(no subject)
(Cross-posting here because this turned into over 3,000 words of pure LET ME SALVE MY SOUL WITH SHAMELESS HURT/COMFORT MMMKAY?)
For the kink meme, prompted by blackcigars - prompt: Ned/Cat, a difficult pregnancy and birth puts Catelyn in a depression that Ned works to pull her from.
No porn, non-graphic childbirth. JUST ME TRYING TO FIX MY FEELS.
it's all a game avoiding failure (when true colors will bleed)
Bran is born on a sweet summer morning in a bed of blood.
He had been harder to carry than the rest that came before him. With Robb each new pain and movement had given her pause, made her wonder and worry, but their maester had given her peace and assurances while she waited in Riverrun, waited for her son to be born and her husband to return. Sansa had practiced her courtesies since before she came into the world - she was a gentle babe with soft movements, an easy birth and she rarely cried. Arya had rollicked in the womb like none before her, often keeping Catelyn up at night while Ned fought another war, and she was born fast and hard, the labor intense but brief, so eager to be a part of the world.
Her fourth child seems to weigh heaviest on her, and there are days that she can barely rise from her bed (and days that she in fact does not, when Ned sends her ladies and maids away with orders to leave her to rest and she wakes to find the day nearly gone). It is the first time that she feels while she carries a child that her body is truly not her own - she is at the mercy of the baby’s whims, she does not merely grow and change and adjust, and when she lies with her energy zapped and her spirits low, she reminds herself that it is only temporary, that the child shall be born soon.
Soon does not come quickly this time, she labors throughout a day and night, and by the time the afternoon sun is low in the sky on the second day her body has gone vague and dreamy with exhaustion, working without her knowledge (it has not been her own, this time). Dimly she is aware of Luwin’s encouragements, of the midwife’s grip on her thigh, of Ned’s hand on her brow, and she thinks deliriously that this child shall never come, and that it is an impossible task and she wonders how she did it three times before.
Her maids ply her with drink and broth, and she heaves them up again until her lips are dried and cracked, and as the second night falls she is shivering despite being soaked in fevered sweat. Wildly her thoughts go to her mother, her mother whom she so carefully pushes from her mind when she goes to the birthing bed, her mother with the two girls and the boy and gone with the fourth, and as each hour slips away and still the babe does not appear the panic in her stomach clenches; is that to be her fate, same as her mother, it is almost like a tragic song (or curse).
And it is almost as though she is there, in the room, in the corner, watching with her sad solemn eyes, a spirit waiting to bear her away, and Catelyn opens her mouth to yell and scream in protest but finds herself only able to gasp for air, as though her vocal chords are snapped. The tears come then, unwanted but unabashed, tears of fear and pain and she feels a hand curl around the back of her head and pull her in, her raw cheek scratching against a doublet and she clings to Ned until her fingers turn white, as though that will keep her alive, keep her tethered. And then another pain is crashing through her body, ripping her in two, and she gives a choked whimper, her cries long gone hoarse, and in that moment, does not care if she lives or dies as long as it is over, she just wants it to be over.
When he is finally, finally born as dawn breaks on the third day, when she hears his lusty cry and knows he is alive, her weeping turns to relief even as the room swims before her, as though she is seeing the world from underwater, like when she was a girl and swam in the river and gazed up into the overhanging trees. She tries to lift her arms for her babe, so badly fought for, but they are leaden and useless at her sides, and she tries to focus on the faces around her, on Maester Luwin and her midwife and on Ned but she catches only glimpses - Luwin’s mouth set in a grim line, Ned’s serious eyes on her face, the wailing newborn swaddled in the midwife’s arms, (he is strong she thinks with relief) and there, the blood beneath her, much more than she remembers, staining the sheet under her and her thighs and still coming with each pulsing throb between her legs.
They are speaking to her but their words sound far away and disjointed, and a cup of sweet milk of the poppy is pressed to her lips. She does not resist, could not if she wished it, it is more peaceful to die this way, she decides and she can hear the baby still crying and the sound of him loud and safe is what sends her to sleep.
It is three days before she wakes, three days of nightmares and ghosts behind her eyelids before the world comes back into focus. Three days before she is able to see her son and then two more before she is able to hold him for the first time, a pillow propped under her elbow for support. He is another russet-haired Tully, as sweet and lovely as Robb and Sansa had been, and she kisses his forehead even as her heart gives a pang and she thinks of the dark-haired boy that is Ned’s child but not her own. But he is her boy, another beautiful son with a loud cry and firm grip with tiny fists, and he is all the more precious for how hard won he is.
