Ivan Press

[Hilary] The two nurses Ivan hired to stay with Hilary in her new apartment don't realize that the screaming is fake. The shaking. The way she's doubled over, cheeks dry, shrieking and slapping at them when they get too close -- they don't realize it's a performance. She's not the best liar, but it's enough to get them to leave her alone. One calls Ivan, one calls the staff at the women's medical facility where her epically paid-off obstetrician is headed right now. They'll meet him there.

Where they are summarily dismissed from the company of the bitch they've been working for and the man who hired them. Where they are shunted aside in favor of a busy staff, a Silver Fang with compelling eyes and a soothing voice, a doctor who realizes after a rapid examination that

yes, of course, she needs a c-section immediately.

Of course.


She has few requests. She only wants a local anesthetic. She doesn't want Ivan in the room. She doesn't care very much past that. She's stopped screaming. She's dead calm, a thousand fathoms beneath the surface.

She drifts a little deeper, the world more distant than before, the voices harder to hear, the darkness impinging.


The baby is white.


Dimly she's aware that they're telling her it's a boy, and she's annoyed because she already knew that. Did they just forget all those ultrasounds? Fuzzily, she's aware of someone grabbing her arm, which she resists, but she can't move very easily as that arm is crooked around a blanket-wrapped warm thing that is very, very loud. She closes her eyes, putting her hand over its mouth, shh but someone moves her hand away and the warm thing starts to get quieter.

At the edges of her awareness she thinks she hears Ivan's voice cutting through the confusion, Ivan's familiar voice. She wants to ask him if the baby is sleeping or dead, since it's gotten quiet. She thinks it's dead. She thinks she hears someone say it's dead. It.

Well it's a he now, isn't it? Now that he's out of her. Now that he's between her arm and her body and not inside of her. She closes her eyes. She's very tired. She hurts.


The rest passes in a daze. She knows she startles, sharply and swearingly, when someone picks up the warm thing and moves him away, and she knows her insides clench up and twist when he starts crying again. She wonders if he kicks as hard as he did inside of her, the little brat.

They're moving her. Ivan's there. She can smell him. Funny, she never noticed things like his smell before. But he smells nice. She thinks she must smell awful right now. Doesn't know what time it is, how long it's been since she washed, how long it's been since he's been born, though really, does it count as being born when you don't have to fight your way out?


Oh, it's -- he's alive, then. And still white. Hilary stares at him, cheek against the back cushion of the seat in the car. Did they always have the carseat ready to go, then? He's so new. Even with the bumper cushion fuzzy against him he's so small. Eyes tightly closed, wriggling, crying out occasionally, sleeping in fits, hands in fists. She doesn't know quite where she is or what's going on. He's so very pink. And he has hair. Pale hair. Huh.

Something cracks, and coolness that turns to warmth rushes through her, runs over her skin. Droplets of water, gourd dust, and the haze of medication lifts so suddenly she feels like she's falling. She grabs out at something as the ache in her abdomen is soothed away, as she gasps at the shocking return to awareness and life.


There's a blanket over her. Ivan is in the back seat of the car with her brushing gourd dust off his palms, Dmitri is driving more slowly and carefully than usual, and her right hand is wrapped tightly around the swaddled bundle that is her son's feet, clenched hard enough that he's lucky there's so much fabric between him and his mother.

She stares at him. He's white.

She looks at Ivan. "Congratulations," she says dimly, and starts to cry.

[Ivan] On the appointed day of the appointed month, Hilary gives birth to a bastard of the Clan Crescent Moon.


There are details, of course. There are so many little intricate details, and she likely knows of none of them. She just knows: scream. Fake an emergency. She just insisted: local anesthesia. And Ivan stays outside.

Everything else was simply taken care of.

To be truthful, even Ivan is only marginally involved. A few critical junctures: the laying of these plans. The final vetting last night, just he and Max and Dmitri, sipping scotch, going over every last detail. Who will be where. Which hospital, which obstetrician. Who will dismiss the nurses with their final bonus check. Who will stay behind at the hospital to make sure all the forms are signed, all the evidence in place. When the new nurses will arrive. Who will call to be certain the jet is prepared, and when. Where the refueling stops will be. It's a long, long way to Novgorod.

