Tu Es Ma Lumière

103 - Delivery

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Prompt - What if Mary never had the miscarriage in 2x04, and she delivers a healthy baby, but she's actually holding Francis and Lola accountable for their actions about their son? Like she's angry about it, as she always should have been in the show?

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The differences between them had never, ever been more prominent as it was now. The King of France notes, looking between the door and the small woman next to him. The obvious was that -plainly- one was a Queen two times over, by bloodright and marriage, and the other was not. The other had given birth in a servent hovel, whilst the first held each and every medical breakthrough and assistance at her fingertips. The first was now birthing him a child, surrounded by physicians and midwives and Nostradamus, safe in appropriate birthing chambers in the palace of France. The second held only a straw bed and no midwife, a barely experienced woman she didn't know at her side.

However, the most obvious difference between them now was the sounds they let out. It shouldn't be, each and every time his mother had pushed a child from her womb -living or dead- she had howled and screamed for hours upon hours. In Charles' and Margot's cases -and his own-, for days. Even little Bash, and Francis himself when he was old enough to comprehend what was happening, had been kept away from the Queen's chambers, since her screams of pain echoed throughout the corridors of whatever Palace they happened to be staying in at the time. 

The woman before him had birthed their bastard hours before he had arrived in the damp little hovel to retrieve them from what was obviously going to turn into the jaws of death. She had told him in hoarse whispers that the pain was so, so horrid that she had screamed like a banshee for over half a day as her child descended from her womb into the damned world that they lived within. Her voice had gone just after they had met Louis of Conde upon the road for a brief family reunion. It had proven to him how loudly she had been screaming in pure, unbridled pain and agony as the baby continued to descend from her body.

But that was not the case in this situation, however. No, the King of France had been banned from entering by Mary's frightening Scottish midwives and Priestesses. He held his ear to the door in an effort to hear even the slightest whimper as the Queen of Scots and France continued to birth their child. But make even the slightest sound, was something Mary did not.

He was torn from bursting down the door to catch even a small glimpse of her. Even if he would have hated the sound, Mary's cries of pain would have alerted him to the fact that the Queen was indeed there in her rooms, bringing in the long awaited heir to the two thrones from her womb. But since she didn't speak a word, or cry a cry, he wasn't even sure that she was inside at all. Frittering servants bringing in cloths or water or bringing out items that were no longer necessary, even his half sister in law or Greer's updates every few hours didn't suffice.

The King couldn't stop frittering outside the birthing chambers. He had to be by Mary. He had to know that she was in the chambers at all, he had to watch the birth of his son or daughter. He had to know that she was alright, that she would survive the birth, as so many women did not. After all, she had been in the stages of childbearing for hours too long. And still, the baby inside of her did not cry.

He lead a pack of noblemen and women that were stationed outside the Queen's birthing chambers. Members of the de Guise house, as well as dull aristocrats sent by their masters and mistresses to report back on the childs' state of life. After all, their allies may wish for a living child to marry when the time was right, but their enemies would love to hear of the Queen delivering either a useless daughter or a dead son. There could be no confusion in the matter of the offspring of the King and Queen of France. Even Catherine, who had been a helpful little bird in Mary's childbearing months, had been banned from the room by the frightening midwives. She stood next to him, partaking in one of her favourite pass times, glaring daggers into the form of Lola Fleming. After all, her son's marriage had noticeably gone downhill since the little whore bore her sons bastard.