Chapter Text
Kendall had bought an obnoxiously obscene triplex penthouse on the Upper East Side, back when Rava divorced him. Five bedrooms, enough for if he had the kids, and ostentatious enough, near Carnegie Hall to make a statement.
He hadn’t allowed Shiv to sleep in her own Tribeca duplex since the vote. Roman had every ability to wander back to his own home on the other side of the park, but Shiv.
“You are staying with me, Pinky, where it's safe.” he had told her after the headlines on Bloomberg had first begun to change.
It’s a sweet protective gesture that makes the faintest approval look dash over Frank’s face. It feels like a dark promise to Shiv, standing next to her brother, watching the carnage she had crafted begin. She almost wishes she could see Tom’s face, no doubt seated in some banal but expensive Midtown suite Matsson had claimed as an enemy camp.
The Board’s unanimous rejection of the acquisition had caught the markets by surprise, they hadn’t really thought Kendall Roy had that much of his father in him. It’s characterized at first, as the young King fending off a hostile acquisition.
She had made the decision to just drop the transcript. No leaks, nothing behind anyone’s back. Re-reading quickly, Kendall’s words spoke for themselves. They could garnish the statement later when they would no doubt be asked to comment. For now, quelling market volatility (or juicing Waystar’s stock) was enough to drop a link on the website with the title: BOARD REJECTS GOJO ACQUISITION 13-0.
Truthfully, Shiv isn’t sure how Stewy got that photo. It looks almost like a painting, of an imperial coronation—her and Roman’s touches imbuing Kendall with control of the company. He, dramatically, captions it Succession. Twitter, and the zeitgeist, latch onto a different description: ‘The Kingdom was worth more than a Horse.’
Fitting, since Kendall had cast Matsson in the role of Richard III, somehow summoning that quote out of his Harvard-educated, somewhat coke-rotted brain that their blue-blooded mother had hammered the classics into. She didn’t like to think of how she, and the children resting under the palm of his hand, were the secondary meaning to the metaphor. Kendall had been the one to say it, that her protection was the first mantle he had ever shouldered.
The media latches onto that narrative. Shiv isn’t sure if it's her children moving inside of her or her stomach turning when she reads the first think-piece tweets from writers from publications like New York Magazine and Vanity Fair. Likening the responsibility of the Father only being successfully borne by the son now. Only now, when he had picked up the patriarchal protection the death of the Patriarch had left vacant.
Kendall watches GoJo stock plummet, turning to Karl, who has the decency to not look too crestfallen about his lost retirement package, and Frank, who still seems to be shaking off the cobwebs of the boy who had never quite been able to follow through the grand ideas he could polish up.
(It’s funny—the reverse Viking idea, the original deal, might have been buried in the sheer drama of the transcript, but Tellis is trying to get a hold of all of them, eager to be the bank who gets any slice of the next Roy Crusade.)
Shiv waits to release a statement. She garnishes the Waystar one with Karolina, bolstering the terms her brother had set in the sand with his pronouncement to the board and softening his delivery a bit. Like any good Queen, she would first try diplomacy. Just like how her brother had originally tasked her, with cozying up to Matsson. Waystar’s press release is designed to do one and the same, although Shiv knows Karolina’s eyes are on her. Everyone can’t stop looking at her and wondering how she was hammering out on particular phrasing when the humiliation was still crawling up her spine.
Greg’s apologetic stare is what makes her snap. He’s just loitering there, in the chaos of the truth he had caused but content in the security of his side’s protection. She snaps at him to get her something to eat, and he had the audacity to look at Kendall, to make sure he’s allowed to follow her orders.
Waystar’s press release suffices for Kendall. But as Siobhan Roy, she hasn’t said a word. Still, even as evening falls, she isn’t sure how to swallow the bitter pill of transcendence.
Shiv had thought he would have fucked her into the carpet like she was a spoil of war. Roman seems to think so, loitering around Kendall’s place when they finally decided to move the war room somewhere she could rest.
(Or perhaps he just wanted to be close to them, still, that lost little boy who had run into their mother’s arms when he was hurt.)
