Kinship Beset (R/NC-17) 7/8
Posted: Wed Jun 02, 2004 9:38 am
AN: I may be posting this prematurely, but this is my favorite chapter, I think. I couldn't help it. 
This one leads up to the end, which is... weird, to say the least. I also wanted to say that there is an epilogue after chapter 8, so we're still not quite finished.
I feel sorry for Milliardo in this chapter... and Heero, of course. I hope you enjoy this one as much as the previous.
Disclaimer: I don't own GW or "Brother and Sister."
As was later told to me, Heero returned that following morning to find who he believed was his wife lying in their bed. He looked at me stoically when he later recalled her expression, with her soft pink lips slightly parted from the teasing of warm breath and the rise and fall of her breasts that lured him to her side. She was unintentionally seductive in the fragile light of daybreak, with her absent, sensuous moans. With the unconscious rubbing of her toes against her shin.
Shudder
Her sighs whispered of an erotic heat as they scalded his flesh, he claimed unabashed, while her groans caressed those lips he meant to devour?the breath he carnally hungered for, to consume in a kiss. Her arm rested just above her head, bedded in her hair as those golden tresses fondled her shoulder, the breeze from the window stroking them and running its transient fingers at her neck. Brushed her body faintly, tickling her skin. She lay in ignorant, licentious slumber, with their infant prince just as restless. Yet on the child?s face were the chapped remnants of earlier irritability, scarring his cheek with chaffing tears.
This king took quiet steps toward my sister, not wanting to disturb her or his newborn son with his presence-- For he was always a more sensual, affectionate man when thought to be alone. Or so Relena has told me on occasion--something I didn't necessarily need to know. He knelt before her sleeping figure, his face hovering just above her own and strands making mock love with hers, and he brought his hand up near her face to merely skim her forehead with a finger?s graze.
"Relena..." he whispered nearly breathless as he beheld her troubled countenance, licking his lips as he murmured her name, to alleviate the raspiness in his voice.
Even today I can still see that confusion in his eyes as he looks at his son; it still mystifies him that Relena willingly offered him her innocence, virginity, and sexual surrender when all he could offer her were bloodied memories and monotone. Restrain her in unbridled intercourse that released his seed of vengeful souls and unshed tears. A spasm in doubt. Yet she bore him a child, loved him so unreservedly that she let him empty his remorse into her body each night their flesh in sweat and promise became one.
Haggard Sigh
He vouchsafed guilt for her soul to bear on his behalf. There was just too much for one spirit to survive alone. And so together? Through touch and caress, groans and sexual grinding in the junction of their muscles, two souls that became inseparable as love was made beyond their miserable pasts? they had created a legitimate miracle: a tiny, baby boy.
It's sickening to have to believe that.
Heero leaned in his face to brush her lips with his own, his tongue running along the edges of her mouth to grant him entrance in their oral mating duel? When the shadow of the witch, disguised as Relena's faithful handmaid, cast him in its breadth. An ominous judgment.
Her voice clashed against his ragged breathing as she seethed: "You mustn't disturb your wife, my Lord, for she is tired from the birth and needs her rest."
"Leave us," he commanded of her gruffly and in lewd tension as he turned his gaze from Relena to the servant; his muscles seized warningly when the shrew made no attempt to vacate the room. She merely stood obstinately as though he had said nothing, eyes narrowing at his defiance.
Taking a step back from the bed, Une grasped the calico of her dress between her fingers as she returned his cold demand with smugness, a sinister confidence in her stance. "She has lost too much blood to be certain of her survival, and your being here only jeopardizes her condition. I would hate to think that you wish to add the blood of your wife to that of the many others that smear your reputation."
His reply was silence, the dreary eyes of an aroused lover that spoke of nothing but desire. His was a suspicious need that betrayed nothing. Only the lifting of his knees from the floor indicated his submission.
If he were pressed, he would leave. It was something he seemed resolved about all along. For he had a greater sense of obligation than to let his family perish in his indulgence, especially a gratification as morbid as sex. He?d rather surrender his wife and child to distance than to their deaths. He would never risk them? Not for himself.
But as he reached the edge of the room, he halted in the doorway, his shoulders rigid and poise deliberate in divulging his battle against the anger that tried to surface, that rage aimed at himself. He could only blame her remark on his own choices and despicable history; he was the one who committed the murders. Who earned the derision for that carnage. No one else. The accountability was on his head, and so he would endure the consequences it wrought.
Yet he allowed a glare against her earlier words?bitterly conceding her the fight... for now. But not without a vow of mutual challenge to follow, it seemed.
Still more convincing than that, it was what happened over the next week that caused both Heero and myself to doubt this queen that the handmaid protected so thoroughly. The girl who slept soundly in the bed that morning, appearing nonchalant about Heero at all as the days slipped by.
