Ivan Press

[Ivan] He's quiet a moment. Strange; they're sitting side by side, and he's half turned toward her, and his elbow is on the back of the couch, cheekbone propped on his fist. Free hand on hers, then on her face the way hers was on his. Is, perhaps. He touches her, studies her, his clear eyes flickering over her face. Looking for signs, surreptitious glimmers of emotion.

He finds none. Or almost none. His hand slips down; his palm rests over her breastbone then, long fingers trailing toward her neck. He can feel her heartbeat. She's not so feverishly warm now as she was in those last days, when her body prepared for its great upheaval, its great labor

that never came to fruition.

"In the car," he says quietly, "you cried because you felt empty. And you held on to him. Do you want to keep him?"

[Hilary] It's strange how calm she is, after her breakdown in the car, the way she clung to the child's feet, cried that she was empty, so empty. He healed her again, took away the marks and potential scars of what's happened to her, what she's done, what she has allowed to be done to her. It always leaves her shiftless, uncertain, confused.

But that carefully created calm, suppressing everything else, wavers and warps and shakes itself apart when he asks her if she wants to keep him. Him, it. Him, the baby. Him, her son. Him, Anton.

"No...!" she all but wails, and then covers her mouth for a moment, shoulders hunched and body curled. Her hand slips down, eyes on the boy for a few moments as he sleeps in pitch-dark oblivion on the table. "I'd break him," she says weakly, sounding helpless.

Somehow Ivan has to know she isn't talking about dropping him.

[Ivan] That no is scarcely out of her mouth when he moves, faster and smoother than such a languid, lazy, careless creature should be able to. There's a strength in his lean arms, long fingers, and he pulls her to him more than he gathers her, pulls her close with more forth than anyone should use with a woman recovering from recent surgery.

Except she's not really recovering anymore. Not physically, anyway -- and in some strange way that lack of physical trauma, the lack of physical effort and work and labor, makes the mental so much more difficult.

Still. He pulls her close. His hand comes to her back, comes to the back of her head, presses her mouth to his shoulder like there were someone to hear, like he had to gag her or stem some outrushing of emotion or strength that she couldn't afford to lose. If she hunches on herself, if she curls on herself, it's against his body. He holds her with his arms tight around her, his face turned to the side of hers; presses a hard kiss to her temple, her hair.

Never, not once, did Ivan imagine Hilary would react this way. Relief, perhaps. Boredom, even. A willingness to forget the whole ordeal, leave it behind her, never speak of it again. But not this. Nothing like this.

He's asked her this before; asks her again --

"What are you afraid of?"

[Hilary] "I've done such a horrible thing," she moans into his shoulder, his neck, wherever her mouth falls with her body pressed to his. His comfort is, for the first time, welcomed without hesitation or confusion. And he didn't hurt her first. Nothing really... hurt her. She isn't the victim here.

Tears are coming again, hard and heavy and pouring out of her like she's purging herself somehow. She grabs Ivan's arms, her fingers clenching in the fabric of his shirt, and shudders as she tries to stop crying. "I should never have let him happen, I should have stayed on the pill, I should have waited til Dión got tired of trying and moved on to someone younger, I've been poor before, I could have handled that, but now he's here and he's going to be so lonely, he's going to be so sad, and I can't keep him, I can't, I can't, I'll break him, I'll make him so hateful."

[Ivan] Ivan doesn't know what to say. What to do. The only things that come to mind are nearly accusations: you didn't even want him. you hated him. you wanted him not to be, except -- perhaps that was always the point.

He doesn't know that once upon a time she curled on herself in the shower and begged the baby or herself or the universe: don't be. Don't be. He doesn't understand that somewhere under all the frustration and anger at what a disturbance the child had caused, what an interruption, that there was fear. And panic. And a bonedeep inability to cope with the idea that she'll consign another living thing to what she herself knows all too well:

what it is to be alone, and terrified, unable to understand why things have happened as they have.

He's hushing her again, shhing as his hands move aimlessly and steadily over her, hushing her while he thinks, thinking while he touches her mindlessly, methodically.

"You can't stay on the pill." Always, it's her first. In the car he flanked her. Here, he thinks of her future, her wellbeing, what happens next with her. "Dion won't just 'move on' to someone younger. You won't just be 'poor' again. You don't divorce a mate, Hilary; it's til death do you part, and everyone knows death has already conveniently done him and his last mate apart. Sooner or later you'll have to give him a child.

"We should have been more careful. That's the only thing we could have changed. But it's too late for that now. Hilary..."

His hand on her head, smoothing back her head. His hand cradling her against his shoulder, his torso all sleekness under his smart powder-blue shirt, as though the birth of a child were a meeting or a luncheon to attend.

