Fic: Two Hands and They are Vanishing [Merlin]
Title: Two Hands and They are Vanishing
Fandom: Merlin
Pairing/Rating: Uther/Igraine; hard R
Word Count: 3,690 (appr.)
Date Completed: 9 November 2009
Disclaimer: These people? Aren't mine.
Author's Notes: Written for i_claudia, who told me to GO GO GO on writing an Igraine!POV/character study, and who later kindly agreed to beta it for me. This is much longer than that was supposed to be, and with a lot more experimentation with chronology than it probably really needs. Whatever. I actually like this one; let's see how you do with it.
Title taken from this poem, which I have spammed you all with before, but which is so mind-blowingly beautiful I can't not link it again.
Also, a warning now for Uther being the soppiest soppy thing that ever did sop. I've been told it's in-character. We shall see.
[000 days]
Igraine pushes, howls because she can’t not. Every inch of her burns, her swollen abdomen, the core between her spread and shaking legs, her forehead where Uther’s hand rests, soft and damning. Her muscles, the breath in her chest -- her whole body seizes, focuses and surges and repeats. Uther’s fingers, ungloved, stroke through her hair, and Igraine imagines she can feel the calluses catching, whispering in her curls, same as she can hear Nimueh’s voice catching, rasping out. Push, push, choked like it’s killing her to say, like she’s dying of fright.
Igraine wishes she wouldn’t sound so. She pushes again, helpless, her voice the only truly audible thing in the room. Seize and focus and push, push, until her voice breaks. The chamber echoes with it, fractured remnants, and Igraine scarcely dares breathe. Finally, she hears it, the one clear cry she was promised, and she knows. She hears him, her son, thinks of him only as he is now (alive, impossibly, blessedly alive). She smiles; she sighs; she sleeps.
[269 days]
Were she limited to only one word to describe her dreams that night, Igraine would choose “possible.”
She is flat-stomached in all of them, only because she hasn’t let herself imagine her abdomen in the burgeoned swell of pregnancy for so long that she really can’t now. It doesn’t matter, though. All of her dreams are of her child, grown or growing but in any case alive, there to hold and touch for the first time beyond the barrier of her own skin and womb.
Nothing is specific, that first night. She sees a boy sparring, dark hair to match his father’s and curious expression to match her own. And there is a girl, small and lovely and highstrung, and even though she knows Uther wishes for a son, Igraine falls in love with the thought of braiding ribbons through her blonde ringlets. She pictures a boy, golden-haired and blue-eyed: astride a pony and riding the trails around the city with her and Uther; or reading with them by the fire; or feasting with them at Yuletide, his cheeks round and flushed from smiling, from too many indulgent sips of his father’s ale. Igraine cannot say which she loves more, only that she loves them all, deeply, instantly, enough that she knows her heart will break for all the permutations she can imagine but never see in this one child she and Uther will receive. Too risky to plan for more, too risky for even this one, but oh, how she wants any one of these children, more than anything.
More than all the possibilities she can dream up, Igraine wants something real.
[030 days]
These days, it is difficult for Igraine to move much. Her belly is large and heavy, obscene. She feels the weight of it all over, a constant ache that grows with each day, and it drains her dry. She does little else but sit now. Once a week, she takes a servant or two to Uther’s library and selects a few manuscripts to read. She learns things, histories of wars and castle walls and tax collections, things no woman should ever know. She reads them aloud, lets the forbidden weight of them sink in and imagines that she can feel them shivering through her ears and into the child inside her. She can feel him kick sometimes, and she decides that he must not like Mercia very much, or the thought of people starving, or maybe that’s just his way of saying she should call for lunch to be brought in now.
She rubs her hand along her stomach absently, still reading. He kicks against it, a little shockwave that tickles her palm and makes her laugh. She thinks they are more connected now than they shall ever be.
[168 days]
The possibilities are shrinking, narrowing their focus and selecting for her. Igraine doesn’t dream of little girls anymore. It has been so long since she combed her fingers through dream-silky curls, long enough that she can’t remember the last time she saw herself matching her gowns with her daughter’s, the last time she watched tiny, satin-slipper-clad feet dance across the flagstones of the castle courtyard. She misses it, but she has always known she would.