Even now, Maxine's at the hospital, cold and meticulous. Yes, what a tragedy. Yes, please do give us the number for that grief and bereavement therapist you recommend. No, we'll handle the remains.


It's an executive car. There are two rows of seats behind the driver, facing one another. So like a Silver Fang: to take the very first trip of his young life in a limousine, and the second in a private jet. The baby -- the boy -- is swaddled tightly. He's so new, and so is the car seat. These are all details that had to be prepared.

There are two rows of seats, but Ivan sits beside Hilary. He keeps looking at it, him, his son, there on the other side of Hilary. The thing that she carried inside her for nine months is out now, and it's alive, and it belongs to him. The evidence his wanted, indelible, that once there was this.

The gourd breaks easily. Her wounds go away, just like that. Muscle and tissue and skin reknitting flawlessly. It shouldn't be so easy, but it is. She gasps. She looks at the nameless boy. She looks at his father, and she congratulates him, and then she starts to cry.

Ivan looks away from the boy. He looks at this woman that is his lover. It's strange, but the lack of the child, the suddenly deflated stomach -- it's more unfamiliar than her pregnancy became. He's not sure he knows her any better now than he did a day ago. Her tears make him awkward and uncertain. He doesn't know what to do.

He puts his arm around her and he pulls her against his side. He wraps his arms around her and cradles her head on his shoulder, in his palm. "Shh," he says, and he remembers this at least: remembers how to stroke her hair back, how to touch her cheek and her hair, softly, over and over. "Shhh."

[Hilary] Hilary has no idea that last night Ivan stayed up with Dmitri and Max figuring all these details out, sipping scotch, making notes, making plans, every last bit of it just in case. All of it in preparation for the possible rather than the inevitable: should the child come out pale-skinned and obviously without a trace of Spanish lineage, they would need all of these plans. All these plans that are now in motion, rolling steadily and tidily forward.

She doesn't remember being placed in the car or the blanket being wrapped around her, so she doesn't know if it was Ivan or someone else. She curled herself to the side, laying against the back of the seat rather than facing forward. Turned, interestingly enough, towards the carseat holding the newborn. Ivan didn't ride on the other side, the way some parents might, to flank and protect the child, so that if they should get hit on either side by some other car their own bodies might provide a cushion between glassy, chrome death and their baby.

He flanks Hilary, as though she is the thing that needs protection, sitting beside her though she is curled in such a way that he is essentially behind her, turned himself so that he can see past the curve of her dark head to the pale-haired child occasionally pursing its lips and wriggling, kicking. He's still all curled up, tightened up, his limbs close to his body because he's so used to having no room to stretch out. They waited to manipulate the medical staff til after his Apgar tests, and he's fine. They cleaned him up and weighed and measured him and he's fine. He's fine. He's alive and fine and healthy.

Every time they make a sound he turns towards them, his eyes tightly closed. Ivan remembers what Hilary does not -- right after he came out, he was noisy for more than just the few seconds she was aware of. He was moving around nonstop. He remembers his eyes opening and some nurse telling him so. He saw a finger given to the baby, he saw the way the boy grabbed hold and held so tight, whether he tested this himself or not. He watched as Hilary groggily stirred because someone was trying to see if she could sit up and feed, and he knows that it was Dmitri who was eventually given a bottle of formula to feed to the boy instead, and Dmitri who put him back in a basinet near the bed when the baby zonked out after his first feeding. Given to him by, like any true Silver Fang, a servant conscripted into nanny duty.

A few hours later, Dmitri had to do it again. In a few hours, maybe they'll get Dmitri to feed him a third time. Maybe Hilary or Ivan will. In any case: he's a very healthy little white baby boy. With fair hair and, when he opens his eyes, steel-gray ones that will perhaps change to green-hazel, or brown, like Hilary's. He is obviously Ivan's. He will be going on a jetplane to Russia before he's a week old. He will never know his mother.


Who is, at the moment, sobbing as though the child really did die, curled up against Ivan's body and the car and the carseat, her hand still wrapped around the boy's swaddled feet, tears running down her face so hard she's gasping and choking. So he holds her, almost awkwardly, his chest half-turned to her back, his arm around her as though to hold her together, shhing her like a child.

