By Kalliroe
Emerald is a very entertaining fanfic, with some cool food for thought too! One of the things it made me think about was "okay, so Ayla knows something about where babies come from...but how much of conception has Ayla figured out, and how much of it has she not figured out yet?". Hence this little parody scene. Please consider this a fanfic of a fanfic. I am totally not trying to rewrite asia's story! Anyway, here goes:
"How are you feeling?" Ayla asked Cherunio while sitting next to her.
"I’m fine" she answered quietly, avoiding her eyes and focusing on the river.
"I saw that you still have cramps and nausea."
‘Nothing escape from her eyes’ she thought to herself "yes, but it’s much better, the medicine helps a lot"
"Are you not happy with the baby?" she looked closely at her.
"Of course I am happy."
"You didn’t look so happy when I told Jondalar"
Cherunio didn’t answer, she let the pebbles drop out of her hand.
"It just… just… I don’t know. I don’t think he is so happy about it." She looked down.
"Of course he is" Ayla exclaimed "we both happy for you"
"I’m afraid he wouldn’t love the baby as much as he loves Matanya" she finally said what was in her heart.
"Why should he love him less?"
"Because he loves you more than he love me."
Ayla sigh "yes, he does love me more than you. But he loves Matanya because she is his daughter, and your child is his too"
"Do you really believe in that?"
"Yeah, I think so."
"But I didn't only share Pleasures with him. What if the baby is someone else's?"
"What do you mean, what if the baby is someone else's?"
"How can you tell?"
"Sometimes you can tell once the baby is born and looks like one man more than the other. Sometimes the baby simply looks more like the mother, or another relative, or has a new combination of old features and then it's really hard to tell."
"Does it depend on how many times you share with each person...?"
"Maybe...."
"Well...I shared Pleasures a lot more with you than I did with him, especially when you got so clingy near the end of your pregnancy, remember?"
At that moment, one of Ayla's earliest memories woke up in her subconscious. It gradually struggled out from underneath a pile of earthquake rubble, slowly crawled up to the center of her attention, and started to remind her of things. Things like a person who had cared for her very much, who had taught her to swim before she began to walk, who (now that she thought about it with an older perspective) probably had shared Pleasures with her mother...and things like one of the first words she had learned....
The two women were silent for a few minutes, and then Ayla spoke up.
"I'm going to be a father?"