Work Text:
Cyra
"He's hungry," I say, rolling over and going back to sleep.
It's Akos's turn to care for Baby Jorek. He gets up and goes to the nursery. I'll see them later.
It originally wasn't my intention to have children, ever. With my currentgift, I didn't ever want to risk inflicting any sort of pain on a child growing inside me. We didn't take any chances; we wouldn't even trust contraception to prevent an accidental pregnancy.
But then, one evening when we had been lying together for a while, Akos accidentally slipped.
We broke apart immediately. Akos swore it was an accident, and by the blush that crept on his face, I could tell that he was telling the truth. It made me realize, however, that all of our precautions would not be enough. Especially since we rather enjoyed the sensation, brief as it was. We needed to take a more permanent solution.
Although I swore that I had seen enough doctors to last one lifetime, we found an Ogran doctor that would remove my ovaries and freeze my eggs. I didn't think that was necessary at the time, but the clinic insisted that I might want to keep my options open. Akos had to stay with me the entire time to ensure that my currentgift wouldn't hurt the doctors.
Well. That at least gave us the opportunity to explore a myriad of new ways to love each other. It was a good choice, considering that at that point, we had already decided to get married.
I had once fantasized of becoming Cyra Kereseth, in more ways than just my birth name, but we decided to retain the Noavek name. Since I was the sovereign of Shotet, it was the practical thing to do. Our best friends know what our true parentage is, but we decided that it wasn't really necessary to broadcast to the nation. The Noavek name allows us to rule more effectively.
Before we hired a surrogate to carry our child for us, we agonized over whether we should even continue the Noavek bloodline at all. After all, Lazmet was a monster, as was his mother before him. Despite all of our faults, we decided that since Akos did not turn out cruel like his biological father, perhaps there wasn't a "monster gene" that we could accidentally pass down. It could have been the result of bad parenting.
When it's my turn to take care of Baby Jorek, I have to make sure that I am touching Akos at all times. We've made it work out. As Jorek grows older, he'll learn that he'll never be able to touch me by surprise. I'm getting better at controlling my currentgift, so he may be able to take my hand for short periods of time without Akos touching me, but he'll never be able to surprise me without feeling any pain. It makes me feel a little sad, but the joy of having him is offset by that one minor detail.
Being the child of two fate-favored families, Jorek naturally was born with a fate as well:
The first child of the family Noavek will bring peace.
Like all fates, its fairly cryptic, but it's a lot better than my fate: the third child of the family Kereseth will die in service to the family Noavek. The nations in our solar system are still bickering over the oracles. Maybe our child will do something about that. Maybe we'll come to war before that and the fate means something different. Like all Shotet children, he'll learn of his fate after he develops his currentgift.
It will be up to him to decide how he ends up fulfilling it.