Chapter Text
“You what?” Zen screeched, voice gone entirely unstrung. Shirayuki pushed herself up on an elbow, struggling to sit up, and Obi reached out to help her, but all that meant was that he didn’t see when Zen started to wobble.
“Catch him!” She pushed Obi’s hands away as what little color Zen had drained from his cheeks and his eyes stared at nothing.
“Got you, your highness.” Obi laughed, setting the prince in a chair and folding him over with his head between his knees. “Don’t forget to breathe.”
Zen just groaned in response. Obi left him there, standing by Shirayuki’s side because his chair was now full of prince. Another drip plopped on the floor with a sharp sound, drawing Obi’s eyes down. “What now?”
Her womb clenched again, another contraction rougher than the last. The tightness had a pinch to it now, the promise of pain to come. “Garrack is with the queen,” she gasped. “And Higata will be with her.”
“So we go get him?” Obi looked ready to leap through the window and haul Higata back by his lab coat, so Shirayuki grabbed his sleeve.
“No. Midwife Hentz, in the village. I need you to go get her, and meet me at the pharmacy.”
Obi crouched by the bed, his eyes searching hers, and the tension in his body relaxed just as her contraction eased. “You’ll be okay?”
She didn’t like it, of course, but she liked giving birth without a midwife present even less, so she forced a smile. “I’ll be fine. I’ll get Zen to help if I need anything.”
Together they turned to the woozy prince, now grasping the arm of the chair as he tried to haul himself back upright. “Last time you said that, I ended up hauling dirt.”
It hurt to laugh. Obi straightened one of her pillows as he stood up, his hand lingering as though he were going to touch her. She wished he would. “We’ll be right back, then,” he promised.
“These things take time, you don’t need to-” He was gone. “-rush.” She sighed. “We should have made a plan.” Garrack had been so sure she’d be able to be there for both of them, because with only two pregnant women in the entire castle, nobody in their right mind would expect them to go into the labor at the same time. “I should have known better,” she sighed.
“Shirayuki?” Zen seemed conscious again, maybe even steady enough to walk, although his eyes never strayed to the floor.
“No point in complaining,” Shirayuki added. “Help me up? The sooner we get to the pharmacy, the better.”
It had been only six circuits of the exam room since they arrived, only three since she sent Zen off for hot water and towels and a stiff drink for himself, when Obi burst through the pharmacy door. In his wake trailed Midwife Hentz, frowning distractedly at the walls like she didn’t quite know where she was. “This is the pharmacy, but we were just…”
Labor was no excuse to forget her manners or her sickroom procedures. “It’s nice to see you again. You didn’t have to hurry, though, I’m still several minutes between contractions. Do you need me to find you anything while I’m still up?” She was halfway across the room with visions of forceps in her head when another contraction hit. It still wasn’t really pain, not quite yet, but it was getting clear how it would develop soon enough. Obi wrapped his arm around hers, holding her up against his hip.
Hentz just laughed, finally showing the sardonic solidity Shirayuki had found so reassuring every time they’d met before. “I’ve been around the pharmacy with Garrack enough times. Never gotten to rifle through her things without her, but I know how to get what I need.” She picked up Shirayuki’s chart, which she’d already laid out, and slapped it back on the table with a bark of laughter. “That is, if you haven’t already done all the work. You just keep up the walking, and keep that slippery husband of yours out of trouble.”
“I’m not-” Obi started, in unison with Shirayuki’s “We’re not-” then both stopped. Obi frowned, and Shirayuki finished, “He’s not the father.”
Hentz’ gaze lingered at Obi’s hand on her hip. “I don’t judge,” she said and flipped another page in Shirayuki’s chart.
“I’ll keep walking,” Shirayuki said. Nobody could blame her for blushing, with everything going on.
“You do that.” A smile lurked at the edge of Hentz’ mouth, and Shirayuki stomped off.
She walked until she could barely pick up her feet anymore, until the light from the window had traveled across the floor from one wall all the way to the other. “You’re telling me this isn’t a problem?” Obi asked when Midwife Hentz was out of earshot looking for some minion to run an errand for her.
“Giving birth isn’t easy,” Shirayuki snapped. Everything hurt, and the space between contractions felt like barely enough time to catch her breath for the next. It was, she watched Hentz count the seconds every time she pulled out her pocketwatch, but it was hard. She leaned fully on Obi’s arm now, her legs barely carrying her forward.
“I didn’t know it would be this hard,” Obi said.
That was suspicious enough that Shirayuki stopped her hobbling, looking up into his face. It was close to hers, and anguished in a way she didn’t understand- he was empathetic, yes, but he had no reason for remorse. “You’ve been nothing but helpful to me, Obi. There’s nothing for you to apologize for. It’s not like it was your fault.”
She laughed, but he didn’t, his mouth dropping open a second before he got it under control. “Isn’t it?”