For weeks now, she has seen only young boys, which she knows will please Uther. They change, though, a thousand forms, different every night: dark-haired and blue-eyed, bow-lipped and dirty blond, fine-boned and pale. She still loves them all, same as before, but it is frustrating and immensely heartbreaking to look at them and know, even as she falls instantly, hopelessly in love with each one, that none of them are him. She almost dreads the dreams now, the possibilities she can’t help but cherish, that shatter her with mourning for every one she loses.
One night, after she has steeled herself for that loss and reluctantly fallen asleep, she dreams of a boy on a hill. He is small, but he stands out sharp against its gentle swell, silhouette clear against the sky from where she stands at the base. She runs to him, gathers up her skirts and still almost trips over her hem, her own feet, and she can see him moving, too. They meet somewhere in the middle, and when she picks him up and hugs him close, he laughs where her hair tickles his nose. His blond hair shines in the afternoon light, his blue eyes crinkle with his smile, and his scent is that of sun-drenched rocks, countless days of perfect, untold adventures.
She smiles and holds him tighter, thinks of all the ways he and his adventures are undoubtedly hers -- her son, Arthur.
[061 days]
Uther is fascinated with Igraine in pregnancy. His love for her -- the sight of her now, changing daily; the way her breasts sit heavy and full in his palms -- is writ plainly on his face every time he so much as looks at her. It always has been that way with him, even from the very first time he saw her, but Igraine thinks that somehow, it is even more prominent now.
He is happy these days, really and genuinely. Igraine has seen him happy before, of course; the entirety of the first six months after they married, before the problems of conception flared up, he spent more time laughing and touching her softly, reverently, than she had ever thought him capable of. This is different, though. She does not think he has stopped smiling since her abdomen first started to round out, that moment when it all became real, irrefutable evidence that they had found a way to make this happen. He is almost carefree now, triumph in his step and excitement in his voice, his entire body visibly elated when they talk of their future, their child.
Late at night, when they are curled together in bed (or as close to curled as they can get with Igraine’s stomach so distended), Igraine tells him about her dreams. She tells him all she can of their son, Arthur: how he will train diligently, how he will grow to have her looks and Uther’s devotion, how his laugh will sound. She tells him every little thing she has loved about their boy from the first moment she dreamed of holding him and knew. Uther’s hand rests lightly on her stomach, stroking it occasionally, and she can feel the stretch of his smile where he kisses her neck as she talks, the way his breath whuffs out and tickles her ear when he chuckles and asks, “And then?”
Igraine thinks that in those moments, she loves him too much for anyone’s good, because those smiles, those minutes when she can see how perfectly, wonderfully happy he is -- those are when she decides to hide away her stories of Nimueh’s increasingly-worried looks, of the way she wakes each morning more tired than the last, of how she swears that she can sometimes feel her energy draining into Arthur inside her. She cannot bear to lose either of them, the way they are now and the way she thinks they will be, and she knows that yes, she loves them both more than she ever should.
[092 days]
Her dreams have all been about Arthur for a little over two months now. She has seen him running through the snow, cloak streaming red behind him like a trail of blood; and she has seen him rolling down a hill in the summer, sun in his hair and his laughter echoing through the grass; and she has held him while he slept, nestled against her and peaceful as she rubbed small and soothing circles between his shoulderblades. She has watched him grow, and she feels like she knows him so well, enough that she wonders whether anything about him will surprise her when he is finally real.
She finds one night that she needn’t have worried.
Arthur is again on a hill, the same one as when she first saw him and claimed him as her own. Last time, he was small, scarcely more than five and childishly open in his joy; this time, he is not-quite grown, probably about sixteen. His frame is something tall and broad, Uther’s to the core, and his muscles look awkwardly defined. They are that strange mix of old and new, she realizes, built up and familiar from years of hard training and combat but still trying to find their new places on his growing body. He is not quite gangly, but he is not quite graceful, either. It is, Igraine thinks, the first time he has looked anything less than effortlessly perfect.
She approaches him, runs up the hill like she always does when they meet here, only this time, Arthur doesn’t run down to meet her. When she reaches the top, she is breathless, and her hem and skirts are smeared green from the grass. Arthur is stoic, his face the picture of surveying detachment, and Igraine feels the pit of her stomach harden into a knot. She smiles hesitantly and moves to touch his face, but he flinches back and brings up a hand to grip her wrist before she can reach him.
“Arthur?” she says questioningly, whispers like it’s painful (it is) to ask about him when she already knows him so well. His gaze remains impassive, if slightly confused, and his grip tightens on her wrist until her hand tingles. Or maybe that’s just her fingertips itching to trace along his cheekbones, the bridge of his nose, the planes of his face and through his hair enough to make him remember.
