Chapter Text
One has know her intimately for the last half hour; the other for the better part of two centuries.
It simply isn’t fair to compare what she just experienced with Cee to what she feels with Zelda.
Cee also does not talk to her like she is an idiot most of the time and he has never killed her or lied to her.
If she were going to work with anyone else, it would be Cee. They have so much in common, more, in fact, than she probably ever has with Zelda.
But it hadn’t been enough to work up that feeling, the one that apparently had nothing to do with sex.
She hadn’t expected that to be great either.
It was sweet and gentle and slow and she does know how to tilt her hips and squeeze her thighs to find her pleasure this way. While it might have been her first time in the flesh, it was not her first time with leather or ivory or silicone.
Her gasp near the end is genuine.
But she also knows it has been a mistake the moment he kisses her after and she wonders how long she has to stay without it seeming strange.
Just friends looms large in her mind.
It’s disappointing.
It’s frightening.
It's really exactly what she expected.
Guilt stacks like stones on her chest.
She kisses him goodnight and his hand lingers at the small of her back.
His smile is so lovely.
She should have never brought him into this.
Zelda will find out.
She’s certain she will say or do something that will give herself away.
More guilt. More stones.
She may be sick from it before the night is over.
Zelda has never made any claims of faithfulness.
Do whom thou wilt isn’t a far cry from do as thou wilt and her sister is devout.
What had happened tonight had nothing to do with revenge.
But the fact remains that Zelda had had that man in their house, in their very room, and no amount of sage could erase its lingering after effects.
At least Hilda hadn’t done that. She’d even had the decency to clean herself up in his bathroom before she came home.
Washing away the evidence like she’d committed some crime--she feels rather like she has when she sees Zelda in the kitchen, pretending she is not waiting up for her.
She isn’t made for this.
So she simply tells Zelda.
Zelda does not react well.
It’s been so long since Zelda has come at her this way.
She will die tonight.
The question is only what size the death will be.
The buttons on her dress pop when confronted with Zelda’s impatience. She hears them fall, will have to find them before breakfast tomorrow. Zelda pushes the fabric from her shoulders; she helps by shoving it past her hips and kicking it away along with her shoes.
She is almost certain this death will be the smaller, sweeter kind--though the path there is not going to be sweet. She’d had that earlier tonight and this is what comes after. This is what she chose.
There will be no repairing the antique lace Zelda’s nails have just dug through to reach her.
The table’s edge is pressing into her in a way that will leave bruises. She’ll have to heal them later herself. Generally she cherishes the marks that Zelda leaves in her wake, the ones her sister couldn’t hold back—the ones that are easily hidden under her clothes from niece and nephew—but she doesn’t think she wants the weeks’ long reminder of that look in Zelda’s eyes when she’d told her.
The way Zelda has caught her at the back of the neck, the way she’s pressing her down until her cheek is rubbing against the tabletop with every thrust of her fingers--there very well might be a bruise there too.
She pushes herself up onto her elbows, despite the warning pinch of fingernails at her hairline, and something changes in the angle Zelda’s fingers are driving into her.
She moans, because, Satan knows, Zelda knows how to chase the most minute responses of her body.
“Come, sister, or I will kill you.”
And it’s gone just like that.
Zelda’s voice is killing-stroke vulnerable.
She risks it.
“Let me up, Zelds.”
She would have sworn it wasn’t possible, but Zelda looks for all the world like she’s afraid of her.
“Show me that you don’t only want me now because someone else does.”
Zelda’s mouth soothes the ache she’d caused, keeps at her until there’s a much deeper ache.
Her tongue steals her breath but it comes back in a gasp that sounds like her sister’s name.
Things are not as awkward with Cee as she had anticipated.
They laugh about it in the end.
He says maybe they should rewind and go on an actual date and she agrees.
She spends her nights in Zelda’s bed.
Maybe they are making up for lost time.
Maybe they are both proving a point.
Cee is gone and the stones on her chest are back.
It is her fault. Somehow. She is being justly punished.
She has nowhere to go now that the shop is closed. Nowhere to be. No one outside of her family to talk to.
It stings to be the one left even if she knows she has no right to feel it. Even if she knows very well it wouldn’t have lasted more than another week even if he hadn’t up and disappeared.
How pathetic she must look.
Zelda doesn’t even mock her.
A spoon slips off one of their mother’s best saucers and clatters to the floor.
She thinks of the old adage but doesn’t say it.
She just picks the spoon up off the floor and sits in on the counter to be washed later.
The last time she had said it Zelda had stolen a baby.
And just look how well that had turned out.
After Solstice, she’d all but moved back into her old room. She’d watched Zelda rocking Lettie to sleep those last few nights. Her heart broke to see her sister saying goodbye rather than goodnight.
She wishes she could give this to Zelda. A child to keep. A child to be hers, theirs. One they weren’t duty-bound to keep at niece-distance no matter how much she felt daughter-close.
It isn’t the first time she’s thought about it.
The summer before Edward had died she was forming a plan that she’d never gotten the nerve to propose to her sister.
But Zelda would have been a part of it. Had to be a part of it.
How else would they make a baby together?
Beautiful strangers never say no to Zelda.
A warlock from a distant country they are unlikely to ever visit again. Exactly the right time of month. Herbs and potions to all but guarantee it. Ideally her mouth, her every sense, filled with Zelda while whoever it was filled her with a baby.
They’d travel with the baby in tow. Show her everything. Have a little house wherever they went so it always felt like home.
Her plan still had all the logic of a dream.
But then they’d gotten that call and everything had changed.
