The baby cries again.
The physician lifts the tiny, furious, perfect body just enough for me to see.
Human-looking first. Small. Damp. Red-faced with outrage at being introduced to atmosphere. Dark hair plastered to a delicate skull. Tiny fists clenched like they already have opinions.
“Oh,” I say.
It comes out as a wreck. I don’t care.
They place the baby on my chest first, because apparently medicine occasionally gets things exactly right.
Warm.
So warm.
And impossibly light and impossibly real and still yelling like the world owes an apology.
I laugh and sob at the same time, which is humiliating but beyond correction.
“Hi,” I whisper. “Hi, baby. Hi.”
The physician assistant is already doing the newborn checks with efficient gentleness. Towel. Suction. Quick scan. The room smells like blood, antiseptic, clean linen, sweat, and something else underneath all of it now—new skin, new life, the raw mineral heat of a body only just arrived.
“Biometric scan good,” the assistant says. “Respiration strong. Heart rate stable.”
Rhyx closes his eyes for one brief second as if the words physically enter him.
Then the physician looks at him and says, “Father, hands.”
For the first time all day, he looks genuinely uncertain.
It lasts less than a second.
He washes, sanitizes, and holds them out exactly as instructed.
The medic lays the baby into his arms.
I will remember that image until I die.
Rhyx, who has carried weapons and command and the weight of fleet decisions and enough guilt to sink cities, holding our child like the universe has handed him glass and flame at once.
His hands are so large. His scales so dark against the soft pale blanket. He adjusts instinctively—one broad palm supporting the back and head, the other curved beneath the tiny body withexquisite caution, claws angled away, wrists flexed to create more cradle than grip.
The baby quiets.
Not entirely. There’s still that offended little hiccuping breath. But the crying eases.
Rhyx looks down with a kind of awe so complete it makes the room seem indecent for witnessing it.
“Hello,” he says, very softly.
The baby opens one furious eye, considers existence, and sneezes.
The Vakutan medic barks out a laugh. “Good lungs. Good judgment too.”
I laugh again, wet and exhausted and wrecked open.
Rhyx looks at me over the baby’s head.
