AN:
Trying my hand at a horror-esc story, since I'm wanting to write something a little creepy. I was noticing that the other Reborn fics I'm writing were loosing the humour so hopefully by shoving all my angst here I can fix that.
A little stuck with MOC and SSWT, so not sure when I'll be able to update them anyways.
The child dies.
The child dies on the birthing room floor from a lack of oxygen, gasping around it's own collapsed airways as doctors and nurses frantically try and find the problem.
The mother; all of twenty years of age, cries quietly to herself, half in and out of consciousness. She already knows. She can feel it like a stone lodged in her breast, nestled between her lungs. There's a nurse trying to soothe her but it does no good.
Half out of some desperate delusion, Sawada Nana, new mother to a dead boy, asks the other woman where her husband is. He hasn't been home in three months, hasn't written in two. She feels his absence all the more keenly in the chaos of the hospital, the lack of newborn cries hallowing out the spot where he should be standing besides her.
The nurse grimaces, trying to mop up the bleeding and keep her calm.
"I'm sure he'll be here soon." She soothes, mind half on the IV line and half on the torn flesh between the mother's legs. She glances around in slight panic, looking for the doctor, before pragmatism reasserts itself and she begins the sutures herself.
"My baby…He was going to name my baby…" The distraught woman mutters. Her tears slow slowly as exhaustion nips at her chest.
"Please…" She says one last time.
The crying of the mother soon fades, lulled into unconsciousness by the steady drip of her medication line, mind struggling still even as her body betrays her.
The nurse glances at her pale face and frowns.
"Poor woman, 28 hours of labour without a man beside her, and the baby won't even make it." She says before going back to work.
She doesn't notice as she's leaving the dark form breaking away from her shadow to cross the small room and linger by the bed.
The door closes, and one clawed finger rises up and presses against Sawada Nana's forehead.
A gaping maw opens and smiles.
They clear the lungs; insert a breathing tube as soon as possible. Inflate the small body with the oxygen it desperately needs. Some distant part of themselves knows it's too late, that the underdeveloped veins have already turned sluggish, that the misfiring brain has already started shutting down.
They try anyways.
Dark eyes watch from the corner of the room as the humans run about, locked on the still form in the glass incubator. Shadows rustle as another shade joins the first, larger and bulkier.
"The mother pays the price." The newcomer says, voice low and inaudible to human ears. In the inky darkness of the wispy forms weave together, swaying in time to an invisible beat.
"The mothers' always pay the price." The other says flatly.
"It is a small thing to pay. Heavy, but small. Knowledge always is." The larger form answers before oozing forward to press a sharp hand against warm glass.
The smaller form joins it, ignoring the human's obliviousness to their presence. It leans over the baby and peers into the glass like it will reveal some great secret. The flickering light bulb pulses in time with its breath.
"What a pitiful body. All those sinew and bones, that faint beating heart." The first one says, in a mockingly loving voice, its hand pressing into the glass until it passes it completely and touches the child. The small form of the baby stills, and the monitors attached stutter for a second before starting again.
"I don't know how I will ever fit all of me in you."
They call it a miracle. Four hours after the doctors' have all but given up on the boy, he takes his first independent breath. The screaming wails are weak, raspy, but altogether properly formed.
There's celebration in the nurse's office, but it's half-hearted. There's an unease to the air as they check the baby over again. The lungs are weak, but no longer failing, and the choked brain tissue is mysteriously healthy.
The doctor blame's it on malfunctioning machines and leaves it at that, but the more superstitious of them watch the boy apprehensively.
In the mother's recovery room they bring the good news, only for the woman to start crying as soon as they do. Her great gasping breaths are part relief and part sorrow. Those who don't know better call them tears of joy.
Nana takes the boy home on the fifth day. She wasn't able to get in contact with her husband, and so had the sign the birth certificate by herself, using a little remembered fact about his family to name the baby.
Tsunayoshi is a quiet newborn, whose baby blue eye's quickly darkened into a shiny black, ever watchful. He likes grabbing onto the ends of her hair, not tugging but holding them in his small fist as if the texture is new and exciting for him.
He startles easily, bothered by loud noises and bright lights, but seems content otherwise to remain a blank mask.
He mostly sleeps.
Nana watch's him with fearful eyes, some part of her recognising him from a deep dream. There's a conversation playing in the back of her mind, over and over, only partly understandable. Some fever dream has plagued her with the knowledge, and now she can't look at her own son without nightmares looking back.
It is something she can put away though, something she can ignore and pretend away. Just like her missing husband, or the bloodstains on the carpet. She copes like she always does, by pushing it out of her mind.
Two months after his birth, as she puts him down in his crib at night, she finds herself humming the words she only half remembers.
"Come away, O, human child!
To the woods and waters wild
With a fairy hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than
you can understand."
Dark eyes watch her and she trails off, caught in a moment as if hanging from some thin thread. She freezes as her baby boy wiggles on the cradle bed, blinking shiny innocent eyes, as the shadows on the wall lengthen and lengthen.
Sharp teeth coalesce in front of her face, and it takes all she can to not shriek into the grinning face of a monster. The rumbling of a great beast fills the room, breathing hot on her face, before the shadow creature shrinks back, retreating back into her child once again.
She collapses like her strings are cut and raises one trembling hand to her face, eyes wide and mind far away.
In his crib the being that is Tsunayoshi sleeps peaceable.