Content warning: detailed descriptions of the symptoms and emotional distress of miscarriage.

Class Mom and Dad (1)
Expecting Parents Time

A bloat-inducing, belly-filling entrée of nausea, topped with the side dish of a splitting headache, rudely jerked Irina from her sleep. After much tossing and turning, she couldn't handle the icky feeling any longer. She kicked back the blankets and stumbled out of bed.

"Damn it," she mumbled. "I don't remember going out for booze last night."

Even if she did, during bar-hopping escapades she could easily drink most people under the table and hangovers were rare for her, thanks to coming from a culture of heavy drinking and tolerance for strong alcohol. So what the hell was the deal with this? If she really went out drinking last night, she couldn't remember. Her husband wasn't around right now to verify that (and scold her for it).

On weekends like this, Irina liked to sleep in while Karasuma woke up early for a morning run. She had the house to herself until he came back. A wave of nausea made her pitch forward and sway as she stood up from bed. She groped at the edge of the nightstand for support. Stumbling at the fork in the road, she had to choose. Hurl safely in a toilet, or pop in pills for pain? Irina opted for the bathroom over the kitchen. She barely made it to the bathroom and emptied her stomach over the toilet. So occupied she was with pulling her hair out of the way, and overwhelmed with the ringing in her head, that she failed to hear Karasuma enter through the front door. Finally she heard her name called several times in the hallway.

"Irina? Irina? Are you there?"

"Here," she croaked. Of course he had to come home at the worst time. She had never felt more unsexy and uncool than right now. Her ears grew hot with embarrassment when he showed up by the bathroom.

"Are you-"

"Before you ask: no, I'm not okay. Do I look okay?" She cut herself off to retch some more, then she mumbled, "I went out drinking last night and didn't remember, right? Now you're gonna give me a lecture."

Karasuma did nothing of the sort, but knelt down to hold her hair in one hand and rub her back with the other. "No, you didn't go out drinking." His voice was low, firm, and assuring, as it usually was, and that soothed her nerves.

"Did I eat something bad, then?"

"I doubt it. If that was the case, I'd be sick, too. We cooked dinner at home and ate it together."

"So why do I feel like crap…" Irina trailed off and her eyes widened. "Hey, I need you out of here for a few minutes."

"Wha-"

"Go munch on a protein bar or something." She ushered her husband out with a few insistent pushes and locked the door between them. She rinsed her mouth, then rummaged through the cabinet underneath the sink to fish out a pink box. She followed the instructions on it, and waited through the longest, nail-biting five minutes she had ever experienced.

Karasuma's voice came from behind the closed door. "Irina, what's going on in there? Are you all right?"

He probably didn't budge from his spot. His concern was something she often craved and he wasn't inclined to express. Hearing it now touched her. Though he couldn't see it, Irina waved her hand impatiently. "Still waiting." Her own voice was high-pitched and trembling. Then she let out a squeal that would have just as easily come from a junior high schoolgirl.

Thanks to his reflexes, Karasuma jumped back out of the way and avoided a flattening of his nose when Irina swung open the bathroom door. She was glowing and all smiles. In other words, nothing like how she was when he first stumbled upon her this morning. She brandished a white stick before him.

"Look at this and tell me that I'm not seeing things."

Karasuma squinted for a better look, then he pulled back in shock. "Irina, you…you're…"

"Yeah, I'm pregnant." She jumped into his arms with a cry of joy.

That joy proved to be infectious as Karasuma lifted his wife off her feet and spun her around several times in the hallway, as if she was a ballerina. Then he put her down and said sheepishly, "Sorry, I probably made you feel sick again…"

Irina shook her head. "No, no, no, I've never felt better. It's like that pregnancy test cured me." She pulled him back into a fierce hug. "We're gonna be parents. You'll be a dad, I'll be a mom. This has to be the happiest day of my life." And she quickly added, "Tied with our wedding, of course."

