Long Winding Road [Finished]

[carcinoGeneticist]

((Let's get this show on the road, kittens. Baby people, you guys can pop in as you please as soon as the little loves are on the outside proper-like. This thread probably won't be long, I just... Time to wrap things up official-like.))

It had been nine long months, and Seth was tired of being pregnant.

For all of the fuss over it, all the fear that had been spread and that he'd finally felt, pregnancy in itself was a non-event. He'd carried Bernard's eggs before, but that had been fairly straightforward, and it hadn't lasted nearly this long. Then he'd just been stuck with incubation, but that hadn't been terrible either. It was a lot like this, in a way. He'd been stuck in a bed, bundled with blankets until he thought he would die of overheating, and gotten yelled at every time he'd tried to get up to do something. Alarmingly similar, really.

The biggest difference was that he'd been allowed to have a smoke when he'd wanted to then, and that was strictly forbidden now. Well. That and the way everyone was walking on eggshells around him. It was like people though that he'd just keel over if they looked at him funny. That was annoying, but he put on a smile and refused to show any of what he was feeling. He didn't want them to worry, though he was tired. More tired than he should have been, he was sure, but.. It was a lot of work, growing babies. He tried not to worry about it, even when it got to the point that he felt like he was sleeping more than he was awake. Hormones made him crabby, too. Crabby and tired, but Seth wore a smile through it all.

After all, if what Temmin had said was true, those nine months might have been the last he had. He didn't plan on it happening, but all the same... He figured it was his chance to make the most of things, to have a little fun with friends and family and to help them remember him fondly if...

Well. Later. So that when the kids were grown they could all laugh about it.

Lightly, the man played his fingers across the swell of his furry belly, feeling the forms inside squirm and wiggle. It wouldn't be long now. He'd been having contractions, off and on, for days.

That was more exciting than anything. He knew there were quite a few babies inside of him, and he was ready to get the little bastards out. A small smile played across the man's fuzzy muzzle as he felt another kick. Active things. It would be an absolute joy to get to know them. Because he would, he was sure. Right now, he just wanted to nap a little bit, and then he'd drag his ass out of bed and go see how Heilyn was doing. It would be worth getting yelled at to move around a little - his butt was going numb. He settled back into his pillows, closed his eyes.

Then he gasped sharply, gripping his midsection. That was a different contraction. Beyond that, it felt... Wrong, somehow. "Heilyn? HEILYN![/b]" Pain laced his voice though he tried to muffle it, swearing as he fell back again. As soon as he heard footsteps, he took a deep breath. "I - It's time, I think.[/b]"

Deep breaths. Calm. It would be over soon, and he would be fine.

[Satra]

These past nine months had been difficult for Heilyn as well, but in a different way. Every moment seemed to feed her paranoia, the only thing keeping it down was the need to stay strong for Seth. These were his last days, after all. No. Might be. They might be his last days. She had to keep him as happy as possible.

She'd become somewhat overbearing in this time. She hadn't meant it, really. She tried to return every smile Seth gave. Return every touch. But every time she saw him doing something, she became shrill and over-protective. He couldn't go anywhere without her. She knew a exercise was good, but there was no way in hell he was allowed to travel down the stairs without her, or walk in the garden without her panicking over every little thing he might trip over.

She entertained his nighttime pillow talk about names and what breeds and regions and mixes the children might be. How they would play with them. Reminiscing about their past children and how to apply their years of parental wisdom to make this new batch the best of all of them. Her teasing him they were all smelly Bog children and not a drop of Solandrian to be found anywhere. Him returning with no, because he was growing an army of mini-Seths and their Solandrian Spade Bat-ness would one day rule the world.

Joking, laughing, wondering. How she wished she meant a word of it.

How she wished she could put away her worries for even a moment, just to be purely happy for him. For them. It never relented.

There was a suddenly rush of adrenaline when she heard her name called with that touch of panic and pain. Everything was dropped and she rushed to his side.

"Of course. Of course. You just stay there and I'll get the doctor," she said in a quivering voice. She gave him a kiss and summoned Spekkio, sending her rushing off while Heilyn stayed with Seth. She curled up onto the bed next to him, petting his face, his mohawk, his belly, his arms. Anything she could touch. It would be the last time she would ever get to do it again.

No.

Might be.

It might be the last time she would ever get to do it again.

[carcinoGeneticist]

Breathing. Seth had to keep focused on his breathing. That would ease the contractions or something - he hated to admit it, but he hadn't really been listening to Temmin since he'd been pretty damn sure that this would happen through a c-section - and would help him out in the long run. When it came down to the line, however, it was much harder to focus on anything than he'd predicted.

