every wave has its peak, then crashes to the sand

[nepheliad.livejournal.com]

Rating: G
Word Count: 1,260
Pairing: Sort of Anthony/Éadoin. Sort of.
Summary: 1996. Miramichi's daughter of the sea, their goddess of folklore and superstition, is really just a woman named Éadoin Landry who's having a baby boy this summer. And she's afraid of her husband becoming her father. Irrational, she knows.
Notes: Ummm I don't really know where this came from. I just had the mental image of her sitting in the window watching the rain and hurting and missing things, and then it gained some backstory, kind of. And a dog, since I had established her as a breeder a long time ago and forgotten. It was also meant to be a drabble. Oops.

The sea goddess of the Maritimes sat upstairs in one of the bedrooms over the shanty – it wasn't hers – and looked out the window onto a town that may have been, and looked across to the water that everyone believed was hers to play with, if not truly her home (and it wasn't, not really; it was the home of her brother, of her husband, even of her father who she never spoke of) and sighed.

Brushing hair back from her face, she put down the mending she'd been doing and let her hand stray to her midriff, which was quite a bit larger than it had been months ago. The sea goddess of the Maritimes, who wasn't really a sea goddess at all but just a woman who would've called herself a reader, or its Irish equivalent, was seven months pregnant.

The only reason anyone thought she was a sea goddess was because of just how superstitious the area could be. So superstitious, she had learned, that she hadn't needed to allow herself to age at all. She was in her seventies; she looked twenty at most, and that was making herself look a bit older, as if one were to strip her of any illusion at all she might have been thought seventeen or eighteen at a stretch. Some assumed her a daughter of the sea, because that's where she had come from, on a boat and not an airplane. She had come on a boat, too, from her home of Ireland, speaking some bits and bats of languages that allowed her, eventually, to learn the local tongue. But it had been a boat; she had not been born of the sea.

Which didn't mean she couldn't control the weather.

She had proved that she could, and the people had learned that if she was sad, if she was thrilled, if she felt any strong way at all that was strong enough, the weather of Miramichi would follow in her path. Since she had come to them the Irish Festival on the Miramichi had always had pristine weather, because the people believed she loved the Irish-blooded best.

And she did. She always liked to feel a little bit at home. She always had, since she had come there, when she was a slip of a girl of twenty-five, seeing the world and breaking her mother's heart when she decided she'd like perhaps to stay.

But the daughter of the Maritime sea, the sea goddess that they called her, the water-maiden the very superstitious even prayed to, always went back to Ireland to visit. From one fishing village to another, though Miramichi wasn't really a village at all, but a largely populated city that just had a constant fishing-village feel.

Eventually, she had learned to love other things.

Nowadays, the daughter of the Maritime sea, who was really the daughter of Margaret Cunningham Ryan of Baile Uí Bheacháin, and of Colm Ryan her estranged and then deceased husband who none of the family ever really wanted to think of, also bred dogs. That was her official title. She bred hounds and spent time with both of her families; her family in Ireland and her family here in Miramichi.

Her name was really Éadoin. Éadoin Ryan, then Éadoin Landry, and really, everyone knew it.

But everyone knew she could change the weather, too. And that she looked young forever. And they had no idea what else she could do; it was her choice not to tell them.

Right then, it was her choice to be lonely.

She could have gone downstairs, but instead she chose to watch out the window, to look over the shorter buildings and out to the sea, where her husband, her one true love had gone and left her behind, pregnant with their boy whose birth, she hoped, he wouldn't miss.

Éadoin hadn't meant to resent him for leaving. He was a fisherman. He left. That was his job when he wasn't helping his older brother run the Forest Primeval – he was a fisherman, he went out to sea and fished day in and day out, and sometimes he traveled to other places with merchant sailors, and right then, he had sailed away. She couldn't quite remember where they had gone. She just knew that suddenly, recently, she'd started to hate it.

She was secretly afraid, she had realized, that Anthony might turn out like her father. Her father, who traveled for his business, and had lovers and eventually just left them and never came back, when she was just a little girl, and the next time she saw him she had been living in Nova Scotia. Not Miramichi, no – Éadoin was glad that her father had never set foot in Miramichi as far as she knew.

She'd been near to thirty.

Shortly after that encounter, she'd heard he'd died.

Éadoin had been quietly thrilled the guilt had killed him. She hadn't wanted to upset her brother and sisters. But she was happy. She bet her mother was happy, and she was even willing to bet her mother and sisters were happy, too.

But she wouldn't speak of it.

He had left her mother and he had had affairs and he had maybe even had other children, and now here she was, wed to a sailor, carrying his baby boy – her baby boy, but his as well, and she didn't want to raise a child alone.

(Through the noise from downstairs, where Éadoin could clearly hear Evangeline trying to wrangle Julienne and the twins into holding still long enough she could get them to help her with something, where she could just as clearly hear Hippo trying to kick a dog or cat or some sort of creature out of the kitchen, where she could just as clearly hear Clio's cries and Bridget's singing and the sounds of customers in general, she could know that she would, in fact, never be raising a child alone, even if Anthony left her. Even if Anthony left her, his family never would. But she wasn't feeling rational. She was feeling lonely.)

