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It was nice in a way, not having to deal with the worst of it for three months. It had slipped to the back of her mind actually, just mild aches and pains, so she had focused on Holland's recovery after the most recent Athos incident. And he'd started doing better.
But life had a funny way of evening out.
Like a fist in her stomach, clenching and unclenching as if trying to scoop out her insides. Settling there and unmoving, leaving her breathless and confined to bed.
At least Holland was doing better, even if better meant shambling with a cane. At least he was actually using the support at hand. Things would be doubly awful if they were both struggling; it wasn't as if they had anyone else to fall back on.
"Did you ever get in that doctor visit?" Holland asked as he carefully placed a hot cup of tea at the bedside table. She was skeptical she could put anything in her stomach but the intention was sweet.
"Mostly useless," Ojka mumbled, wishing she could bury herself further into the wool blanket. She hated when the pain locked her into wakefulness. "Just gave the usual advice, then said I'd probably be forever childless."
"He actually said that?"
Ojka didn't answer. She wished she could reach in and cut out the source of the pain; ibruprofen only took the edge off. She understood to a degree what Holland had meant about wanting to reshape himself like clay.
She didn't complain when he crawled into bed and carefully wrapped his lanky arms around her. Comfortably warm, presence more soothing than any heating pad.
"Do you want children?" Holland asked quietly.
She just sighed, pain slightly easing but leaving her body heavy with exhaustion. "No point wondering. Just want to sleep."
It was the wrong question. She hadn't actively imagined anything, aside from the random ponderings during her teen years that she would make a better mother than any of her so called caretakers.
But Ojka had experienced this pain for the last three years. Bleeding too irregular to predict. Disabling week-long pain when it came by. Treating symptoms instead of the cause.
And she might never be able to have a child of her own the usual way because of it. All that pain for no benefit. An unfair trade as Holland would say.
It wasn't about the child. It was about the choice that was being denied to her, unable to even want to be a parent. Though certainly not housewife material, she wouldn't be half-bad at motherhood, she figured.
But it was what it was.