Post by indifferentred on Jul 20, 2012 1:53:55 GMT 10
Title: Holding the Fort
Summary: Why is it that when she is ill, he falls apart?
Rating: PG
Warnings: None
Author's Notes: Just major Cavall-family fluff, the result of a preliminary plot-bunny for the Decathlon.
“How is she, Baird?” He is nervous, and with good reason. He hasn’t seen Vivenne this ill since the days after Margarry’s birth, when she was too weak to even hold a spoon. The Duke of Queenscove smiles comfortingly, looking for all the world as though he has not just ridden ninety miles in foul weather to be here. He is a childhood friend of Vivenne’s, after all, and has been the family healer ever since Vivenne first suspected she was pregnant with Eiralys.
“Oh, with rest, she’ll be fine,” he reassures Wyldon. “The fever has just taken her harder than it did you. I advise complete quiet and bed rest. No conversation, plenty of sleep, good nourishing foods… you know the sort of thing.”
He nods, breathing a private sigh of relief. “Yes… of course.” Wyldon offers his hand to Baird. “Thank you for your help.”
Queenscove grips it firmly, and then warns, “And by ‘complete rest’, I mean that she mustn’t be bothered by anything.” Seeing the bemusement on the other man’s face, Baird shuffles awkwardly on his feet. At last, he prompts, “I understand that your housekeeper and nursemaids are ill too…”
“Yes,” Wyldon replies briskly. “No matter - I’m sure I can manage the girls alone for as long as it takes.”
“Of course.” Baird pauses briefly. “Good luck, Cavall.”
“How are you feeling?” he asks, easing himself onto the edge of their bed. Vivenne, flushed and sweaty, raises her eyebrows at him, and he chuckles softly. “A foolish question, my darling, I’m sorry.” He picks up her hand and kisses it.
She smiles and waves him away with her other. “At least I’m not in labour this time,” she points out fairly. “What did Baird say?” Her breathing is heavier, he notes, more laboured and her eyes are already shutting.
“Just that after a few days of complete rest, you would be well again. You’re not to worry about a thing,” he whispers.
“I always worry,” she confides sleepily and he squeezes the hand he is still holding.
“Well, try not to, for the next few days at least. Promise?”
“Mmm,” she murmurs and turns her head aside, curling into her usual sleeping position. He slips quietly from the room.
Wyldon balances the heavy, leather bound book on the arms of the nursery chair, and looks across at his waiting daughters, all four tucked up in bed. It has been a trying day, and he wants nothing more than a moment of peace and quiet, but a story at bedtime has been part of the routine in the Cavall household since Eiralys was old enough to toddle, and Wyldon is nothing if not consistent. “Once upon a time there was a handsome prince - “
He does not get any further. “Will you do all the voices, Da?” a small voice asks.
“The, er, voices?” he asks curiously.
“Yes. Mama always does funny voices for all the different people,” three-year-old Margarry lisps plaintively. Her eyes, so like Vivenne’s, are presently far too solemn for such a small child.
He sighs and forces a smile. “Of course. Voices. Well, then…” He clears his throat, and turns back to the book.
When the story is finished, and the girls are all asleep, he creeps quietly from the room, straightening a quilt, picking up a stray stuffed bear as he goes, and enters the room next door. Normally, he would be at the other end of the house, in his study, but while Vivenne and the nursemaids are ill, he has moved himself next to the nursery, so as to be near the girls in case of trouble. His steward has left letters and assorted paperwork on his desk in his absence, and he looks at it with an expression verging on horror. He deals with the running of the estate, of course he does, but Vivenne has benignly invaded this area of his life, as she has all the others, he finds, and now it seems so difficult to be dealing with any of it when she isn’t curled up in his study armchair, offering helpful comments, or standing behind him as he works, pointing out mistakes and making corrections.
He has just drifted off to sleep over his paperwork when he hears it. The lung-bursting cry coming from the next room. He lurches blindly up from his desk, and stumbles to the door. Cathrea’s small face is red and scrunched up as she wails, woken from some childhood nightmare; he plucks her five year old body from the bed and rests her against his broad chest, leaning from one side to the other as he has seen Vivenne do countless times. The crying only grows louder and his ears begin to whine in protest. Wincing, he carries her from the room before she can wake the others, murmuring comforting words into her hair. Her Sight can take her like this sometimes and it always grieves him that they can do nothing more at such times than hold her. At last, the crying slows to a shuddering whimper, which dies away into a series of intermittent hiccups. He settles himself into the largest chair by the fireplace, grimacing as his shirt, damp with Cathrea’s tears, sticks to his chest. His daughter is already fast asleep again, but he remains where he is, too exhausted to move another muscle. His last thought before he drifts into slumber is: Goddess, Vivenne, how do you do it?
