The cold white hospital walls were like the walls of a mother's womb, closing in, squeezing him like toothpaste from a tube. Marie lay on the table before him, her legs spread as she tried to push the baby through her birth canal. Her deafening screams stabbed at the walls, trying to buy them more time. The baby wasn't coming. The baby would die in the womb.
"I'll get it," he said, reaching his hand back for a scalpel with his surgeon's steadiness. The walls continued to press inwards, the gears behind them creaking like the ghosts of the past.
"Franken, no, wait!"
The hand that pressed the scalpel's handle into his hand was as smooth as a newborn snake.
"Go ahead, Doctor. Show her what you're made of. Or are you still trying to deny your true face?"
The hand glided down his back, though the shiver that ran through his body was not from its touch. His lips pulled into an aggravated smile.
"I know what you're doing, Medusa. I know your game. You're trying to make me hesitate."
He raised the scalpel to Marie's stomach. "It's going to be a C-Section, Marie. I know I should probably give you a pain killer, but there just isn't time."
Medusa chuckled behind him. "'There just isn't time.' Listen to yourself, Stein. You're lying. Is that what the Academy has taught you? To lie?" Medusa padded to Marie's side, tracing the other woman's cheek with a black-nailed finger.
"Look at her, Stein. Helpless and about to deliver a baby. You know what you want to do to her. You know what you want to do with her child."
The walls were getting closer, pressing in on his mind like a vise. He grit his teeth against the pressure and squeezed his eyes shut, willing his shaking hands to be still. And then, there was silence, a stillness found only in the presence of waking madness.
He snickered and opened his eyes, forcing a pained smile through his teeth.
"I'm sorry, Marie."
The scalpel plunged in.
Why do you fight it?
Medusa had vanished. The walls had stopped moving. The baby was swaddled in his arms, crying for its mother's milk. He had done it. He had delivered the baby successfully.
"Marie, look-"
His breath froze in his throat. Marie lay sprawled on the table, limp and lifeless with her stomach split open. Ribs jutted from her lower diaphragm like a broken bird cage with a canary crushed inside. The blood had dried long ago.
"Marie- You- What did I-"
But any horror or remorse was stifled by two tiny words.
"Hello, Father."
The baby's voice was muffled by the folds of blanket covering its face. Stein quickly unwrapped it, wondering if he had simply misheard a cry.
But the smiling face that greeted him had three kishin eyes.
