The Will and The Word
Warnings: Mpreg and terrible formatting - LJ keeps eating my paragraph breaks
Assumptions can have surprising consequences.
"By the Shards! You can't even bear to touch me anymore! Why won't you just put me out of my misery and say it? Say that you don't want me." I hated how my voice broke as I asked him to refute me. Hiding my insecurities, I picked up another plate to hurl at his head.
As he ducked, my head-in-the-clouds lover boggled at me. "Don't want you?" he parroted.
"You don't touch me at night, sure you sleep next to me but you just -- just inspect my belly!" I hurled a bowl at his head. "I'm getting fatter but I exercise and I'm not eating more, it's not my fault!" Another cup joined its shattered comrades on the floor.
"You're not fat --" he started.
I interrupted him with yet another plate; this one at least grazed his cheek. "I know you think I'm fat! You're cooking me all those dinners and breakfasts that make me throw up every morning and you keep making me eat healthy vegetables and I can't remember the last time I had food from that diner down the street that we used to go to every week. When was the last time we went out on a date? You keep shunting me off back to your lair in the middle of the woods and not letting me out!" I knew I was hysterical, but I couldn't stop throwing more flatware.
"Hummingbird," he tried to soothe me with his favorite sweet-name, calling me a hummingbird -- the swift bird who flew in these woods and eluded larger prey through tricks and feasted on nectar from flowers. "I'm making you healthy food for the baby. You're pregnant, Hummingbird, with our baby. That's why you throw up in the mornings. You're not getting fat, that's our baby growing inside you."
It was my turn to boggle. My inexplicable rage extinguished like a pinched candle, leaving a few wisps of smoke to keep my blood hot. I dropped the cup I had snatched up in my earlier rage. It fell with a thump back on its shelf.
"He-who-flies-in-the-light," I addressed him with his proper mage title, "you are a fantastically powerful mage, but I am still a man and so are you. I can't be pregnant because I have no womb, and you can't get me pregnant because again, I have no womb," I explained to him.
"Of course we can. It was our Will. I wanted a family and so did you. And you strengthened your Will with the Word every time you said 'I want to make a new family with you', and I Willed we would have children. I willed it every time we lay together."
I prodded my distended belly skeptically. It was ludicrous that I could be pregnant, but my lover was a powerful mage. He barely needed to exert his Will for it to alter this world, unlike most mages who used focusing rituals to augment their Will. Other mages used complex chants which were Words given strength by the generations of mages who had used the same phrases to evoke specific changes; he used plain speech to describe the change he wanted to happen. I had seen evoke more miraculous feats than a simple miracle that women perform all the time, everywhere -- that of bringing new life into this world.
I had watched my sister the first time she grew heavy with child. The uncontrollable mood swings, her cravings for certain foods, her daily retching - these resembled my own recent experiences. And her husband had tended her much like my mage was -- constantly petting her belly, cooking her special foods, sheltering her from others -- even over her protests.
While I had been reflecting, my lover had filled a basin with water (and restored the shattered earthenware with his Will).
"Come look at our child," he said, as he gently steered me to the table.
In the still water within the basin, he had created a looking glass. I stared horrified at the creature reflected. It had a large black eye in it's head which was half as large as the rest of it's body, and it had a strange long lizard-like tail.
"Dearest, are you sure that's our child?"
"Yes, Hummingbird. See there's his hands -- he's waving, and there's his head - it's big, but he'll grow into it and you can see his little heart fluttering so fast ... "
"We're going to have a baby," I interrupted him breathlessly, glancing between the looking glass and my belly in wonder. "A baby with a tail."
"Yes, we are. No, no that's not a tail, Hummingbird, that's his tether so that you can feed him until he's born," he brought his hand to touch my belly like he had been for the last few weeks. He hadn't been poking my chubbiness, he'd been feeling for our child.
I flung my arms around his neck and cried tears of joy. I'd always wanted a family and children of my own, but after I'd fallen in love with a man, I had put aside those dreams.
That night he took me to bed and worshiped my belly with our growing child inside, pressing tender kisses all over and bringing me pleasure. He stretched out behind me, wrapping his arms around my swollen belly and resting his hands protectively on my belly. He nuzzled my ear and whispered promises of a large family with children's laughter filling the grove next to his cottage (his lair was actually supraterranean).
Sometimes I thought that my lover lived in a different world from most, but I knew I lived there with him.