Chapter 52

7 months, 3 weeks, 4 days pregnant.

Liliana was still avoiding her a week, and a few days later.

“Did she even read the letter?” Livia asks about her empty room as she stares dully at her bed covers.

Her hair was a tangled mess and rearranged in a way that could be likened to modern art as a mild headache pounds cheerily behind her eyelids. In her womb, her son chooses this moment to fall asleep while only minutes before he had been kicking out happily for almost two hours straight. Altering between her bladder and her ribs.

Livia blinks slowly, wondering why this was her life now.

In a corner of her room, a page flutters to the floor, near the chair of her desk, which was currently overflowing with stacks of parchment. She pays it little mind.

It was late in the afternoon but she has only just woken up.

She rubs at her dry eyes as Noctis curls into a tight ball near her hip, snuffling. He was a small bundle of warmth and Livia was tempted to just lay back down and sleep the day away, but her stomach chose that moment to grumble in protest.

Livia yawns and then turns and places her feet on the cold floor, intending to freshen up. When she is done and stretching out her limbs, she looks up when Beth steps into her room, a tray of food in her hands.

Livia eyes it, noticing it was only a serving for one.

“Everyone else has already eaten lunch,” Beth says in explanation as she places the food down and begins to take it off the tray.

“Liliana too?” Livia could not help but ask as she takes a seat.

Beth pours her a glass of lemonade, humming, “Yes. And then she and Amaya jumped right back into...what did they call it? A ‘regime’?”

“I suppose that is swell,” Livia grumbles. Liliana has taken a liking to spend up her energy with Amaya whenever she could. As well as leaving the room or turning in another direction whenever her red eyes landed on Livia with a troubled look.

Beth pushes the glass of juice towards Livia and gives her a worried look, “How are you feeling, Lady Livia? Any new aches I should know about?” She asks gently.

Livia takes a few bites of her meal, not tasting anything before she chews mechanically and swallows.

“Since the last time you asked?” She wonders, reaching for the glass of lemonade, “There has been nothing new. My son is as energetic as ever and I feel like I could sleep for years and still somehow wake up dead tired,” She takes a small sip. Sweet and sour. That was how the lemonade was supposed to taste right?

Nothing.

It still tasted like nothing.

Livia sets the cup down.

“What fun my life has become,” she says lowly. Her hands still ached from writing well into the night, the tip of her fingers stained with ink. Eventually, she would need to have the stacks of paper properly bound into books.

Her second self apparently had been awfully keen on observing things from afar, from the lives of a pack of strange mystical animals to some ‘few’ important historical humans and events. For years own end, as if they were obsessively following a TV series over the years. Livia guesses when you lived so long, you had to find some way to keep yourself entertained outside of unorthodox experimentation. Those particular memories still alluded to her though.

Instead, her mind was currently having fun badgering her with memories of lost history. It was all it could focus on as everything else had been pushed down so it remains dominant.

It was all she could focus on these days but she couldn’t stop until she was finished. It was a phantom urge that she could not shake. Though at this rate, it seemed like an impossible task to accomplish. Writing down hundreds of years from her second-self eyes would take years. It didn’t help that fatigue seems to weigh her down these days. When she wasn’t writing her own version of history, she was sleeping.

But Livia could not shake the feeling that somehow, doing all of this was important. That it needed to be done here and right now, or else. That it wouldn’t be never-ending. But that it was something specific, small hundred-piece puzzles following to place to paint a bigger image. It was the same feeling she had gotten while standing over that stupid cup, so long ago. The same urge that pushed her to sabotage herself.

Livia did not like feeling so out of control and now knowing why. But at the same time, the gut feeling would not leave her, and these days, she was just too tired to actually fight it.

Beth watches with a frown as Livia takes small nibbles of her food, taking note of the dark bags below her eyes and how her face was paler than normal.

“Maybe a break is in order,” She suggests, and looks out the window, to the setting sun, “Why not take a stroll in the gardens? Or maybe read in the library or parlor?”

Livia sets down her knife and fork, “And chance a run-in with Liliana or my mother?” She asks, and shakes her head, “No thanks.” She dabs daintily at her mouth before scooting her chair back.

“Plus, I am still not finished,” She adds, nodding to her desk as she gets to her feet with the aid of Beth.

“But, Lady Livia, you haven’t left your rooms in days,” Beth protests, watching helplessly as Livia settled once more at her desk, picking up her dipping pen with stiff movements. Like a puppet on a string.

“I need to get this done,” Livia states stonily and begins to write.

7 months, 3 weeks, 5 days pregnant.

The day has ended and Livia had spent it writing once again.

Now approaching midnight, she lays in her bed staring up at the high ceiling above her, unable to fall asleep. Of course, her son was of the same mind as he twists and turns happily in her stomach as Livia rubs at it and hums along to a song not of this world.

Around her neck was one of her newer memory orbs, and it glows gently in the darkness of her room, casting soft shadows along her face as her memories dance inside it like children playing. A soft, steady flow of music sweeps out of it as one of her remembrances plays out.

It was a music video from Earth. One she had happily viewed and listened to more than once as her first-self. Livia knows the lyrics by heart, and sure, she could have easily sung them to herself, but hearing it. In this world, far gone from Earth, probably millions of light-years away, (and that was if it was even in the same universe) was something else entirely.

It was a sort of familiarity that many would have abandoned and let go of in a new world and in a new life, but for Livia, she just couldn’t. For the longest time, she had pushed down her first-self and wallowed in her second, detached self in her own mind for her own sanity's sake. Because when she looked back, it wasn’t with fuzziness and a vague idea of what had been, but it was as if she was back in her room, back on earth, with her mom and sister. Back with her few friends and precious family, returned to the girl she had once been, barely figuring out life.

There was no escaping the past that is now only memories, but Livia had done her damn best to try anyway because, unlike her second-self, her first just brought to light a life that had ended way too soon.

One moment, she was playing in her room like normal, the next, she was just dead.

Livia had never gotten a chance to say goodbye. To make any sort of amends and the what if and what could have been haunts her. It was too painful to think about, to even mourn because everything had been so incomplete.

It was only now that she let herself sink and think. Alone in her room except for her baby in her stomach and Noctis silently staring outside on a perch by the window.

No one could judge Livia here.

No one can comment on the tears stinging her eyes and falling down her round cheeks as they disappear into the feather-stuffed pillow below, soaking it.

As the first song ends and the next one begins to play, a soothing and hurtful lullaby, Livia turns her head to stifle her choked sobs, crying for her mom, her sister, her friends, and her family, and wanting more than anything to wake up and see them again.