He, and the rest of the crisis management, the deal team: their fucking entourage always seems to be there. The need to speak with the GoJo Board, with bankers, with lawyers, form a distraction of war games that allows them both to stick to their stances of ‘we don’t talk about The Thing.’
They hadn’t been intimate since leaving California. Since Pierce. Since their father’s death. Since he had gotten chosen as their father’s heir. Since she had conspired with Matsson. Since she had openly switched allegiances. Since he had coaxed her back to his side. Since she had betrayed him for a second time. Since he had won.
Neither of them is going to bring up they hadn’t necessarily negotiated the exact terms of her surrender, Shiv realizes, six days later when her loosest pair of pants refuse to button.
She had taken to… talking to the bump more, since she had gotten the amino results. Mostly informing her twins how infuriating their sire was. Kendall had interrupted one such rant on the terrace as she stroked her stomach and for a moment, Shiv had thought, rather than discussing the deal, they were going to discuss their future.
“Haven’t even gotten a chance to haggle for my bride price, and you both are spilling out to sour negotiations.” she mutters, yanking up one of the maternity dresses Sarah had slipped into the pile of clothes, haphazardly packed from her own apartment.
The black, stretchy material clings to her already full figure in a way that both softens the hard edges of her and also hones her into a disrupting, immovable celestial body. She forgoes the blazer, deciding to put Kendall off kilter with the intrusion of her body, served up like a buffet to let him come to her for negotiations.
His dark eyes rarely leave her form, yet he doesn’t approach her. Doesn’t comment, as Roman did of ‘Holy shit Shiv you got big.’ Only the presence of others prevented him from saying some vile, perverted, slightly incestuous thing that Shiv knew he was too chicken to act on.
Not like Kendall, who just watches her, patiently, like he had done before she had ever told her brothers that she was pregnant.
It wasn’t like he hadn’t known. Tom had to have been an idiot to not have noticed the subtle changes in Shiv. Her tits swelling, her waist thickening, her skin glowing with a luminosity that the encroaching winter could not have wrought. All due to what he had put in her. But, of course, Tom hadn’t noticed, not even when Shiv was using him as a glorified dildo (yeah, he knew about that.)
Her husband could never know Shiv as intimately as Kendall. He had been with her for every step of her life, there was no way that she could ever be indifferent towards him.
Kendall hadn’t confronted her about the baby, for the simple reason of why he’d known she had been late getting back to LA on their father’s birthday. The amino, the genetic testing, Shiv might have been pretending who the father was, but Kendall knew that she wouldn’t be going to all the trouble if it wasn’t of a particular heritage.
So, of course, he had waited for her to confess—or rather, to tell him that he had fulfilled what she had asked from him. Eventually when she had fallen into line and anointed him submerged in the Caribbean and smiling up at him. He had hoped, once he’d been installed on the throne, she would allow him his reward.
Kendall hadn’t wanted to wield her request against her. But, then she had tried to devour him. The betrayal had stung, he had asked her to just go in and vote. Yet, she had thought she had wrenched the last bit of usefulness out of him and now was ready to dispose of him.
And unlike in nature, the father refused to allow the mother of his offspring to feed off of the corpse she had slaughtered. Perhaps a scorpion could devour a lesser predator, but no, she had chosen an equally poisonous predatory to breed with.
She’s baiting him now, with that backless sweater dress, every bit of his Good Work on display.
But Kendall has begged enough at Shiv’s feet. If she wanted something from him, it was her right to ask.
The morning of her 20-week scan is when Shiv finally breaks their unspoken détente, storming into the master bedroom across from hers. He nearly slices his cheek shaving at the abrupt intrusion.
“Cancel your morning,” she impetuously demands. It’s the same tone she once used when the seven-year-old version of himself would be putting on his Buckley uniform and Shiv, all of almost 3, would insist he stay with her.
“Somewhere you want me to be, Shivy?” he returns to swiping the razor through the foam.
“You are the one who wielded the damn date my twenty-week scan is like a fucking shiv, stop acting ignorant,” she snarls, crossing her arms over the green sweater dress. Another number made to make her pregnancy an offering, a statement.
“You ready to stop acting like Mom, who fucking loathed Dad by the time you slithered out?” he makes the reptilian parallel blithely like it’s a fact, not a grievous insult.