Karasuma had to nod in agreement. After a bout of long, stressful workdays, he welcomed this good news with open arms. For much of his life, he never had that longing to be a father and have kids. He just couldn't see himself fitting the role. He didn't think he had what it took. Being the PE teacher for Class 3-E had transformed him, to say the least. Now that was all he could look forward to with his wife.

Class 3-E had transformed Irina, too. Since the class had graduated from Kunugigaoka Junior High and she married Karasuma, those kids left a hole in her heart that she longed to close and fill up. In her former life as a hitman, having a kid was unthinkable. A burden and liability to her dangerous line of work. Now having a kid and being a mom had been all she dreamed about. Give or take nine months, that dream would become a reality.

It was a no-brainer that the kids in Class 3-E would be the first to get the news.

Irina kept in touch with them through group text. She wished she could tell Koro-sensei, too. That up-to-no-good, almost unkillable octopus teacher had been so adamant about shipping her and Karasuma. He would've been devilishly satisfied to see them married, and thrilled to hear about a baby along the way. That thought, though bittersweet, was fleeting. Irina mostly gushed over divulging the news with caps lock text and smiley faces. To top that off, she sent a photo of the positive home pregnancy test. The response blew up her notifications sky-high. Amid all the "OMGs," congratulations, and strings of heart emojis, some of the students couldn't help but sneak in a few jabs and banters:

Maehara: "FYI in case you guys didn't know, bitch-sensei peed on that stick"

Kataoka: "Duh of course we know. We're not little kids anymore."

Isogai: "Things better left unsaid"

Okano: "Ugh way to ruin the romantic mood, Maehara"

Okajima: "Speaking of romantic, it's about time. Ten times a day, right?"

Isogai: "Things better left unimagined"

Okajima: "Noooo give us the juicy deets, bitch-sensei"

Terasaka: "Pff yeah as if she's gonna tell you"

Yoshida: "Seriously dude, can it!"

Irina burst out laughing at the conversation, which then spiraled into intense debate and bets made on whether the baby will be a boy or a girl. Name suggestions also popped up. Eventually, Irina couldn't keep up with the tidal wave of texts.

Let them have fun by guessing all they want.

In the end, clinical tests, not luck, will determine the sex, and she and Karasuma would ultimately choose the name. Morning sickness was a small price to pay for the great reward that would come in nine months.

Irina ended the day with a message in the group text: "Word of advice to the girls who want to be moms someday: morning sickness is a bad name, because be ready for that sucker to hit you at any time of the day! Ask me how I know!"

As with most things in life, Karasuma took a regimen approach with the pregnancy. Irina may be the one whose eating habits and choices directly influenced the baby's wellbeing, but he made sure that he understood the diet recommendations and that she followed them. He didn't need to corral her too much; she had dropped her smoking habit and stayed tobacco-free for a while, and she readily avoided alcohol since the day of the pregnancy test. Still, he had to remind her every now and then about the diet plan, not to gorge on junk food, and not to indulge in weird pregnancy-fueled cravings:

"No, don't order sushi today. Raw fish has the risk of containing mercury, and that can be bad for the baby."

"No, you are not eating that whole jar of Nutella."

"No, you can't mix sriracha sauce in your cereal and milk. That's just…gross."

She would pout and say, "Aww, you're no fun," but she would still comply. Sometimes she intentionally dropped junk food into the shopping cart just to get a kick out of annoying him, but she'd end up putting it back on the shelf. She knew that Karasuma was just looking out for her, and making sure that the pregnancy was going smoothly for herself and the baby. The preoccupation over a healthy diet turned Irina into a foodie, and she would snap photo after photo of her meals to send to the Class 3-E kids.

"Been eating like a rabbit lately," she said in a text, "Hubby's watching me like a hawk!"

