Creation began on 05-02-09

Creation ended on 05-03-09

Paranoia Agent

Tragedy after Pain

A/N: This is inspired by the Paranoia Agent episode ETC, with the third story about the woman that was pregnant with the baby that wasn't related to her. An alternate universal twist of the story: What would happen if it were true, and if it the woman hadn't gone to the hospital in time to deal with the problem she didn't know she was having that was caused by the doctor and the nurses? I shall be using a combination of the original Japanese and English dubbed versions to make it very creative. I hope to make this as scary and angst-filled as possible. Now…we begin.

"My happiest congratulations, Ms. Iizuka, you're three weeks pregnant." The doctor had informed her.

"Thank you so much! In vitro fertilization is so expensive, and I was wondering about my choice at first…but I'm glad we went ahead with it!" She thanked him when she found out that she now carried a little life inside herself.

"You can thank modern science," he told her. "In vitro fertilization has improved so much in recent years, making it virtually full-proof."

If that was so true, then why was the mother-to-be suffering from constant abdominal pains for the last few months? Ms. Iizuka, doing everything she was supposed to do to ensure she had a perfectly-healthy baby when she had to back to the hospital to have it there, had a subtle fear that something may have gone wrong in the procedure when she went to be inseminated, but fought against the possibility, that it was just not possible. Even the doctor said the baby was okay.

"Here, this is the head and this is the body," he had told her when she received her first ultrasound of the fetus.

"That's my baby!" She cheered, happy to have see it developing in her womb.

Then, there was the second ultrasound, about two months later, when she went back again.

"Look. You can see it's beginning to take a clear, human form now," the doctor had revealed to her as she saw the baby, bigger and more like a little person rather than a tiny, lizard-like creature.

"My baby's growing well, don't you think, doctor?" She had asked him, just to be sure she had been doing everything she'd been instructed to do right, which meant eating right, exercising, and staying away from things that would hurt the baby.

"Yes, it's coming along quite well," he answered her.

But then, when she was at least a month away from finally meeting her child face-to-face, the pain started occur. The baby kicking around her insides all the time that all she could do was cry. It even hurt her in her sleep. She didn't know what was wrong but intended to go see the doctor about it tomorrow, when she was feeling a little better in the morning hours when it didn't move so much. Right now, all she wanted to do was enjoy her bath, which was also the only other thing that kept the baby from hurting her.

It keeps moving around so violently, it hurts so bad, she thought as she slowly rubbed her palms against her swollen belly. At least this calms it down some.

When she was done with her bath and in bed, resting and waiting for the next day, she pretty much had a dream of the oncoming day in which she would tell her doctor the problem she was having.

"Acute pain?" The doctor asked, once she'd been seen by him, while she sat in front of him, holding her stomach and trying to keep from screaming of her intense pain.

"It keeps moving around so violently, it hurts so bad," she explained to him, and then groaning as it kicked her again.

"It's that bad?" He asked, and then she couldn't hear what he was whispering to himself, except that it sounded like he was wondering if it was premature labor or something, and later said, "Well, I think we'd better take a look."

It wasn't until moments later when she was worried if she was having a miscarriage and asked the doctor while she was panicking a little. Tossing and turning in her sleep, all she consciously wanted to do was wake up to the next day. But her subconscious mind wouldn't allow it to happen, so the nightmare continued for her against her will.

"It'll be okay. Everything will be okay! This is your baby, after all," the doctor assured her as he began to perform the ultrasound procedure.

"It's my…it's my little baby!" She heard herself say, feeling even greater pain in her womb.

"Yes, it's your little baby. Your very healthy and lively, little baby." She heard him tell her.

It was when he showed her the ultrasound that the rest of her awareness went down the dark tunnel: The baby had been shown holding a bat that similar to the one that was used by the assailant that the media called Lil' Slugger or Shonen Bat, smiling before it moved the bat again.

"Aaahh!" She gasped, waking up to the new day, covered in sweat and shaking. "Oh."

