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in which naima does not even consider discussing any of her beliefs about pregnancy
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Naima is having a baby!

It's not her first time having a baby. Obviously. But it's her first time having a baby with Elie, and that's its own kind of momentous. There are some ways in which she's grown out of normal Osirian gender roles, sure, but this, after all, is the core of them, the core of what it is to be a woman. Given that, it's probably unsurprising that she still has all of the usual feelings of pride about her ability to bear children for her husband. She knows that's not quite how he's thinking of it, but she thinks (hopes) that he still has something analogous to the way that Osirian men feel about their wives bearing their children, and that he'll be happy and proud and impressed with her for doing this objectively very impressive thing.

It's important that people feel this sort of pride about having children, of course, for all of the usual reasons that one ought to be able to feel pride in their work. It inspires people to continue doing the best job they can. This is most obviously important for parenting children who have already been born, but it's important for pregnancy, too! And Naima, given the enormous amount of pride that she takes in all of her work, including this work, is going to do a really good job. She's going to make sure to eat a carefully balanced diet and not leave her nutrition to her ring of sustenance, which might or might not be enough to support two creatures, one of them growing very rapidly, without any negative effects on either. She's going to be careful to avoid foods that are generally agreed to cause malformed or weak babies (like sugar cane, tea, acidic foods, and alcohol). She's going to cast remove disease and her regenerative hex on the fetus every day to ensure that it doesn't catch anything that might kill it or cause any problems for its development. She's going to get enough rest (although there, she is going to trust her ring of sustenance; it would cost too many other babies too much if she were to go back to spending an additional six hours sleeping every day). And she's obviously not going to have sex with her husband, no matter how annoying this particular requirement may be; it's well-known that sex during mid to late pregnancy can lead to a miscarriage or a stillbirth, which would be disastrous, since you can't bring a child back to life if it dies before it's taken its first breath.

Really, of course, proper Osirian women aren't supposed to decide when they have sex with their husbands anyway, either by acting like they have the final authority on the matter or by needling their husbands into making some particular decision. And Naima doesn't! She's not that crass! But it's not like she doesn't send signals. Everyone probably sends signals. Naima's not very good at subtlety, so her signal is mostly taking off her clothes without any discussion or warning that might constitute needling someone. It has not escaped her notice that this usually works pretty well at getting the desired result.

Anyway. She's going to stop doing that. Presumably it wouldn't matter if she did, since it hasn't occurred to her that the badness of sex during pregnancy might not be common knowledge in other places, so Elie must know it too, and therefore he would just ignore her. But there's no point in sending the signal in the first place if you know it's going to be ignored, and it also seems rude to deliberately tempt someone with something they can't have right now. So. No more signals.

It does not at any point occur to her that this change in behavior might be at all confusing, or that Elie might be confused about the causes behind any frustration that happens to leak through about it.

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Élie is having a baby! 

Well, technically Naima is having a baby, in the sense that Naima is doing all the hard work and dealing with all the concomitant nausea and back pain and not being able to polymorph for nine months, and childbirth, which fifth-circle witches simply don't die of even if they're not expert healers with more money than most countries, but he worries anyway. He worries about a lot of things – like, Naima might have a miscarriage, and then they'd have to sort through all the boneyard children and invent a new way to resurrect fetuses and it would throw all their plans off schedule – or what if the baby doesn't like him – or he's a bad father – or it's kidnapped by Chelish agents and raised to be the antithesis of everything he believes in and he has to trap his own child's soul in a final blade – 

Anyway, Élie is having a baby

When he's not worrying – and he's getting a handle on it, thank you very much – he feels nearly delirious with joy. Naima says their baby is the size of a frog right now. It has a tiny little heart and a tiny little brain and soon it's going to have tiny little feet with tiny little toes. He wonders what its first word is going to be. He's trying to decide which languages to raise it with (after Taldane and Osirian and Draconic) so it has the easiest time learning magic when it's older. He's decided it's important to introduce basic spell structures as a natural part of play. so the child doesn't associate training with coercion. He's got a whole theory about it and Rahim's always happy to help him test things out. He's enchanting a sling with protective spells against all common workshop accidents. If babies aren't held enough it's certainly bad for their development. 

He's working a lot harder than he used to. There's a lot wrong with the world, and he's not going to fix all of it before his child is born, but he can at least make a good faith effort. 

Between the extra work and the fact that their sleep schedules don't always line up and the worrying and the touch of mania, it takes him a few weeks to notice that Naima hasn't initiated sex lately. 

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When has Naima ever initiated sex. Sending very obvious signals that you would be the opposite of averse to it if it happened is obviously a completely different sort of thing. Definitely.

Naima is continuing to spend about sixteen to eighteen hours a day at work, six days a week (and six hours at work on the seventh day). She's trying to think positive thoughts, because she read a book by someone who thought that negative thoughts during pregnancy were bad for a baby's development. At a few weeks in, she's not that frustrated by the various restrictions she's placed on herself - she's well aware that there are several more months of this to follow - but she's definitely missing her husband some amount. That's to be expected, of course. Her husband is just really good, okay.

