Corvos’ Castrum Vespera filled with rows of bodies in glass tubes, each of them bearing the same visage—a pale-faced Garlean man whom Estinien does not recognize. Gaius looks stricken.

“This face is familiar to you?” Valdeaulin asks, as Severa locks the doors behind them with her lance through the door-handles.

With his eyes locked on the still face of one of the dozens of identical men—sleeping? Dead? Estinien cannot rightly say—and hackles raised, Gaius reminds Estinien of nothing so much as an uneasy beast. The Black Wolf, indeed. “Aye,” breathes Gaius. From his back, he retrieves his gunblade. “Solus zos Galvus. Though he has not looked like this since I was a boy.”

“Are they… alive?” Severa walks up to one of the bodies in its glass case to inspect it. She is wary, as Estinien thinks is reasonable under the circumstances—this is surely more than a curiosity, found in the deepest levels of a facility charged with the production of weapons of mass destruction. As are Valdeaulin and Estinien herself. Gaius is openly fearful, and why, she does not know. “Oh, it’s breathing.”

Sure enough, the bodies take slow, steady breaths inside their suspension—breaths which do not falter once pulled out of their glass cases, limp and unresponsive like so many dead fish. They do not flinch for blades at their throat, and their pulses do not quicken. Unsettled, the Shadowhunters do away with the lot of them, and finish the job they came here to do.


That evening, Gaius finds himself in front of the campfire, staring into the flames and then through them, a thousand yalms to nowhere and nothing. Heirsbane laid out on his knees, he thumbs the blade’s fuller, some flecks of dried blood still visible in the groove, coming off on his fingers.

“You’re quieter than usual,” Estinien says, dropping herself down beside him, stealing a sip of cold coffee from the mug at his feet.

He can’t get Solus’ face out of his head, looking as he had back then. But lingering on the past can do no good, and Castrum Vespera’s mysteries have more on Gaius’ mind than just those nine old ghosts of his. “You’re affiliated with the Scions, are you not?”

Frowning, Estinien replies, “I am. Why?”

It was uncomfortably familiar, the steady breathing of the simulacra, the way their heads fell limp as a newborn infant’s. Turning his hand to inspect it, he finds his fingertips stained red-brown. “The Leveilleur boy. Know you aught of his fate?”

“Alphinaud? Still comatose along with the rest, as I understand it, but in good hands. You were close?”

Before Gaius has a chance to think up a reply, Valdeaulin cuts in with a scoff. “Oh, yes. Baelsar took quite the interest in him.”

Where but a moment ago there had been a hint of fondness about her, sympathy in asking after their relationship, now Estinien is as icy as the fabled halls of her Fury. “What do you mean by that? Gaius, what does he mean by that?”

Gaius is not in the habit of lying, but the truth is not like to calm her down. Estinien has a short fuse, he’s learned, where the youth are concerned. “The boy was under my care,” he says, setting Heirsbane aside.

“That’s what you call it, is it? Some care. Half the time he couldn’t walk when you were through with him.”

A small sound pulls Gaius’ attention back from Valdeaulin; Estinien has a hand over her mouth, a cornered-animal look in her eyes. “You didn’t,” she says, quiet and desperate, and looks to Severa for aide. Severa looks at her hands in her lap. “He’s still only a boy!”

This is… more or less how Gaius expected she might react. “It may not be so in Ishgard, but sixteen is ample age in Garlemald and Sharlayan both,” he reminds her.

“Oh, on paper, I’m sure!” Estinien cries, a hysterical tinge to her voice. “But that doesn’t make him grown, and if you can get it up for Alphinaud Leveilleur, what exactly is it that you think about when you’re—” she cuts herself off suddenly, her mouth agape as she takes in a slow breath, and then another. Her eyes slowly close. “Gaius?” she asks once she has collected herself, and if her voice were not so raw it would sound nearly sweet. “When you say you hope the baby takes after me, why is that?”

“It is the sort of compliment you pay to the mother of your child. Am I wrong to do so?”