Her face contorts in offense.
“You ready to stop acting like Dad and actually be present for your children? Mom was fucking heartless to us, but she had every reason to hate Dad using her like a broodmare,” he winces and looks at himself in the mirror.
Already getting the deadbeat Dad allegations on their pair. C’mon Ken, buck up.
The voice in his head is his father’s. Silly Mirror had been played in Kendall’s head long after Logan stopped holding it up to his son’s visage.
“You think you’re my broodmare? I thought you’d be pleased—beating Rava with two of my blood in one go.” Her face sours at the mention of his ex-wife. Or at the confirmation that he had violated her privacy with more than just a glance at her calendar, he took her usage of a plural to describe what grew in her womb as no surprise.
“We went over this, Shivy. Remember, when I exalted you?” the Madonna imagery had been… nice, Shiv had to admit.
A rare compliment from society, which had swallowed Kendall’s characterization and her spin, eager for a hero and a villain. For a family who the world had been demonizing for the Election call a week prior, she would have expected them to take Matsson’s words as truth and call her a whore. But, Kendall had sanctified her with how he had framed her in the narrative, carving from marble like a martyred maid in a fairy tale.
“I told you I wanted you on my side,” he turns away from the mirror to physically do what his words in the boardroom had done.
His hand wasn’t a heavy weight, thumbing the fabric at her hip, splaying his long fingers on the curve of her stomach, but his grip was a Presence.
“Unlike you, I’ve committed to no other option but them,” she rolls her eyes at their joint reflection, her one concession to maintaining the argument. Her body is of a different mind, pressing the backless portion of her dress against his warm, bare chest.
“You think how you set me up that I could have any options open but joining you?” Shiv allows more than a hint of resentment into her voice. As if she had ever, really, had any options open to her. They had all been different ways of using her blood to get closer to a throne she could never sit on.
“Shivy, honey, forgive me if I’m looking for something a little more certain,” Shiv wants to angrily weaponize her stomach, reminding him who did this to her. Yet, she knows he’s not wrong.
Twice, she had chosen her husband over her brother, preferring a man she could control. And yet, both times, Kendall has easily forgiven her and offered her elevation to be by his side.
Meeting his eyes in the mirror, she was uncomfortably reminded of how her father had looked when she asked him if this was real.
That was the horrible thing about her and Kendall—Logan Roy’s prized hounds. Shiv wondered if they would have always happened in the void left by their father’s passing. If them being kicked out of the nest had just expedited what would have always been the winning dogs’ fate.
If they had always been destined for their leashes to knot together, to form a tether, and in the absence of a master, to find solace in each.
Logan’s order for them to ‘make their own pile’ might have freed Shiv and Kendall from the post, but they were so tangled together they can barely walk a step apart from each other. Even when they wanted nothing to do with each other—that dreadful morning in the Church—they had still walked side-by-side, coupled in their grief, leaning on the other to hold some of their lead.
“My lawyers served Tom,” she hadn’t even communicated with her husband since that argument in Logan Connor’s apartment. Sarah and a few other Waystar Comms people were filtering all of her texts—her family and doctor were the only people who had the number of her new burner phone.
She can feel his chuckle down in the notches of her spine. The material of her dress does move up a bit, though.
“C’mon, Shiv, isn’t that for you?” she realizes he had to have known—her divorce attorneys were technically his, on retainer for how long he’d drawn out his own divorce with Rava.
(Greg had mentioned a neat little fact of Tom’s divorce strategy—meeting on behalf of the divorcing party, Shiv had realized didn’t technically count as being conflicted. Not when an attorney was particularly… enthusiastic about taking such a layup. Gretchen had been the one to reach out to her former client, Mr. Roy, about presenting his sister.)
“I let him have the apartment,” she tries to affect a sultry tone but it comes out as whiny and desperate. His thumb is still circling her hip at that slow, steady pace, his breath hot on her bare neck.
His eyebrow raises as he meets her gaze in the mirror.
“Shiv. Honey. You'll have to do better than that,” she wonders what more he could want. She’d told him she was forgoing any home but his.
Until his marriage with Rava comes into view. Until she remembers how he had taken to the task of putting a kid in her with a vengeance like it was a crusade for his very soul.
