By the time the med team arrives, the house no longer feels like our pleasant half-finished domestic project with the scrappy little herb patch out back. It feels like a threshold. Like something in the walls has started listening.
The door opens to two medics and a maternal physician assistant carrying cases and scanning the room in one practiced sweep—entry points, space, lighting, patient orientation, all of it logged in under a second.
One of the medics, a stocky Vakutan woman with iridescent scales and a voice like sanded wood, smiles at me and says, “Good morning.”
I stare at her. “Debatable.”
“Fair.”
They move fast but not chaotically. Monitor leads. Portable scanner. Sterile packs opened with that dry, crisp paper-plastic hiss that instantly changes the smell of the room—antiseptic, polymer, cool metal, and under it all the human heat of labor and fear and determination. The physician assistant clips a biometric monitor to my wrist. Another to my abdomen. Soft tones begin sounding from the portable unit—pulse, uterine rhythm, fetal tracing.
There.
The baby’s heartbeat.
Fast. Strong. Real.
The sound hits me so hard I have to close my eyes for a second.
Rhyx hears it too. I know he does because his whole body stills—not with fear, with reverence so intense it almost burns through the room.
The assistant glances at the monitor and nods. “Fetal vitals stable.”
Rhyx exhales for the first time in maybe ten minutes.
The Vakutan medic catches it and says, “You can keep breathing too, father.”
He looks at her. “I am breathing.”
She raises one brow-ridge. “Barely.”
I would laugh if I weren’t busy being broken in half by biology again.
Hours do strange things in labor.
They do not pass normally.
They stretch and fold and lose their names. Light changes on the walls. The bright silver morning fades toward afternoon gold without asking permission. Voices become more intimate and more functional at once. Pain stops feeling like spikes and starts feeling like weather systems rolling through my entire body.
At some point they decide it’s safer to stay home than move me. The district maternal unit is fully equipped. My vitals are good. The baby’s vitals are good. The physician arrives in person and confirms it with one calm scan and a hand on my shoulder.
“We stay here,” she says.
I nod because speech is suddenly for people with hobbies.
Rhyx stays beside me through all of it.
Not hovering. Not crowding. Not trying to fix what cannot be fixed because it isn’t broken, just brutal.
He relays contraction timing. Reads monitor numbers back when asked. Supports my shoulders when the physician wants me shifted. Brings water to my mouth between contractions and somehow never spills any despite the fact that I’m pretty sure he’s one bad fetal deceleration away from punching a wall through another wall.
At one point the doctor says, “We need her on her side now.”
And before she finishes the sentence, Rhyx is there, one hand under my upper back, the other bracing my hip with such care it almost makes me cry from reasons not entirely related to labor.
“Tell me if I’m hurting you,” he says.
I’m sweating, shaking, furious, and halfway to transcendence via pain, so naturally I say, “That’s a hilarious question right now.”