The boy starts crying, too, a tight, struggling wail that is shocking in its volume for coming from such a small thing as he is.

Hilary hiccups through her tears. "I'm empty," she gasps, shuddering, her tears staining Ivan's other arm where it pillows her head, "I'm empty."

[Ivan] And all those plans, all those what-ifs, all those contingencies failed to take this into account: that Hilary, so cold a mother, so borderline hateful toward the fetus in her womb, would react like this to its departing. Though perhaps it was never the infant, or its lack. Perhaps it's simply what she says:

I'm empty.

Hilary, who is terrified of the swallowing dark. Hilary, who needs pain, and domination, and something that skirts treacherously close to abuse to feel in herself.

"I'm here," Ivan murmurs, over and over. It's all he can think to say. The baby is bawling too. He doesn't know what to do about that, either. For a moment the very thought of that responsibility weighs down on him like panic. He thinks blindly, I can't, I can't -- but what comes out is, "It's okay. I'm here."

He can't reach the boy from here. He doesn't know what he'd do, even if he could. He stares at it over Hilary's dark hair, this tiny thing with the shockingly loud voice, with the fair hair and strange, mashed, blotchy face. He doesn't feel any paternal instinct toward it. No recognition, no attachment; only a sense of bewilderment, half-overwhelmed. It barely looks to be the same species, and yet --

it's his. Unquestionably. His; theirs.

"Don't cry." There's a note of pleading there. He's not sure if he means it for Hilary or the boy. "Please, don't cry."

[Hilary] What could he possibly do to soothe the wailing child, the sobbing woman? Both of whom are, in some way, his. Responsibility and panic clench together in him.

And in Hilary, there's nothing but emptiness. Her joints feel loose, her body deflated, every internal system thrown into a tailspin after preparing for some great physical struggle that was bypassed in a cloud of drugs. And Ivan holds her, begs her to stop crying, and all she can feel is hollow, perhaps the most terrifying thing she knows.

She doesn't want to be hungry. Maybe that's why she eats well, if not too much, not enough to explode into being fat, but why she doesn't ever want to be one of those women who likes the feeling of being hungry. She hates feeling hungry, empty, hollow, she doesn't want to be the thing that needs to devour. And right now she feels so empty, so empty, that it's the only thing that can make it into words.

No more words after that. She subsides into crying, and the boy just wails until her fingers find a tiny pacifier clipped to his blanket and eases it into his mouth. He refuses it, and she starts to say

shh, shh,

saying something to him in French, muttering and cupping her hand over his head until he shuts up. She deflates again, exhausted, and then they are at her apartment complex. It wasn't a very long drive.

Hilary's cheeks are wet. Her eyes are glassy. She stares at the boy, her sobs gone now, and closes her eyes. "There's no one upstairs, is there?" she asks quietly, hopefully.

[Ivan] Ivan is so weary right now. So wary. He feels raked thin, stretched taut. Even last night -- drinking with his closest, most trusted servants, laying these plans -- even then it had a certain excitement to it. An air of fantasy and intrigue; a gloss that's lost now in the bitter, hard details.

A boy, a woman, both of whom he's so dreadfully responsible for. Both of whom are crying, crying, and he can't do anything about either, and even when both are finally quiet he doesn't know how, doesn't know what, why, when they'll start again.

He still holds her. He can hardly say why himself, but he does: his arm around her shoulders, clasping her against his side, his chest. "No one," he reassures her. "Not until morning, and then the new nurses will be here. They'll think you've lost your son, and they'll have instructions not to bother you if you want to be left alone."

There's a faint click as Dmitri exits. Only seconds before he opens the door. Ivan reaches around; he can't see from this angle, and he does it by touch -- he wipes her face, smooths moisture from her cheeks. "Can you walk?" he asks gently, as though she were still torn and tender from a childbirth she never really experienced. Even the wound is gone. It feels like there should be something, some mark that

once, there was this,

but there's nothing. No wound, no ache, no scar, no living thing inside her kicking at her organs, moving to the sound of its sire's voice.

[Hilary] It would be quite romantic to say that that's why the baby kicked the shit out of her every time Ivan came around, every time he spoke. Even Hilary knows it was probably the rage and not some mystical awareness that yes, this was his father, coming close to his mother. But it would be such a sweet little thought, would it not?