For when dusk neared the following day, Heero begrudgingly rose from his stack of decrees, proposals, and pending edicts to take Relena?s hand for bed, as was the usual custom. But as he twined his fingers within her own, leading her to their chambers, since they never slept apart-- She pulled hers free from his ritualistic entrapment to rest upon her thigh, nearly sneering at his touch. Her body trembled as darkness dawned, as the moon emerged from the gleam of the fading sun and immersed the castle in its feeble, supplementary light. She looked at him, her eyes threatened with an urgency to escape from Heero and his penetrating stare, to leave her alone for fear of... something. Desperate for seclusion as she seemed.
And so without a word she turned away from him to follow the corridor to their bedroom, hands coming up to her face in a tentative shield as her steps changed from a hurried walk into reckless haste the further down the hall she ran. She was revealed in the moonlight that flooded through the windows in torrential, omniscient waves, washing away her asylum. Groans wailed from her lips as she slunk through the door, grasping the right side of her face in agony as her nails scraped along the flesh at her own disgust. Nearly wretched, searing her skin with angry red welts. Leaving Heero to wonder.
Her visits to my stable bed ceased after that day, along with any acknowledgment of my presence whatsoever. I approached the castle to question her about her absences the next morning, but when I called up to her from beneath her window?s ledge, she only stared at me. Raised her eyebrows at my garbled grunts, as if she couldn?t understand what I was trying to tell her? Before shutting the window to put an end to my interrogation.
She always had time to listen to me. She was always able to decipher my broken tongue. But that morning she couldn't, and later refused to try.
She didn?t even seem to know who I was.
But the final piece of the puzzle disturbed us most, because when the prince cried out for milk from his mother?s breast, she ignored his sniffles and squeals entirely and pulled the blankets over his head to muffle his annoying wails. She would leave him alone in the room to cry himself to sleep on an empty belly, with hunger pains stirring the child from his rest. Deprived sniffles drifted from the chamber as he was forced to nurse on his own flesh.
"Relena," Heero asked of her that evening, clutching her wrist in his hand and forcing their eyes to meet. His baby was dying, and nature had damned him to helplessness in this practice. Against his responsibility to protect this child, she had to produce the milk their infant needed to survive, for it was a craving only the mother could abate. Father sedate in only watching and waiting.
Curse his sex.
"He needs your milk if you want him to live. Nurse him."
But when she held the baby to her breast and let him wrap his lips around her nipple to suckle, his stomach received nothing but more emptiness, testified by the little boy?s moans and his mouth that sucked the air even when she pulled away. The feeling of her nipple was still reminiscent in his mouth, his starving body not willing to accept that she had left him with nothing. So he was forced to pacify his thirst for milk with the salty, undernourished water form a tear.
Her breasts were dry of any milk for him.
The father?s expectant gaze was at her back as the prince?s cries begged her for something to ease his stomach?s churning, and the young mother therefore knew she had to do something before her husband reprimanded her again and the child?s screaming deafened her from sanity? So she shoved the boy into Heero's arms, marched out of the room as she warned him bluntly, never turning to look her husband in the face. "You can?t expect me to feed the thing if it won?t stop screaming. From the way it carries on, it doesn?t want to have anything to do with me or my milk. So now it gets nothing."
It was a strange reply. Relena didn?t run away from her mistakes or defeats of any kind; I couldn?t think of a single instance in which she had, not even when one of Stepmother?s penalties loomed. Instead my sister embraced them as weaknesses that, once conquered, could pave the way for an opposing strength. According to her, from fear can be born courage, for in being afraid we learn to risk ourselves for the very desire to be fearless. From sorrow love can thrive in its place, for in misery our hearts open to the finest company. Faults are not attributes to be feared, but to be molded into perfections. The girl before us certainly didn?t exemplify that same outlook.
This wasn?t my little sister... but her looks said otherwise.
Then the problem worsened.
As Lucretzia soon revealed to us, her eyes aggrieved and voice halting with what she was to tell, refusing to even step all the way into the room where we stood listening: the third night after the prince's birth, she was sitting near his crib?as was her normal routine since he was born?and watched him in his restless sleep, beset with hunger and abandon. The starlight nestled his gaunt face, only casting deeper shadows where his cheeks were sunken and rubbery bones protruded from his flesh. He looked old and worn, like a skeleton, coughing and sneezing because of the dust in the nursery--from his parched throat.
She was so desperate, she said, she felt so sorry for the baby that she even unlaced her gown and held him to her own breast to feed. That by some miracle she may save his life. But she was no mother of any kind, whether new or of many children past, and could therefore give him nothing. She prayed for milk, and she was granted a child?s tears.
"It... was a cruel tease to him," she whispered with her shoulders quivering, "to have my nipple between his lips and get nothing from it. I only made him even more upset."
