A/N: Written for the Mega Prompts Challenge, writing prompts #009 – write a 1000 word super drabble.

I called it a parasite…

I called it a parasite, sucking the life out of me. A festering maggot – a decaying thing that was growing, uncontrolled. Why couldn't it just die like the first one, I thought. Why couldn't it have never existed in the first place. Then everything else might have been a little more bearable.

But in the end, I was just kidding myself. Once it was over and done with, all I had to do was forget. And yet I was thinking about his birthday one year later. His – not it's. I even brought a little cake and spread it around. And I confessed to a priest.

Pathetic. It was so pathetic. I still hated the very thought of it: those nine long months that almost killed me.

Sometimes, just sometimes, I'd wish it had killed me. Or just died.

But now I watch Izumi's misery, Daisuke's misery, and I think: how could I have been wishing for such a thing?

She'd wanted that baby so much… For it to die before it took its first breath in our world…

I didn't hear her screams on the roof, but Daisuke told me the words later, and they were extra wounds. I was one of those women Izumi meant. One of the ones who gave birth to a child they didn't want. Izumi…Izumi had wanted her child. So badly, she'd wanted him…and yet…he…

Was I selfish, wanting my child gone? But it's still so hard to change that thought. Because it was a child I had because of him. I hadn't wanted it. I didn't love him. Not like Izumi, who'd had her child with the person she loved, and who'd wanted her child born, wanted to be a mother and hold that little boy and feed it the milk in her breasts and rock him when he started to cry. I hadn't wanted any of that, and the only sliver of regret I was thinking of was the sorry state I was in when it was all over.

Only a year later did I think that, maybe, I did want to see him after all. But all I did was go to a confession booth and even then it was asking a simple question. Not if I was worthy of seeking my child out, if I was worthy of still calling myself his mother. I just asked if it was okay for me to celebrate his birthday…like such a superficial thing…

I didn't realise it was Daisuke then, but he said this to me: God will help you. He'd heard, and listened to, it all: listened to my tragedies, my sins – but not my regrets, because I hadn't been able to voice them then, even in the presence of God. Maybe it was because I didn't believe in that God. I wasn't Christian like the Suwa family after all. But still I'd been drawn to that sad and lonely place to pour out my heart.

But even in that sort of peace and tranquillity, I'd held on to a few things. Or maybe I'd been conscious of the fact that the voice in the confession booth would be human. A priest, I'd expected. A student from my school I'd gotten instead – though, ironically, I'd only discovered the fact when I'd decided to tell Daisuke the truth myself. But that was another story. I'd never gotten the chance, and it wasn't because of Yuzu or Izumi who knew the truth but because Daisuke had heard my confession.

It's oddly appropriate now, considering the relationship we've built, but at that point, it was something unbearable. I knew it wasn't his fault. I didn't blame him at all. But they were still dark secrets, dirty secrets, I didn't want to share them with anyone else. Not even the impartial priest, the ears of God that I'd thought was in that confession box. I'd tried to forget him as well, think only of that intangible presence called God.

And I don't know what made me suddenly go there, call out to something I'd spent my whole life not believing in. There was just a calling. A feeling in my heart, nudging me to that place. Maybe that was one of destiny's strings. And maybe the purpose wasn't to talk to a priest in the confession box but to Daisuke – because that marked the true beginning of our relationship. Not the pram that was I'd thought it was. That was a different symbol altogether.

But whatever the reason, my confession helped. Even if it wasn't everything. Even if I'd kept my regrets to myself. I was able to do a tiny little thing because of it: buy a little cake and put a single candle on it, for my son's birthday. And I was able to celebrate it, even if I'd never seen the child, never even given it a name…

But that brief interlude passed and my next thoughts of it were the same hatred that had clung to me while it had grown inside. And that only continued to grow when I met Izumi, and learnt of the life that was, then, growing inside of her.

But Izumi was so looking forward to her child, that I found myself warming up to the idea as well. And when she asked me to visit the child when it was born…I couldn't help but say "yes", because I was loving a little bit more.

But as I warmed up to the idea of babies being born, I thought more about my own, that child I'd abandoned the moment it was outside my body and never saw again. I'd wondered if I should look, more than a year after I'd given birth to…him. Part of me wanted to. Another part of me feared what I would find.

And then Izumi's son was dead, and I was thinking, would I have been sad, then, if it had been my son that had died like that?

I think so now.