Because I’m a terrible tease and this is the only real part I’m sort of satisfied with:
It happens early.
Caroline rises to her feet, passes her sewing onto her good sister and feels glad from a respite from the task. She straightens her spine and it only takes a second. There’s a rush of cold down her leg and her whole body stills in a combination of fear, excitement, discomfort, and embarrassment. Thoughts and words and images flash through her brain, but she can’t decide on a single action. She stands still and confused for what is only mere seconds, but it is long enough for her lady mother to notice things are amiss.
“Caroline?” Catelyn tilts her head, a question hanging in the air before realization dawns. Tully blue eyes lock on her, but not her, her gown? Caroline breaks from her paralysis, looks down and sees what she should have expected but is still shocked to find.
“Did you wet yourself?” Arya, ever classless and obtuse, leans forward to stare even as Septa Mordane hushes her. It makes her laugh, a short shrill thing that makes her feel more panicked than anything else.
“It’s all right, dear,” and her lady mother is suddenly across the room and right there. Catelyn puts one hand on Caroline’s back and one hand ever so gently on the swell of her belly. “It’s early, but it’s fine.”
And then it all happens so fast.
She’s taken to her chambers, and Maester Luwin waits for her there. Sansa comes with her, though Catelyn makes her wait by the doors. Arya, having figured it out only when whispered the answer by her sister, long since vanished and was no doubt running through the halls of Winterfell either screaming the news from the top of her lungs, or teasing everyone about knowing something they did not.
Robb arrives with her lord father just as Maester Luwin adjusts the pillows behind her and tell her not to worry. “Sometimes, they are just in a hurry to arrive.”
Only, there’s apparently no real hurry. The pains do not start for a full day and half after, long enough to make Luwin’s eyes full with worry and Catelyn’s reassurances to begin to fall flat. There are mutterings of potions and elixirs and debates over which would be wise and which dangerous. But then her stomach twists and churns most painfully and her sudden gasp chases the worry from the room.
It takes half a day, hours of labour and hours of pushing. Caroline does not scream obscenities, like all those tv shows in the other world where women abuse all those around them. She certainly understands the sentiment, when it feels like she is being ripped in two over and over again. But she is as ever Caroline as before, so she grits her teeth and maybe shouts and maybe cries and maybe begs, but that is the worst of it.
But it is not so easy. She has children, where before she had only expected a child. One child is born is flood of pain and blood and tears and then the pain continues and Luwin makes an interesting exclamation and her lady mother urges her to push again. Her eyes almost roll back into her skull and her fingers hurt from gripping tightly whatever she could get her hands on, but the pressure builds and builds again and finally the second, the surprise, is brought into the world.
The second does not cry like the first.
Fifteen years ago, a boy and girl were brought into this world, a world where neither of them were meant to live. But by the grace of gods or monsters, the girl lived. Now, up in the north, in the snow and the cold, a boy and girl are brought into the same world. Only the first, the boy, was expected.
And only the boy lives.