She then replaced him in his cradle and began to tie her frock once more? When she saw a figure move against the darkness. An apparition of the queen that so frailly, forlornly staggered towards the crib, her flaxen tresses frayed and dull as they strangled her wrists to pale, bloodied beauty. Her hair rubbed raw against the sensitive skin, carving it with spattering crimson blotches and bracelets that dangled down her arms. Her tendrils were tangled around her waist so taut that her chest refused to rise when her lips parted for a breath. Even in a soul?s wandering her delicate body still remembered life, the delicious function of respiration. Her gowns were tattered, drenched in blood that dripped along the folds, torn to reveal small teeth marks on her calves. Vermin punctures that spit blood on the floor, in salivary streams of infected, vile, corporeal fluid. Her eyes were downcast and flesh white as the moonbeams that shimmered through her essence. Nothing but glassy evanescence.
The specter kneeled over the malnourished body of her son, but no shadow formed over his face as she hovered above, only a mythril glow that entered through her back and cut through her translucent sinew to land upon his hands and feet, surrounding the innocent babe in light. Relena shed one tear as she beheld him, his gaze weary and body fragile against the solid wood of the cradle. And with those lucid hands she brought the child to her breast so that he could suckle, ran her finger down his cheek and kissed his little head with her lips soaked in sweat. It stilled his form to passive sleep, once again in his mother?s embrace, and after laying him back against the pillow when he?d had his fill, her phantom found its way to the stables.
Of these happenings I remember nothing, but Luctretzia said that Relena lowered herself to the hay beside me and stroked my fur a moment as I slept. She whispered of sorrow and of pain, of her despotic punishment she had and would endure for her lover betraying Fate.
But that was only for a short time, for she soon rose to her feet again and carried her languid ghost to her bedchamber... to the place where Heero slept in an empty bed without her. To the place where promises were sealed and another begotten.
Sadly she entered the room, bringing her hand to her breast in wonder at the sight as she watched, nearly mesmerized, the rhythmic rise and fall of his chest while in repose. She listened for the patter of his heartbeat and anticipated his exhalation, waiting for the next throb before she observed him instinctively inhale. Standing vigilant to his every breath, her lips shaking at the reflex-- It was such a sacred cadence since she had none. She took a few lonely steps forward to close the space between their skin, lowering her mouth to his lips to claim them in a brittle kiss. Relena drew breath from his mouth, spit from his tongue as her form grew more tangible with every second more they kissed. The moonlight reflected from her flesh, no longer through it, brandishing her pasty and sepulchral. He was breathing for her... warming her body with his heat.
He was giving her life.
But then she pulled away. Stopped the gentle sucking of his lower lip and stepped aside... reduced to the shallow essence of before. Her body degraded to a prism.
Lucretzia just observed her, followed the ghostly maid from nursery, to stable, to bed. She was unable to speak as the girl turned to her, gaze so mournful as she requested, voice echoing against the stone:
"How is my child?
Is Heero well?
How is my roe?
I can only come twice,
But then no more."
This apparition appeared again the following night: nursing the child, stroking my fur, and kissing the king. It was all the same, identical to the previous evening. But Relena's face was more despondent this time, telling of even greater pain as she wandered through the corridors. As she haunted the stable with her sighs. Tasted mortality with her lover when her spell she cast.
And once more the specter turned to Lucretzia and cried:
"How is my child?
Is Heero well?
How is my roe?
I can only come once,
But then no more."
It was then that Lucretzia came to Heero and myself with these appearances, body shaking slightly beneath her robes, lips shuddering from enigma.
"You have to see her for yourself, and she says she won?t come after tonight. This may be your only chance.
"She comes to see you," the woman told us as her voice broke in desperation, letting her hand clench into a fist by her side. "She doesn?t even notice me except to tell me how many more times she?ll come. But she may listen to you.
"I just can?t..."
And so as the moon flooded the land with a ghoulish river of white and the stars illuminated the nursery in their light, the king and I sat together beside his sleeping son, waiting for this spirit to come. His arms were crossed over his chest, eyes hidden by his unruly bangs to keep his expression secretive. Heero was always more comfortable when his emotions were elusive; then he was only vulnerable to himself. He was in total control. But I knew he was anxious-- He had to be.
He was about to lose everything. If what she said was true-- He may be a widower before the hour. Heero opened himself to Relena, shared his past and his destructive soul. His broken body. He gave himself a second chance at humanity.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice... shame on me.
This king had to be anxious, even if he didn't show it. This could be the last string of emotions he ever had for his beloved queen... for my sister. Relena.
For anything.
She returned. True to her word the apparition arrived as midnight struck, taking her child from the cradle and feeding him for the final time. But she seemed unaware of our presence--or perhaps deliberately ignorant--with all of her being completely focused on her infant son. She just stroked his face and kissed his chubby fingers and stubby toes. She let her lashes flutter against his cheek, causing a few drops of milk to spill from the side of his mouth as he giggled at the ticklish sensation.
She smiled. Nostalgically.
But before she stirred again from her seat beside the crib, wearily facing in the direction of the stables, Heero stopped her in her tracks. She stilled, unwilling to pass through him and with her eyes cast downward, waiting for him to move aside or speak, it seemed. Whichever came first.