He wakes early the next morning, when Cathrea slips from his lap and wanders next door to rouse her sisters. Wyldon himself potters along to the other side of the house, to visit his wife. Her lady’s maid is already up and about, and she curtsies briefly as Wyldon enters. Vivenne is propped up against her pillows, still asleep, but he is pleased to note that her cheeks are no longer so flushed with fever, and that she seems less restless than she had done even a day ago. Calmed and comforted, he kisses his fingertips and touches them to her forehead, before leaving.
When the Cavall girls traipse into breakfast the next morning, it is with some alarm that their father notes the mud on their clothes and the bits of twig that Sunarine is surreptitiously trying to remove from Margarry’s hair. “And what, may I ask, have you been doing?” he inquires sternly. They look as though they’ve been dragged through a hedge backwards!
“Nothing,” nine-year-old Eiralys answers, far too quickly, sliding into her chair. When their parents are at home, the girls always eat with them, rather than taking their meals in the nursery - a throwback from Vivenne’s informal childhood. “Is Mama any better, Papa?” He tries to ignore the smudge of dirt on her pert little nose and instead focuses on cutting and buttering a fresh roll that Sunarine has just passed to him.
Returning the plate, he replies, “She’s very tired and still quite ill, but she’ll be better very soon. So I want all of you to stay away from that part of the house, yes? Your mother needs peace and quiet, not a quartet of rampaging ruffians.”
“Yes, Papa,” four dutiful voices reply.
There is a knock at the door, and a moment later, Master Bryn enters. Wyldon’s steward inherited his position from his father, just like Wyldon himself, and there is no one (except perhaps Vivenne) that the lord of Cavall trusts more. “Pardon, m’lord, but I thought you ought to know that a few of the hedges in the bottom paddock have been badly damaged. Mayhap we’ve had poachers on the land in the night.”
"Anything missing?"
Bryn coughs slightly, looking somewhat embarrassed. "Nothing, my lord... except some of old Lady Robina's daffodils."
Wyldon sets down his knife and fork and directs a penetrating, and decidedly unhappy, glare at his suddenly red-faced daughters. “I shouldn’t worry, Bryn. I very much fear that our culprits are rather closer to home.”
“Wyl?”
He looks up from the fief accounts, his mind awhirl with Vivenne’s peculiar notation marks, to find the lady herself standing in the doorway, pale but unbowed, swathed in what looks suspiciously like his dressing gown. Lit by soft candlelight, her hair shows up more russet than brown, and the shadows glossing over her neck and face make her look at once mysterious and alluring. He first saw her by candlelight, fifteen years ago, he recalls. She is barefoot, he notes, as he rises and moves forwards to guide her into a chair. “Vivenne. How are you feeling?”
She chuckles dryly, accepting his arm, but leads him back to the desk instead. “Like I’ve been beaten all over by the Smith God’s own hammer, but I’ll live. Where are the girls?” Her voice is hoarser than normal, dry from the fever, he supposes. But it is just like her, to be worrying about everyone else. “All in bed,” he reassures her quietly. “Asleep by now, I shouldn’t wonder.” She nods, but her eyebrows are raised when she asks, “Are you sure? They aren’t, say, in the stables feeding apples to Heart, or in the orchard climbing trees?”
His mouth drops open and his eyebrows shoot up. He doesn’t know whether he wants to laugh, cry, or run for the door. “WHAT?” The rapidly growing quirk at the corner of his wife’s mouth, however, alerts him to the fact that he is being teased and he leans back against the desk, bracing himself with his arms. “Just a jest, my dear,” she smiles lightly. “I poked my head round the nursery door on my way up - fast in the arms of Gainel, all four of them. Anna mentioned the hedges when she brought me some willowbark tea. But the flowers were beautiful.”
He frowns grumpily. “Hmm, very funny. I’ll have them mucking out the stables for a month.” In punishment for her teasing, he adds, “Talking of ‘up’ - you shouldn’t be.”
She lets out a breathy laugh of disbelief, hands on her hips. “The words ‘pot’, ‘kettle’ and ‘charred’ spring to mind, somehow,” she replies tartly. “I’m not the one who was out in the fields helping with the harvest the day after I’d been shot through the shoulder by bandits.” The old spark has flared between them again as they spar, her stubborn archness twining around his dry wit and bringing him to the good humour he shows around no one else. He tuts softly, inspecting his nails. At last, addressing the air, he announces, “My father told me it was a mistake to marry a woman who’d argue back.”
She snorts indignantly but, relenting at the last moment, leans in to kiss him sweetly and lingeringly. He blinks. “Careful,” he croaks when his senses have returned. “When a woman kisses a man like that, he might try to take liberties with her person.”
Vivenne leans closer, strands of dark hair brushing against his cheek. “When a woman kisses a man like that, it’s usually because she wants him to.”
