1270 Words, One Pun. When Alicia had moved onto Mt. Pierce, she had had two main goals. One had been ensuring, by whatever means necessary and possible, that Thad never regretted marrying her. The other had been to obliterate as many traces of Marcus Pierce’s family’s residence as her budget and the overall aesthetic of the Mt. Pierce houses would allow. She did not want to live in anything Wesley would remotely consider ‘his’ house, and she wanted him and the Other Alicia to feel as uncomfortable as possible when they got demoted into what was now her house. The garden overall was much as it had been when she’d moved in, but she had taken the time to have jasmine vines trained around the windows of the rooms she used most often, both because she liked them and because she hoped the scent - the basis for her perfume - would sufficiently permeate the wood over the years that it would be impossible for the Demoted Ones to get out in due time.
Spite had not, however, been the only thing on her mind when she had set to the task of figuring out how to make her relatively small remodeling budget stretch as far as possible. She had had two sub-objectives in her project to obliterate the memory of her uncle-by-marriage’s residency: one had been to create some rooms where she and Thad could entertain both influential old-schoolers and the fashionable people of their own age group equally comfortably, and the other had been to, in other rooms, create an atmosphere where they could simply be comfortable, full stop.
The library was, in her opinion, the jewel in the crown of this effort. It had taken quite a lot of effort and creativity on her part to create a space which combined both her and Thad’s tastes as seamlessly as possible, producing somewhere they could both be wholly content, either together or separately or with close friends. She had driven the workers to distraction insisting on exact placements of colors and furniture, particularly their respective working desks. This was why as she watched new workers come in with a piece of furniture she had never wanted, not an hour after someone had moved one of her favorite Sunset Garden orchids from the spot of honor it had occupied since her first year of marriage, she could not quite force herself to look gracious and welcoming.
“Here, Mrs. Pierce?” asked one of the two people carrying in the detestable-but-necessary addition to the room.
“No,” said Alicia. “I don’t want it scratching the floor - on that rug - no, still at an angle, just not reaching off the rug - “
She caught several dirty looks sent her way before the addition was in place, but no comments; she didn’t know if that was because she was, after all, at the end of the day, not even the lowest-ranking person on the mountain, or if it was simply because of her condition. As far as Alicia could tell, the one good thing about said condition - besides that it pleased Thad - was that she did seem to attract a certain amount of deference, though she preferred not to think of the details of why she suspected this was, which revolved around the fact that she looked like death warmed over no matter what she did to try to rectify the situation. That was why she required this addition to her library.
From the few reliable-seeming print sources she had been able to find on the topic, it was perhaps not completely fair to blame the fact that she was still a kaleidoscopic number of kinds of completely and utterly miserable on the fact that her child had turned out to be children, plural - the print sources suggested that being just as sick was possible with just the one - but she couldn’t imagine that twins were helping anything. Certainly they were to blame for the order to spend as much of the rest of this sojourn in hell as she could bear lying down. This she felt perfectly comfortable blaming them for, and so she did.
Spending weeks in bed was not an option. It didn’t matter that she could prop herself up on pillows and read and work there when no-one was looking; she was not spending weeks in bed. She had tried it for a few days just to be a good sport, but had been ready to shred something by the end of the second one. By the end of the fourth, she’d still wanted to shred something, it was just that by ‘something’ she had meant ‘someone, into strips.’ This - a sort of rather complicated cross between a wingback chair which lacked arms and a sofa, with lots of soft padding and pillows in the back and a little collapsible writing surface on a hinge, which could be shuffled up to the nursery after that room was finished and occupied - was the compromise.
Finally, the chair was settled and Alicia left alone with it. Reluctantly, she approached it, sat down, swung her feet up onto it, and leaned back, closing her eyes.
It was rather comfortable.
Still, though. Here she was - she, who climbed rocks for fun, she, who had helped keep the rabble from feeding on one another - here she was, confined to this ridiculous contraption like an invalid. Later, she was expected to confine herself to it so a pair of rather poorly-behaved, if their behavior since they became large enough to do detectable things besides make her sick was anything to judge by, brats could feed off her. It was all so - dreadfully vulgar. She supposed that was the thing that troubled her most: she had dedicated her whole life to perfection, and now she was just a woman, stuck with a body which had finally reached a point where it would not conform to her will anymore. She had expected a few days of inconvenience once the children were born, getting back on her feet and adjusting her schedule around the nanny, but this was rapidly sliding toward a year, and she was beginning to suspect it got worse from here, even though later she would not be solely responsible for the beasts….
One of them kicked her rather hard. She put her hand to the affected area. The issue of names wasn’t settled, but she imagined family names would be used, one way or another - if only to establish that their children had as much of a right to them as anyone - and that would necessitate nicknames. Since doing anything that Uncle Derwent had ever done was probably a bad idea, numerals would not work, and she thought she had a viable option for whichever of them was born first and therefore was their heir.
“I’m going to call you Carus,” she informed the kicker. At first, she had thought the very notion of talking to the creatures bizarre, but since they had become very distinctly not-her, they had become convenient people to complain at, as they couldn’t talk back or, at this point, tell Thad that she had indicated anything was less than perfect in any possible way. “Stars know you’re costing me enough, whether I find you very dear or not.”
OOC: Alicia’s nickname is a Latin-to-English pun; the word ‘carus’ (which historically was sometimes used as a name) means ‘dear,’ which can be translated as ‘dear’ in the sense of ‘is dear to me,’ but is just as validly translated as ‘expensive,’ as in, ‘it cost me dearly.’