Her ladies are careful around her, and quiet, as though she is fragile and breakable and she feels hollow at their treatment and chafes at the confinement. She thinks of Princess Elia and her labors, and the whispers that had followed, weak, fragile, unworthy, child. She bristles at the idea and tries to rise, but Maester Luwin orders bed rest for a fortnight and he will not budge and Ned will not relent and her maids follow their orders. And when Luwin comes to see her at the end of the fortnight, there is some trouble hanging in the room with them after he examines her to check her healing, a furrow in his brow, and when he says nothing she asks the question hanging between them.
“Will I be able to have another child?”
The kindly maester purses his lips, frowning, considering, and she waits expectedly - he is an honest man, holding tight to his belief in the importance of truth. “I do not know,” he answers finally, and she flinches at the words despite herself, despite her desire to know. “Perhaps. Perhaps not. There is scarring, my lady - but it is early yet. Your womb may heal. Only time will tell.”
She is young still, and it is a bitter pill to swallow and she finds that she chokes on it when she is finally able to rise from her bed. She attends her duties of running the household still sore but with a desperate sort of determination, to right her world again, a silent declaration I am not weak. She holds little Bran in her arms, her precious boy, and tries to ignore the ache in her heart that he could be the last (already, so soon, and she wonders what they say of her, if they label her with derisive names as well, if they think her a poor choice for a lady). She thinks of the birthing bed, of the blood and the ghosts in the room with her looking to grasp her ankle and pull her down; of how she had wept, and her cheeks flush red in shame (she did not do her duty then, she thinks, she did not bear the burden but had instead cracked, and they spend all their time trying to piece her back together and instead just rip her further apart).
She is steel and stone in the days that bleed into weeks, she refuses rest and care and she does her duty as she has always been taught to do (and now it comes to pass that it may be all she has left to give). She watches Robb in the training yard with guarded eyes and Sansa helps her with the baby, little lady that she is, and Bran laughs for the first time, and Arya races on feet faster every day, and at times she is able to forget everything that is broken and wrong.
The times she is unable to forget, she starts half a dozen letters to her sister, but the words stick in her throat and she taps her quill until the ink freezes. Lysa has had more tragedy and loss than any woman has a right to, and she is sure that her own sorrows will seem small and fall to unsympathetic ears (but how can she explain that at least for Lysa there is still a chance, and it may be that Catelyn has used all of her own opportunities?).
One after another her thoughts go into the fire, and she watches them burn.
It is the nights that press down on her mouth and nose like a suffocating glove, and she paces the room while her husband sleeps unawares, and she tries to catch her breath. The sheets were taken away after the birth, the furs removed and replaced, even the soft feather mattress changed, and her bed is fresh and clean. And yet when she lies there at night she is sure she can still smell the blood thick in the air, can see the shapes that frightened her so in the shadows that the candles cast on the walls, and she cannot sleep. She stretches up to throw open the windows; normally she despises the frigid northern night air, but it helps her to breathe and she rests her hand heavily against the wall.
“Cat.” His voice is thick with sleep and she turns her head to see Ned watching her tiredly, barely illuminated by the lone candle she has left burning. “Come to bed.”
Numbly she turns back to the bed, leaving the window open to air out the room, the musty scent of unpleasant memories, and she crawls in next to him, pulling the fur up to her chin to ward against the cold.
Behind her, Ned shifts, his body curling against hers in a familiar move and touch, his large hand spread wide on her stomach, his face nuzzling against the top of her head. The failure sits all the heavier in her heart then, and it is easy to think somber thoughts in the darkness, to wonder if he will still want to touch her if there will never again be the chance at a child, a boy with his grey eyes like the one another woman gave him and she did not.
“Are you well?” he asks, his voice low and intimate and yet she has to bite her tongue to keep herself from crying out against it, the concern and care, she is no delicate thing that will shatter (perhaps merely splinter). “You’ve been quiet.” His fingers brush against her cheekbone, and she sighs at the touch, and resists the urge to reach up and press his hand there, to use him as a tether as she had when she had worked so hard to birth their son. “And you look tired.”
It would be easy enough, to excuse it on the basis of a new child and a large household to run, but she chews her lip uneasily. It would be better to tell him; Catelyn has never been able to abide secrets and intrigue, and it is because of that the thought of the unknown mother of Ned’s bastard son is all the more painful. It cuts like a glass shard at her now, and she wonders again of the woman’s identity (the beautiful Ashara Dayne is always her foremost thought, the laughing specter she sees most often in her moments of doubt) and how she so easily accomplished what Catelyn fails to provide.