"Hilary, if you want, I'll find someone to raise him as their own. He'll never find out who his parents were. He'll never miss us. Is that what you want?"

[Hilary] She pushes him back a bit. Everything so easily becomes anger to her. Fear, confusion, sorrow, guilt -- all trickles back into that bottomless sea of wrath that informs who she is. It won't change. It won't dry up one day. It won't be integrated somehow into her person, make her half-sane, make her even remotely stable. Any more than one day Ivan will be a strong, steady paternal figure of the Silver Fang tribe, a true leader and heartfelt member of any pack. They are both of them endlessly, utterly broken -- but she's had longer to stew in hers, a handful of extra years to marinate in madness.

Hilary's hands still clutch at his tear-dampened shirt, her brow furrowed in a scowl. "What are you talking about?" she mutters at him, whispers. "Dión had a very elegant annullment with Ángela, Ivan," she tells him, in part annoyed, or disgusted, or something with him, his traditionalism, his thoughts that oh, well, this is how it is, and he's wrong, he's wrong, he doesn't know these things.

Feeling that anger boil up in her, choke her, gag her, Hilary withdraws a few inches, puts a cool hand on her brow, pulls away from him entirely until they aren't touching anymore. A moment ago his comfort, his closeness, was everything she needed. And now she withdraws, as though she's afraid she's going to attack him. Her head stays down, eyes closed, relishing the coldness of her palms against the feverish heat of her brow.

"She never gave him a trueborn heir. So it was annulled. And she killed herself." One, two, three. "Maybe his House is different from yours. Or he is. Or..."

Hilary curls up, drawing her knees to her chest, and wraps her arms around her legs, and rests her brow on her forehead. "I've never hurt anyone really innocent before," she whispers. "Not a child. Not someone so small. He'll be so alone." She lifts her head a bit, staring at her knees, mulling over Ivan's suggestion -- parents to raise him. No knowledge that somewhere he has a father, somewhere he has a secret mother. She sniffs moisture out of her nostrils and wipes her cheeks with her hands, looking exhausted again, drained again, dazed again.

"I'd rather he grow up eating dirt than be alone like that," she says in a whisper. "Knowing how much we don't love him." Because if they loved him, they wouldn't leave him. Like her parents left her. Like Emmerich left her. Granted, her parents and her brother died. But it was still an abandonment. They were supposed to stay. "Even if I kept him, Dión might kill him, or hurt him. And if he didn't, I eventually would. Even I know I can't feel this way forever. This won't last. Nothing ever lasts."

It isn't a philosophical statement. It's specific, subjective, personal: no anger she has, no love, no happiness, no release, nothing. Nothing in her can stay. She's a black hole, inhaling and destroying everything in the cold darkness inside her. She annihilates even light.

"He has to go before I hurt him," she says, so quiet it's almost a gasp.

[Ivan] Ivan says nothing to Dion's annulment, that elegant, tidy affair. No trueborn children, so they annulled. It was very civil. Very calm. Later, Angela killed herself.

He says nothing, but perhaps it's a good thing Hilary's head is bowed; else she would see the look in his eyes. Sometimes he doesn't understand how a creature so callous, so cold, could be so naive. Sometimes he understand all too well that she's not callous or cold at all. Just broken. Just deeply, tragically damaged; damaged so young and so utterly that she'll never recover.

She's drawn away from him now. She curls on herself, and he shifts, folding his knee sideways on the couch, setting his elbow back atop the cushions. She tells him what he wants; only not really. Of course not. Hilary so rarely tells him what she wants. Shows him, sometimes -- with anger or with stark, frightening lust or with strange, aching need -- but so rarely in words, so rarely so bluntly, so explicitly.

He could make the decision for her. Perhaps that's what she wants. For him to say: yes. We'll give him to someone else. Tell them to raise him as their own. Or -- no. The boy is my blood, and he always will be. Ivan is merely silent awhile, though.

Then, "Why are you so very certain you'll hurt him?"

[Hilary] Ivan hears the story of Dion and his first mate and thinks Hilary naive. He can think what he likes, believe what he believes in. She might not recognize that if she looked into his eyes. She might not care, just as likely. Maybe even moreso; Ivan's opinion of her has always mattered a great deal less than his interest in her, his capitulation to what happens between them, his hands locked around her wrists, his teeth in her shoulder, his cock in her cunt. His arm around her, sometimes. The closeness, however it's achieved, matters. His opinion of her, good or bad, admiring or pitying, has never meant quite as much.

As far as Hilary knows. This baby didn't mean much til it came out, til it was there and she couldn't remember giving birth to it, could barely remember carrying it for nine months all of a sudden. Til he was right there, rooting in his sleep, looking for a nipple -- looking for her before settling again after a mighty yawn. Dmitri fed him at least two or three times today already; he is hardly as hungry as he is curious, wanting for connection. Other than the Russian servant, he's scarcely been held.