Summary: Why is it that when she is ill, he falls apart?
Rating: PG
Warnings: None
Author's Notes: Just major Cavall-family fluff, the result of a preliminary plot-bunny for the Decathlon.
“How is she, Baird?” He is nervous, and with good reason. He hasn’t seen Vivenne this ill since the days after Margarry’s birth, when she was too weak to even hold a spoon. The Duke of Queenscove smiles comfortingly, looking for all the world as though he has not just ridden ninety miles in foul weather to be here. He is a childhood friend of Vivenne’s, after all, and has been the family healer ever since Vivenne first suspected she was pregnant with Eiralys.
“Oh, with rest, she’ll be fine,” he reassures Wyldon. “The fever has just taken her harder than it did you. I advise complete quiet and bed rest. No conversation, plenty of sleep, good nourishing foods… you know the sort of thing.”
He nods, breathing a private sigh of relief. “Yes… of course.” Wyldon offers his hand to Baird. “Thank you for your help.”
Queenscove grips it firmly, and then warns, “And by ‘complete rest’, I mean that she mustn’t be bothered by anything.” Seeing the bemusement on the other man’s face, Baird shuffles awkwardly on his feet. At last, he prompts, “I understand that your housekeeper and nursemaids are ill too…”
“Yes,” Wyldon replies briskly. “No matter - I’m sure I can manage the girls alone for as long as it takes.”
“Of course.” Baird pauses briefly. “Good luck, Cavall.”
“How are you feeling?” he asks, easing himself onto the edge of their bed. Vivenne, flushed and sweaty, raises her eyebrows at him, and he chuckles softly. “A foolish question, my darling, I’m sorry.” He picks up her hand and kisses it.
She smiles and waves him away with her other. “At least I’m not in labour this time,” she points out fairly. “What did Baird say?” Her breathing is heavier, he notes, more laboured and her eyes are already shutting.
“Just that after a few days of complete rest, you would be well again. You’re not to worry about a thing,” he whispers.
“I always worry,” she confides sleepily and he squeezes the hand he is still holding.
“Well, try not to, for the next few days at least. Promise?”
“Mmm,” she murmurs and turns her head aside, curling into her usual sleeping position. He slips quietly from the room.
Wyldon balances the heavy, leather bound book on the arms of the nursery chair, and looks across at his waiting daughters, all four tucked up in bed. It has been a trying day, and he wants nothing more than a moment of peace and quiet, but a story at bedtime has been part of the routine in the Cavall household since Eiralys was old enough to toddle, and Wyldon is nothing if not consistent. “Once upon a time there was a handsome prince - “
He does not get any further. “Will you do all the voices, Da?” a small voice asks.
“The, er, voices?” he asks curiously.
“Yes. Mama always does funny voices for all the different people,” three-year-old Margarry lisps plaintively. Her eyes, so like Vivenne’s, are presently far too solemn for such a small child.
He sighs and forces a smile. “Of course. Voices. Well, then…” He clears his throat, and turns back to the book.
When the story is finished, and the girls are all asleep, he creeps quietly from the room, straightening a quilt, picking up a stray stuffed bear as he goes, and enters the room next door. Normally, he would be at the other end of the house, in his study, but while Vivenne and the nursemaids are ill, he has moved himself next to the nursery, so as to be near the girls in case of trouble. His steward has left letters and assorted paperwork on his desk in his absence, and he looks at it with an expression verging on horror. He deals with the running of the estate, of course he does, but Vivenne has benignly invaded this area of his life, as she has all the others, he finds, and now it seems so difficult to be dealing with any of it when she isn’t curled up in his study armchair, offering helpful comments, or standing behind him as he works, pointing out mistakes and making corrections.
He has just drifted off to sleep over his paperwork when he hears it. The lung-bursting cry coming from the next room. He lurches blindly up from his desk, and stumbles to the door. Cathrea’s small face is red and scrunched up as she wails, woken from some childhood nightmare; he plucks her five year old body from the bed and rests her against his broad chest, leaning from one side to the other as he has seen Vivenne do countless times. The crying only grows louder and his ears begin to whine in protest. Wincing, he carries her from the room before she can wake the others, murmuring comforting words into her hair. Her Sight can take her like this sometimes and it always grieves him that they can do nothing more at such times than hold her. At last, the crying slows to a shuddering whimper, which dies away into a series of intermittent hiccups. He settles himself into the largest chair by the fireplace, grimacing as his shirt, damp with Cathrea’s tears, sticks to his chest. His daughter is already fast asleep again, but he remains where he is, too exhausted to move another muscle. His last thought before he drifts into slumber is: Goddess, Vivenne, how do you do it?