She didn't want to raise a child alone and she didn't want Anthony to be like her father.

She didn't want the baby to have no father.

She didn't understand why she felt this way. She didn't understand why everything hurt so much all of a sudden. She didn't understand why she was so emotional and scared. He had left her before.

He hadn't left her side for a day since she'd told him of the pregnancy, and now it had been near to a week.

Six days that she'd been without him.

Six days that she'd been feeling worse, and worse, and listless and uncertain and scared and couldn't understand how hormones had manged to get such a hold on her.

Six days she'd been irrational. Six days she'd felt alone despite being surrounded by family.

His family.

Their family.

One of the hounds lay his head on her feet, and Éadoin reached for the telephone – extending her hand for it simply to float to her, in this case, as she ached and couldn't move and it was oh so easy to do when pregnant, everything magical had seemed easier – and dialed Dublin, where she knew Francis would tell her that Anthony wasn't anything like Colm had been, and Mary would tell her to visit, and then she'd see her brother and her sisters and her mother, because of course her mother would come to see them ...

Éadoin dialed long distance, and outside the pouring rain began to lighten up, just a little.

Comments

[chimbleysweep]

Éadoin :( Your daddy was a dumbhead. But he stayed away by choice! He wasn't a merchant sailor, nor was he a pirate, or a fisherman, or in a navy. He was just sailing the world with his son and a lot of other readers. He stayed away because he couldn't take being on land/having a wife with so many daughters. SO HE'S NOT A THING LIKE YOUR ANTHONY, I AM SURE.

Besides, he knocked up Margaret when she was fourteen or fifteen (I can't remember) and he was twice her age. They did not get off on the strongest footing. But your mumsy was always there, teaching her kids what she could, and telling them stories, and trying to keep their father alive. Because he was only home a month or two out of the year.

NOTHING TO FEAR!

Although now your brother is going through this, too.

I suppose everyone did.

What a butthead, Colm.

[nepheliad.livejournal.com]

Her Anthony is really a homebody who never wants to leave for longer than like ... 2 days. And in this case he was gone for 2 months. And so she went to Ireland to hang with her blood relations. She might've given birth there, actually, he might've met her – I'm not sure. I know Ireland and Canada both do dual citizenships so Mathurin's a citizen of both places either way.

Would her sisters and mum want her to have given birth near them because I ... doubt any of the Landrys would object.

[chimbleysweep]

You know Margaret wants her bbs around her when they need her. She travels across the ocean to visit quite a bit, but she looks about fourteen because of her size (thankfully she's, I think, the final generation after a human or something so she doesn't QUITE look like a baby--I did it intentionally because she's so teeny). And yet, because of her age (she's only fifteen years older than her son ahahaha), she refuses to be like, the long-lost cousin or daughter. SHE IS DISTINCTLY A MOTHER. She also dresses mostly Edwardian.

I forgot to mention that Colm would have seen a lot of Miramichi over the years. Because, well, it's Miramichi. He hit up every coast and every port and nailed quite a few ladies. When you've sailed for... well over 100 years, there is no port unnoticed.

Thankfully he doesn't leave much of a legacy. Francis was more fun.

[nepheliad.livejournal.com]

Miramichi is a pretty awesome place. She just doesn't want to think about him being in Her Shanty when her husband was a baby, because that's when it was opened. When Anthony was really little. And so he shouldn't get to taint her man like that!!!

I really miss Miramichi now. Maybe we should have DirtyCon THERE, instead, except for how nobody would have anywhere to stay since my relations moved. I've only ever been there once but damn fuck it ate my SOUL.

[rimestock.livejournal.com]

I am totally in favor of this!

We just need, uh, 2374892374 different cheap hotel rooms, and then we're set, right?!

[nepheliad.livejournal.com]

OH COME ON, WE ONLY NEED ONE.

There are four of us. Five if we get paintmarks too, because I hold hope she will come play with us again someday.

[chimbleysweep]

I'll assure her that he hasn't for the sake of hoping that he hasn't. And that he had nothing to do with Anthony. So all is well.

A DIRTYCON THERE WOULD BE ROCKIN'. If it could be done some day.

[rimestock.livejournal.com]

I am glad at least the hound is there to give her a hug in person, because her family isn't (yet!) and neither am I.

I am also very glad for her that her husband is not turning into her father, literally or metaphorically! In neither case would it be a good thing.

[nepheliad.livejournal.com]

I was thinking about that icon, and how I wished I had one like it to reply to comments on this post so I wasn't using the same icon every time. And then I thought, I wonder if Beth used that icon, because the comment notification didn't show me an icon, because it never does.

And you did. So I'm satisfied.

But now I have this horrible mental image that thus will have to stop me from ever letting Scout see what Anthony Landry looks like, because she might doodle it one day to horrify me. Of, y'know. Him morphing physically into Colm. Like. With melting and stuff. And being extremely freaked out by it.

But this happened in the past, so we already know he didn't. Because it's over! It says backstory! And 1996! We're safe!

[chimbleysweep]

...although in her family, her husband being her father would not be so unusual.

>_>

[nepheliad.livejournal.com]

SHE LOOKS SO HORRIFIED.