And that is why Hilary knows she would break him. Is already breaking him, because any other mother in the world would be cradling him right now, kissing his brow, keeping him close and warm and safe, hers, hers, as dear and protected as anything so fragile and so recently connected to her very body.

Even she knows babies need to be held and cuddled and loved. Even she realizes that the surge of revulsion and annoyance she feels at the thought of it is not normal. Not natural. Not good. That she, to her very core, is not good. She's always known that.

It's just that right now, it's making her sad. That's all.


She slowly lifts her head up, looking at his hand on the back of the couch. His ever so familiar hand, gold-colored and long-fingered, as elegant as any polite annulment that was murmured about but understood, two children and neither trueborn. Tsk. Well, it's awful but understandable, can't be too patient in this day and age. Let the woman go give kinfolk babies to less renowned Garou, or to other kinfolk.

God only knows what will become of the woman who is not only aging, but who could not even keep a baby alive. Tsk, tsk. Indeed.


Hilary touches his hand with the same sort of idle, scrutinizing curiousity as she looked at the chocolate bunny he offered to get her a truckload of because it was hers and he wanted a bite, as though it were the only chocolate bunny in the world, or the only one she would ever get. If she were more self-aware she could tell him it was mine because you gave it to me. I don't want a truckload. I want the one you gave me. I didn't want to share it because you gave it to me, and it was mine, and if you took some of it then it didn't mean anything, it was just chocolate.

If she were self-aware enough to say all of that to herself, though, she would be embarrassed.

She strokes his hand, the pale, fine hairs that are almost imperceptible on the backs of his fingers, invisible unless she holds his hand up to the fading sunlight, which she does. She brings his hand towards her face as she did while still pregnant with what they now know is his child, his son, his heir. She puts his fingers to her lips as though he has to feel them moving in order to understand her, as though he were deaf.

Her breath is warm and moist on his fingertips, her eyes closing again as she murmurs, "I hurt everyone." She's quiet a moment, and opens her eyes, and lowers his hand, letting it go. Letting him have it back. "I think everyone wants to hurt everyone sometimes. I see it when they get angry. If they were like me they wouldn't say passive-aggressive things or snipe or backbite. They'd just... try to kill each other all the time. Everyone's like that. The nice people just control it better, the good people just have something in them that says 'no no, you don't really want to do that' and I don't have that in me. There's always something saying I shouldn't, or logically telling me what I'd lose, or how I should act, but... nothing that makes me not want it as badly."

She's silent. Looks at Anton. Looks at Ivan. "Except I don't want to hurt him. And I don't always want to hurt you. Even when I'm angry at you, I don't... I don't know how to explain this. I'm not used to this." She reaches up, scrubbing her face, which looks older without the makeup she usually has on. She takes a breath, both hands over her eyes, looking like a child who is the Seeker in that game where you have to count, and you have to say ready or not, and at the end it's

olly olly all come free!

but even she knows that's just giving up because you suck at finding what's hidden from you.


"Usually," Hilary says, steadily, "if I am bored or angry or anything, I just... do what I want to do. Unless I hear my old caregiver's voices telling me no, and why not, and what bad thing will happen to me if I do that. I'm not used to wanting to hurt someone and there being some other voice saying no, that isn't you, you don't want that, it will hurt you to hurt that person." She shakes her head, eyes still covered. "I don't know what that is. I know it won't last. And eventually I'll do something bad, and it might be something very very bad, and even if it's not then sometimes he'll want me to do something or give him something or be nice to him and I won't, I just won't be able to. I don't... have that inside me. Not enough of it."

[Ivan] It's perhaps the most self-disclosure he's ever heard from her. It's possible this is only possible because of her emotional state, her hormones out of whack, her mind still recovering from sedation. It's even possible that she rarely sinks so deep, or floats so high, that she can see all this laid out beneath her like a roadmap.

She does what she wants to do. Unless something external something taught and engrained from childhood reminds her: no. no, normal people don't do that, and if you want to pretend, then you can't. She's missing some other, critical piece, though; the part of her brain or the part of her soul that tells her not that's bad or that's wrong but simply:

I don't want to do that. I'll hurt someone else if I do that, and I don't want to.


She touches him as she tells him this. Takes his hand and holds it up to the light, brings his fingers to her mouth as though somehow this made it easier for him to understand. Or for her to speak. She keeps his fingers on her moving lips as she tells him -- though not quite in these words --

I'm broken. Something's wrong with me.

And eventually she just covers her eyes, like even his hand over her mouth isn't enough anymore. Hide away, hide away. See no evil, speak no evil; don't let the blackness inside her seep out.