She's certainly not going to talk about it, though. Everyone knows that husbands find the lack of sex harder than their wives do, and you can't complain about something to someone who's probably more frustrated about it than you are, and trying not to say anything because they're aware that you're having a harder time with other aspects of this situation. That would be rude.

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Élie is Galtan, and when a Galtan woman wasn't naked thirty seconds ago and is naked now, she generally means to send a certain message. Which, it is impossible not to notice, Naima hasn't seemed interested in for quite some time. 

....It could mean anything, really. Pregnant women often feel unwell. Naima's even complained. Maybe she just hasn't felt like sex lately. If that's so, he'd certainly never do something so presumptuous as to ask her about it. Of course not. Élie is Galtan, but his wife is Osirian, and he lived in Mut long enough to learn what kinds of things Osirian husbands expect from their wives. What if she thinks he's unhappy. What if she thinks she has to sleep with him, to keep him satisfied, when she's tired and sick to her stomach and the very thought makes her ill – 

Besides, Naima's the most direct person he knows. It's one of the things he loves about her. If there was a problem, she'd say so. Right? 

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Right! So he can be confident that there are no problems here, which is appropriate, because there aren't.

Which is not to say that there isn't still some general grumpiness about this non-problem that she's going to continue not explaining.

 

If Naima were a more charismatic person, she would probably already know whether it's a bad idea to try to cuddle your husband while you can't have sex with him. Unfortunately, she isn't. Like, on the one hand, it's obviously nice in its own right, and arguably even nicer when you can't have sex, but on the other hand it also might make someone think about all the sex that they can't have? It makes her think about all the sex she can't have. Like, she'd still like to do it, but she can see how it might be annoying if you were experiencing different comparative levels of those things than Naima is.

...maybe she should be defaulting to not cuddling her husband, either, and probably Élie will cuddle her at some point and then she'll know it's okay without having to ask him? Yeah. That seems like a good first pass. And if he doesn't do that and starts giving off weird vibes about it, then she can try... asking.

That's okay, right? Cuddling is different than sex. Nobody ever specifically said you shouldn't ask your husband to cuddle you.

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Well, Naima sure does seem to be avoiding him. 

It could just be the pregnancy – but she hasn't seemed especially unwell, and it's not like her withdraw when she's in pain (rather the opposite, really). Élie doesn't like the other options. She could be having second thoughts about his suitability as a husband and father. She could be – actually, nothing else springs to mind. He could try to convince her otherwise, by being an especially good father to Rahim, but obviously the way he's being a father to Rahim is what's upset her. On the other hand, if she disapproved of the way he was helping to raise her son, surely she'd tell him? A couple weeks ago he would have said so confidently. Now – 

Maybe she doesn't feel safe mentioning it. She's Osirian. Rahim is Osirian. They were married in Mut. Legally, if he decided to take the child away from her, he'd be perfectly within his rights. He devoutly hopes Naima wouldn't have married him if she thought him capable of even considering it – but maybe she didn't at the time – and obviously something's changed. 

They do still try to eat together every night. He likes food, Rahim still needs it, and Naima's apparently decided to indulge every pregnancy-related dietary superstition known to the inner sea region and quite a few that aren't. The mature, responsible, adult thing to do would be to ask her at dinner what he's doing wrong. 

....Dinner tonight is some kind of stewed gourd and he's going to eat it in excruciatingly awkward silence. 

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Naima is pretty openly annoyed tonight, though it's got nothing to do with him. There's an outbreak of some unidentified disease in Aspenthar, the second-largest Thuvian city-state, some twenty thousand people large. It's too small to be on her normal route, and its people will be poorer than Osirians, their purses cleaned out by the Thuvian attempts to contain the House of Oblivion. So, worse all around than the alternatives, from a profit perspective, but if the alternative is leaving one of the major sources of Thuvian troops and supplies in shambles...

She hates politics. This would be much simpler if you only ever had to worry about what made the numbers go up the most.

     Her sister Dahab is scribbling something in a notebook at the dinner table; Naima has no mind to stop her from working through dinner. "So if it is a new disease, that's - do we have specific numbers, for how the average case of that goes - "

          "Dunno," says Frederick, in between shoving food in his mouth. "Pretty bad, on the bad end."

     "I know that."

Naima sighs. "We'll see what they know in Merab tomorrow. It's probably something ordinary that just hasn't been seen in Aspenthar in a while. Either way, if it's still in the early stages, we might be able to skip Merab one day and nip it in the bud before it sweeps the city, assuming the authorities can identify and move the infected to a quarantine zone beforehand."

          "That's not a very good way of making money."

"Neither is letting your customers fall to the forces of Abaddon. If it's already got a real foothold - I dunno. How was your day, Élie."

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Just completely awful! 

