[Pre Gryf-Huff Game] Awkwardness: Sage and Aislinn
sagemacmillian:
She felt a little calmer herself with the steady chopping and cutting of the ingredients, something she could do methodically and carelessly, maybe even in her sleep she’d done it so often. Sagitta had a similar skill, but Sagitta had a skill in anything she put her mind to. It was something Sage envied, with her specific skill in potions and alchemy and not much else. “Still, distancing himself and acting like a right arse are two entirely different things.” She shrugged. Merlin, she couldn’t believe she was the last to know, how dare those boys keep something so huge from her!? She hated being the last to know, it always made her feel like the stupid little sister…. which technically she was but still! If anyone had a right to be upset, it was her, not Cygnus.
“Why are you high-risk? Because you’re young or something else?” She couldn’t help the questions, and probably wouldn’t until Aislinn told her to shut it. “That’s cool, that you’re keeping her if she’s Loxias’.” She said, smiling a little at the thought of a new baby around. That’d be pretty fun, having a tiny thing around to play with. Assuming it was Loxias, but in Sage’s mind, one one-night stand (very loosely using the term) and a whole relationship worth of Loxias… it seemed almost entirely likely the baby was Loxias. What awful luck for that one night to have claimed the baby, that’d be the worst kind of luck, the anti-felix-felicis kind of luck.
“That sucks, hopefully they come around. I mean, yeah, teen pregnancy, that’s a little bad, image-wise, but it’s a baby! And it’s not like you or Lox are running off, that’d be bad, image-wise. Not knowing who the dad is- I mean, between all the ministry kids, not between… you know- that’d be bad. Sticking together isn’t that awful, if you think about it. Plus a baby! No one can stay mad with a cute little baby around.” She laughed. She’d never liked Aislinn’s reputation, but had never really taken issue with it before she’d started dating Loxias, and then she’d stopped the sleeping around and the slagging around, and Sage had kept her opinions to herself. And now, feeling betrayed by her boys, she barely remembered that she’d disliked Aislinn because of her reputation at any point, and waved her knife in a blithe movement. “Plus who in our crowd hasn’t slept around with a few others. As though the parents can pretend their little angels are anything but little devils, we all know the truth, you’ve just been more… open,” she laughed, “about it.”
Sage had so many questions that it was surprising for Aislinn, if she was honest. Most of the other students seemed almost... uncomfortable, about the pregnancy. They avoided mentioning the parts of it that she enjoyed -- the increasing movement, the added energy that had come in the last month or so -- and mocked the parts she disliked -- the increase in her weight, the need to change her wardrobe -- as though it were their business to make her pregnancy even more uncomfortable than it was without ever asking questions about it. Sage, though, was asking, at least. And Aislinn was surprised at how much she wanted to answer.
“Mostly because I’m young, yes. The younger you are, the higher your risk factor. They said my risk is lower than expected because I’ve been gaining weight well, but still high for how young I am. That and the stress of still being in school, and they don’t want to take any unnecessary risks.” She shrugged a shoulder thoughtfully at that, looking down at her ingredients as Sage started to pass some of them over toward her. “I’m kind of excited about it, to be honest. I mean. I never really wanted kids -- Loxias wanted a family eventually, I wasn’t so sure -- but it’s... different, somewhat. I’m more excited now than Loxias is, I think. When I’m not utterly frustrated with how people are talking about me, anyway. D’you know you can almost feel her kick now? It’s still not as strong externally, but it’s not quite muscle flutter anymore. I’m trying to wait until you can really feel her kick before letting Loxias feel it.”
Aislinn wondered why Sage was seemingly taking her side on this, really. It wasn’t as though they were particularly friends before. Getting along, yes, especially since she and Loxias had started dating and Aislinn had grown faithful toward him. But not friends, not close ones that actually shared anything of interest. She liked this, though. She liked the feeling of having someone who had started to veer toward the side of dislike coming back around and acting almost... normal. Normal, that was something she could work with. “You know how Pureblood parents are about their reputations, whether the seeming black mark on it is valid or not. I’m not even the first one in our generation to crop up pregnant anyway. And at least I know almost for certain who the father is, you know?”
Carina Peakes had turned up pregnant the year before, at just turned sixteen, with no notion of who the father might be save that he was definitely one of the Pureblood boys. Aislinn had been pleased by that at the time, enjoyed teasing the girl about it, though she now regretted it a bit. She wondered if Carina was talking about her now as she had once talked about the other girl. “Like father, like daughter, really, though,” she continued, looking up with a wry smile. “You’d think he’d be happier that I’m the one shouldering the reputation right now, considering it keeps his cheating on my mother under wraps. I’m a perfect cover for him. No one ever hears about his affairs because they’re too occupied with my antics. He should be thankful.” Her father’s cheating wasn’t a well-known thing among Pureblood circles, save those few that Aislinn deemed to tell. Loxias, Louis, and now Sage, but no one else. She protected her father too much to let that slip -- save now, of course, when she was brilliantly furious with him. “I wonder if he’d still be displeased if I pointed out that I’m the one that keeps his secretaries from being notice.”