“Who are you?” he asks, and even though she had known something like it was coming, the reason why this dream is so absolutely wrong, Igraine feels something in her fracture apart.
[087 days]
Igraine lasts five days before she seeks out Nimueh.
Uther leaves Camelot for a few days to go hunting. Igraine knows he is reluctant to go; she can see it in the way his eyes linger on her figure, taste it in the almost-longing kisses he presses to her mouth, feel it in the gentle tangle of his fingers through her hair. He is trying to anchor himself to her, afraid of losing her, even after they’ve been married for almost three years. Igraine loves this about him, the fact that he is still so reverent of her, that he acts like it is a miracle that she is even there, let alone his to touch and kiss and hold. But she can sense his restlessness building, even as he tries to ignore it, and she sends him off to hunt. She figures they both need a couple days of freedom.
The day after he leaves, Igraine finds Nimueh. She was supposed to anyway. Nimueh has insisted on checking regularly on the health of the child and Igraine herself, scheduled reassurances that everything is going as it should. As expected, Nimueh asks her the questions that are, by now, routine: Do you fall ill in the mornings? How lively do you feel? Are you ever in serious, mind-bending pain? Have you been bleeding? Today, though, Igraine arrives with a question of her own.
She has kept Nimueh informed about the dreams, same as she has Uther, from the moment they settled on one child. She tells them what he does, what he is like, how blessed she feels to know him so intimately before his birth. Uther always smiles, broad and happy and wondrous; Nimueh looks impassive, offering only a small, “Me, too,” before helping Igraine back up to her study or out to the gardens or wherever she may wish to go. Igraine has never understood why Nimueh would give such a reaction to her dreams, gifts that they are. But today, her question and the dream it connects to rest heavy in her gut, solid and poisonous like a ball of lead, and she can guess why Nimueh dreads hearing about them.
Nimueh’s face, when Igraine tells her about Arthur unknowing on the hill, is almost as impassive as always. Almost, but not quite, and Igraine catches her biting her lip as she turns away to stare out the window over the castle courtyard. Igraine stands and walks over to her, silent. The courtyard is filled with people, noblemen and commoners, small shapes in cloaks of brown and red and yellow that make Igraine think of autumn, of leaves blowing scattered on the wind. A boy runs ahead of his family, red shirt and gold hair bright in the sun, and Igraine has to breathe deeply before she finds it in her to say, “Tell me everything you know.”
Nimueh’s eyes are wide, broken-open and blue, when she wrenches her gaze away from the crowd (that boy). “I’m sorry,” she whispers, choked in her throat. “You don’t want to know.”
Igraine is both angered and soothed. She inhales again, slowly, before saying, “I do. Tell me.”
The words taste bitter in the back of her throat, salty and desperate and brokering no argument. Nimueh looks at her, helpless, and begins to tell.
[049 days]
Igraine doesn’t dream of Arthur young anymore. She never sees him a day before sixteen, when he is awkward and in-between and a little more visibly like her with each week. Arthur grows up tall and confident and beautiful, exquisitely fair, and Igraine’s heart aches for all the ways he is so clearly hers when she knows that this is all she will get. She watches him lead armies into battle, win tournament after tournament, grow so deeply in love with his kingdom that she fears for what should happen to him should his people ever rebel. Not that they would; it takes some getting there, but Arthur matures into a kind, gracious soon-to-be king, just and beloved, the sort of man she wishes she could have the chance to raise.
She watches him almost die more times than she thinks she can stand, and she watches him waste so much of his potential and good judgment that she wants to cry for all the opportunities he’s blindly thrown aside. She watches him scrabble for Uther’s commendation, support he should never have needed to question, and she wants nothing more in those moments than to pull him close and hug him, dream or no, to whisper in his ear that she is so very, very proud of him. And she is. She always will be, so much so that it pains her with the force of it, even if he will never know. Every day, she breathes and thinks of how he is growing, how he will grow into something great, and every night, she watches that happen, and she thinks that she could burst from how proud of him she is.