“Maester Luwin says I may be unable to bear another child,” she says quietly, voice heavy with regret and resignation, her eyes downcast, and she whets her lips, the words sour to taste. They are words she did not think to say for years yet, not with her babes born healthy and strong, not with the wars finally fought and over, and she feels old before her time, used and broken and robbed of what should come naturally to a woman and a wife.
His hand tightens on her stomach, pressing her firmly back against his chest, and she feels his breath against her ear as he exhales. “I know,” he answers and she turns in his grip to look at him, eyes surprised. “He told me as well. Is that what has been troubling you?” he asks, his fingers threading through the ends of her hair, hand brushing against her back.
“Yes,” she says, bewildered, and she furrows her brow. “Does it not trouble you?”
He sighs, and his fingers come to rest against the nape of her neck as he presses his lips briefly to her temple. “The gods have blessed us, Cat. Four children, all healthy and good and strong. If we are not meant to have more, I am content with all that we have.”
“I am not,” she blurts out, lifting her head to look at him, and he frowns. “A wife should be able to give her husband children.”
His frown deepens, his fingers gripping at the hair at the base of her neck, his voice severe, brokering no room for argument. “You are not a brood mare, my lady. You have more value to me than that. I had hoped you knew that.”
She lowers her eyes, somewhat abashed, and her voice catches in her throat despite herself when she answers. “I do know. But I cannot help what I wish.” What she wishes, truly, she does not share; to finally be sure that she has plucked the pieces there may be of another woman out of his heart so that it belongs to her alone, to excel in every way possible as the lady of Winterfell.
His eyes soften at the break in her voice, and he pulls her back down against his chest, where she can feel his heart beating steadily against her cheek, and her fingers curl into him the way they did that day; she blinks rapidly to try and keep that thought and the swirling panic it raises at bay. “I was far more troubled to see you in such pain,” he murmurs against the crown of her head, and she thinks she does not imagine the tightening in his fingers that are now at her back. “It was…not as it was before.” His knuckles press against her spine, and she remembers anew that before Bran he had only been present for Sansa’s birth, the easiest of the children she bore, war taking him away while she labored with their first son and second daughter.
“No,” she agrees, and her smile is small and trembling when she glances up at him. “They said childbirth is a woman’s war. It seems that just as in your wars, some battles are bloodier than others.” Thoughts of her mother rise again, always lingering in the corner of her mind, and she wonders where the line is; it seems so simple in the wars the men wage, the differences between life and death, but everything in childbed is blurry and grey, slipping from one world to the next. When had her mother given up, lost the battle, and how closely had Catelyn brushed the same fate, she wonders.
A shadow crosses his eyes at that, and she wonders if his thoughts are similar as he brushes a thumb across her bottom lip. “And if Bran is in fact the last of those battles,” he says, and he tilts her chin up, pressing his lips against her eyelids, catching the dampness there that she struggles so valiantly to keep at bay, “than you have done more than I ever could have asked of you, my love.”
“You do not think less of me?” she asks, her voice barely above a whisper as her thoughts travel back to a regal Dornish princess with her head held high but a streak of poor luck in the birthing bed, and the harsh rebukes she had suffered. Ned kisses her mouth now, tasting of salt and of everything familiar and everything desired, and she opens her mouth against his, suddenly desperate and needy, and he pushes forward in response, hand cradling her jaw.
“No,” he answers firmly when he draws back. “And you have no reason to think less of yourself.” Her lips curl in a small self-mocking smile at that; he knows her too well, after these years, can follow the trail of thought through her eyes. “You are here and well, and so are our children - I have need of nothing more.”
She sighs and puts her head back down, wearily closing her eyes (he is right, she thinks, she is tired, and it has been weeks since she has slept well). “And Luwin did say that he was not certain,” she says, and Ned’s hands are large and warm on her back through her nightclothes, rubbing soothing circles, and she sighs at the feeling. “Perhaps he is wrong.”
“Perhaps,” Ned agrees, fingers pressing into the small of her back, and she lets out a small moan at the sensation. “It does not matter, Cat.”
It does matter, she thinks, but the thought is vague; she should protest but her head swims with exhaustion and his touch is soothing and warm. It matters, but he will love her regardless, respect her anyway - she will still have him, and that matters, too, perhaps most of all.