They are not sweet little people. Not really, no matter how much sweetness they might indulge with or pretend. Ivan's weary and if she knew that, if she cared to hear it, Hilary might slap him. He's weary.

She sits there, numb, as he wipes her tears and asks her if she can move, if she's all right to walk. She huffs a breath, longing for the cool confidence that she had once upon a time on a yacht, in a hotel room, before Ivan knew just how broken she is, how breakable. She looks at the boy and tells him in her head she wishes he'd never existed, even while she has her hands on him, hasn't let go since Ivan healed her.

"All right," she whispers, either to the talk about the nurses that will come tomorrow or to the question about whether or not she can walk. She looks at Dmitri and sighs as though his appearance frustrates her, and starts to look for how to get the goddamn child unbuckled. After roughly five seconds she gets annoyed, stops, and Dmitri reaches in and does it. Unclasps the carseat from the car, lifts the carrier, and takes the little boy away.

It's the first time Hilary's let go of him since she came out of her drugged, post-surgical stupor. She watches the door close behind Dmitri,

then follows Ivan out of the car, shedding the blanket. She's dressed simply, in loose-legged yoga pants hanging low on her hips and a large -- for Hilary -- sweater in pale purple. Her shoes were just slipped on when someone -- she doesn't remember who -- helped her dress. She frowns as she unfolds from the limousine and touches her abdomen, then grimaces faintly. "Let's go upstairs," she says quietly, "I want to get this bandage off."

Details. Bitter, hard little details.


So they ascend. Dmitri with them, holding the carrier with the baby inside unless Ivan took it from him -- Hilary certainly won't be carrying it up the elevator. No one here knows her. Knows she was pregnant, and they do look when they see a young man and a woman and a baby in a carseat,

but when that baby isn't around any longer and no one ever sees it and they never hear any crying and the woman seems as distant and cold as anyone could be, they will not want to ask what happened. Even if they do, after ten seconds talking to Hilary, they will wish they hadn't.


Upstairs, the apartment is empty as it has not been since the first time Hilary saw it with Ivan before the ballet. It's quiet. Soon enough, whether Dmitri helped them carry everything up -- even for twenty-four hours or less the child will need diapers and formula and a hundred other tiny acccessories -- or not, they're alone.

With the bastard.

Hilary excuses herself a moment as the carrier is set down on the coffee table with the baby inside of it. She goes to the bathroom and closes the door, lifting up her sweater and pushing down her pants and taking the bandage off. It's stained; she drops it in the trash and, using a pair of cuticle clippers, removes her own sutures. Instantly, even as the strings are removed, some lingering healing finally finishes off the rest. The wound it came for to begin with is gone. Forever.

She drops the bits of black line in the trash as well, washes her hands meticulously, turns off the light, and returns to the living room, where Ivan has, for the past few minutes, been alone with his son.

[Ivan] Ivan notices these things: he notices that Hilary's hand never leaves the infant. He notices that she was the one to shush it, to put a pacifier in its wailing mouth. He notices that she stares at it balefully, that she's probably wishing it away in her mind the same way he's heard her wish it away aloud once, twice, more.

He notices that when Dmitri takes the baby, she watches it go. And then she doesn't seem to care at all, and he notices all this, but he has no idea what it means.

She disappears into the bathroom, above. He sits in the living room and Dmitri sets the baby in front of him; thinks a moment to congratulate his master on a fine, healthy baby boy, another Priselkov for the lineage, even if it this one is a byblow. He thinks about it, but then he sees the look on Ivan's face, pensive, a little puzzled, frowning, and he thinks better of it.

He retires to the kitchen. He is not the household cook, but he cooks anyway. It gives him an excuse to be somewhere else. Doing something else, until later tonight they take the child and board the jet and fly away from its mother.


Left behind, Ivan stares at the boy. It's quiet now. It keeps sleeping. After it was born, they gave it to Hilary and tried to make her feed it, but she was groggy; she had been sedated. He wasn't sure if she asked for it herself or if the nurses, frightened by her screaming, asked for it. He supposes it doesn't matter. Eventually they took the baby from her because it wasn't latching, she wasn't feeding it, they came out into the hall where he was waiting, cool as spring water, reading The Economist while Dmitri, irony of ironies, did the pacing. They went toward Dmitri first, assuming -- his age, his restlessness -- and Ivan did not correct them.