She loves him, her Arthur, more than she can say. Some nights, she tries to. Some nights, she dreams of him dreaming, asleep in his bed and finally looking peaceful, innocent like she remembers him being all those months ago, when he was young and waiting for her on the hillside. These nights, she kneels next to him, strokes her intangible dream-fingers through his hair and tells him all the ways she loves him, all the ways he makes her so very proud, all the ways she wishes he could know this. He shifts in his sleep as if leaning towards her, and even though she knows this is only her dream, she imagines that somewhere, he can hear her; somewhere, he knows, and he is smiling.
[153 days]
The first time she needs to have one of her gowns let out, Igraine spends the entire rest of the week smiling. When he sees them, the extra inches of fabric and the ever-so-slight bump in her abdomen, Uther lifts her by her hips and spins her around. They laugh, freely and irrationally joyous over something Igraine remembers her mother calling a burden. Igraine can’t imagine ever thinking of Arthur (and still such a marvel to know him, to know his name, Arthur Arthur Arthur in her head, the rhythm of her pulse and life and breath) like that. She knows that she will grow with pregnancy, enough that her back and legs and every muscle will ache from the weight of it, and she knows that when that comes, yes, she may wish for this smaller bulge. But that seems like such a long way off from now, when she is just beginning to show, when all they have to do is look and wonder and dream of a future that suddenly seems very, very real.
For now, the stretch of fabric over the swell she never thought she’d have feels like a miracle. She imagines it growing every day, her child feeling the soft tempo of the way she strokes her stomach absently and reaching for it, for her. For now, Uther cannot stop touching it, and she cannot, both of them needing the constant reminder that this is actually happening. For now, Uther lifts her and spins her, and even when he sets her down and draws her flush against him, kisses her like he can think of nothing else he’d ever need to do, Igraine still feels untouchable, like this is all she would need to fly.
[005 days]
There is only one time when Igraine looks at Uther, so happy and unknowing as he sleeps next to her, and wonders if she is making the right choice.
She falls asleep again and dreams -- expected. This time, she sees further into Arthur’s future than she ever has before. She sees him on a throne more powerful than even Uther’s, a throne over all Albion. His voice calls clear and quiet, understatedly commanding, through the castle’s great hall, the very definition of unchallenged, respected authority. He reigns with peace, justice, the kind of king she read about in impossible legends as a young girl. She looks at Arthur, her glorious, glorious son, grown wise in his age, and thinks that he always has been one to defy all sense of what is possible.
When she wakes later, Uther is still asleep next to her. His hand rests with hers on her belly, their fingers interlaced. Igraine reaches out with her other hand and lightly, desperate not to wake him, traces the arch of his brow, the bow of his lips, the faint lines around his mouth from smiling too much. Underneath where their hands -- hers and Uther’s, joined -- lay on her abdomen, Arthur kicks once, sharp and restless, ready even now to emerge. Igraine smiles slightly, knowing, just as she always has, that she could never deny him anything.
[270 days]
Every part of Igraine’s body burns. Her skin is flushed red, her chest feels tight and hot when she pants for breath. Between her spread and shaking legs, at her core, Uther enters her with a desire she can feel, searing up from his fingertips on her hips and his lips on her face to race across her skin like wildfire. The calluses on his fingers drag and catch where he skates his hands up and down her sides, sticking in sweat and whispering slightly over any patch of dry skin they find. One of his hands comes up to cup her left breast, heavy and full in his palm, and she moans because she can’t not.
From some corner of the room, she can hear Nimueh chanting, voice rasping out the strange, guttural syllables of the Old Tongue. All Igraine understands is the same thing her own body tells her, push, push, so she does. Uther groans and stretches to press his mouth to hers, too wet and hot to really be a kiss. His tongue tastes sweet, though, lingering and longing in that peculiar way he always has of kissing her, like he thinks she may disappear if he closes his eyes for too long. One of his hands slips between her legs, rubs just there to send pleasure licking up her spine faster than flames, and Igraine can’t help the way she keens at that.
When she finally comes, it’s with a broken cry that echoes in the room, reverberating with the noises of Uther’s thrusts into her. She looks at him, wild-eyed and dark-haired and beautiful above her, even more beautiful as he breaks apart inside her, all for her to see, and she is almost afraid to breathe. Nimueh stops her chanting, finished with the two of them, and the silence in the chamber is heavy, expectant.
Later, after Nimueh has checked her and confirmed that the magic did hold, Igraine curls up next to Uther, more happy than she has ever been. She can feel his smile stretch wide against her neck even as he sleeps, and when she finally drifts off to join him, it is with a hand on her stomach, the taste of possibility strong in the back of her throat.