Another contraction swept through her, and she hunched over his arm until she could speak again. “This is not the time for mysteries, Obi.” Yet for all she complained, something about the thought felt like a key slipping into a lock. She felt Obi close to her and her heart racing, and heard Obi’s voice in the shadows, by the lake. It was all familiar, like something she’d dreamed so deeply it felt real.
“It’s all going to be fine, Obi.” She needed to hear it even more than she needed to say it. “This is all normal.” If she said it enough times, it would be true.
Nothing about this pregnancy had been normal, and Obi’s eyes said he knew that. “But how can you know?” She never thought she would see Obi pleading. “I owe you, miss, I will do anything you wish for, but you have to ask.”
“It’s time to lie down and see how things are going.” Hentz had no time for their drama when there was a baby to be born. “You can hold her hand if she wants you to, Sir Not-the-father, but otherwise I’m going to have to ask you to step out.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Obi snarled, a threat imbued with an impression of sharp teeth and a curl of impossible shadow forcing back the bright daylight of the room. Shirayuki startled, catching herself on her elbows against the bed as she jolted out of Obi’s hands. He caught her again, steadying her, and all she could do was lean on him and breathe even as the knowledge tried to steal the air from her lungs.
He told a story of being banished by magic when that was impossible for a person. The proof was there in front of her, her shadow man revealed, the body pressed against hers the same one that had featured so brazenly in her imagination. The familiarity of his touch resonated with the cloudy memory of dozens of dreams.
It was no surprise, anymore, that she wanted him. She just hadn’t understood what exactly she was hoping for. “My lady?” He prodded her gently, and when she pushed herself far enough to look into his face, all his unworldly menace was once again replaced by naked concern. She could almost dismiss everything she’d just realized as simply pregnant fancies, but she knew herself and she knew the answer to a puzzle when she saw it. All the times he’d joked about being the father might have been covering for the truth.
There would be time for anger later, if she made it. There would be time to take him to task for everything. “He stays,” she said, leaving no room for argument.
“Hmph.” The midwife made her opinion clear in one syllable, then turned back to her notes. “Up, then.”
Obi helped her settle in the bed, as comfortably as anything could be at this point, but when he went to pull away, she grabbed his shirt, pulling him in with all the strength she could bring to bear. She had nothing to hold back, and he wouldn’t break. “Promise me,” she said. “You will care for her if I don’t make it. Find her a good home, if you can’t do it yourself, but you are responsible.”
His eyes widened, an almost childlike worry washing away the last of his feral anger. “That’s your wish, then?”
“No. I don’t want a wish, I want your promise. You’ll do it. She’s yours as well, isn’t she?”
He nodded once, solemnly, and she would marvel that at last she’d left him speechless if it had been at anything less than an acknowledgment of all the secrets he’d kept all these months. Still, she grasped his hand as Midwife Hentz took her measurements and as she braced herself against contraction after contraction. He paled as she screamed at the pain, whispering encouragement in between as nervously as any father-to-be. Time blurred into a checkerboard of effort and rest, the intervals ever shorter and the work ever harder.
“This is taking too long, and you’re getting so tired- make a wish.” She peered up at him again through the fallen nest of her hair, and he peeled a lock back from her forehead, tucking it behind her ear. “Let me help.”
He could do it. All of this had been his doing in the first place, and now he was offering to make it end. Months ago perhaps she would have, but now she had too much to lose. She wanted her child. “You are helping. Just the way you are.” She clung to his hand, and he held it tightly as though he’d keep her safe just by holding her.
“All right, let’s see what we’ve got.” Garrack sailed into the room, already scrubbed and smelling of clean vinegar.
“Count on you to show up just in time to catch.” Hentz offered Garrack her notes and a frown, but instead Garrack planted an elbow on the bed beside Shirayuki, leaning down so she could hear clearly.
“Haki is safe, and the baby too. She and Izana have the little prince they wanted so badly. You don’t need to worry about them anymore.”
It was a relief she wasn’t expecting, like unclenching a muscle she’d been holding taut for nine months. She’d done what she’d promised at the very start. Even the contraction that followed on its heels felt different, although the relief quickly turned to a slithering sort of wrongness. She would have heaved if there had been anything left to throw up, the room spinning and receding into a dark tunnel. She tried to tell Garrack, but no sound came. She couldn’t even tell if her mouth was moving.
Even the voices stopped making sense, although she could still hear them far away.
“Shirayuki! Stay with me-”
“The baby’s crowning, I’m going to use the forceps, she can’t push like this-”
“No.” That one rang differently in her ears. There was a sense of power behind it, a desperation she didn’t understand-
And everything came rushing back. The exhaustion, the pain, Garrack’s wide eyes staring back at her, Obi’s hand clamped around her own. She gripped it with all her might and pushed with every iota of force she could summon, and there was a sliding and a release. “I’ve got it,” said Midwife Hentz, awed. “You did it.”
“You did it,” echoed Garrack, patting Shirayuki’s free hand. “I thought for sure we’d lost you for a moment there. But I guess it goes to show we still don’t know everything.” She glanced sideways at Obi, who still hovered silently by Shirayuki’s other side, her hand still interlaced with his. He only let go when Hentz set the baby on her chest, and she held it in her arms for the first time.