In addition to monitoring her diet, Karasuma helped Irina find an OB-GYN to follow up with for regular check-ups. He made sure that she went to all her appointments and didn't miss taking the prenatal vitamins. Weeks went by and her belly grew into a noticeable bump. Irina ticked off the days on the calendar religiously. The pregnancy put her out of the field and had her working from home. After the baby was born, she could be sent out on covert missions again. Irina liked to play the piano, hoping the baby would hear and enjoy her performance.

After playing one of her favorite pieces by Mozart, she would look down and say, "There, feeling smarter now? I'll keep playing for you, and you'll come out as smart as Einstein."

"Babies don't get smarter from listening to Mozart. That's just a myth." One day Karasuma caught her whispering to the bump of her belly, and at his amused remark, Irina straightened up and whirled around with an indignant look on her face.

"I'll prove you wrong. What, you don't want your kid to be smart?" Then she stuck out her tongue at him.

Karasuma never did it in front of her, but when she pretended to sleep, she could hear him beside her and whispering to the baby: "Hey, this is your dad. Don't tell your mom that I talk to you at night. Let's keep it a secret between you and me. Your mom and I can't wait to meet you."

Irina would bury her smile into a pillow. She had seen from their time with Class 3-E what kind of dad he would be: strict and firm, yet protective and with a good heart. No doubt that he would make a great dad. Irina could only hope that she would measure up and be a great mom.

On the day that marked the tenth week of her pregnancy, Irina woke up to gut-wrenching cramps and, to her horror, heavy bleeding that pooled from between her legs. Only one word ran through her mind without any pause in between, or an end:

Nonononono-

Karasuma was out for a weekend morning run, as usual. Irina felt lightheaded and weak, barely able to sit up in bed. Trembling all over and breaking out into a cold sweat, she tried to call her husband. He didn't pick up. She tried to text him next, and the pain that stabbed through her lower abdomen made her gasp and almost drop the phone. Her message was short and simple: "Bleeding. Not feeling good. Please come home."

Panic made her hyperventilate and tears blurred her vision. She wouldn't stop bleeding. It just kept running, and so much of it, too…Irina tried to blink away the tears, but they kept welling up. Like a deer in headlights, she was frozen and paralyzed in the bed. She wanted so badly to save the baby. Wasn't that her new job now? To save people instead of kill them? But there was nothing she could do, and she felt so helpless.

This is a bad dream. I'll wake up and everything will be okay.

The last thing she saw was Karasuma running up to her. The last thing she felt was his grip on her shoulders. The last thing she heard was him crying out her name. Her world faded to black.

Karasuma called the paramedics, then he and Irina were rushed from the house to the nearest ER by ambulance. Irina had always been fair-skinned, but it frightened him to see the deathly pallor of her face as she laid unconscious on the stretcher. Her vitals were stable en route, so that was somewhat assuring. She still didn't stir, however, after being wheeled to a room in the ER. Only Karasuma could relay to the physician what had happened: his wife was ten weeks pregnant with their first child, and this morning he ran home to her passing out from vaginal blood loss.

The physician performed a bedside ultrasound, with Karasuma gripping Irina's limp hand through the ordeal. His fervent hopes were cruelly dashed when the physician shook his head at the screen and said solemnly, "I don't see the fetus, and I can't detect a heartbeat." Feeling gutted, Karasuma squeezed his eyes shut. He didn't want to hear it, but he had to. "I'm sorry, Mr. Karasuma…" the physician went on. "It's likely that your wife is actively undergoing miscarriage. She will continue to bleed and have abdominal pain for the next few days. I'm afraid that there's nothing we can do to prevent the process."

Karasuma's thanks in reply came out low and quiet, and numbness flooded through his body. It was some small comfort that he had heard the physician's verdict first. Irina should hear it from no one else but him. Little could be done about the bleeding except to staunch it with pads. Her blood loss wasn't drastic enough to warrant a transfusion. A nurse gave IV fluids to help Irina stir back to consciousness and bring back some color to her face.

