every_blossom_blooming | (no subject)

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Nina stood outside the apartment door for far too long, staring at it. She was being a coward and she didn't know why. Maybe because some part of her was afraid that Inej would disapprove, or judge her, or--

She didn't know. But Inej was her best friend, and somehow she was the hardest person to tell. Her opinion would mean the most.

Finally she made herself knock and put on a smile. No need to be grim when Inej answered the door. At least she was certain that Kaz wasn't home. She didn't need him hearing this before she told Geralt.

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Inej comes to the door in airy things. It's stupidly hot in Darrow, and even though they have air conditioning in the apartment, she isn't entirely sure that she trusts it when she's alone. It's all well and fine when Kaz is around, but by herself? No, she'll just put on sheer things and throw open the windows and try to catch a breeze through the place.

She smiles when she finds Nina there. She'd known it was her, from the way she knocked, but it's still good to see her.

"Come inside," she says. "I have iced tea, and a good excuse to turn the air on now."

"I'm a good excuse for a lot of things," she quipped as she breezed into the apartment. Nina slowed down as she put her hair up before she invited herself to a seat in the kitchen. "And iced tea would be lovely, I ah-- I have something to tell you. And you aren't allowed to be mad or judgmental or any of that, because you're my best friend and if I wanted any of those things I'd try to get in touch with Zoya."

It all came out in a rush and somewhere in it all, Nina's smile had fallen to a more hopeful look.

They're barely inside when it all comes out, the door barely shut, and Inej cocks a brow at Nina. She's already prepared for a lot of things to come out of Nina's mouth following a statement like that, and most of them--because Inej is a paranoid, wounded thing--involve her being mad, but not at Nina; or judgmental, but only as judgmental as she ever is about anything at all.

She turns on the air conditioning and starts to go around closing windows or shutting doors so the front half of the apartment can cool off.

"I promise," Inej says, "that no matter what it is I will love you. You're my best friend, and my sister, Nina. Nothing you say is going to change that."

Nina waited until Inej was back in the same room with her. It took her a moment to actually summon the words, because the more she said them out loud, the more real it all became in her head.

"Inej, I'm pregnant."

She swallowed and looked down at her hands, folded in her lap. "It shouldn't even be possible, but I am. I must have-- Geralt was human, the last time there were strange happenings here. He was human and I-- I suppose I stopped thinking about actively keeping it from happening ages ago. He's sterile. There was no danger of it, and I--"

Nina looked up again. "I haven't told him yet."

Inej stills. Everything in her, even her heart, goes very quiet for a moment, as Nina can't look at her. Because, she finds, she's not mad or judging her or anything like that, but she is terribly jealous. After all, the words There was no danger have another meaning, and the one that it conjures to Inej is the unspoken I was not planning.

But Inej--for months now, she has been. She's been thinking about it, and how to tell Kaz, and the whole process she would need to consider, for herself, before she's ready to try and have a child.

She finds herself touching low on her stomach, just as Nina looks up, and her hand falls away before it can become talking about her instead of talking about her friend. This must be about Nina, right now. "Do you want to tell him? Do you...want it?"

"That's the question, isn't it?" Nina offered a wry smile and sank back with a quiet sigh. "I keep waiting for Zoya to show up and throttle me," she confessed. "To tell me how stupid I've been but--"

Nina looked down at her stomach, which had not changed at all yet, but she was intimately aware of all the quiet changes her body was making.

"I don't know. I suppose it will all depend on how he reacts to this," she confessed. "I have to tell him. But if he's agreeable, I don't see why not. And maybe even if he isn't... as long as I'm not alone, I think I'd be alright. I'm not afraid of having a baby, I just-- I never expected that I would lead the kind of life that would allow for it. Not so soon." Even if she knew plenty of other girls her age, in Ketterdam and in Ravka, that had children.

"You haven't been stupid," Inej insists, eyebrows tight together, because she's mad that someone would make her feel that the creation of life was an act of stupidity.

She turns and goes to the fridge, getting the iced tea, and then to the cabinet to get two glasses. She makes them each tea, and then hands Nina one of them.

"You're not alone," she assures. "Even in a worst case scenario, you're not alone, Nina Zenik."

