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Chloe's love of roses came from her mother.
Her childhood memories of Babylon had faded as she'd grown, but she still remembered the gardens there even if they often had a dreamlike quality to them. She wasn't certain how accurate her memories were, but if the real gardens were even half as beautiful as the ones she remembered in her dreams, they had been quite gorgeous indeed.
The garden her mother had planted in Egypt was much fresher on her mind. Chloe had helped her plant every flower and tree and vine in that garden, carefully watering and fertilizing them as they went, and she had stood by her mother's side and watched as the tiny seedlings they'd planted grew. It had started small, nothing more than a promise of something greater someday in the future. Now, years later, it was one of the most beautiful gardens in the city, at least in Chloe's mind.
Someday she dreamed that her own garden would be half as beautiful as that of her mother. It was getting there, slowly but surely, but it still had quite a long ways to go.
Chloe leaned down to smell a rose on one of the nearby bushes, smiling at the familiar scent. The child growing inside of her chose that moment to kick, and if anything her smile grew even wider. Her unborn daughter or son clearly already loved roses too, if just the scent of them was enough to catch their attention.
Perhaps they would make an appearance before the roses lost their petals and stopped blooming for the year. It would be fitting if they did, for one of the first scents her child encountered to be the smell of blooming roses just like her own had been.
She straightened back up, her hand coming down to touch the swell of her stomach. Her smile faded a little at that, her mind wandering back to the latest argument she and her husband had. Looking back, she still wasn't certain what had caused it. One moment everything had been fine, and the next it had not. Just like the time before that. And the time before that.
The larger she grew, the more nervous Lydias became. Sometimes Chloe swore that he was more concerned about her pregnancy than she was. She supposed it made sense. He'd learned firsthand what that kind of loss was like, and she could not blame him for being drawn into his memories from time to time. He'd already lost one child, so it made sense that a part of him would be concerned about losing another.
That didn't mean she felt at all guilty in going behind his back to conspire with Bagoas. As fond as she had grown of Bagoas over the years, she knew him well enough to know he never would have taken the steps needed without her stepping up to push as well.
Each of them was what their pasts had made them into after all. All three of them had cracks and weaknesses in their wholes. The hard part, the part they had to actively work together to resolve, was making certain those cracks didn't grow to the point where any or all of them might shatter.
And sometimes that meant conspiring against your husband before he pushed his wife or his lover past the point of no return.
Lydias would probably be quite irritated with her once he realized that she had played a role in helping Bagoas all but kidnap him for a few days. Still, she hoped Bagoas would be able to help relieve the building stress that she'd seen in his face and heard in his voice the last few weeks. Gods knew Lydias needed all the help he could get with that before things reached a breaking point.
Chloe had learned to love her husband over the years, but that didn't mean she was willing to let him smother her. And, intentionally or not, he had gotten much too close to doing just that in recent weeks.
She was the daughter of a general-turned-Pharoah and the proud hetaira who would never be his wife. She had been a child of the baggage train. She had seen more of the world than most people even knew existed in the first place before she was even a maiden. She was not and had never been some fragile thing that would easily shatter.
Lydias knew that, but over the last few weeks he'd forgotten. She hoped a few days away might help remind him of it.
If not, she was going to have to take much more drastic steps to remind him that she could take care of herself. And she very much preferred to save that as a last resort, especially considering just how quickly she was reaching the final stages of pregnancy. It would be uncomfortable for both of them otherwise.
As if they could hear the thoughts rushing through her head, the child kicked her stomach again. Chloe let out a quiet laugh and reached down to rub her rounded belly again.
"Yes, my dear," Chloe said softly, "your father is being quite the fool. Fathers are good at that, from my experience. From time to time, at least."
Lydias had spent so much time worry over her in recent weeks that even she had noticed he'd been neglecting his lover. If Chloe had learned anything from her parents' relationships it was that nothing good ever came of one partner being ignored in favor of another. It complicated things in ways that they didn't need to be complicated, and sometimes it was very difficult to come back from once you went too far in a direction.
Chloe loved her father. Truly, she did. That didn't mean she didn't have very strong opinions on some of the things he'd done over the years.
A warm breeze blew through the garden, taking the scent of roses with it. Chloe smiled and closed her eyes, breathing in deeply.
For just a moment, she was a small child again, standing in a garden in Babylon as the King smiled down at her with eyes that were exactly the same as her own. Then she was older but still so young, clinging to a horse on a wild nighttime ride as a man who she would someday know better than anyone promised to keep her safe. And then she was on the cusp of maidenhood, standing in her mother's garden as that same man made a similar promise, neither of them yet knowing that he would be her husband just a short time later.
Inside of her, the child kicked again. This time it felt almost like a promise of its own.
Chloe opened her eyes.