She sleeps.
Fandom: Merlin
Pairing/Rating: Uther/Igraine; hard R
Word Count: 3,690 (appr.)
Date Completed: 9 November 2009
Disclaimer: These people? Aren't mine.
Author's Notes: Written for i_claudia, who told me to GO GO GO on writing an Igraine!POV/character study, and who later kindly agreed to beta it for me. This is much longer than that was supposed to be, and with a lot more experimentation with chronology than it probably really needs. Whatever. I actually like this one; let's see how you do with it.
Title taken from this poem, which I have spammed you all with before, but which is so mind-blowingly beautiful I can't not link it again.
Also, a warning now for Uther being the soppiest soppy thing that ever did sop. I've been told it's in-character. We shall see.
[000 days]
Igraine pushes, howls because she can’t not. Every inch of her burns, her swollen abdomen, the core between her spread and shaking legs, her forehead where Uther’s hand rests, soft and damning. Her muscles, the breath in her chest -- her whole body seizes, focuses and surges and repeats. Uther’s fingers, ungloved, stroke through her hair, and Igraine imagines she can feel the calluses catching, whispering in her curls, same as she can hear Nimueh’s voice catching, rasping out. Push, push, choked like it’s killing her to say, like she’s dying of fright.
Igraine wishes she wouldn’t sound so. She pushes again, helpless, her voice the only truly audible thing in the room. Seize and focus and push, push, until her voice breaks. The chamber echoes with it, fractured remnants, and Igraine scarcely dares breathe. Finally, she hears it, the one clear cry she was promised, and she knows. She hears him, her son, thinks of him only as he is now (alive, impossibly, blessedly alive). She smiles; she sighs; she sleeps.
[269 days]
Were she limited to only one word to describe her dreams that night, Igraine would choose “possible.”
She is flat-stomached in all of them, only because she hasn’t let herself imagine her abdomen in the burgeoned swell of pregnancy for so long that she really can’t now. It doesn’t matter, though. All of her dreams are of her child, grown or growing but in any case alive, there to hold and touch for the first time beyond the barrier of her own skin and womb.
Nothing is specific, that first night. She sees a boy sparring, dark hair to match his father’s and curious expression to match her own. And there is a girl, small and lovely and highstrung, and even though she knows Uther wishes for a son, Igraine falls in love with the thought of braiding ribbons through her blonde ringlets. She pictures a boy, golden-haired and blue-eyed: astride a pony and riding the trails around the city with her and Uther; or reading with them by the fire; or feasting with them at Yuletide, his cheeks round and flushed from smiling, from too many indulgent sips of his father’s ale. Igraine cannot say which she loves more, only that she loves them all, deeply, instantly, enough that she knows her heart will break for all the permutations she can imagine but never see in this one child she and Uther will receive. Too risky to plan for more, too risky for even this one, but oh, how she wants any one of these children, more than anything.
More than all the possibilities she can dream up, Igraine wants something real.
[030 days]
These days, it is difficult for Igraine to move much. Her belly is large and heavy, obscene. She feels the weight of it all over, a constant ache that grows with each day, and it drains her dry. She does little else but sit now. Once a week, she takes a servant or two to Uther’s library and selects a few manuscripts to read. She learns things, histories of wars and castle walls and tax collections, things no woman should ever know. She reads them aloud, lets the forbidden weight of them sink in and imagines that she can feel them shivering through her ears and into the child inside her. She can feel him kick sometimes, and she decides that he must not like Mercia very much, or the thought of people starving, or maybe that’s just his way of saying she should call for lunch to be brought in now.
She rubs her hand along her stomach absently, still reading. He kicks against it, a little shockwave that tickles her palm and makes her laugh. She thinks they are more connected now than they shall ever be.
[168 days]
The possibilities are shrinking, narrowing their focus and selecting for her. Igraine doesn’t dream of little girls anymore. It has been so long since she combed her fingers through dream-silky curls, long enough that she can’t remember the last time she saw herself matching her gowns with her daughter’s, the last time she watched tiny, satin-slipper-clad feet dance across the flagstones of the castle courtyard. She misses it, but she has always known she would.
For weeks now, she has seen only young boys, which she knows will please Uther. They change, though, a thousand forms, different every night: dark-haired and blue-eyed, bow-lipped and dirty blond, fine-boned and pale. She still loves them all, same as before, but it is frustrating and immensely heartbreaking to look at them and know, even as she falls instantly, hopelessly in love with each one, that none of them are him. She almost dreads the dreams now, the possibilities she can’t help but cherish, that shatter her with mourning for every one she loses.
