and let me crawl inside your veins. I'll build a wall, give you a ball and chain.
He was perhaps the one thing in her life that she had not hand-picked. She had not sought him out the way she had so many of her other interactions; at least, not with malicious intentions. She can still remember his boyish face, how even when they were children he had been too handsome, too pure for this world. She had recognized it the moment she had seen him, and no matter how hard she tried to keep herself hardened and walled off from him, she had never been able to bring herself to lock him out the way she had everyone else. He had picked her, more than she had ever picked him.
The feel of him pulling her tightly against him causes her breath to catch in her throat, and her heart jumps to an unsteady rhythm with each kiss against her skin. She rests her forehead against his neck, all the while ignoring the pains that keep rolling inside of her. Even as they steadily strengthened, she had been so focused on the emotional turmoil she had been enduring that she hadn’t even noticed that their child was intent on making his appearance now. Her own lips find his jaw, offering him in a strained whisper, “I forgive you.” She isn’t sure if she does – but she says it, hoping that saying it out loud will make it true, will make her feel it. “And I love you too. Just you.” That part is genuine; there is no room for doubt or second-thoughts in that statement. She loves him, and she would try to forgive him.
The pain inside of her increases, until she is trembling and curled tightly into him, as though he could somehow make the pain go away. She knows that he likely has no idea what is going on, and truthfully, she barely knows, but by now her body is so wracked with the force of the contractions that she couldn’t explain it to him even if she wanted to. She bites back a sound that is almost like a whimper, before slowly lowering herself to the ground. With sharp, ragged breaths she lets instinct take over, the muscles of her barrel clenching tightly as she pushes and strains. Her coat grows damp from her effort, the starlit dapples bright and shining against her sweat-slicked skin, and she isn’t sure if this seems so hard because it’s her first, or if it’s always like this.
When the colt finally slips free, she is shaking with exhaustion and some version of adrenaline. With sides still heaving as she struggles to catch her breath, she shifts herself to look at her – their – first child. Even laying there damp and shivering, he is stunning, and she can’t find words to even speak. He had the striking gold of his father, and his wings and glowing markings, but the rest of his body was broken up by patches of endless stars. “He’s….beautiful,” Is the only thing she can manage to say, unable to tear her gaze away from the newborn’s eyes to even look up at Ophanim. There was a shadow lingering over her overwhelming happiness, however, a sudden ache in her chest that spreads in the wake of the surge of love she had felt upon first looking at him; she couldn’t imagine ever leaving him, but her mother had left her all the time. She had never understood it then, and she doesn’t understand it now.
With a gentleness she hadn’t even known she possessed, she cleans him dry. She doesn’t stand quite yet, but instead she curls her head over top of the newborn’s back, and pulls him tightly to her chest as she whispers with her lips buried in the soft curls of his mane, “I won’t leave you. I promise.”
starsin
it’s not like me to be so mean. you’re all I wanted.
( just let me hold you Like a hostage. )