She groaned and scrunched her eyes from the bright hospital light overhead. "What happened…? Where are we?"

"You passed out, Irina," Karasuma murmured. "We're in a hospital now. The doctor said you're going to be okay."

She blinked several times and sat up with a wince. "The baby…is he, or she…"

Karasuma's hold on her became two-handed, and he forced out the words through the lump growing in his throat. "Irina, I'm so sorry…we lost the baby."

She went straight and still as a statue, so still that he couldn't see the rise and fall of her chest, and he could barely tell she was breathing. Finally, she blinked, sagged back into the bed, and quietly said, "Oh." There was no theatrical crying, yelling, and screaming, as she was prone to doing whenever she got upset. She simply sat there looking stunned, shell-shocked, like the PTSD victims Karasuma was no stranger to seeing during his days in the military. This reaction hurt him more than any other would have. She remained this way when they were discharged home a few hours later.

"Is there anything I can do for you, Irina?" Karasuma asked gently. "Anything at all?"

He had his hand on her sagging shoulder, in case she swooned again, and he would catch her. For a while she didn't answer, as if she hadn't heard him. She didn't meet his eyes, and she said in a soft voice, "I just need to sleep. I'm really tired."

Even as she curled up in bed, she didn't break down crying.

Irina wanted to show her husband that she can be strong, even when she crumbled behind that wall she put up. She was determined not to let Karasuma see her cry.

Since that first day of the tenth week, she insisted on being put back on the field and taking up missions again. She needed a distraction, anything to take her mind off of what she had lost. She took on international missions with almost reckless abandon, not seeing home or her husband for days at a time. Every time Karasuma asked her if she was all right, she would force a smile and insist that she was doing fine. Her success on the missions should prove that.

I won't break. I won't let him see how much I'm hurting.

As for the kids in Class 3-E, they were the first to know, whatever the news may be. Every day they were hungry for updates from her. Unlike her prior long messages filled to the brim with excitement, she sent them a single, tersely worded text: "We lost the baby." She couldn't bring herself to say more, and muted notifications from the group text. She really was in no mood to be flooded with condolences, however genuine and heartfelt they would be.

As the physician had said, the bleeding and cramps subsided after a few days, but a different kind of pain continued to haunt her. She was sure that it would never go away. Irina wavered between crippling, numb depression or red-hot anger. Either she spent long, drawn-out naps in bed, wishing she would never wake up, or spent workouts at the gym beating the living daylights out of punching bags.

How could things turn out this way? Where did she slip up? Irina followed the recommended diet to the letter, and Karasuma made sure that she stuck to it like a recruit to a bootcamp schedule. Hell, she even kept track of her daily calorie intake and went down the list of essential nutrients in a journal. She worked from home and was careful not to exercise too much. She hadn't touched a cigarette, didn't taste a drop of booze, didn't do anything crazy or stupid to endanger the baby in any way. So, why? Why? She tried to do everything right, but it all went wrong. It wasn't fair.

At night, Irina couldn't sleep. Next to Karasuma, she had to pretend to sleep so she could maintain her façade. If she slept, she would have to face the nightmares, and hear the nasty little voices that chilled her like centipedes crawling into her ears.

You didn't have a name for it. You didn't know if it's a boy or a girl. Now you'll never know.

It came and went as just a clump of cells. How could you be sad over something like that?

You had taken the lives of countless people. What's one more life lost to you? What's the big deal?

To keep the nasty voices quiet, Irina had to stay awake. Become an insomniac. During the day, she applied makeup to hide shadows under her eyes. Karasuma wasn't stupid and likely wasn't fooled, but he hadn't said anything, and she tried to keep up appearances anyway. Despite her best efforts, she could pretend to look strong for only so long. Sooner or later, the wall she put up around herself would crack and collapse.