She was disturbingly stoic. Decayed and striking.
Narrowing his eyes and forcing her own to meet his, he acutely demanded, "Who are you?"
One tear glided down her cheek at his question, and in response she raised her hand to his face, only to leave the residue of decadence and hollowness where her finger grazed, and whispered:
"How is my child?
Is Heero well?
How is my roe?
I'm here now,
But I won't be anymore.
"I am Relena... but after tonight..."
"No," the king grated as he locked his fingers around the phantom?s wrist and pulled her into him, feeling nothing but chill as he held onto her illusion... not the substance of her flesh and blood. "What?s wrong?" His eyes were impassive-- But intense. "Relena?"
"Heero..." Her words caught in her throat. Her voice was hoarse. Shuddered. "I don't have anything to say. What do you want me to tell you?"
"Why?" She sobbed.
"Heero..."
"Why didn't you come to me before now?" Her wracking body startled him, with a glint passing across his feral eyes.
"I did come to you, Heero," Relena murmured as she touched her fingers to her lips and then pressed the pads against the lining of his mouth. "I?ve been with you these past few nights, watching you sleep."
His eyes widened a fraction at her confession, or at least I believe they did, as his lips began to tingle from her illusory kisses of before, at the breathless sensation that returned to his throat as he ensnared it from a recollection of those two dreams. She being there, sucking on his mouth and their tongues touching in the sedated darkness? They were his fantasies... now verified as memories.
He suddenly pulled her into his arms and, without a word, leaned down to give her his lips that had once, on those former nights, sustained her? But she turned her face away and rejected him, her eyes vacant, staring at the ground. Heart-broken.
Her form passed through his fingertips and into the darkness of the corridors beyond the chamber. Into that faithful darkness that always welcomed her return. Lonely and hopeless. Realized the devastation and morbidity of physical dependence--the danger of loving by sex and knowing nothing more profound.
"I?ll give you my breath..." he said to her back as she walked the passage, his voice gruff and raspy from the desperation that choked him. The need to feel her beneath him. "...I want to protect you."
But she continued to stumble through the darkness, as though deaf to his pleading. She chose to ignore him, her back slumped over and intent on her destination, hobbling through the halls with nothing more than painful grunts. "Because I must protect you..." Her whisper silenced the evening air; her light vanished in the blackness.
But Heero would keep her safe as he had promised, as would I? I could never revoke my vow to her. I'm her brother. And so we followed her spirit close behind.
We chased her dejected soul down into the castle dungeons, finding our way through the maze of debris and filth by the vanquishing light her specter cast. She acted as a subliminal torch through that rank, mortal tomb, her beauty surrounded by grotesque cages of metal and crumbling limestone. But we were soon halted as we saw the apparition approach a woman's battered form, its wrists dangling from chains welded in the wall. She was dead within the musty, guttural ruins and dilapidated shadows, which provided a sanctuary for the rats that nibbled on her dress's hem.
It was foul. Disgusting. To see my sister's rotting corpse.
The soul descended into the cadaver's flesh, marred by dust and splatters of blood along her face and arms and thighs. It dissipated entirely beneath the sinew and returned a dulled flush to the woman's cheeks, her breasts moving just slightly with her breath.
Weak. Still alive.
But then a voice rang out through the stagnancy, broken only by the screech of the rats? claws that scratched against the stone. A voice that caused my fur to stand on end as my mind placed a name to its so familiar, putrid tone. "I don?t remember giving you permission to come down here... and disobedience is not a crime I take lightly. But I?m inclined to grant you amnesty for the sake of my daughter, so forget what you?ve seen and leave."
"Une," I grunted as I arched my back and scraped my hooves against the ground for speed, fluid dripping from my nose as I snorted in the heat of rage that drowned me in its retaliatory seduction. I lowered my set of antlers in range of her stomach, charging the witch out of revenge for what she?d done. She?d murdered my Relena. She tried to kill my nephew. She was going to rob me of my family again.
No. Not again.
I would have my vengeance.... I waited so long, and it was finally mine. I almost wanted to laugh in the satisfaction I felt, drunk on my own retirbution.
But no.
All that vigor fled from my limbs when the shrew?s eyes began to glow like fired copper on my fur. Her out-stretched hand forced me to the ground as she lowered her arm to the floor, in mimicking my body's struggle against her sorcery. My legs fell from under me. My head felt impossibly heavy. She drained me of my strength. Of my last hope for vindication. All taken away by those eyes I so gravely feared as a child.
Her subtle cackles that held within their depths the lament of Relena?s condemned soul were the last sounds that surrounded me that night before I succumbed to her spell. They tossed me into darkness, into a void where my sister?s cries resounded over and over again, becoming louder with each reverberation. I saw her face, watched the tears slip down her cheeks and felt her body convulse in her despair. She reached out her hand to me. I couldn't grab it-- I was too far away. My one, last memory.