“When—when you rape little blond children?” Estinien accuses incredulously. “Yes!”

“I did not. He was willing.”

Estinien offers a tight smile, her lip twitching. “That’s what they all say. And the two of you—!” She switches her attention to Valdeaulin and Severa. “You just let him carry on like that? When he was—? Eugh!” Giving a disgusted cry, she pushes herself to her feet, pregnant belly making this more of a process than it might have been. “I’ve had it with all of you. I’m going for a walk. And you,” she points a finger at Gaius, “you will never lay a hand on this child, you understand me?”


When she is far enough from their camp that the fire is only a flicker in the dark, Estinien fishes the well-worn image of her baby the obstetrix had given her after her ultrasonus. In good light, you can hardly make out any details; by Menphina’s faint glow, Estinien can just distinguish the bulbous shape of the baby’s head. Resting her other hand softly on her belly, she promises, “I’ll keep you safe, do you hear? Whatever else happens, I’ll keep you safe.”


“—ce inside, Severa and I can destroy any remaining stores of Black Rose and retrieve the personnel files. Oen Baelsar here can replace the guard, and no one should notice anything amiss.”

Severa hides a snicker behind her hand. “Oen,” she echoes. It’s what they call retired old soldiers, in Garlemald.

“And what am I to do?” Estinien demands. “Twiddle my thumbs and await your triumphant return?”

“In your condition…?” Gaius says warily.

Estinien has been in a foul mood all day, as she often has been of late, and this may well be her limit. “I am with child, my hands are not broken. I can still hold a lance, you kn—oh,” she stops abruptly, having stood halfway through her tirade and feeling her center of gravity shift dramatically enough she has to take a small step to steady herself. Placing a hand to her swollen belly—at seven months now, near to bursting—she gives it a withering look. “Fine. I’ll sit this one out.” To baby, she says, “Truly you cannot come soon enough.”


They make plans to return to the city before the baby’s born; birthing a child is a task best left to the professionals, in Gaius’ opinion, and there are no shortage of professionals in the Garlean capital, which even has a hospital for the express purpose of caring for expectant mothers and infants. But, of course, plans are little use when you cannot put them into motion, and they’re at least two days outside civilization when Estinien’s water breaks.

“Should we make camp?” Gaius asks.

“No need,” says Valdeaulin shortly. “It will be a long while before the birth. You can walk, can’t you?” This question he directs to Estinien.

Sitting on the trunk of a fallen tree beside the road, her trousers are soaked through at her inner thighs, the fabric looking almost black. “…Aye,” she says after a moment, “but I’m—eugh—dripping.” She makes a face.

“That’s normal,” Valdeaulin assures. “‘Tis a great deal of fluid. My wife always found early labor least unpleasant wearing just her tunic.”

Though she complains of it, Estinien follows Valdeaulin’s recommendation after they’ve walked perhaps only half a malm more. “It chafes,” she insists as she tugs off her boots and then her trousers. With the pregnancy, her tunic rides up higher on her thighs now than it had; over the next hours, her bare skin shines from the steady trickle of fluid down her inner thighs. When her labor has progressed far enough that she can no longer cling to Gaius’ forearm and breathe through her contractions still standing, he takes Estinien up into his arms, her upper body slung inelegantly over his shoulder. This is the closest they’ve been in months, though Estinien’s fury with him has been steadily fading, he thinks, or likes to tell himself. He relishes the heat of her body against his chest.

When dusk sees a bonfire on the horizon and a scattered collection of tents, Gaius breathes a thankful, “Eschva. With any luck, there will be a midwife in their camp.” The nomadic Elezen tribes of northern Ilsabard are not known for their friendliness to outsiders, but with half of their party Elezen and one in active labor, it seems reasonable to hope at least for a place to pitch their tents.

Valdeaulin takes the lead, petitioning the first people they see for aid in rapid-fire Eschve, the dialect of it they speak in Eorzea, and Estinien, when her contractions do not forbid her speak, answers the questions of an older woman who ushers the four of them to set down their things in a sort of common area of the camp, children lingering curiously near the fire to investigate the strangers. Gaius has picked up some of the language over the years, but between the three distinct dialects at play and the speed of their conversation, he finds he can understand perhaps only a word every three or four: the Eschva woman will bring hot water and some rags, he pieces together, and Valdeaulin, who assisted in the births of his own children, means to do his part.