(Kendall, like all of them, was spoiled and possessive over what was his. He had lain claim to a son that wasn’t even his by blood, in a vain effort to hold onto Rava. Had adopted another child with her, when for some reason, he had been unable to have one of his own by her.)
“His lawyers asked about… scheduling opportunities,” she hoped Kendall hadn’t known how… close she had almost been to conning Tom into parenting her baby out of convenience.
“And?” it sounds like a snarl at her throat, his hand suddenly bruising on her hip bone. The father claiming her and his litter that she grew.
“I told him my due date.” Shiv had realized, that first or second night, lying alone in that new bed in Kendall’s apartment that Tom had never actually… acknowledged her pregnancy was due to him. He might not have disputed it, in front of her mother or Matsson… but he’d never accepted the very thing he had wanted most from their marriage.
Like even he knew, deep down, she had done it to spite him, rather than for him.
Kendall pulls up the skirt of her dress and brushes just the pads of his fingers to the front of her underwear, a sharp grin hidden by her neck.
“Really Shivy,” he’s already kneeling down on the cold marble floor, she knows this is just for his ego. She’s earned his vow. “Who are you gonna put on the birth certificate?”
“You made me a Madonna.” her voice raises an octave when he roughly grabs either side of her grey silk thong and shoved them halfway down her thighs. “So, one Roy should be enough.”
He makes a pleased humming exhale that makes her shiver at the sudden coldness on her damp cunt.
Secretly, Shiv savors the idea that her children's lineage will always be a mystery, something to haunt historians long after she had passed. That they would loom larger because, their mother was all they needed to have a right to the Family Legacy, no need for an interloping enemy general to sire them. Her child would one day command the Empire, a claim they only needed through her.
It’s that thought and his tongue that gets her off. The first time they had fucked, Shiv had finally realized why Rava had taken so long to divorce her drug-addict brother. The Roy children had been likened to dogs for too long, and Kendall, the best of them, had an eagerness and ferocity that only the most honed hunting hounds could muster.
Tom had a big dick. Guys like that never learned to use their mouths. Kendall’s was serviceable, long, and lean with a surprisingly wicked curve that hit parts of her that the straight and narrow had never unearthed. But he wasn’t solid like a tree—making him a devout study in the art of devouring cunt in a way only an addict could muster.
He’s more precise, she would assume, in comparison to the days when he would gorge himself on other women’s gasps and moans. Her brother had had a drug habit since he was 16. Shiv takes a plum smugness to know not only is her womb the only one his seed had ever quickened in, but her cunt is the only one he’d indulged in with a clear head.
Three clever fingers and his quick tongue wrench an orgasm from her, a loud whine of the first syllable of his name involuntarily coming out.
That’s probably what makes Roman come running—probably thinking that he needed to protect her from the increasingly Loganfication of Kendall.
(Shiv was pretty sure she’d heard her father comment that it was queer to say he loved his wife. It was a reasonable assumption to make that her father had probably told her brothers that cunnilingus was unmanly.
Ken stood and brought his lips to hers, letting her taste the oddly different tang of herself. Another expected change from pregnancy. He seemed to like it, swiping his tongue inside her mouth.
Even as he had assumed their father’s throne, he wasn’t entirely turning into Logan Roy.)
“Jesus fuck, I managed to make it my whole life never walking in on Mom and Dad and now I gotta find out the curtains match your drapes, Shiv?”
Shiv’s face is hot.
“Isn’t that what you always wanted to know, Romy? You’ve talked yourself hard enough times about it.” She hides her burning face in Kendall’s shoulder as she yanks up her underwear and pulls down her skirt.
Roman snorts and leans against the doorway of the master bedroom, unable to stop staring at his siblings. Kendall’s lips are red, and fuck, his chin still was wet from Shiv’s cunt.
“Is that how you made the demon spawn? A few revenge fantasies, where you pretended to be Caroline asking Logan for an heir?” Roman had mentally gone over the events of the summer again and again. It had been easy to miss, but now, in hindsight, impossible to not see.
The way Shiv hadn’t bothered with a hotel when she got back to New York, at first, when they returned from Italy. The way they had chosen the damn house in LA, how Ken had taken the smaller bedroom near the master and let Roman have the executive suite.