One night, after she has steeled herself for that loss and reluctantly fallen asleep, she dreams of a boy on a hill. He is small, but he stands out sharp against its gentle swell, silhouette clear against the sky from where she stands at the base. She runs to him, gathers up her skirts and still almost trips over her hem, her own feet, and she can see him moving, too. They meet somewhere in the middle, and when she picks him up and hugs him close, he laughs where her hair tickles his nose. His blond hair shines in the afternoon light, his blue eyes crinkle with his smile, and his scent is that of sun-drenched rocks, countless days of perfect, untold adventures.
She smiles and holds him tighter, thinks of all the ways he and his adventures are undoubtedly hers -- her son, Arthur.
[061 days]
Uther is fascinated with Igraine in pregnancy. His love for her -- the sight of her now, changing daily; the way her breasts sit heavy and full in his palms -- is writ plainly on his face every time he so much as looks at her. It always has been that way with him, even from the very first time he saw her, but Igraine thinks that somehow, it is even more prominent now.
He is happy these days, really and genuinely. Igraine has seen him happy before, of course; the entirety of the first six months after they married, before the problems of conception flared up, he spent more time laughing and touching her softly, reverently, than she had ever thought him capable of. This is different, though. She does not think he has stopped smiling since her abdomen first started to round out, that moment when it all became real, irrefutable evidence that they had found a way to make this happen. He is almost carefree now, triumph in his step and excitement in his voice, his entire body visibly elated when they talk of their future, their child.
Late at night, when they are curled together in bed (or as close to curled as they can get with Igraine’s stomach so distended), Igraine tells him about her dreams. She tells him all she can of their son, Arthur: how he will train diligently, how he will grow to have her looks and Uther’s devotion, how his laugh will sound. She tells him every little thing she has loved about their boy from the first moment she dreamed of holding him and knew. Uther’s hand rests lightly on her stomach, stroking it occasionally, and she can feel the stretch of his smile where he kisses her neck as she talks, the way his breath whuffs out and tickles her ear when he chuckles and asks, “And then?”
Igraine thinks that in those moments, she loves him too much for anyone’s good, because those smiles, those minutes when she can see how perfectly, wonderfully happy he is -- those are when she decides to hide away her stories of Nimueh’s increasingly-worried looks, of the way she wakes each morning more tired than the last, of how she swears that she can sometimes feel her energy draining into Arthur inside her. She cannot bear to lose either of them, the way they are now and the way she thinks they will be, and she knows that yes, she loves them both more than she ever should.
[092 days]
Her dreams have all been about Arthur for a little over two months now. She has seen him running through the snow, cloak streaming red behind him like a trail of blood; and she has seen him rolling down a hill in the summer, sun in his hair and his laughter echoing through the grass; and she has held him while he slept, nestled against her and peaceful as she rubbed small and soothing circles between his shoulderblades. She has watched him grow, and she feels like she knows him so well, enough that she wonders whether anything about him will surprise her when he is finally real.
She finds one night that she needn’t have worried.
Arthur is again on a hill, the same one as when she first saw him and claimed him as her own. Last time, he was small, scarcely more than five and childishly open in his joy; this time, he is not-quite grown, probably about sixteen. His frame is something tall and broad, Uther’s to the core, and his muscles look awkwardly defined. They are that strange mix of old and new, she realizes, built up and familiar from years of hard training and combat but still trying to find their new places on his growing body. He is not quite gangly, but he is not quite graceful, either. It is, Igraine thinks, the first time he has looked anything less than effortlessly perfect.
She approaches him, runs up the hill like she always does when they meet here, only this time, Arthur doesn’t run down to meet her. When she reaches the top, she is breathless, and her hem and skirts are smeared green from the grass. Arthur is stoic, his face the picture of surveying detachment, and Igraine feels the pit of her stomach harden into a knot. She smiles hesitantly and moves to touch his face, but he flinches back and brings up a hand to grip her wrist before she can reach him.
“Arthur?” she says questioningly, whispers like it’s painful (it is) to ask about him when she already knows him so well. His gaze remains impassive, if slightly confused, and his grip tightens on her wrist until her hand tingles. Or maybe that’s just her fingertips itching to trace along his cheekbones, the bridge of his nose, the planes of his face and through his hair enough to make him remember.