The thought of bringing someone into the world who could be taken away at any second was now unthinkable, abhorrent.
And there was Sabrina, lovely sweet Sabrina, who needed them so much. And Ambrose who needed them in a different way.
And they had made a family.
She bleeds each month like clockwork almost to the very hour.
That she hasn’t thought of it, or rather the absence of it, until this very moment is unlike her.
She’s been preoccupied.
Surely not.
The Dark Lord may very well have a sense of humor but certainly it doesn’t run this much to the absurd.
She gives it another day. And then another.
She still knows the ingredients like the back of her hand even though she’s had no call to use them since she gave up midwifery for the mortuary business.
She laughs at herself, to herself, as she casts the spell.
She repaints her toenails, foot propped on the edge of the tub, as she waits because it is going to be nothing. Just some quirk of her system and she might as well get on with things that are real, like her need for a pedicure.
The liquid in the copper bowl hisses, turns blue.
Hilda gapes at it.
She runs the test for a second time and gets the same result: positive.
She runs it for the third time, a charmed number.
Positive.
She is positively pregnant.
Incredulity turns to elation in the space of a few seconds.
Most of the troubling details fall away.
She brings her hand to her mouth to hold in the happiness about to spill out of her.
She fails.
It’s only later she realizes how truly dumbstruck she was that she hadn’t cleaned the counter up after herself.
She’s stretched out on her bed, trying to figure out the best way to share her news with her sister without aggravating Zelda’s blood pressure when she hears her sister’s voice and her niece’s, raised.
And coming from the bathroom.
She rarely curses but she does now, a blue streak until she steps into the bathroom.
Her whole family is there but it’s Zelda she addresses.
This is not the way she would have chosen to tell her. Not at all.
This is all wrong. Zelda has gone pale as death, looks about as steady on her feet as the undead.
But Sabrina is happy.
Her happiness multiples, would be exponential if only Zelda would smile instead of looking as if she wanted to cry.
It’s just the two of them now. (Or three and that thought makes her giddy.)
“Say something, sister.”
Zelda is just misunderstanding.
She reaches to take her hands. If only she’d listen and let her explain, but Zelda steps back as if she’d threatened her.
“How can you smile ?” Zelda asks.
“What?”
What a question—she laughs.
“Of course, I’m smiling, silly. I’m happy.
“A baby, Zelda. We’re having a baby.”
It’s the first time she’s said it out loud and she’s in love with how it sounds.
She isn’t sure why Zelda should bring Cee up now.
They are having a baby.
He really has nothing to do with it at this point.
She steps closer and closer until Zelda is within kissing distance--because there will be kissing once Zelda has let this sink in.
“I meant us, obviously. You and me.”
Zelda’s eyes are cold; her lips have tightened into a thin line.
Hilda frowns.
“What makes you think I have the least interest in helping you raise your bastard?”
Zelda tears her apart.
She listens and cries—quietly or it will only make Zelda worse.
She cowers like usual.
She can’t even find it in her to defend Sabrina when Zelda insults the very duality that makes their niece so much herself.
“You could always do the sensible thing and brew yourself a tea.”
That Zelda can look at her and suggest—
She finds a voice for one word: “No.”
“Or I could expedite the matter with a shove down the stairs.”
She finds exactly how much her palm burns when she slaps Zelda outside of a nightmare.
She’s never hit anyone in anger, but Zelda crosses a line neither of them knew was there when she threatens not only Hilda’s life but the new, fragile life within her.
She leaves and has no idea where she is going.
She only knows she needs to be away from Zelda.
“The babe is fine,” Desmelda says as soon as she opens the door and finds Hilda on the other side.
“Good. But I’ve come about a different one.”
Her hand falls to her abdomen.
“How in Satan’s name did that happen?”
She has to smile at Desmelda’s reaction. She can see how it is a bit of a shock.
Desmelda motions for her to come in.
“The way it usually does, unfortunately,” she explains and immediately regrets it. “I don’t mean that.”
She covers her face with her hands.
“Now I’ve jinxed the poor thing and I’ve only known about it for a few hours.”
“Sit.”
She sinks into a worn chair facing the fire.
“Sister-of-yours isn’t at home weeping with joy then?”
“No.” Hilda doesn’t want to recall the way Zelda had looked, what she had said but it all comes unbidden, as do her tears. “She hates me now.”
In the room behind them, someone else starts to cry.
Desmelda goes to fetch Lettie.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have just shown up here. But I didn’t have anywhere else to go.”
“Stay.”
Desmelda returns with baby Leticia in her arms.
So many stones on her chest now that she can hardly breathe.
“You know how much it hurt her to give Lettie up,” Hilda says. “This is salt in the wound.”
“Salt can heal but it burns first.”
“Do you want that wee one you are carrying?”
“Yes.” So much already. But she’d never wanted it alone.
“I thought she’d want it too, deep down.
“Maybe it’s me she doesn’t want. Or anything of mine.”
Leticia is still fussing, angry at being woken up.
“She wanted Lettie. Zelda loves her. She loves Sabrina.
"Why doesn’t she want ours?”
“Did you come here for my advice?”
Hilda nods.
“Leave her. Go and be happy.”
Hilda knows she won’t and so does Desmelda.
The older witch shrugs and deposits Lettie into her arms.
“Get this one back to sleep. Good practice.”
She almost tells her that she doesn’t need any practice. She’d had plenty with Sabrina and with Lettie herself but it is warm by the fire and Lettie is just the right weight in her arms and she has so much thinking to do before morning. So many decisions to make before she faces Zelda again.