"I have been," she countered, even if she thought Inej's insistence was kind. "I know how babies are made and I got careless."

Nina sighed and accepted her tea, grateful to have something to hold. "Good. Because as wonderful as I am, I would rather not be a mother alone, if it's to come to that."

She sipped her tea, still rather deep in thought. "Now I just need to tell Geralt. I suppose there's no sense in delaying it. I already know, and if I try to hide it, he'll sniff out that I'm concealing something sooner or later, even if I'm careful."

"He'd better not give you trouble about it," Inej says, quiet but not particularly threatening. There's no need to be. This is a holy time, something soft and sacred, the conception of a child.

Inej is consumed with anguish and jealousy, but that's for her to work through, not Nina. She pours herself her own glass of tea and smiles.

"You'll have me, no matter what," she assures. "You would always have me no matter what."

"I don't think he will. Besides, you know how well I handle both disappointment and trouble at the same time," she said with a wry smile. If he did give her trouble, she'd leave him unconscious in the woods and storm back to this apartment. Then she'd kick Kaz out of his own bed and hide there with Inej until she knew what to do with herself.

But she didn't think it would come to that.

Nina looked at her tea. "I know I have you. And I also know you're upset, even if you're trying very hard not to be. I love you for that right now."

Shame washes through Inej, but she knows better than to lie to a Grisha, and to her friend.

“I’m not upset at you,” she distinguishes, because it is something to distinguish. She is upset, but not with Nina. Never with Nina. Her smile is raw and rare but it is real. “I get to be an aunt, and a life is holy and wonderful.”

Inej sniffles a little, sips her tea. “I’d like one, some day.”

"I know you aren't. And yes, you get to be an aunt." Nina reached for Inej. She wanted to give her more comfort - Grisha comfort - but she wouldn't dare without Inej asking for it.

"I cried when I realized, you know. I felt silly. I felt stupid. I'm a Heartrender, and this still happened because I was a silly girl. I cried because I thought Zoya was right."

"I mean," Inej says, and rolls her eyes a little bit, "I'm on a synthetic hormone to prevent an accident happening, at the moment, and it could still happen. You're with someone who, normally, is sterile. You weren't stupid. You were going about things the way you had been since you'd been with him. Why would you think it would be different than normal?"

She lets herself be mad at Zoya, wherever she is, for putting the idea of Nina's silliness into her head too hard. But then, Inej thinks her mother would also have called her silly if she'd managed to get in the family way without getting married first. But things happened sometimes.

She wouldn't dream of asking if Nina plans on getting married. That's hardly the point here.

Nina shrugged. Inej made a good point, but she'd still been hard on herself at first. She sighed and looked over at her friend, trying to make sure that she wasn't harboring anything. But Inej wouldn't lie to her: she was upset, but not at Nina.

"I suppose all that's left is to tell him and go from there. And hope that you'll, eventually, want to help me nest a little."

Inej comes over to Nina and hugs her around the shoulders, squeezing her as tight as she can. She kisses her cheek, a loud smack of a gesture, and then several smaller ones, up to Nina's hairline, hoping to get her to laugh.

"Of course I will," Inej says. "Anyway you'd like help nesting, of course."

"I'll think about that more when the time is closer. Or when the hormones take over and I become a monster." She smiled at Inej and set he tea on the little kitchen table.

"I suppose you can tell Kaz, though it'd be more fun if no one told him at all. Just to see his face as he tries to figure out how to ask if I'm pregnant when I actually start showing."

"Hopefully, I will have started all the nesting in motion before you become a hormone monster," Inej says tenderly. And she appreciates the permission, though she thinks she would have told Kaz even without it, and seen how things might have gone from there.

She's sad that their relationship is contentious in Darrow, but she understands why. Their friendship, such as it was, leaned toward business. Inej desperately wants Nina to see the man that she has, in fits and starts in Ketterdam and now, more and more in Darrow, but she knows the history of their arrangement makes it hard.

So she smiles a little and teases. "You know he wouldn't ask. He'd just let it happen and awkwardly hover on the edges of things. I have to tell him or he'll just be strange about it."

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