Dmitri fed the boy first. Held it in hands that knew how to hold a child, eased a rubber nipple into its tiny mouth and fed it. Ivan watched him and wondered if Dmitri ever held him like that.


This is the closest he's been to the boy since it was born. It's sleeping now, but soon enough it'll wake up and wail for food. After a long moment he picks up the carrier; sets it on his lap. Looks at the child. It's an ugly little thing, he thinks. He doesn't think he sees any similarity between it and himself, except for hair and skintone, though Maxine had taken one look in the hospital and told him in her offhand, uninvested way,

it looks like you.

Congratulations.


Ivan looks up when Hilary comes back. Her balance is different. The wound is gone. It's like it never was. The baby, the surgery, all of it -- all that's left to show is a few extra pounds on her frame, which she'll probably despise because it makes her feel so fat and work to rid herself of; and the baby, of course. In its carrier, on his lap.

He watches Hilary return. Watches her come closer. "What are you naming him?" he asks quietly.

[Hilary] The boy stares at Ivan when he puts its carrier on his lap. His face is only about eight, maybe ten inches away; it's blurry to the newborn, but it's there, and in the bizarre wonderment of new life, he is already putting together patterns, attaching voices to faces, forming bonds that will never be returned, creating in himself the core of an ache that will last his whole life, longing for a relationship that will be dashed against the rocks within a day or so. Less. He might never understand how that ache evolved along with the ability to walk and talk and run and rule and manipulate; he might never understand what it is he's looking for.

Right now, he just stares unconsciously at Ivan's face, discerning its shape, waking up like it keeps doing at random intervals, and he kicks his legs in the blanket and thrashes his arms up and down and wiggles himself, alert and interested and then very very tired and falling asleep again before Hilary even comes out of the bathroom and back into the living room.

She sighs when she sees him with the carrier on his lap and sits down next to him, staring at the boy.

"Anton," she says, then, because the truth is she already thought about this, had a choice between one long-winded name full of Spanish ancestors and one more fitting with his actual paternity: "Anton Emmerich Agustin Ivanovich... Press, I suppose. Or whatever your Russian name is."

[Ivan] There's a faint, rueful smile on Ivan's lips when that name first crosses hers. He remembers talking about this with her a long time ago. Or perhaps he merely wrote it in a letter. She suggested her brother's name. He mentioned Anton, for no other reason than that he liked it. He wonders if that's why she named the boy that. To make him happy.

"Anton Ivanovich," he says, softly. Because that's what he'll be called, perhaps for the rest of his life -- because in the homeland of his House there are no middle names, there are no names that honor five generations of ancestors the way his own does. That's a pretentious, pseudo-anglican invention one of his recent forebears popularized, the same way his last name was bastardized to something american. "Anton Ivanovich Priselkov."

He lifts the carrier off his lap then. Sets it gently on the coffee table. It's like a thing. A clumsy piece of decor. He sits back on the couch and considers the baby, shoulder to shoulder with the woman that created it.

"Who are Emmerich and Agustin?" he asks.

[Hilary] Anton, he wrote to her in a letter, though he said it would have to be Antony if it were Dion's -- assumed in the letter, assumed that there was no chance it was his own -- and that's not as dignified. But now: Anton. And a host of other names, which he asks about now.

The child stirs a bit when the carrier moves, but settles and continues to sleep. Hilary looks blandly from him to Ivan, and keeps her eyes on the man instead of the boy.

"My brother's name was Emmerich Agustin Laurent de Broqueville," she tells him, the first time her own maiden name has passed through her lips to him. She must not know her brother and Ivan share at least one name. Fucking Fangs. "He was a Philodox."

[Ivan] That brings his eyes from the infant. He looks at Hilary, an eyebrow quirking faintly; a hint of humor there. Just a glimmer.

"Laurent is one of my middle names," he says. "The first, actually. After my eldest greatuncle, the patriarch of our little branch of the family. I suspect he'll be rather to hear about Anton, even if he is illegitimate."

A pause. The humor fades. He reaches to Hilary, touches her cheek, her face.