“Oh Rome, you think it took a few—” Shiv whips her head around to see the smirk on Kendall’s face. He’s hard at her hip.
“Kendall!” Shiv hisses, embarrassed again. Kendall ignores her.
“What Shiv? You embarrassed to illuminate Roman on how he missed me breeding you every evening for three months straight?” Roman makes a horrified, strangled sound in his throat.
“C’mon Shivvy, you had to suspect you were pregnant by August, no?” their brother starts to slowly back out of the master suite.
That was the thing about Roman, he delighted in suggesting a fantasy but was never prepared to be confronted with the reality.
“I didn’t take a test until after Dubai,” After Labor Day Weekend, Shiv had waited for a second missed cycle.
“Didn’t want to stop fucking me, hm?” Shiv glares at his boner, next to her clothed hip, as if it was an inconvenience and not the cause of her current place in the world.
“Ken, I’m getting my fucking cervix examined today, I’m not having them seeing your miracle swimmers in the lens.” Roman practically yelps at the slightest mention of biology and flees.
~~
Shiv hadn’t registered how lonely her pregnancy had felt until Kendall had a death grip on her hand and the OBGYN is squeezing the cold, blue gel onto her bare stomach. Usually, a technician would do it, but Shiv supposed for Dr. Hasford’s high-profile patients, she preferred to be hands-on.
“I know we were worried about any genetic conditions, and those are clear, and your red blood cell count is still a bit low—that iron supplement isn’t going to do everything,” the middle-aged woman lectured her, coasting the wand over her distended abdomen. “But the good news is that your babies are very… active, you notice them reacting to your voice?”
“She’s been talking to them a lot.” Kendall intones, his eyes never straying from the fuzzy black and white screen.
A hand jerks across the screen and her brother nearly jumps.
“Their hearts look good, limbs too—I know you were worried about any defects,” the doctor said in a business-like tone, her eyes on the screen preventing her from seeing Shiv’s lips purse and Kendall’s face turn drawn and pale.
The doctor continued to catalog the parts of the pair as if they were but a collection of organs. Good parts with a bad name, Kendall cringed to think of.
Their brains, their arms, legs, fingers, toes, their spines, their tiny kidneys, and bladders were all deemed no cause for concern. Their faces, small and merely suggestions of people, are coasted over, but given nothing of note besides mentioning how Roy their noses looked. Shiv stammers an answer Kendall forgets, momentarily forgetting to breathe.
“Could you talk again Mr. Roy? Baby A seemed to like your voice and I’d like to see if it will move its legs for us to confirm the gender,” Shiv doesn’t look offended at how her child already seemed to be choosing a favored parent in the womb.
“Uhhh, that’s the one on the left?” the child responds wriggling his legs a bit. “The one with—“
“Yes, your nephew’s thing.” Shiv had known from the bloodwork one of her children was a boy. She had kept that, somehow, from Kendall.
The awed delight on his face was well-worth never putting that in her email.
“Makes sense it’s the boy who won’t settle,” Shiv blinks a few tears, watching her son squirm again on the screen. Restlessness was intrinsic to Roy men.
“He’s just irritated, his sister keeps poking him.” cherubic was the only way to describe the first glance at his daughter. Even though her legs were splayed in an unladylike way as if deliberately trying to irk her wombmate, the infant serenely sucked on her thumb.
“Acting like she isn’t doing anything wrong, gets that from you Shivy.” the doctor thinks it’s sweet, how her brother can summon a burble of laughter from Shiv, still blinking tears away.
“Dad let me get away with it. Like you’re going to be any better than Logan,” the doctor has a moment of pity for the siblings, no wonder Kendall Roy was so protective of his sister—the grief of their father’s death not even a month ago.
“Hey, look, there he goes throwing a fuss,” clawing, turning, reaching, the child on her left makes his presence, known, pushing his sister’s encroaching foot out of his space.
Shiv is reminded of Kendall in that. He had always been content to be pushed around for a time, quiet in his discontent. Until he got restless and became prone to dramatic outbursts that either blew up in his face or pushed him to new heights.
The next Roy heir, true to form, had every bit of his father in him.