Relena was dead... I couldn?t save her. I couldn?t even avenge her death.
This one leads up to the end, which is... weird, to say the least. I also wanted to say that there is an epilogue after chapter 8, so we're still not quite finished. I feel sorry for Milliardo in this chapter... and Heero, of course. I hope you enjoy this one as much as the previous.
Disclaimer: I don't own GW or "Brother and Sister."
As was later told to me, Heero returned that following morning to find who he believed was his wife lying in their bed. He looked at me stoically when he later recalled her expression, with her soft pink lips slightly parted from the teasing of warm breath and the rise and fall of her breasts that lured him to her side. She was unintentionally seductive in the fragile light of daybreak, with her absent, sensuous moans. With the unconscious rubbing of her toes against her shin.
Shudder
Her sighs whispered of an erotic heat as they scalded his flesh, he claimed unabashed, while her groans caressed those lips he meant to devour?the breath he carnally hungered for, to consume in a kiss. Her arm rested just above her head, bedded in her hair as those golden tresses fondled her shoulder, the breeze from the window stroking them and running its transient fingers at her neck. Brushed her body faintly, tickling her skin. She lay in ignorant, licentious slumber, with their infant prince just as restless. Yet on the child?s face were the chapped remnants of earlier irritability, scarring his cheek with chaffing tears.
This king took quiet steps toward my sister, not wanting to disturb her or his newborn son with his presence-- For he was always a more sensual, affectionate man when thought to be alone. Or so Relena has told me on occasion--something I didn't necessarily need to know. He knelt before her sleeping figure, his face hovering just above her own and strands making mock love with hers, and he brought his hand up near her face to merely skim her forehead with a finger?s graze.
"Relena..." he whispered nearly breathless as he beheld her troubled countenance, licking his lips as he murmured her name, to alleviate the raspiness in his voice.
Even today I can still see that confusion in his eyes as he looks at his son; it still mystifies him that Relena willingly offered him her innocence, virginity, and sexual surrender when all he could offer her were bloodied memories and monotone. Restrain her in unbridled intercourse that released his seed of vengeful souls and unshed tears. A spasm in doubt. Yet she bore him a child, loved him so unreservedly that she let him empty his remorse into her body each night their flesh in sweat and promise became one.
Haggard Sigh
He vouchsafed guilt for her soul to bear on his behalf. There was just too much for one spirit to survive alone. And so together? Through touch and caress, groans and sexual grinding in the junction of their muscles, two souls that became inseparable as love was made beyond their miserable pasts? they had created a legitimate miracle: a tiny, baby boy.
It's sickening to have to believe that.
Heero leaned in his face to brush her lips with his own, his tongue running along the edges of her mouth to grant him entrance in their oral mating duel? When the shadow of the witch, disguised as Relena's faithful handmaid, cast him in its breadth. An ominous judgment.
Her voice clashed against his ragged breathing as she seethed: "You mustn't disturb your wife, my Lord, for she is tired from the birth and needs her rest."
"Leave us," he commanded of her gruffly and in lewd tension as he turned his gaze from Relena to the servant; his muscles seized warningly when the shrew made no attempt to vacate the room. She merely stood obstinately as though he had said nothing, eyes narrowing at his defiance.
Taking a step back from the bed, Une grasped the calico of her dress between her fingers as she returned his cold demand with smugness, a sinister confidence in her stance. "She has lost too much blood to be certain of her survival, and your being here only jeopardizes her condition. I would hate to think that you wish to add the blood of your wife to that of the many others that smear your reputation."
His reply was silence, the dreary eyes of an aroused lover that spoke of nothing but desire. His was a suspicious need that betrayed nothing. Only the lifting of his knees from the floor indicated his submission.
If he were pressed, he would leave. It was something he seemed resolved about all along. For he had a greater sense of obligation than to let his family perish in his indulgence, especially a gratification as morbid as sex. He?d rather surrender his wife and child to distance than to their deaths. He would never risk them? Not for himself.
But as he reached the edge of the room, he halted in the doorway, his shoulders rigid and poise deliberate in divulging his battle against the anger that tried to surface, that rage aimed at himself. He could only blame her remark on his own choices and despicable history; he was the one who committed the murders. Who earned the derision for that carnage. No one else. The accountability was on his head, and so he would endure the consequences it wrought.
Yet he allowed a glare against her earlier words?bitterly conceding her the fight... for now. But not without a vow of mutual challenge to follow, it seemed.
Still more convincing than that, it was what happened over the next week that caused both Heero and myself to doubt this queen that the handmaid protected so thoroughly. The girl who slept soundly in the bed that morning, appearing nonchalant about Heero at all as the days slipped by.