"I'll have to write Dion immediately. Inform him of the terrible news, and that I'll be exiling myself for a Umbral quest of atonement or ... some such thing. In reality I'll board a plane tonight and bring the boy to Novgorod. I should be back in a week or so, but the boy will stay behind, where my distant kin will raise him. I suspect if he proves to be trueborn, my closer relatives, perhaps even my parents, will want to move to Russia for his sake.

"He'll lack for nothing. I'm the only Garou in my family for generations, and I don't expect to ever have a true mate. My family knows a bastard is all they're likely to get from me. They'll treat him like a king."

Another pause; a little more hesitation. He has no idea if she wants to hear this. If she even cares, "If you'd like... if you want, I mean... I'll have pictures sent to you. Updates. Perhaps you could even visit him from time to time."

[Hilary] She lifts her eyebrows faintly when he tells her that Laurent is one of his names, too. She looks at his face suddenly, as intent as the boy -- Anton, one supposes, since he has a name, even if it isn't legal -- and then reaches out and touches his lean, narrow jawline, his full and curving lips. "You look a little like him," she whispers, lost for a moment. It's not clear if she means Anton, or Emmerich, or maybe even his eldest greatuncle, but she's never seen him.

Her thumb stops stroking his lips and rests at the corner of his mouth. "Do you have to go with him?" she asks quietly. "Can't one of the servants just take him to Russia instead?"

Nothing about what the boy will or won't want for. How he'll be treated. If he'll be loved.

And nothing about what she wants to do with the child, if anything.

[Ivan] The truth is, the boy will want for nothing -- except love.

Because he won't be loved. Not the way a parent is meant to love a child. The distant cousins he'll be left with will treasure what he means, what he stands for, what he could do for them if only he lived long enough to First, to gain rank, to become prominent. If Ivan's uncles and aunts go back, if even his parents go back, they might even be fond of him. But he'll also be envied because of his wealth and privilege, set apart because of it; grow up spoiled and superficial and with some buried ache, because he won't even have what Ivan had.

An intermittently attentive father. A gay, laughing, utterly irresponsible mother. Not even that much.

Still. Perhaps to comfort her, or perhaps to assuage the small part of himself that understands that such irresponsibility is terrible, is disgusting, Ivan tells a white lie. He makes up a little fantasy in which the boy grows up better than he ever could here, with his parents half-insane, with his half-siblings resentful. Ivan thinks about private tutors and pony-sleighs and ice skating on the lake in winter; he thinks about sable coats and the latest video games in a private movie theater; he thinks about occasional pictures of the boy growing up, enough that he can take one out and smile proudly, perhaps even show Dmitri, but never so much that he'll ever have to worry about it. Care for it. Protect it, clothe it, keep it warm and fed and

loved.


Her hand is on his face. They've touched each other often in these few moments. She touches his mouth and his jawline; tells him he looks like 'him'. His son, perhaps. Or her brother.

He looks back at her for a moment. Then his hand covers hers. He turns his head and kisses her fingertips.

"He's my blood. I should take him myself. I should do this much for him before leaving him half an orphan."

He has that much clarity, at least.

A softening then, "Come with me. Unless you think Dion will come searching for you?"

[Hilary] "What should I do for him?" she whispers back to him, her fingers kissed the way he does after they've fucked, before they've fucked, when he's just pretending that they're some half-normal couple going to fancy parties, fancy restaurants, fancy everything. As though they're not animals and don't turn into monsters when he fucks her, which is the closest he comes to loving her.

She's missing so many chances to answer questions, to help Ivan understand her. He wants to know if she wants pictures, if she could maybe visit, and the chances of that even happening are minimal. Too painful, perhaps; too troublesome, more likely. The baby is 'dead'; maybe it's just too much of a risk for her to contemplate. Someone might realize the awful lie.

Her brows tug together, though, when he talks of the baby being his blood, he should take him himself. He sounds almost protective. He sounds -- if not paternal, then at least responsible. And it vaguely disgusts her. She is vaguely jealous. She is defensive. And bereft.

what should she do for him?

What can she do for him.

[Ivan] [EMPAFEE]
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 4, 4, 5, 7 (Success x 1 at target 6)

[Ivan] [GRUMP.]
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 3, 3, 4, 10 (Success x 1 at target 7)