“Who are you?” he asks, and even though she had known something like it was coming, the reason why this dream is so absolutely wrong, Igraine feels something in her fracture apart.
[087 days]
Igraine lasts five days before she seeks out Nimueh.
Uther leaves Camelot for a few days to go hunting. Igraine knows he is reluctant to go; she can see it in the way his eyes linger on her figure, taste it in the almost-longing kisses he presses to her mouth, feel it in the gentle tangle of his fingers through her hair. He is trying to anchor himself to her, afraid of losing her, even after they’ve been married for almost three years. Igraine loves this about him, the fact that he is still so reverent of her, that he acts like it is a miracle that she is even there, let alone his to touch and kiss and hold. But she can sense his restlessness building, even as he tries to ignore it, and she sends him off to hunt. She figures they both need a couple days of freedom.
The day after he leaves, Igraine finds Nimueh. She was supposed to anyway. Nimueh has insisted on checking regularly on the health of the child and Igraine herself, scheduled reassurances that everything is going as it should. As expected, Nimueh asks her the questions that are, by now, routine: Do you fall ill in the mornings? How lively do you feel? Are you ever in serious, mind-bending pain? Have you been bleeding? Today, though, Igraine arrives with a question of her own.
She has kept Nimueh informed about the dreams, same as she has Uther, from the moment they settled on one child. She tells them what he does, what he is like, how blessed she feels to know him so intimately before his birth. Uther always smiles, broad and happy and wondrous; Nimueh looks impassive, offering only a small, “Me, too,” before helping Igraine back up to her study or out to the gardens or wherever she may wish to go. Igraine has never understood why Nimueh would give such a reaction to her dreams, gifts that they are. But today, her question and the dream it connects to rest heavy in her gut, solid and poisonous like a ball of lead, and she can guess why Nimueh dreads hearing about them.
Nimueh’s face, when Igraine tells her about Arthur unknowing on the hill, is almost as impassive as always. Almost, but not quite, and Igraine catches her biting her lip as she turns away to stare out the window over the castle courtyard. Igraine stands and walks over to her, silent. The courtyard is filled with people, noblemen and commoners, small shapes in cloaks of brown and red and yellow that make Igraine think of autumn, of leaves blowing scattered on the wind. A boy runs ahead of his family, red shirt and gold hair bright in the sun, and Igraine has to breathe deeply before she finds it in her to say, “Tell me everything you know.”
Nimueh’s eyes are wide, broken-open and blue, when she wrenches her gaze away from the crowd (that boy). “I’m sorry,” she whispers, choked in her throat. “You don’t want to know.”
Igraine is both angered and soothed. She inhales again, slowly, before saying, “I do. Tell me.”
The words taste bitter in the back of her throat, salty and desperate and brokering no argument. Nimueh looks at her, helpless, and begins to tell.
[049 days]
Igraine doesn’t dream of Arthur young anymore. She never sees him a day before sixteen, when he is awkward and in-between and a little more visibly like her with each week. Arthur grows up tall and confident and beautiful, exquisitely fair, and Igraine’s heart aches for all the ways he is so clearly hers when she knows that this is all she will get. She watches him lead armies into battle, win tournament after tournament, grow so deeply in love with his kingdom that she fears for what should happen to him should his people ever rebel. Not that they would; it takes some getting there, but Arthur matures into a kind, gracious soon-to-be king, just and beloved, the sort of man she wishes she could have the chance to raise.
She watches him almost die more times than she thinks she can stand, and she watches him waste so much of his potential and good judgment that she wants to cry for all the opportunities he’s blindly thrown aside. She watches him scrabble for Uther’s commendation, support he should never have needed to question, and she wants nothing more in those moments than to pull him close and hug him, dream or no, to whisper in his ear that she is so very, very proud of him. And she is. She always will be, so much so that it pains her with the force of it, even if he will never know. Every day, she breathes and thinks of how he is growing, how he will grow into something great, and every night, she watches that happen, and she thinks that she could burst from how proud of him she is.
She loves him, her Arthur, more than she can say. Some nights, she tries to. Some nights, she dreams of him dreaming, asleep in his bed and finally looking peaceful, innocent like she remembers him being all those months ago, when he was young and waiting for her on the hillside. These nights, she kneels next to him, strokes her intangible dream-fingers through his hair and tells him all the ways she loves him, all the ways he makes her so very proud, all the ways she wishes he could know this. He shifts in his sleep as if leaning towards her, and even though she knows this is only her dream, she imagines that somewhere, he can hear her; somewhere, he knows, and he is smiling.
