The Royal Scandal | Prince William |

I Bleed Red

June 22, 2018

The second she says it, William springs to action, calling Nanny Marion to watch the kids while scrambling to grab their hospital bag, and yelling at their security guards to get the car.

Jaclyn sits there helplessly, fighting between closing her eyes and falling over and crying. The weight on her pelvis has intensified, and the twins press and press further down like an anchor thrown overboard.

They kick and she feels the bruising immediately. They kick and her ribs pop. They kick and every muscle in her body contracts together.

At some point William pulls her up and into her chair, pushing her down the hall, and out the door. Her voice is gone, but she internally cries to see her kids. She can't leave and never see them again, but her lips seal as her vision blurs and William lifts her into the car.

He follows, propping her up against him, and the car takes off.

“Darling, you have to stay awake,” he whispers in her ear, and she jolts, looking out at the blurry world racing by. She wasn't sleeping, at least… she doesn't think she was, but then her head is bobbing again. Fight, she tells herself, biting her lip to keep back the burning tears, the exhaustion.

“Will, if I-”

“You're going to be fine.” Even her pounding ears can hear the surety in his voice, and the wavers that crack the glass underneath. Jaclyn shakes her head, curling into his arm and inhaling. Memorizing it, the scent on his clothes, the feel of his arm, the sound of his voice.

Because she's anything but fine. She's quivering and bleary, weak and trembling. She knows what fine feels like, and it's not this.

“I love you, you know? No matter what I can't stop.” She tilts her chin up smiling, and that's when her tears finally escape, cascading down her cheeks instead of soaking eternally into his shirt. “That's my truth, my curse, I'll love you forever it seems.”

She's so mad, so blindingly mad at herself. For crying, for loving him, for telling him. Now she'll die, and she's given him the out of the century. No guilt will have to be carried for his actions because he knows she loves him. She can die, and he can know till the end she loved him.

Her tears are fat globs now turning her warm cheeks sticky, and she can't bother to wipe them away. “You know,” she says before William can say anything himself. She doesn't want to hear his own obligatory confession. “Edgar Allen Poe once said: The death of a beautiful woman is the most poetical topic in the world.”

She wheezes through a scoff, her head slumping so her cheek is pressed into William's shirt. There is nothing poetical about her current pain, no beauty to be found in her suffering. Real poetry would be her survival. There should be stanzas of motherhood, and prose of her accomplishments, but if she dies in this hospital tonight her life will become one tragedy.

She will become the narrative heroine dying to give purpose. Dying for her husband to mourn. Dying to become another looming figure for her kids to fall short of. She will become death itself, and gone from the world she will never escape it.

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June 23, 2018

People keep telling her to keep her head up, eyes open, but the delirium that fading away gives her is so sweet, numbing the pain crippling her.

Dr. Farthing looks her over once they're in the hospital suite that's equipped with everything they'll need. When they lock eyes he's slightly out of focus, but she still sees the grim line of his lips turn quickly into a tight smile.