The quiet was deafening, after everything else. She’d delivered the afterbirth, been stitched and cleaned and the baby taken her first attempt at the breast, and everything moved so fast until, at last, it stopped. The baby, who still needed a name, was deeply asleep against her skin. Shirayuki ached, so tired her body was ringing with the aftermath of pain. Any minute it would subside enough to let her get the sleep she so desperately needed, but until then, she could get some answers.
“I thought you only answered wishes,” she said.
Obi tensed. “Ha, I’ve been lax with my secrets.”
“You were trying to tell me. It was my grandmother, in your story.” The more she thought it through, the more it all made a terrifying sort of sense.
“It was,” he answered. He grabbed his shoulder, making a smaller figure there in the chair than he should.
“And I almost died,” she added. “Nobody should come back from a seizure during delivery like that, but I heard you. You stopped it.”
He shook his head. “It shouldn’t have worked. I don’t know- I just wanted-”
Tears, already so close to the surface, welled up in Shirayuki’s eyes. The man who granted wishes didn’t even recognize what he’d done. “You wished.” She adjusted her hand on her daughter’s back and watched her sleep, hoping he wouldn’t see the tears fall. “Why did you follow me all these years and never say anything?”
His hand slipped down from his shoulder, pressing against his chest as if he didn’t know what to do with it. “Hah. I lost you, actually. Didn’t realize it until Lilias, when you yelled at me.” The corner of his mouth twitched.
She’d recognized the troublemaker immediately and warned him off her patients in no uncertain terms. “I didn’t yell.”
“Your grandmother was very accomplished at banishing. You sounded just like her,” he said, and it felt like a compliment.
She could fall asleep any moment, could close the book on the day and move on to the next, but she could imagine all too well waking up to find Obi gone. She’d wagered all or nothing on a card still lying unseen back in her room, and he apparently was in a mood for answers. “Does this mean we are even, now? Haki has her baby, I have mine-”
The baby squirmed on her chest, and Obi waited until she stilled again, his eyes fixed on her every move. “Hardly,” he whispered at last, and she couldn’t tell whether the lilt in his voice was humor or resignation. “I thought she would make you happy, that a baby was something you wanted just like the queen did. I was wrong to guess that, and I was wrong that it would chip away at my debt. We are more entangled than ever.”
It wasn’t what he meant, but Shirayuki’s imagination seized on the word. Her dreams had been entangled with him, for certain, and she had wanted and imagined fulfilling that with her body. Beneath her hand, the baby, still without a name, breathed in and out, warm and tiny. Her perfect eyelids were closed, tiny nose flaring in her sleep with what might already be a little angle. The black fuzz on her head was already starting to lift into a brush as it dried. There was very little of Shirayuki in her look, as much as anyone could tell with a baby so new and squishy and blotchy, but nobody would question who her father was.
“What would it take to free you?” She wanted him to stay, to make her dreams a reality and find out what kind of father he could be, but not at the cost of his freedom.
“I wonder,” he said, the slightest edge of his usual manner back in the words. His eyes, however, still burned into her with an offer she didn’t quite know how to accept.
“Don’t you owe me an answer? From our game, earlier? I won a forfeit.”
“I don’t think that game went the way you remember it, miss.”
“Are you going to argue with me?” The baby sighed, and she lowered her voice again.
“Only if you’d like me to.” His smirk was only a pale imitation of the usual, but it was far better than the way he’d been hunched in the chair just a minute ago. “The same goes for counting my debt- I owe you both now, and I find I have no motivation to ever even the scales. I will stay by your side so long as you will have me.”
“That’s- oh. Then-” Shirayuki wouldn’t have thought she had the blood and energy left to blush. Her imagined moments and half-remembered dreams could be more than just wishes. “I guess, if we’re not going to talk about debts, then I can’t ask for the forfeit I won.”
Obi’s chair creaked as he leaned forward, so close he must have read her mind- “I won.”
“Is that so?” She couldn’t seem to find her voice.
“It is.” His smirk flashed into a full grin, dazzling at close quarters.
“What prize do you want, then?”
His fingers toyed with the tips of her hair, spread out on the pillow. “The same one you want.”
She stopped him with a finger against his lips before he could get any closer. Her arm weighed a ton. “No promises, and take it slow. One kiss, and we’ll talk about everything else more when I’m not so tired.”
Even that didn’t dim his smile. Her fingers slid across his cheek and at last into his hair, just as his lips touched hers. He felt familiar, even as her heart raced with excitement. He felt like home, like hope- and then he pulled back, just as she needed but desperately did not want. With careful hands he scooped the baby from her chest and settled her in the crook of his arm, tucking the blanket around her until only the little fuzzy globe of her head was visible. “We’ll be here when you wake up,” he said. “I’m not going to go anywhere, when everything I’ve wished for is right here.”