Afterward, a silence. Even after she's let go his hand, it hasn't fallen away from her very far. Hangs gracefully from the point of articulation where his elbow rests atop the couch -- a smooth slope through the forearm to the fingers. Eventually those fingers curl; he runs his thumb along the outside of the index for a moment.

"I don't know what to do," he says then, very quietly. "I don't know what the 'right thing to do' is.

"I don't want to raise him myself, even if I could. But I don't ... want to give him up entirely either. Nor do I want you to cry. Or hurt. Or worry about him and how he grows up.

"I don't know what to do."

[Hilary] Even Hilary isn't aware of the way she does this, bringing Ivan's fingers to her mouth as though it's a comfort. She can't remember clearly enough, or doesn't connect the dots, to tell him that one of her caregivers from early childhood was an old woman before Hilary was ever born. Her hearing began to degrade, then fail, as Hilary's family members dropped like mad flies, and sometimes it was easier for her to understand the girl's distant, underwater murmurings if she could feel her lips moving like this, piece together the shapes and the sounds and make them one. It was so long ago. It wasn't long before that caregiver died and the people around Hilary began to mutate into people who never knew Emmerich, never knew Mother or Father, and as they abandoned her to embrace their own personal oblivions, they took the memory of her past with them.

She only dimly remembers that woman anyway. She might find it funny, now, if she realized that when she wants badly to be understood and feel like what she has to say matters, she does this with Ivan's hand. She rarely has it in her to ache over the fact that when she brings his fingers to her lips, what she's really doing is begging him to hear me. please hear me. please understand me. i'll be so alone if you can't even hear me when i speak.


For awhile there's just quiet, Hilary hiding and Ivan thinking. And he breaks it with a soft voice, and it's rather hopeless, all told. Neither of them are really capable of loving this little bastard as much as it will need, giving it what it will want. Hilary lets out a huff, a helpless sort of laugh. "Then why did you even bring up letting someone raise him as theirs?" she asks, and if she weren't so drained, there might be rage and malice in it, fury roaring right back to the surface. For once, it just exhausts her to even be angry.

Her hands finally slide away from her face, smoothing tears away past the shallow lines where true crow's feet will one day appear. She shakes her head. "I wouldn't listen to me right now if I were you," she says, wearily. "We should just do whatever was already planned."

[Ivan] She never gets so far as to tell him not to listen to her. She asks him why and he answers immediately, quiet and strained --

"Because if that's what you want, I'd do it. If that made you happy or ... less unhappy, I'd do it. Isn't it obvious?"

[Hilary] At that, Hilary's silent a moment, watching him. Her brow is furrowed a little, or rather: her eyebrows are tugged together, creating two thin lines between them.

In the end, she says it anyway. That he shouldn't listen to her. That they should do what they already planned. Only this time she adds, still quietly: "If I knew what would make me happy, Ivan, I would ask for it." Her small shoulders lift and fall. "I wish I could love him. And I know I can't. So I give him up to you, because at least then he'll be safe."

[Ivan] Creatures so rich and beautiful and careless as they are shouldn't ache like this. They shouldn't be allowed to. They shouldn't be capable of it. But there's nothing but ache on his face, in her voice, in her weariness, in his long silences.

After a while his hand moves a little -- a bare flicker of gesture, ever so subtly an invitation. Or a request. Or a beseeching.

"Come here," he says. "Please come here and let me hold you."

[Hilary] Hilary hesitates, because of that tone in his voice or look in his eye or the way his gesture is so open, so accomodating, but then she seems like she's going to move forward, closer to him. And:

Anton gives a faint fit, wiggling a bit, starting to work himself up into something. And Hilary suddenly, viciously hates him. He won't wait. He won't ever wait. If she wants to be held, if she wants to spend six hours being fucked. She knows how many nannies she could hire if it were Dion's brat, she knows she'd never have to see him, and he could grow up sort of like Ivan, his mother swirling in beautiful and cold like a January wind through an open door on those rare occasions when she felt like paying attention to him. She knows she could lavish affection on him here and there, have no responsibility to him but signing things occasionally or telling someone else to make the decisions for where he goes to school, which doctor to take him to.

But right now he's here and starting to work himself up. He can't just lie there and sleep peacefully, and already she hates him as much as she hates beseeching, pleading, requests from the very young man who is Anton's father.

She makes a noise that's almost a growl and turns her head away from the baby, who in a matter of seconds has gotten perilously close to the precipice of outright wailing. Her head is turned to the side, her profile a mask of hatred, til she snaps a shout: "Dmitri!"

Which is the first time she's ever treated one of his servants, his kin, like her own. Come get it, she wants to tell him. Come get it, take it away, make it be silent. At least when it was inside me it wasn't loud.