Of many things she accepted as truth, the whole stories about a vigilante that wore in-line skates and carried a bat that was bent like a dog's leg was just one of the few things she never really believed in, not even for the sake of gossip. It just wasn't her thing to believe that a kid running around every day assaulting people that are emotionally cornered. As she got set to get out of bed, a jolt of pain struck her in the waist. The baby had kicked her again, but the reaction was much more painful and brought tears to her eyes as she fell back onto bed. Then, before she could try to get up again, she felt a cold and wet feeling go down her legs. Her water had broken, and at the worst time imaginable, too!

Oh, no, she realized, trying to get up to enter the kitchen and reach the phone in there, but another contraction seized her and she fell to the floor. Ow…ow…

Dragging herself as far as to the living room of her home, which was the only room that connected her bedroom to the kitchen on the opposite side and to her front door, she couldn't go any further as she felt stronger contractions and the baby kicking her harder than it used to. So, lying on her back with her legs spread apart, she waited for the outcome to come to her. With her next contraction, she began to push the baby out of her.

-

Neighbors had called the cops after hearing what sounded like a baby crying in Ms. Iizuka's apartment…and no response had come to the door. A pair of paramedics carried a stretcher holding the near-dead woman while another carried a bloody newborn over to the ambulance that was waiting. When they arrived at the hospital for medical attention, there was a lot of trouble to the woman's doctor and his two nurses: After Iizuka had been taken to a recovery room and her injuries treated, tests on the newborn had confirmed that, while it was born to her, it wasn't genetically-related to her, and that it's premature delivery nearly killed her. Forced to explain himself, the doctor wanted to blame the nurses that did the procedure nearly eight months ago, that it was they that nearly killed her, but the nurses were also forced to reveal what had happened: That there was an error in the procedure to inseminate the woman and that the wrong sperm and egg were used by accident, and that the doctor told them to burn away the evidence and threatened to kill them if they told anyone. The end conclusion for the people directly involved in the trouble was the nurses getting fired and sentenced to just eight months of community service for not telling the woman that nearly died. The doctor himself fired and sentenced to fifteen years behind bars for malpractice and near-attempted murder of hospital staff involved and deception. Ms. Iizuka, who wasn't aware of any of this to begin with, and despite the nonexistent blood tie between them, was allowed to keep the child she had borne by herself…as she had always wanted a child to raise.

-

Lying in the hospital bed, Iizuka recovered from her injuries quietly and watched the news reports on what was going on, and surprisingly found very little that she actually bothered to look at: Latest murders, recent robberies, business deals that achieved some goal or went sour, and more crap about the boy with the bat and skates that attacked people that were emotionally cornered. Turning away from the television, she looked over at the bassinet that had her little baby girl sleeping in it. She looked at her as the only reason there was no need to believe in Lil' Slugger trying to come after her, since she never really felt like she'd been driven into a corner and had nowhere to go.

If it's true, and he does come to people that have been emotionally cornered, then he'd probably come after me to see if I was cornered about my choice of whether or not to go through with the procedure, she thought as the need to sleep claimed her. I am not driven into a corner…not…into a…corner.

-

It was a shame that the former had been driven into a corner the moment he was thrown into a jail cell, and was filled with terror at who would be coming to see him. It was late at night, and he could hear the sound of skates and a bat coming through the halls. A shadow was outside his cell's door, passing through the door, and standing right in front of him. Nobody heard or saw anything, but would be around to notice the mangled remains of the former doctor that had nearly killed one of his patients by lying to her about her baby. They wouldn't even know that he'd been killed by Lil' Slugger.

The End.

Please, review. I was solely interested in the third story of that episode. It caught me more than the rest of the thing. That, Enter Lil' Slugger, Double Lips, Happy Family Planning, and Fear of a Direct Hit are the best episodes in my own opinion, and for various reasons. I can't categorize this as 'horror', but I could definitely categorize it as 'angst' and 'hurt/comfort'. See ya.