November 20th, 1891 - Zelfred's House

Xena was expecting.

It was about time for that, and Zelda supposed that she should have caught on to the swell of her belly before it was announced, but it had still caught her by surprise. Her sister claimed that the baby was coming sometime in the early spring, and Zelda had gotten started on embroidery early — she tended to find embroidery projects frustrating, so it was better to get started early.

She would have significantly more time to spend on the hoop in just a few days. Alfred was leaving — expected back in January — which meant that Zelda would be more or less alone until he was back in January. (Or — alone with Yorick.) She wasn't sure how she felt about that. She liked their little home, and she liked the Sanditon, but she had never been alone for this long. And it would give her a lot of time to think about how Xena was thirty, and significantly expecting, and shouldn't Zelda have had some of the early signs by now?

Both Zelda and Alfred were coexisting in the sitting room of their house. Zelda was working on the embroidery hoop for Xena and nearly got her thumb with the needle; she dodged it and sighed. "Evander knows I'm not going to church on Christmas, right?"

Celebrating the holiday itself was fine — if she hadn't been invited to the Darrows, she likely would have gone to her father's for supper, if only because the rest of the Sanditon would likely be busy doing whatever it was they did to celebrate.

She was not actually irritated about the Christmas thing, but it was easier to sound disgruntled about that than it was to sound disgruntled about anything else.

---

The ship's manifest for the upcoming voyage was open on his lap and Alfred was meant to be reviewing it for discrepancies, but he was having trouble focusing. This was not a particularly exciting trip, and nothing in the cargo hold of the ship they were escorting was interesting. Maybe he would have had better luck with the voyage they'd initially planned, but he'd had to renege on that contract in order to stay here and work on fixing up the house after the storm, so this one had been a last minute substitution to give him something to do through the winter until his next contract picked up, which in turn carried him through until the Sanditon season started again (presuming, of course, that the Sanditon season did start up again — he had heard nothing to the contrary, but given recent events he couldn't be entirely sure).

In any case, he was halfway to nodding off when Zelda spoke.

"Hm?" he responded, sitting up a bit straighter in the chair to disguise the fact that he'd nearly fallen asleep. Church on Christmas. It seemed an odd thing to have any particular feelings about one way or another. Alfred wasn't going to be here for Christmas, and Zelda didn't celebrate it, so other than a vague suggestion that she ought to spend the holiday with his family he hadn't given it much thought.

"You could wait to head over until after it's finished," he pointed out. Evander would likely be going to church on Christmas because it was the proper thing to do, and Evander and Caroline had been married in that church and so ought to be seen to be respectable churchgoers, but Alfred doubted Evander (or anyone in his family) was pious enough to take offense to her not going. On the other hand, if she went to stay for a few days and sat around at home while everyone else went to church, things might be a little awkward. "I don't think he'll mind. We never really went that often when we were kids, anyway."

---

Zelda considered that for a beat, then nodded. She'd known that Alfred hadn't gone to church much in youth, of course, but always read Evander as being more serious than the rest of the family. So perhaps he took church more seriously than their parents had.

"Do you know when Christmas church usually ends?" Zelda asked, quirking an eyebrow at Alfred. "When we go to the synagogue for Rosh Hashanah it's usually not longer than an hour." Yom Kippur, however, could last the whole day. And Zelda rarely went to synagogue for Hanukkah, since it was such a minor holiday, but when she was a child the rabbis would hand out sweets during the celebration. (She made a mental note to ask her father when Hanukkah was this year; it seemed like the sort of thing he would know.)

She held up the barely-started embroidery hoop in Alfred's direction. "Do you think I'll be able to finish this by Christmas? It's for Xena," Zelda said. Xena's husband was the same sort of generically wizarding Anglican as the Darrows were, which meant to Zelda that sending her a Christmas present was nice but not fully necessary.

But if she was going to be working on projects for the baby anyways, she ought to start sending them over sooner rather than later. This one depicted symbols from The Tales of Beedle the Bard, or at least it was supposed to. Right now it just had the outline of a rabbit.

---

Alfred hadn't been to a church service in actual years, and his vague memories from childhood supplied little in the terms of definite answers. He felt like he'd always thought it lasted too long, but in childhood he'd mostly been restless and daydreaming, so even a short service would likely have felt like torture just because he was forced to sit still and pay attention. "You could ask Evander," he offered with a shrug, but then he tried to picture Zelda and Evander having a conversation about church and amended that to, "Or you could ask Caroline." Evander may not actually care about Zelda's religious preferences, but he also probably didn't know how to talk about the differences between Jewish traditions and Christian traditional while remaining polite, which would end up making him — and potentially Zelda — uncomfortable.

He glanced over at the embroidery hoop at her second question, but only as an empty gesture. He had no serious opinions on needlepoint of any variety. The type of sewing he had learned was intended for mending sails and patching holes in clothes, and it never had to look pretty — and after learning a wandless spell to accomplish the same task while he'd been living in South America, he hadn't picked up a needle and thread since. He had no frame of reference for how long an embroidery loop took to finish, or what Zelda's skill set was like here. Even if he had, what was on the hoop so far didn't give him much information to go on when conjecturing. There was so little done that he couldn't even tell what it was meant to look like when it was finished.

"It's for Xena?" he clarified, raising one eyebrow. It looked a little small for her sister, though in fairness maybe that was only because he didn't know what it was.

---

Zelda wrinkled her nose at the thought of asking Evander; she had never entirely managed to be comfortable with Alfred’s brother, for all that she ought to be. He was like a too-serious version of Alfred, and she didn’t get it. (Also, their hospital bed meeting had not exactly set them up for success.) Caroline was a much better option — Zelda really genuinely liked her Darrow sister, and if it wasn’t for Caroline she likely would have skipped the concept of Christmas entirely.