[153 days]
The first time she needs to have one of her gowns let out, Igraine spends the entire rest of the week smiling. When he sees them, the extra inches of fabric and the ever-so-slight bump in her abdomen, Uther lifts her by her hips and spins her around. They laugh, freely and irrationally joyous over something Igraine remembers her mother calling a burden. Igraine can’t imagine ever thinking of Arthur (and still such a marvel to know him, to know his name, Arthur Arthur Arthur in her head, the rhythm of her pulse and life and breath) like that. She knows that she will grow with pregnancy, enough that her back and legs and every muscle will ache from the weight of it, and she knows that when that comes, yes, she may wish for this smaller bulge. But that seems like such a long way off from now, when she is just beginning to show, when all they have to do is look and wonder and dream of a future that suddenly seems very, very real.
For now, the stretch of fabric over the swell she never thought she’d have feels like a miracle. She imagines it growing every day, her child feeling the soft tempo of the way she strokes her stomach absently and reaching for it, for her. For now, Uther cannot stop touching it, and she cannot, both of them needing the constant reminder that this is actually happening. For now, Uther lifts her and spins her, and even when he sets her down and draws her flush against him, kisses her like he can think of nothing else he’d ever need to do, Igraine still feels untouchable, like this is all she would need to fly.
[005 days]
There is only one time when Igraine looks at Uther, so happy and unknowing as he sleeps next to her, and wonders if she is making the right choice.
She falls asleep again and dreams -- expected. This time, she sees further into Arthur’s future than she ever has before. She sees him on a throne more powerful than even Uther’s, a throne over all Albion. His voice calls clear and quiet, understatedly commanding, through the castle’s great hall, the very definition of unchallenged, respected authority. He reigns with peace, justice, the kind of king she read about in impossible legends as a young girl. She looks at Arthur, her glorious, glorious son, grown wise in his age, and thinks that he always has been one to defy all sense of what is possible.
When she wakes later, Uther is still asleep next to her. His hand rests with hers on her belly, their fingers interlaced. Igraine reaches out with her other hand and lightly, desperate not to wake him, traces the arch of his brow, the bow of his lips, the faint lines around his mouth from smiling too much. Underneath where their hands -- hers and Uther’s, joined -- lay on her abdomen, Arthur kicks once, sharp and restless, ready even now to emerge. Igraine smiles slightly, knowing, just as she always has, that she could never deny him anything.
[270 days]
Every part of Igraine’s body burns. Her skin is flushed red, her chest feels tight and hot when she pants for breath. Between her spread and shaking legs, at her core, Uther enters her with a desire she can feel, searing up from his fingertips on her hips and his lips on her face to race across her skin like wildfire. The calluses on his fingers drag and catch where he skates his hands up and down her sides, sticking in sweat and whispering slightly over any patch of dry skin they find. One of his hands comes up to cup her left breast, heavy and full in his palm, and she moans because she can’t not.
From some corner of the room, she can hear Nimueh chanting, voice rasping out the strange, guttural syllables of the Old Tongue. All Igraine understands is the same thing her own body tells her, push, push, so she does. Uther groans and stretches to press his mouth to hers, too wet and hot to really be a kiss. His tongue tastes sweet, though, lingering and longing in that peculiar way he always has of kissing her, like he thinks she may disappear if he closes his eyes for too long. One of his hands slips between her legs, rubs just there to send pleasure licking up her spine faster than flames, and Igraine can’t help the way she keens at that.
When she finally comes, it’s with a broken cry that echoes in the room, reverberating with the noises of Uther’s thrusts into her. She looks at him, wild-eyed and dark-haired and beautiful above her, even more beautiful as he breaks apart inside her, all for her to see, and she is almost afraid to breathe. Nimueh stops her chanting, finished with the two of them, and the silence in the chamber is heavy, expectant.
Later, after Nimueh has checked her and confirmed that the magic did hold, Igraine curls up next to Uther, more happy than she has ever been. She can feel his smile stretch wide against her neck even as he sleeps, and when she finally drifts off to join him, it is with a hand on her stomach, the taste of possibility strong in the back of her throat.
She sleeps.