“Father?” the woman asks, and Estinien gives a vague sort of wave in his direction.

“Yes?”

“Help her,” she says firmly, and with a surprisingly strong grip, pushes Gaius down by his shoulders until he kneels at Estinien’s side.

The next several hours are a blur. Gaius is shown where to put his hands to provide counter-pressure to Estinien’s contractions, digging his thumbs into her lower back and helping her hips to cant open; suggested that massage can help quicken labor, he obliges this, too, his fingers slick with amniotic fluid. When she is through what seems to be the worst of it, and Gaius’ fingers find the top of the baby’s head, an Eschva girl—a different one, the older lady having long since gone to sleep—with a toddler on her own hip tells Estinien to get up higher on her knees, and Gaius to hold her steady in his arms. “Let baby fall,” she says with a shrug of one shoulder, before adding, “…but catch him, do.”

The position does seem to help, gravity easing the way; once the baby’s head peaks out from between the lips of Estinien’s weary cunt, it takes only seconds to deliver into Gaius’ waiting hands, Estinien clinging bruises into his shoulders behind her, falling forward onto her hands and knees with a cry. Beneath her, a bloody, wrinkled creature gives a smaller cry.

“Oh…” With a shaking hand, Estinien reaches down, tenderly thumbing the baby’s cheek.

“A girl,” Gaius tells her. “Here, lie back.” Their packs, stacked one atop the other, make for a good enough pillow to support Estinien’s back; he guides her to rest as Severa soaks rags in a bowl of warm water with which Valdeaulin scrubs baby clean. Out of the corner of his eye, Gaius can see him cut the umbilical cord, tied off with a length of twine. “Only the afterbirth, now.” It is no trial to deliver it; parting Estinien’s legs, Gaius guides it out of her with the cord and his hands, and then it is done.

Exhausted, sweat matting down her hair to her forehead, Estinien lets her head loll back. “Let me hold her,” she bids Valdeaulin. “She must be starving.” Without further guidance than a mother’s instinct, she loosens her tunic, then handed her child brings her to her breast. Heavy with milk, silvery stretch marks mar her skin; Gaius watches, transfixed, as the newborn latches on.

“Do you know what you will call her?” he asks. His mouth is dry.

Estinien looks down at her baby, a softness in her eyes Gaius has never seen. “Reinette,” she says, like a question; seeing it fits her, Estinien says again, decidedly: “Reinette Varlineau.”

“Oh, that’s pretty,” Severa says. “Is it a family name?”

Estinien shakes her head. “A saint. She became a knight to seek vengeance, and once she had won it, she set down her lance.” There is a longing in her voice that Gaius knows better than to bring attention to. “Gaius, do you mean to hold her?”

“I… no?” he startles. “You want me to?” By Garlean law—inasmuch as Garlean law might be applied in such a remote part of Ilsabard—to take up the baby would be to declare his paternity and accept responsibility for the child’s care and wellbeing. He was under the impression that Estinien did not want him involved in the baby’s—Reinette’s—life in any capacity, and naming her Varlineau certainly seemed the final nail in that coffin. But then, he supposes Ishgard has proven itself a world apart from Garlemald more than once before.

“After all this, you’re not even going to pick her up?” Estinien says incredulously. “You’ve my permission for that much.”

“Give her here, then,” Gaius tells her. “If you would let me, I would be glad to meet our daughter.” Reinette is gorgeous. She has her mother’s ears, though soft and bent out of shape from the womb, and amidst the wrinkles on her newborn face are the lids of an eye which will open in the coming weeks. With one tiny, perfect hand she reaches out blindly, taking hold of the tip of her father’s finger when he offers it to her. Conspiratorially, he tells her, “You know, sometimes I don’t think I understand your mother at all.”