Caroline wasn’t pregnant yet, at least as far as Zelda knew, and she’d been married a few months less than Xena had. That wasn’t as reassuring as Zelda would have liked.

”Yeah,” Zelda said, settling the hoop back in her lap. She shifted in her seat on the sofa as if she was trying to find a more comfortable position. ”Or — kind of. She’s having a baby this spring, it’ll be for the nursery.”

Zelda had always gotten the impression that Mr. Bixby married Xena because he wanted more children, and her sister’s Fisk genetics were certainly delivering there. Maybe he would be relieved. Or maybe Zelda was being uncharitable about him; it was hard for her to tell.

---

Alfred raised both eyebrows at that. It certainly made more sense that the thing in her hands was for the nursery and not for Xena herself, but he hadn't been aware that her sister was expecting. Of course, given his complicated history with the Fisks it was not particularly unusual that he hadn't been the first to know about the news, and there wasn't anything unusual about her expecting a baby. She'd been married in the spring, and that was generally what married women did.

"That's nice," he offered in a perfunctory way. "It'll probably be just fine if it's not done by Christmas, then, since she won't need it until spring."

What was particularly nice was that this saved him from having to give any sort of real answer as to whether or not she could finish it by Christmas.

---

Zelda wasn't sure what she'd expected there; it wasn't like she'd had much of a reaction to the news when she got it via letter, so Alfred's perfunctory tone shouldn't surprise her. She hadn't started to have more opinions until later, when she'd really thought about it. "Yeah," she said simply, shifting in her seat again as if that would dispel her unsettled airs.

---

Alfred had been mostly on autopilot through this conversation so far, but her body language here was an obvious enough sign that something was amiss that he frowned. Something was on Zelda's mind. Something to do with Christmas? It seemed far-fetched, though it was possible. It was the first time she'd really celebrated, and he wasn't going to be there, but on the other hand... how could anyone be nervous about Christmas? So something else, then. Something to do with Xena, or Xena's baby? His first thought was maybe she'd gotten into a row with her sister, but if that was all wouldn't she have just said that?

His frown deepened. He wasn't going to be able to guess, and would probably look silly if he tried. "What's the matter?"

---

Zelda wasn't sure how to verbalize this, but one of the perks of being married was that she didn't have to couch her conversations with Alfred in polite language. (Even if this made her uncomfortable, it ought to be a perk.) She bit her lip before she organized her discomfort enough to answer. "My sisters have all tended to start — expecting very soon after getting married," Zelda said. "And I'm —" She shrugged. She wasn't. What if there was something wrong with her?

---

Zelda hadn't specifically told him that she wasn't expecting yet, but Alfred had of course assumed she would have told him if she were, so this news didn't surprise him. Her discomfort over the fact did, because Alfred didn't have enough experience in these things to know how long was long enough. They hadn't been married very long at all, he thought — certainly not compared to how long they'd been trying to get married.

Alfred put the book on his lap onto the nearest table. "That's not the only way you're different from your sisters," he said. He'd meant that as a compliment, and as an indication that she could be very far from her sisters and still fall well within the realm of normal, but after it left his mouth he wasn't sure if that was how it had come across.

"It'll happen soon enough," he said, aiming for reassuring. "We're doing everything right."

---

Zelda frowned. She was very different than her sisters — and usually she preferred things that way — but their biology ought to be the same.

"I know," she agreed. She knew that they were doing everything right, but she still wasn't pregnant. And shouldn't she be? She'd been so worried when they'd slept together on The Voyager, and now that she actually wanted to have children it just wasn't happening. (Not that being with child would solve all her worries — Zelda still wasn't convinced she'd be any good at parenting.) "But there's just so little information, I don't know how I'd even know something was wrong."

---

Something wrong? It seemed entirely too early to be worried about something being wrong, but what did he know? Alfred's expertise on this particular subject was incredibly limited. He knew his role in the process, and then little else except that pregnant women put on a lot of weight before they had the baby. He didn't even know what sorts of things could go wrong, but of course he had heard about cases where they did.

"What sort of something?" he asked. He wasn't sure asking was the right thing to do. Maybe he should have just tried to be reassuring, but since he didn't know what he was talking about that would probably have just come across as bland and hollow. "Do you have any reason to think something would be wrong?"

---

"No," Zelda admitted; she flushed a faint pink because she knew that it made her sound silly. "Just — sometimes there's women who can't." No matter how hard they tried, they wouldn't become pregnant. And never mind all the shady, desperate things like potions that they could get into in order to try and make it happen — things Zelda had not even seriously thought about yet — they just wouldn't.

"And what if that's me?"

---

Alfred ran his tongue over his teeth before he responded. "Well, if that does turn out to be the case... I suppose we'll just have to keep on living here together, just the two of us, blissfully happy until the day we die. And we'll find spare week-ends to take spontaneous sailing trips and keep on kissing each other in any room of the house that we feel like and maybe sometimes only eat cake for dinner." Although his tone had started serious enough, by the end his mouth was turning up at the corners. He allowed a full grin in her direction, then sobered slightly as he continued. "I do want children. But I really meant what I said back in August. If it was only ever just the two of us, I'd still be happy."

---

She didn't want to smile about it, but the longer he talked the more Zelda felt a wide smile coming onto her face. It was funny now that she was listening to it. And while her expression sobered as his did, she nodded at him when Alfred finished. "I love you," Zelda said honestly.

---

Alfred put on a dramatically indulgent smile at the remark. "Which never ceases to amaze me and everyone else we meet," he joked. "But I'm happy that you do."

---