For when dusk neared the following day, Heero begrudgingly rose from his stack of decrees, proposals, and pending edicts to take Relena?s hand for bed, as was the usual custom. But as he twined his fingers within her own, leading her to their chambers, since they never slept apart-- She pulled hers free from his ritualistic entrapment to rest upon her thigh, nearly sneering at his touch. Her body trembled as darkness dawned, as the moon emerged from the gleam of the fading sun and immersed the castle in its feeble, supplementary light. She looked at him, her eyes threatened with an urgency to escape from Heero and his penetrating stare, to leave her alone for fear of... something. Desperate for seclusion as she seemed.
And so without a word she turned away from him to follow the corridor to their bedroom, hands coming up to her face in a tentative shield as her steps changed from a hurried walk into reckless haste the further down the hall she ran. She was revealed in the moonlight that flooded through the windows in torrential, omniscient waves, washing away her asylum. Groans wailed from her lips as she slunk through the door, grasping the right side of her face in agony as her nails scraped along the flesh at her own disgust. Nearly wretched, searing her skin with angry red welts. Leaving Heero to wonder.
Her visits to my stable bed ceased after that day, along with any acknowledgment of my presence whatsoever. I approached the castle to question her about her absences the next morning, but when I called up to her from beneath her window?s ledge, she only stared at me. Raised her eyebrows at my garbled grunts, as if she couldn?t understand what I was trying to tell her? Before shutting the window to put an end to my interrogation.
She always had time to listen to me. She was always able to decipher my broken tongue. But that morning she couldn't, and later refused to try.
She didn?t even seem to know who I was.
But the final piece of the puzzle disturbed us most, because when the prince cried out for milk from his mother?s breast, she ignored his sniffles and squeals entirely and pulled the blankets over his head to muffle his annoying wails. She would leave him alone in the room to cry himself to sleep on an empty belly, with hunger pains stirring the child from his rest. Deprived sniffles drifted from the chamber as he was forced to nurse on his own flesh.
"Relena," Heero asked of her that evening, clutching her wrist in his hand and forcing their eyes to meet. His baby was dying, and nature had damned him to helplessness in this practice. Against his responsibility to protect this child, she had to produce the milk their infant needed to survive, for it was a craving only the mother could abate. Father sedate in only watching and waiting.
Curse his sex.
"He needs your milk if you want him to live. Nurse him."
But when she held the baby to her breast and let him wrap his lips around her nipple to suckle, his stomach received nothing but more emptiness, testified by the little boy?s moans and his mouth that sucked the air even when she pulled away. The feeling of her nipple was still reminiscent in his mouth, his starving body not willing to accept that she had left him with nothing. So he was forced to pacify his thirst for milk with the salty, undernourished water form a tear.
Her breasts were dry of any milk for him.
The father?s expectant gaze was at her back as the prince?s cries begged her for something to ease his stomach?s churning, and the young mother therefore knew she had to do something before her husband reprimanded her again and the child?s screaming deafened her from sanity? So she shoved the boy into Heero's arms, marched out of the room as she warned him bluntly, never turning to look her husband in the face. "You can?t expect me to feed the thing if it won?t stop screaming. From the way it carries on, it doesn?t want to have anything to do with me or my milk. So now it gets nothing."
It was a strange reply. Relena didn?t run away from her mistakes or defeats of any kind; I couldn?t think of a single instance in which she had, not even when one of Stepmother?s penalties loomed. Instead my sister embraced them as weaknesses that, once conquered, could pave the way for an opposing strength. According to her, from fear can be born courage, for in being afraid we learn to risk ourselves for the very desire to be fearless. From sorrow love can thrive in its place, for in misery our hearts open to the finest company. Faults are not attributes to be feared, but to be molded into perfections. The girl before us certainly didn?t exemplify that same outlook.
This wasn?t my little sister... but her looks said otherwise.
Then the problem worsened.
As Lucretzia soon revealed to us, her eyes aggrieved and voice halting with what she was to tell, refusing to even step all the way into the room where we stood listening: the third night after the prince's birth, she was sitting near his crib?as was her normal routine since he was born?and watched him in his restless sleep, beset with hunger and abandon. The starlight nestled his gaunt face, only casting deeper shadows where his cheeks were sunken and rubbery bones protruded from his flesh. He looked old and worn, like a skeleton, coughing and sneezing because of the dust in the nursery--from his parched throat.
She was so desperate, she said, she felt so sorry for the baby that she even unlaced her gown and held him to her own breast to feed. That by some miracle she may save his life. But she was no mother of any kind, whether new or of many children past, and could therefore give him nothing. She prayed for milk, and she was granted a child?s tears.
"It... was a cruel tease to him," she whispered with her shoulders quivering, "to have my nipple between his lips and get nothing from it. I only made him even more upset."