His abdominal muscles clenched tightly and another pained scream escaped the man's mouth. If it didn't hurt so bloody much, he might have been embarrassed. He barely notice that, instead focusing as something seemed to twist.

Wrong. That just felt... Wrong. It hurt, too, a bone-deep ache. When Heilyn stepped into the room, the big man whimpered, squeezing his eyes closed.

Damn. Damn it all.

Red-ringed eyes were turned up to Heilyn, but he was only able to look at her for a moment before she was buried against his body and another contraction hit. With her close by, he managed to keep his cry down to a simple yelp. His breathing was deeper now, strained. Each contraction was increasing that ache, making it more vivid and impossible to ignore. He closed his eyes tightly, grunting as his wife showered him with affections. Spekkio was fast. The doctors would be here soon.

"Something's - it's not right. Something's not right.[/b]" The man finally managed to gasp, reaching out to grip the woman's shoulder. He gave her an imploring glance, gasping to catch his breath. Shit, shit, something hurt so damn bad... "I think one of them is twisted in there.[/b]"

[Satra]

"Shh, baby. The doctor will be here soon. He'll fix it," she whispered into his ear and kissed him. "He'll fix it. Everything will be fine. Just concentrate of breathing." She knew she was saying these things to tell herself. The thought of this being her last moment with Seth made her despair. It couldn't end here. It just couldn't. For all her paranoia, she could never actually bring herself to imagine that situation past simply its possibility. She held him and comforted him as much as she could until the doctor arrived.

Heilyn refused to leave the room, but stayed out of the way as they worked.

[carcinoGeneticist]

He'll fix it.

Something in the words felt empty to Seth. Temmin had, after all, tried to fix it. Months ago, in the form of an abortion. Seth had turned it down. He only wanted an option that would let him have these children. He wanted them. He wanted to give them to Heilyn, even if she'd seemed less interested as time went on and the pregnancy progressed. He'd looked at her, seen her fear, recognized its cause, but... Until now, he hadn't really known it.

He did now. Something was wrong. Something serious, the kind of serious that in thirty years of injury Seth had never felt.

"Oh, Suits,[/b]" he gasped as the doctor rushed in. The next few minutes passed in a strange rush. There were more contractions, more pain. There were urgent words from the doctor and his aide, words like "stuck" and "pressure" and "insufficient dilation". None of them made much sense to the man's brain, riddled with pain as it was, but he could hear it in their voices and see it on their faces, blurred as his vision was.

Another contraction. This one came with a strong, sharp pain, more intense than the pain from before. All that the man could do was whimper, giving his wife a pleading expression. Help me.

He felt heat between his legs, fluid. More liquid than there should have been, if it had been his water breaking. The doctor cursed, the blood soaked through the mattress, and Seth's vision clouded. There was a new word, now, as the man put strong and vividly painful pressure on his belly. Seth screamed.

Rupture.

But still, the contractions continued, one after another. Every fifteen seconds. Whatever had been stuck before shifted, then wrenched free. Something deep inside him snapped, and then Seth felt nothing below his torso. His vision faded, and as the activity in the room increased a hundredfold his thoughts began to slow. "Heilyn...[/b]"

[Satra]

Heilyn could only look on, horrified and helpless. Please, please, please let eh doctor be able to do something. She didn't like the words he was saying. Then came the blood. She covered her mouth and began to shake, trying not to cry. He was looking at her, after all. She had to be strong and help him through it.

There was a crack. More blood. The doctors and nurses very suddenly flew into a flurry of activity. Needles and knives came out. There was cutting. More blood.

"Seth!" she cried in a desperate whisper, but she couldn't get close. The doctors were moving too unpredictably. If they were able to save him, but didn't because she got in the way...

The stunned "Oh suits" from the doctor caused another heavy wave of adrenaline to course through her. She could suddenly hear little over the buzzing in her ears. There were some words "Get this one out first". Something about "least chance of survival."

As they pulled the other children out, they cleared a space for her next to him. She knew this was it. She knelt by the bed, grabbing one of his hands in hers and touching his face with the other.

"Baby..." she whispered between sobs. "Baby, can you hear me?"

[carcinoGeneticist]

They didn't need to anesthetize the man; his spine had been broken by the force of his contractions and the way all of the children had pressed together inside of him. Seth felt nothing more than a warm haze, his eyes fixed on the woman that rested beside him as hands slipped inside his belly. He saw, dimly, as one form was removed before the others, pink and soft and naked as could be. The others followed, furred and squalling and full of life.

