From the Stars, to the Stars

From the Stars, to the Stars: Chapter Twenty-six

The blood, hot from her body, melts the snow beneath her huge, very pregnant belly. The impact from being thrown from the car—no seatbelts in Model-T's—has started her labor prematurely, and her baby—no, wait, babies, twins—are coming, like it or not.

The father-to-be splays his hands over her abdomen, a strong circle of light around each as he tries to ease her pain . . . or maybe to slow the bleeding.

Because there is too much blood, much more than there ought to be.

"You must fetch my sister, Vincent. You must fetch her, now," the woman pants between huffs of breath. Her stomach hardens, and more blood spurts into the deepening groove in the snow.

The man shakes his head, refusing, but her contraction peaks, and she can't see him with her eyes shut against the pressure. He leans closer to her belly, pleading for the little beings inside to hold on for a little longer.

His long, white hair brushes the snow. It would blend in perfectly with it if the icy ground hadn't already been stained with red.

She wailed.

*****

She wailed.

She wasn't who she'd been, completely different, but she felt the same to me, like I'd gone from one room to another in the same house.

In fact, I'd gone all the way to the Isle of Skye, to Melusine's and Victor's home by the bluffs, and Melusine lay in a bed, sweating and grunting over her own huge stomach.

Such almost parallels.

Two women in labor, two women with strands of their hair—one black like a crow, the other as bright as a cardinal—plastered to their damp faces, baring down against the tiny bodies within their own, trying to bring those bodies into a new world.

Two husbands trying to calm wives, trying to ease torments and give assurances, but failing, because each sister, while enduring her own labor, feels the labor of the other. One feels life ebbing from her sister, the other feels new life being given.

The woman in the bed grabs her husband's shirt by the collar and drags him down until his nose touches hers. She hisses for him to go, to go to her sister who is dying.

"Stream now, Victor!" she demands of him, but even as a tear slips down his cheek he tells her no, he won't leave her, not even for that, not until he knows she and the babies are safe.

Because, of course, he too feels it all, feels the horror and panic his brother feels in those exact same moments, the stab of misery as the first child slides from his sister's-in-law womb, blue and still, and no longer within reach, just as his wife feels her sister cry out in grief.

Twins have the way of that, and here in this case, twins have married twins.

Both angered and determined beyond sensibility, the woman on the bed gives her hardest push, and the top of one messy golden head makes an appearance, followed by the rest of her firstborn son. Another few focused pushes and a daughter joins him in the bassinet, where the two mewl pitifully as their father inspects them and finds them whole.

His wife screeches at him again. Her sister's second baby is giving her an even harder time. He's breech, and isn't descending as he ought.

The wife hobbles out of the bed to the bassinet, and shoves her husband in the chest, demanding again he go help their family. She points at the ground. "Look, no more bleeding. I'm already healing. I need you more with her than here."

The man looks doubtful, but she's already over the task of bathing and swaddling their newborn children, and has dismissed him completely, knowing he will give in this time.

And he does. His body begins to emit light, flaring brighter by the nanosecond, then he's gone.

He finds his brother and his wife's sister in the snow, laboring over the baby still inside. Even though his sister-in-law has trouble pulling air into her lungs, and her muscles tense again and again, she holds tightly to her chest a heart-breakingly small form bundled in his brother's jacket. He looks away from it as another swell of shared grief rolls over him.

"Melusine?" the woman asks?

"She came through well," he says, but doesn't mention the two healthy babies who did, too. He can't, not after seeing the tiny creature resting—peacefully, God have mercy—above his vantage point by her up-drawn knees.

"What can we do, Victor? The blond brother asks, though it's really more of a statement, because he already knows the truth. His wife is dying; she's too week from the blood loss to Stream, not to mention the consequences the move might have on the unborn baby mid-birth.

"Something . . . I don't know, but we'll do something," Victor mutters to Vincent.

To his sister-in-law he says, "Naida, I need you to try your best not to push so I can turn this little one around. Your body will try to work against you, but you must fight it for a while."

She nods, the slight bob of her chin more a drop of her head than a proper gesture. She's already fought with her body to bring a child out of it, and not she doesn't have the energy to both talk and keep this second child within herself.

Instead of pushing, she sucks in and feels the heat of more blood gushing up the back of her thigh. She forgets this quickly, because another contraction peaks almost immediately, and because what Victor is doing to save her child has introduced her to a whole slew of different agonies.

Yet, it's worth it when she hears the thin cry minutes later, and Victor has directed her to push once again.

"He's perfect," Victor crows. "Perhaps smaller than ours . . ." and here he stops, because he doesn't want to remind them his two children live while only one of theirs will grow up.

Weary and whispering, Naida asks to be the first to hold her preemie. Victor slips this second bundle to her, beside the first. The son, his white-blond hair (like his father's) stuck to his head, reaches automatically for the other baby, the missing little soul. Only then does he truly begin to cry, disconnected from his womb-mate.

Your sister, Melora, Sebastien," Naida tells her boy, having just enough breath in her to give her children names.

Then she closes hereyes, the world dims, and all I hear is sobbing, until even that fades away.