He wakes early the next morning, when Cathrea slips from his lap and wanders next door to rouse her sisters. Wyldon himself potters along to the other side of the house, to visit his wife. Her lady’s maid is already up and about, and she curtsies briefly as Wyldon enters. Vivenne is propped up against her pillows, still asleep, but he is pleased to note that her cheeks are no longer so flushed with fever, and that she seems less restless than she had done even a day ago. Calmed and comforted, he kisses his fingertips and touches them to her forehead, before leaving.
When the Cavall girls traipse into breakfast the next morning, it is with some alarm that their father notes the mud on their clothes and the bits of twig that Sunarine is surreptitiously trying to remove from Margarry’s hair. “And what, may I ask, have you been doing?” he inquires sternly. They look as though they’ve been dragged through a hedge backwards!
“Nothing,” nine-year-old Eiralys answers, far too quickly, sliding into her chair. When their parents are at home, the girls always eat with them, rather than taking their meals in the nursery - a throwback from Vivenne’s informal childhood. “Is Mama any better, Papa?” He tries to ignore the smudge of dirt on her pert little nose and instead focuses on cutting and buttering a fresh roll that Sunarine has just passed to him.
Returning the plate, he replies, “She’s very tired and still quite ill, but she’ll be better very soon. So I want all of you to stay away from that part of the house, yes? Your mother needs peace and quiet, not a quartet of rampaging ruffians.”
“Yes, Papa,” four dutiful voices reply.
There is a knock at the door, and a moment later, Master Bryn enters. Wyldon’s steward inherited his position from his father, just like Wyldon himself, and there is no one (except perhaps Vivenne) that the lord of Cavall trusts more. “Pardon, m’lord, but I thought you ought to know that a few of the hedges in the bottom paddock have been badly damaged. Mayhap we’ve had poachers on the land in the night.”
"Anything missing?"
Bryn coughs slightly, looking somewhat embarrassed. "Nothing, my lord... except some of old Lady Robina's daffodils."
Wyldon sets down his knife and fork and directs a penetrating, and decidedly unhappy, glare at his suddenly red-faced daughters. “I shouldn’t worry, Bryn. I very much fear that our culprits are rather closer to home.”
“Wyl?”
He looks up from the fief accounts, his mind awhirl with Vivenne’s peculiar notation marks, to find the lady herself standing in the doorway, pale but unbowed, swathed in what looks suspiciously like his dressing gown. Lit by soft candlelight, her hair shows up more russet than brown, and the shadows glossing over her neck and face make her look at once mysterious and alluring. He first saw her by candlelight, fifteen years ago, he recalls. She is barefoot, he notes, as he rises and moves forwards to guide her into a chair. “Vivenne. How are you feeling?”
She chuckles dryly, accepting his arm, but leads him back to the desk instead. “Like I’ve been beaten all over by the Smith God’s own hammer, but I’ll live. Where are the girls?” Her voice is hoarser than normal, dry from the fever, he supposes. But it is just like her, to be worrying about everyone else. “All in bed,” he reassures her quietly. “Asleep by now, I shouldn’t wonder.” She nods, but her eyebrows are raised when she asks, “Are you sure? They aren’t, say, in the stables feeding apples to Heart, or in the orchard climbing trees?”
His mouth drops open and his eyebrows shoot up. He doesn’t know whether he wants to laugh, cry, or run for the door. “WHAT?” The rapidly growing quirk at the corner of his wife’s mouth, however, alerts him to the fact that he is being teased and he leans back against the desk, bracing himself with his arms. “Just a jest, my dear,” she smiles lightly. “I poked my head round the nursery door on my way up - fast in the arms of Gainel, all four of them. Anna mentioned the hedges when she brought me some willowbark tea. But the flowers were beautiful.”
He frowns grumpily. “Hmm, very funny. I’ll have them mucking out the stables for a month.” In punishment for her teasing, he adds, “Talking of ‘up’ - you shouldn’t be.”
She lets out a breathy laugh of disbelief, hands on her hips. “The words ‘pot’, ‘kettle’ and ‘charred’ spring to mind, somehow,” she replies tartly. “I’m not the one who was out in the fields helping with the harvest the day after I’d been shot through the shoulder by bandits.” The old spark has flared between them again as they spar, her stubborn archness twining around his dry wit and bringing him to the good humour he shows around no one else. He tuts softly, inspecting his nails. At last, addressing the air, he announces, “My father told me it was a mistake to marry a woman who’d argue back.”
She snorts indignantly but, relenting at the last moment, leans in to kiss him sweetly and lingeringly. He blinks. “Careful,” he croaks when his senses have returned. “When a woman kisses a man like that, he might try to take liberties with her person.”
Vivenne leans closer, strands of dark hair brushing against his cheek. “When a woman kisses a man like that, it’s usually because she wants him to.”
Maybe once we'd have seen it during Smackdown!