She sleeps.
For the kink meme, prompted by blackcigars - prompt: Ned/Cat, a difficult pregnancy and birth puts Catelyn in a depression that Ned works to pull her from.
No porn, non-graphic childbirth. JUST ME TRYING TO FIX MY FEELS.
it's all a game avoiding failure (when true colors will bleed)
Bran is born on a sweet summer morning in a bed of blood.
He had been harder to carry than the rest that came before him. With Robb each new pain and movement had given her pause, made her wonder and worry, but their maester had given her peace and assurances while she waited in Riverrun, waited for her son to be born and her husband to return. Sansa had practiced her courtesies since before she came into the world - she was a gentle babe with soft movements, an easy birth and she rarely cried. Arya had rollicked in the womb like none before her, often keeping Catelyn up at night while Ned fought another war, and she was born fast and hard, the labor intense but brief, so eager to be a part of the world.
Her fourth child seems to weigh heaviest on her, and there are days that she can barely rise from her bed (and days that she in fact does not, when Ned sends her ladies and maids away with orders to leave her to rest and she wakes to find the day nearly gone). It is the first time that she feels while she carries a child that her body is truly not her own - she is at the mercy of the baby’s whims, she does not merely grow and change and adjust, and when she lies with her energy zapped and her spirits low, she reminds herself that it is only temporary, that the child shall be born soon.
Soon does not come quickly this time, she labors throughout a day and night, and by the time the afternoon sun is low in the sky on the second day her body has gone vague and dreamy with exhaustion, working without her knowledge (it has not been her own, this time). Dimly she is aware of Luwin’s encouragements, of the midwife’s grip on her thigh, of Ned’s hand on her brow, and she thinks deliriously that this child shall never come, and that it is an impossible task and she wonders how she did it three times before.
Her maids ply her with drink and broth, and she heaves them up again until her lips are dried and cracked, and as the second night falls she is shivering despite being soaked in fevered sweat. Wildly her thoughts go to her mother, her mother whom she so carefully pushes from her mind when she goes to the birthing bed, her mother with the two girls and the boy and gone with the fourth, and as each hour slips away and still the babe does not appear the panic in her stomach clenches; is that to be her fate, same as her mother, it is almost like a tragic song (or curse).
And it is almost as though she is there, in the room, in the corner, watching with her sad solemn eyes, a spirit waiting to bear her away, and Catelyn opens her mouth to yell and scream in protest but finds herself only able to gasp for air, as though her vocal chords are snapped. The tears come then, unwanted but unabashed, tears of fear and pain and she feels a hand curl around the back of her head and pull her in, her raw cheek scratching against a doublet and she clings to Ned until her fingers turn white, as though that will keep her alive, keep her tethered. And then another pain is crashing through her body, ripping her in two, and she gives a choked whimper, her cries long gone hoarse, and in that moment, does not care if she lives or dies as long as it is over, she just wants it to be over.
When he is finally, finally born as dawn breaks on the third day, when she hears his lusty cry and knows he is alive, her weeping turns to relief even as the room swims before her, as though she is seeing the world from underwater, like when she was a girl and swam in the river and gazed up into the overhanging trees. She tries to lift her arms for her babe, so badly fought for, but they are leaden and useless at her sides, and she tries to focus on the faces around her, on Maester Luwin and her midwife and on Ned but she catches only glimpses - Luwin’s mouth set in a grim line, Ned’s serious eyes on her face, the wailing newborn swaddled in the midwife’s arms, (he is strong she thinks with relief) and there, the blood beneath her, much more than she remembers, staining the sheet under her and her thighs and still coming with each pulsing throb between her legs.
They are speaking to her but their words sound far away and disjointed, and a cup of sweet milk of the poppy is pressed to her lips. She does not resist, could not if she wished it, it is more peaceful to die this way, she decides and she can hear the baby still crying and the sound of him loud and safe is what sends her to sleep.
It is three days before she wakes, three days of nightmares and ghosts behind her eyelids before the world comes back into focus. Three days before she is able to see her son and then two more before she is able to hold him for the first time, a pillow propped under her elbow for support. He is another russet-haired Tully, as sweet and lovely as Robb and Sansa had been, and she kisses his forehead even as her heart gives a pang and she thinks of the dark-haired boy that is Ned’s child but not her own. But he is her boy, another beautiful son with a loud cry and firm grip with tiny fists, and he is all the more precious for how hard won he is.