She then replaced him in his cradle and began to tie her frock once more? When she saw a figure move against the darkness. An apparition of the queen that so frailly, forlornly staggered towards the crib, her flaxen tresses frayed and dull as they strangled her wrists to pale, bloodied beauty. Her hair rubbed raw against the sensitive skin, carving it with spattering crimson blotches and bracelets that dangled down her arms. Her tendrils were tangled around her waist so taut that her chest refused to rise when her lips parted for a breath. Even in a soul?s wandering her delicate body still remembered life, the delicious function of respiration. Her gowns were tattered, drenched in blood that dripped along the folds, torn to reveal small teeth marks on her calves. Vermin punctures that spit blood on the floor, in salivary streams of infected, vile, corporeal fluid. Her eyes were downcast and flesh white as the moonbeams that shimmered through her essence. Nothing but glassy evanescence.
The specter kneeled over the malnourished body of her son, but no shadow formed over his face as she hovered above, only a mythril glow that entered through her back and cut through her translucent sinew to land upon his hands and feet, surrounding the innocent babe in light. Relena shed one tear as she beheld him, his gaze weary and body fragile against the solid wood of the cradle. And with those lucid hands she brought the child to her breast so that he could suckle, ran her finger down his cheek and kissed his little head with her lips soaked in sweat. It stilled his form to passive sleep, once again in his mother?s embrace, and after laying him back against the pillow when he?d had his fill, her phantom found its way to the stables.
Of these happenings I remember nothing, but Luctretzia said that Relena lowered herself to the hay beside me and stroked my fur a moment as I slept. She whispered of sorrow and of pain, of her despotic punishment she had and would endure for her lover betraying Fate.
But that was only for a short time, for she soon rose to her feet again and carried her languid ghost to her bedchamber... to the place where Heero slept in an empty bed without her. To the place where promises were sealed and another begotten.
Sadly she entered the room, bringing her hand to her breast in wonder at the sight as she watched, nearly mesmerized, the rhythmic rise and fall of his chest while in repose. She listened for the patter of his heartbeat and anticipated his exhalation, waiting for the next throb before she observed him instinctively inhale. Standing vigilant to his every breath, her lips shaking at the reflex-- It was such a sacred cadence since she had none. She took a few lonely steps forward to close the space between their skin, lowering her mouth to his lips to claim them in a brittle kiss. Relena drew breath from his mouth, spit from his tongue as her form grew more tangible with every second more they kissed. The moonlight reflected from her flesh, no longer through it, brandishing her pasty and sepulchral. He was breathing for her... warming her body with his heat.
He was giving her life.
But then she pulled away. Stopped the gentle sucking of his lower lip and stepped aside... reduced to the shallow essence of before. Her body degraded to a prism.
Lucretzia just observed her, followed the ghostly maid from nursery, to stable, to bed. She was unable to speak as the girl turned to her, gaze so mournful as she requested, voice echoing against the stone:
"How is my child?
Is Heero well?
How is my roe?
I can only come twice,
But then no more."
This apparition appeared again the following night: nursing the child, stroking my fur, and kissing the king. It was all the same, identical to the previous evening. But Relena's face was more despondent this time, telling of even greater pain as she wandered through the corridors. As she haunted the stable with her sighs. Tasted mortality with her lover when her spell she cast.
And once more the specter turned to Lucretzia and cried:
"How is my child?
Is Heero well?
How is my roe?
I can only come once,
But then no more."
It was then that Lucretzia came to Heero and myself with these appearances, body shaking slightly beneath her robes, lips shuddering from enigma.
"You have to see her for yourself, and she says she won?t come after tonight. This may be your only chance.
"She comes to see you," the woman told us as her voice broke in desperation, letting her hand clench into a fist by her side. "She doesn?t even notice me except to tell me how many more times she?ll come. But she may listen to you.
"I just can?t..."
And so as the moon flooded the land with a ghoulish river of white and the stars illuminated the nursery in their light, the king and I sat together beside his sleeping son, waiting for this spirit to come. His arms were crossed over his chest, eyes hidden by his unruly bangs to keep his expression secretive. Heero was always more comfortable when his emotions were elusive; then he was only vulnerable to himself. He was in total control. But I knew he was anxious-- He had to be.
He was about to lose everything. If what she said was true-- He may be a widower before the hour. Heero opened himself to Relena, shared his past and his destructive soul. His broken body. He gave himself a second chance at humanity.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice... shame on me.
This king had to be anxious, even if he didn't show it. This could be the last string of emotions he ever had for his beloved queen... for my sister. Relena.
For anything.
She returned. True to her word the apparition arrived as midnight struck, taking her child from the cradle and feeding him for the final time. But she seemed unaware of our presence--or perhaps deliberately ignorant--with all of her being completely focused on her infant son. She just stroked his face and kissed his chubby fingers and stubby toes. She let her lashes flutter against his cheek, causing a few drops of milk to spill from the side of his mouth as he giggled at the ticklish sensation.
She smiled. Nostalgically.
But before she stirred again from her seat beside the crib, wearily facing in the direction of the stables, Heero stopped her in her tracks. She stilled, unwilling to pass through him and with her eyes cast downward, waiting for him to move aside or speak, it seemed. Whichever came first.
She was disturbingly stoic. Decayed and striking.
