Yay! Chapter 3 is up! Many, many thanks and free pocky to all my fabulous reviewers! This is the first story I've ever gotten more than 1 review for, so thanks guys!
A few nights later, she started to scream.
She'd been staying in his father's room; what Riff found surprising about this was that his father now slept on the couch. He didn't know if Father actually cared about this woman or the child that lay growing within her, or if the man was simply too caught up in the constant cycle of boozing and hangovers to really care much at all. Riff strongly believed it was the latter.
When her wailing started up, high pitched and pained, coming in between ragged gasps of air, his father lay unconscious on the sofa. It was eight-thirty, and Riff had been in his room, as always, reading a book. He bolted to the door of his father's room, but he didn't dare go in. He knew what was happening. He was scared…
Eventually, her cries ceased, only to be replaced with new ones- wails that could not have belonged to the red-haired young woman, because they were too different in tone; it was nearly squealing. And soon, even that stopped. Riff's heart skipped a beat, and for a moment a silence ensued that seemed to echo in his head.
"You can come in now, Riff."
He jumped visibly at the sound of her voice; how had she known he'd been there? Tentatively, he opened the door and stepped inside.
She lay there, amid the soiled sheets and dust, looking for all the world like some sort of maternal goddess with a fiery halo of hair and child at her breast. Walking up to the bed slowly, her eyes following him the whole time, Riff studied the child that lay in the crook of her pale arm. The little one smiled, a toothless, pink smile of absolute and untainted glee. Only a child could look like that; only an infant could be so very pure.
"It's a girl."
He nodded. A pause.
"What's her name?"
She smiled through the exhaustion that shown in her eyes; there was happiness there, too, though, and a sort of quiet pride.
"Ah, well… What do you think her name should be?"
Both of their eyes fell again on the crooning, smiling infant in her arms.
Riff thought, studying that small face, the dark eyes that so matched her mother's.
"Magenta." He said. "You should name her Magenta."
She nodded, still smiling wearily. "Magenta it is, then."
Riff realized something just then, looking contentedly upon this woman with the baby he'd named in her arms.
He loved them.
And, in truth, these two people, each beautiful in their own right, were the first things he'd ever really, truly loved in the desperate and dirt-poor five years of his life. This woman, this angelic creature with the exotic voice and hair that circled her pale face like a halo of flames, and this child, this dark-eyed, beautiful child with the pink smile and pink name.
He loved them, and that was all his young heart needed to know.
He called the woman his mother from that day on.
Aww, it's baby 'Genta! I know this chapter is unbearably short! Gomen nasai! More shall come soon, I promise! .