Her ladies are careful around her, and quiet, as though she is fragile and breakable and she feels hollow at their treatment and chafes at the confinement. She thinks of Princess Elia and her labors, and the whispers that had followed, weak, fragile, unworthy, child. She bristles at the idea and tries to rise, but Maester Luwin orders bed rest for a fortnight and he will not budge and Ned will not relent and her maids follow their orders. And when Luwin comes to see her at the end of the fortnight, there is some trouble hanging in the room with them after he examines her to check her healing, a furrow in his brow, and when he says nothing she asks the question hanging between them.
“Will I be able to have another child?”
The kindly maester purses his lips, frowning, considering, and she waits expectedly - he is an honest man, holding tight to his belief in the importance of truth. “I do not know,” he answers finally, and she flinches at the words despite herself, despite her desire to know. “Perhaps. Perhaps not. There is scarring, my lady - but it is early yet. Your womb may heal. Only time will tell.”
She is young still, and it is a bitter pill to swallow and she finds that she chokes on it when she is finally able to rise from her bed. She attends her duties of running the household still sore but with a desperate sort of determination, to right her world again, a silent declaration I am not weak. She holds little Bran in her arms, her precious boy, and tries to ignore the ache in her heart that he could be the last (already, so soon, and she wonders what they say of her, if they label her with derisive names as well, if they think her a poor choice for a lady). She thinks of the birthing bed, of the blood and the ghosts in the room with her looking to grasp her ankle and pull her down; of how she had wept, and her cheeks flush red in shame (she did not do her duty then, she thinks, she did not bear the burden but had instead cracked, and they spend all their time trying to piece her back together and instead just rip her further apart).
She is steel and stone in the days that bleed into weeks, she refuses rest and care and she does her duty as she has always been taught to do (and now it comes to pass that it may be all she has left to give). She watches Robb in the training yard with guarded eyes and Sansa helps her with the baby, little lady that she is, and Bran laughs for the first time, and Arya races on feet faster every day, and at times she is able to forget everything that is broken and wrong.
The times she is unable to forget, she starts half a dozen letters to her sister, but the words stick in her throat and she taps her quill until the ink freezes. Lysa has had more tragedy and loss than any woman has a right to, and she is sure that her own sorrows will seem small and fall to unsympathetic ears (but how can she explain that at least for Lysa there is still a chance, and it may be that Catelyn has used all of her own opportunities?).
One after another her thoughts go into the fire, and she watches them burn.
It is the nights that press down on her mouth and nose like a suffocating glove, and she paces the room while her husband sleeps unawares, and she tries to catch her breath. The sheets were taken away after the birth, the furs removed and replaced, even the soft feather mattress changed, and her bed is fresh and clean. And yet when she lies there at night she is sure she can still smell the blood thick in the air, can see the shapes that frightened her so in the shadows that the candles cast on the walls, and she cannot sleep. She stretches up to throw open the windows; normally she despises the frigid northern night air, but it helps her to breathe and she rests her hand heavily against the wall.
“Cat.” His voice is thick with sleep and she turns her head to see Ned watching her tiredly, barely illuminated by the lone candle she has left burning. “Come to bed.”
Numbly she turns back to the bed, leaving the window open to air out the room, the musty scent of unpleasant memories, and she crawls in next to him, pulling the fur up to her chin to ward against the cold.
Behind her, Ned shifts, his body curling against hers in a familiar move and touch, his large hand spread wide on her stomach, his face nuzzling against the top of her head. The failure sits all the heavier in her heart then, and it is easy to think somber thoughts in the darkness, to wonder if he will still want to touch her if there will never again be the chance at a child, a boy with his grey eyes like the one another woman gave him and she did not.
“Are you well?” he asks, his voice low and intimate and yet she has to bite her tongue to keep herself from crying out against it, the concern and care, she is no delicate thing that will shatter (perhaps merely splinter). “You’ve been quiet.” His fingers brush against her cheekbone, and she sighs at the touch, and resists the urge to reach up and press his hand there, to use him as a tether as she had when she had worked so hard to birth their son. “And you look tired.”
It would be easy enough, to excuse it on the basis of a new child and a large household to run, but she chews her lip uneasily. It would be better to tell him; Catelyn has never been able to abide secrets and intrigue, and it is because of that the thought of the unknown mother of Ned’s bastard son is all the more painful. It cuts like a glass shard at her now, and she wonders again of the woman’s identity (the beautiful Ashara Dayne is always her foremost thought, the laughing specter she sees most often in her moments of doubt) and how she so easily accomplished what Catelyn fails to provide.