Narrowing his eyes and forcing her own to meet his, he acutely demanded, "Who are you?"
One tear glided down her cheek at his question, and in response she raised her hand to his face, only to leave the residue of decadence and hollowness where her finger grazed, and whispered:
"How is my child?
Is Heero well?
How is my roe?
I'm here now,
But I won't be anymore.
"I am Relena... but after tonight..."
"No," the king grated as he locked his fingers around the phantom?s wrist and pulled her into him, feeling nothing but chill as he held onto her illusion... not the substance of her flesh and blood. "What?s wrong?" His eyes were impassive-- But intense. "Relena?"
"Heero..." Her words caught in her throat. Her voice was hoarse. Shuddered. "I don't have anything to say. What do you want me to tell you?"
"Why?" She sobbed.
"Heero..."
"Why didn't you come to me before now?" Her wracking body startled him, with a glint passing across his feral eyes.
"I did come to you, Heero," Relena murmured as she touched her fingers to her lips and then pressed the pads against the lining of his mouth. "I?ve been with you these past few nights, watching you sleep."
His eyes widened a fraction at her confession, or at least I believe they did, as his lips began to tingle from her illusory kisses of before, at the breathless sensation that returned to his throat as he ensnared it from a recollection of those two dreams. She being there, sucking on his mouth and their tongues touching in the sedated darkness? They were his fantasies... now verified as memories.
He suddenly pulled her into his arms and, without a word, leaned down to give her his lips that had once, on those former nights, sustained her? But she turned her face away and rejected him, her eyes vacant, staring at the ground. Heart-broken.
Her form passed through his fingertips and into the darkness of the corridors beyond the chamber. Into that faithful darkness that always welcomed her return. Lonely and hopeless. Realized the devastation and morbidity of physical dependence--the danger of loving by sex and knowing nothing more profound.
"I?ll give you my breath..." he said to her back as she walked the passage, his voice gruff and raspy from the desperation that choked him. The need to feel her beneath him. "...I want to protect you."
But she continued to stumble through the darkness, as though deaf to his pleading. She chose to ignore him, her back slumped over and intent on her destination, hobbling through the halls with nothing more than painful grunts. "Because I must protect you..." Her whisper silenced the evening air; her light vanished in the blackness.
But Heero would keep her safe as he had promised, as would I? I could never revoke my vow to her. I'm her brother. And so we followed her spirit close behind.
We chased her dejected soul down into the castle dungeons, finding our way through the maze of debris and filth by the vanquishing light her specter cast. She acted as a subliminal torch through that rank, mortal tomb, her beauty surrounded by grotesque cages of metal and crumbling limestone. But we were soon halted as we saw the apparition approach a woman's battered form, its wrists dangling from chains welded in the wall. She was dead within the musty, guttural ruins and dilapidated shadows, which provided a sanctuary for the rats that nibbled on her dress's hem.
It was foul. Disgusting. To see my sister's rotting corpse.
The soul descended into the cadaver's flesh, marred by dust and splatters of blood along her face and arms and thighs. It dissipated entirely beneath the sinew and returned a dulled flush to the woman's cheeks, her breasts moving just slightly with her breath.
Weak. Still alive.
But then a voice rang out through the stagnancy, broken only by the screech of the rats? claws that scratched against the stone. A voice that caused my fur to stand on end as my mind placed a name to its so familiar, putrid tone. "I don?t remember giving you permission to come down here... and disobedience is not a crime I take lightly. But I?m inclined to grant you amnesty for the sake of my daughter, so forget what you?ve seen and leave."
"Une," I grunted as I arched my back and scraped my hooves against the ground for speed, fluid dripping from my nose as I snorted in the heat of rage that drowned me in its retaliatory seduction. I lowered my set of antlers in range of her stomach, charging the witch out of revenge for what she?d done. She?d murdered my Relena. She tried to kill my nephew. She was going to rob me of my family again.
No. Not again.
I would have my vengeance.... I waited so long, and it was finally mine. I almost wanted to laugh in the satisfaction I felt, drunk on my own retirbution.
But no.
All that vigor fled from my limbs when the shrew?s eyes began to glow like fired copper on my fur. Her out-stretched hand forced me to the ground as she lowered her arm to the floor, in mimicking my body's struggle against her sorcery. My legs fell from under me. My head felt impossibly heavy. She drained me of my strength. Of my last hope for vindication. All taken away by those eyes I so gravely feared as a child.
Her subtle cackles that held within their depths the lament of Relena?s condemned soul were the last sounds that surrounded me that night before I succumbed to her spell. They tossed me into darkness, into a void where my sister?s cries resounded over and over again, becoming louder with each reverberation. I saw her face, watched the tears slip down her cheeks and felt her body convulse in her despair. She reached out her hand to me. I couldn't grab it-- I was too far away. My one, last memory.
Relena was dead... I couldn?t save her. I couldn?t even avenge her death.
)
i couldn't stand to see her die! And the poor baby too!!!