He saw something with arms, legs, and wings, tucked securely into a bassinet, wailing its silly little head off. For a second, he had to blink. Did it look...? No, couldn't have. All he'd seen were Solandrian shades. They were all over the next ones, too, and then the last was another mix. A perfect little mix.

Seth smiled, and then his eyes closed.

He was dimly aware of the fact that someone was still digging around inside of him, searching for the origin of the bleeding even as his life continued to gush out around him. He almost wanted to tell them to stop, to leave them. But he just didn't have the energy. This was it, then?

Slowly, weakly, the man opened his eyes, raising the hand she wasn't holding and resting it against Heilyn's cheek. "Yeah. I can hear you. Look at all the little Solandrians,[/b]" he whispered, a smile working its way onto his face as he did. His eyes... He wanted to see her, to burn the image of her face into his mind. He brushed one blue-clawed thumb against her cheek. "It's been fun, baby. 'm gonna miss you."

It was getting hard to keep his eyes open, and it just didn't seem as important for him to breathe. "You love them for me, Heilyn. 'm sorry I won't... won't be there.[/b]" His hand fell down from her face, his smile fading as he sucked in another deep breath. It just... didn't seem like there was much point in fighting this. He closed his eyes for just a second, then increased his grip on her hand, almost urgently, and opened them again. "I love you, you bitch.[/b]"

A full, toothy grin spread across his muzzle, his little leafy nose twitching. This was it. The man took one last shallow breath, then went still.

Seth was dead.

[Bee]

The last baby entered the world with a flurry of kicking limbs--too many of them, actually, but with clawed humans and near-doppelganger bipeds a spice of strange seemed to have been sprinkled over the whole batch--and almost no sound, aside from a couple small whimpers, breathing awkwardly, shaking lightly. (Someone was calling for masks, for both the human and him.)

He was aware only that he had left his comfortable, crowded, quiet home for a world of brightness (beyond his closed lids, red) and noise, and he didn't appreciate it.

Later he would imagine that he felt his father's gaze on him before death seized him, recognizing him, and that he in turn had recognized his father. Some first and final moment of parental love. And though he would actually recall nothing, the reconstruction would become almost as good and comforting as a real memory.

But that would come later. Right now he squirmed, twitched, and whimpered, wanting warmth.

[Satra]

It was moments like these that there was little wonder in her mind why she loved him. That smile. He always knew when to fight and when to roll with the punches.

He was at peace with it. It brought her terror in that everything became so much more real, but at the same time it made her tumultuous emotions calm just a bit. She let him go for only a moment to take off her gloves and thrown them aside. Her naked hands ran through his thick fur.

"It's been more than just fun, and I'm going to miss you so, so much," she bit her lip as a sob tried to escape her. Tears now flowed freely from her eyes, hot streams of liquid collecting at and dripping off her chin. She gave a harsh laugh that was half sob, "I love you, too, you jackass," she smile faded into a softer expression and she whispered, "God, how I love you."

Heavy, broken breaths escalated quickly into sobs, then tormented screaming as she flung her arms around him and buried her face into his neck. She held onto his cooling body until the doctors had to pull her away.

[Okay, I think at this point we'll leave it open for Momo and Lucca to make posts and then we can close this up? :3 ]

[Lucca]

((ooc: KNEW it would happen while I was in transit. Darn it. XD;; ))



He wasn't the last to come out, nor was he the first...he was in the middle. And compared to many of the rest of the babies, he was very...normal. Yes, his Rank was nice and high, and he looked very much like Seth's very first son, but it would be no surprise if he was barely noticed. He and his twin. He felt hands grabbing him, felt the warmth leave, and he curled up as best he could. He was oddly quiet, his small, scared whimpers probably barely even heard above the wailing of some of his siblings.

He had, of course, no idea at all what was going on, but something just felt...wrong, even to the small Coyote. As he was wrapped up in something warm and soft, but not warm enough nor soft enough, his paws moved, his little wet nose sniffling, whimpers increasing in volume as he desperately tried to find...something. He wasn't sure what, but it was important that he find it soon, and...it just wasn't there.

Unfortunately for him, whatever it was he was looking for wouldn't quite be there for most of his infancy...and in some ways it never would. He never knew his Father, something that would always trouble him in later life, something that troubled him even then, as he lay helpless and scared bundled in a blue baby blanket, with some sort of horrible sound that made his ears fight to stay against his head in the background.