Irina asked for a day off, and could think of nothing else but to curl up in bed, bury herself under all the blankets, and sob into the pillows. She wanted the mattress to close in on her like jaws, to snap her up and not let her go. She cried so hard that her chest hurt, she gasped for breath, and couldn't hear Karasuma coming home from work early. She didn't even hear him walking up to her, and at his touch, at his hand over her shaking shoulder, she flinched. Her tear-filled gaze snapped up to meet his eyes, his brows knitted in pained concern. He didn't ask her if she was okay. The answer was so obvious. Shame welled up within her and she averted her gaze.

"Thought you would come home later," she mumbled.

"Talk to me, Irina." His voice held none of the hardness he had to use during interrogations. "You've been bottling up everything, and it comes out like this." She could hear how weary he was underneath that gentle tone. He sank into the bed next to her, resting his head on the pillows so he could be eye level with her.

It was hard to avoid his gaze when he was in that position. Irina bit down on her bottom lip, trying but failing to stifle the sobs caught in her throat.

"You cry in your sleep," he said. "Even before you got pregnant, ever since you moved in with me. Did you know that? Do you remember?"

"I…I really do that?" she asked meekly.

"You had nightmares about losing your parents. I know because you would call out for them in your sleep." Karasuma held up the corner of a blanket and dabbed it over her wet face. "The tears are gone by morning."

Her husband dried her tears every time, she realized, and he never asked her about those nights. "I really don't remember having those dreams," Irina admitted. Even if she remembered, she would be too embarrassed to talk about them. Maybe he knew that, and that was why he had kept quiet about it.

Though Karasuma dried her tears now, as he always had, more welled up in her eyes and ran down her face. Her chest ached too much for her to bear it any longer.

"It's my fault that our baby's not here anymore."

"No, don't say that. Don't ever blame yourself. You did nothing wrong."

Still, anger at herself flared from the bottom of her chest. "How else could it have happened? I was the one carrying the baby. I felt it grow inside me, then I…I…" She swallowed hard. "I felt it leave me…"

"This kind of thing happens," he murmured hoarsely. "I can't say I know why, but it just does. What I do know is that it wasn't your fault."

He drew her into a hug, and the terrible mix of grief and frustration made her thump a fist against his chest.

"I wanted this so badly. I tried so hard. I did my best."

He rested his palm on the back of her head. "I know, Irina. I know you did."

"I don't deserve to feel sad. Maybe losing the baby is what I deserve. It's my punishment for killing so many people by my own hands. Blood for blood."

Karasuma's hand over hers clenched with such sudden tightness that she sucked in a sharp breath and met his fierce eyes. "Irina, you don't deserve the pain you're feeling now. As a mother, you have every right to grieve over your child. No one can take that right away from you." He pulled off strands of blonde hair stuck to her wet cheeks. "Don't deny yourself of those tears. Don't be ashamed of them. Don't hide them away anymore. Let them all out, and let me wipe them away for you."

"O-Okay," she choked out. She curled up against her husband, welcomed his embrace, and the tears kept flowing well past dinner time. Karasuma didn't pull away from her side and kept his hold around her. The only part of him moving was his hand going up and down in slow strokes along the curve of her back. Finally, she asked, "Are you hungry? You should probably eat."

He sighed. "I'm too tired for that."

"I'm sorry. This must be hard for you, too." Irina had been selfish. Until now, she had been focusing too much on her own grief to consider his. He had hidden it well underneath that serious, unflinching demeanor he always presented to the world, but here, in the private, intimate proximity between himself and her, Irina could see the raw pain in his eyes. He wanted to have the baby just as much as she had. He didn't like to admit it, but he had been so excited. Irina couldn't forget his whispers to her belly at night.

She tried to console him with a kiss on his lips and fingers wrapped around the nape of his neck. He leaned in to touch his forehead against hers. With the assurance of having his support and love, Irina drifted off into the first proper bout of sleep she had in days.

Karasuma joined his wife not too long after her, relieved that she didn't have to fake sleeping anymore.