"I wonder if you could get Alexandria to subsidize you. Doesn't something like half of Aspenthar's outbound shipping stop off there? It's probably worth something to them to avoid a quarantine." 

 

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"Maybe," she says, dubiously. "They're probably already sick of dealing with the hospital development. I suppose that's really also doing them a favor."

After dinner, her apprentices scurry off to their rooms, and she takes a stab at looking over the plans for a sewer system on her island. It's genuinely important, and she should probably put in a few hours of work on it, and she's also already been working on things all day, and she kind of wants to go to bed. 

...well, no, what she wants to do is snuggle her husband.

Maybe she'll... grab a book from her pile about obscure aspects of magical theory, and lie in bed reading it until he's done with whatever he's doing at this hour, at which point he'll presumably also come to bed.

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He's working on the witch patron. He's usually working on the witch patron, since he needs to get this phase of the project to a reasonable stopping place before they head off to Tian Xia. When he's done as much there as he thinks he can take, well – he's gotten a bit distracted noodling around with variant scrying sensors that move autonomously along ley lines and generate a map as they go, and he could still stand to practice his Tien – 

He gets to bed late. 

Naima is reading – maybe she doesn't want to be disturbed – and even in his current state he can recognize an obvious excuse. This is important. He's an adult man and he's going to use language to communicate to his wife and the mother of his children. 

"You do know that whatever happens I'd never try to take the children away from you." He's taking a leaf out of Naima's book here: better to be straightforward and to the point. 

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- okay what.

"....yes?"

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"If that's what you're worried about. I wouldn't. I'll swear on any god you care to name."

He knows this is irresponsible reasoning. He doesn't want to think too hard about a world where Naima doesn't beleive him, so he isn't, he – he wants to be the kind of person who wouldn't create this problem in the first place, and failing that he wants the problem to go away

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"I... know? I mean, I wouldn't want you to swear it because that's presumably barring some kind of situation in which you think I'm being mind controlled by whatever entity granted me my powers and need to take them away because otherwise I'd be a danger to them, and I wouldn't want to risk having drawn the categories of exceptions too - did something happen?"

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"No. Maybe. – I mean, if it did, I want you to feel completely safe telling me about it." 

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"Now rapidly going over everything that's happened recently to determine what could be related to - okay, having a baby, I guess, that would be the obvious one, but I hadn't even really considered any scenarios in which you might want to take the children away from me. - I mean, well, yeah, I guess I have, but they mostly involved one or the other of us being mind controlled, in which case I guess it really comes down to which of us our friends decide isn't being mind controlled."

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" – If nothing happened, then why are you avoiding me?"

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"What?

 

" - ohhh. Sorry, I was trying to be considerate. Which was a terrible idea, really, I'm not sure I've ever succeeded at being considerate to someone in my life."

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"I'm sorry. Did I do something to make it look like I wanted you not to touch me?"

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"No? Uh, I just had the thought that it might be making things harder for you, as long as we can't, uh, have sex. I figured if you didn't think so you'd just ask to snuggle and not... construct a theory that I was avoiding you because I was afraid you would take my children away... but I kind of regret it anyway just on the grounds that it was also really annoying. - do you wanna snuggle now? For the rest of this conversation? Because it's okay if you think this is too serious of a conversation to have while snuggling, but I was honestly planning to give up on being considerate and ask if you wanted to snuggle as soon as you came up, so I am at this point delaying it to have more of this conversation."

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He does very much want to snuggle now. He will kind of just flop into Naima's lap and end up awkwardly head-butting her hip-bone before settling into a more comfortable position. 

 "Love you. We obviously aren't going to have sex if you don't want to. ...I am confused about why we couldn't if you did." 

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Snuggle. Her husband is warm and soft and good. 

"'cause it's a miscarriage risk. Not, like, something that happens to everyone who does it, obviously, but enough of a risk that you're not supposed to."

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"Huh. I've never heard of that. ...I'm actually surprised I've never heard of it, knowingly having sex despite the chance of miscarriage seems like it would ding you for evil so you'd think Cheliax would publicize it." 

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"Huh, I guess. It's an interesting question, actually, whether doing something you know could cause a miscarriage for reasons that are dominated by other goals is much less evil than deliberately inducing an abortion, so you could imagine someone deciding that it wasn't worth it to educate people about it because it might also cause them to mostly go about their lives while hoping that things would work out the way they wanted without them having to take any single-mindedly murderous actions. - I'm sorry, it didn't occur to me at all that you might not realize. I think it's common knowledge in Osirion, but given the context it might be the sort of common knowledge that often gets transmitted through, uh, parents and midwives and Abadaran marriage classes."

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 "So it depends on whether the little bits of evil they'd get from the people who wouldn't have had an abortion in the first place outweighs the risk of having slightly fewer abortions – ." His baby is the size of a frog. "Actually, I don't want to think about that. Sorry." 

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" - yeah. Morbid.

"I do miss you. And stuff. I'm really happy that we're doing this but I find this particular aspect kind of annoying."

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