“Maester Luwin says I may be unable to bear another child,” she says quietly, voice heavy with regret and resignation, her eyes downcast, and she whets her lips, the words sour to taste. They are words she did not think to say for years yet, not with her babes born healthy and strong, not with the wars finally fought and over, and she feels old before her time, used and broken and robbed of what should come naturally to a woman and a wife.
His hand tightens on her stomach, pressing her firmly back against his chest, and she feels his breath against her ear as he exhales. “I know,” he answers and she turns in his grip to look at him, eyes surprised. “He told me as well. Is that what has been troubling you?” he asks, his fingers threading through the ends of her hair, hand brushing against her back.
“Yes,” she says, bewildered, and she furrows her brow. “Does it not trouble you?”
He sighs, and his fingers come to rest against the nape of her neck as he presses his lips briefly to her temple. “The gods have blessed us, Cat. Four children, all healthy and good and strong. If we are not meant to have more, I am content with all that we have.”
“I am not,” she blurts out, lifting her head to look at him, and he frowns. “A wife should be able to give her husband children.”
His frown deepens, his fingers gripping at the hair at the base of her neck, his voice severe, brokering no room for argument. “You are not a brood mare, my lady. You have more value to me than that. I had hoped you knew that.”
She lowers her eyes, somewhat abashed, and her voice catches in her throat despite herself when she answers. “I do know. But I cannot help what I wish.” What she wishes, truly, she does not share; to finally be sure that she has plucked the pieces there may be of another woman out of his heart so that it belongs to her alone, to excel in every way possible as the lady of Winterfell.
His eyes soften at the break in her voice, and he pulls her back down against his chest, where she can feel his heart beating steadily against her cheek, and her fingers curl into him the way they did that day; she blinks rapidly to try and keep that thought and the swirling panic it raises at bay. “I was far more troubled to see you in such pain,” he murmurs against the crown of her head, and she thinks she does not imagine the tightening in his fingers that are now at her back. “It was…not as it was before.” His knuckles press against her spine, and she remembers anew that before Bran he had only been present for Sansa’s birth, the easiest of the children she bore, war taking him away while she labored with their first son and second daughter.
“No,” she agrees, and her smile is small and trembling when she glances up at him. “They said childbirth is a woman’s war. It seems that just as in your wars, some battles are bloodier than others.” Thoughts of her mother rise again, always lingering in the corner of her mind, and she wonders where the line is; it seems so simple in the wars the men wage, the differences between life and death, but everything in childbed is blurry and grey, slipping from one world to the next. When had her mother given up, lost the battle, and how closely had Catelyn brushed the same fate, she wonders.
A shadow crosses his eyes at that, and she wonders if his thoughts are similar as he brushes a thumb across her bottom lip. “And if Bran is in fact the last of those battles,” he says, and he tilts her chin up, pressing his lips against her eyelids, catching the dampness there that she struggles so valiantly to keep at bay, “than you have done more than I ever could have asked of you, my love.”
“You do not think less of me?” she asks, her voice barely above a whisper as her thoughts travel back to a regal Dornish princess with her head held high but a streak of poor luck in the birthing bed, and the harsh rebukes she had suffered. Ned kisses her mouth now, tasting of salt and of everything familiar and everything desired, and she opens her mouth against his, suddenly desperate and needy, and he pushes forward in response, hand cradling her jaw.
“No,” he answers firmly when he draws back. “And you have no reason to think less of yourself.” Her lips curl in a small self-mocking smile at that; he knows her too well, after these years, can follow the trail of thought through her eyes. “You are here and well, and so are our children - I have need of nothing more.”
She sighs and puts her head back down, wearily closing her eyes (he is right, she thinks, she is tired, and it has been weeks since she has slept well). “And Luwin did say that he was not certain,” she says, and Ned’s hands are large and warm on her back through her nightclothes, rubbing soothing circles, and she sighs at the feeling. “Perhaps he is wrong.”
“Perhaps,” Ned agrees, fingers pressing into the small of her back, and she lets out a small moan at the sensation. “It does not matter, Cat.”
It does matter, she thinks, but the thought is vague; she should protest but her head swims with exhaustion and his touch is soothing and warm. It matters, but he will love her regardless, respect her anyway - she will still have him, and that matters, too, perhaps most of all.
She sleeps.