xx.
Change came slowly.
The long bouts of silence were expected – though their being so did nothing to help the sour, uncertain air which permeated Chrono and Eri's moments together – and to a certain extent, Eri had also known Chrono would become cold towards her. That is, he was not callous or even aloof, but lacking in any of the fondness he usually sprinkled upon her: secreted spoons of sugar in her tea, murmured conversations in the morning before Kai woke up, games or television after dinner. Their interactions became clinical and polite, and it wrenched Eri's heart into her throat with a rusty hook.
Such grief, a special sort like mourning, reached its first pinnacle when they went to the market that next week. The baskets were packed with their usual assortment of vegetables and fruits; the area had filled to its usual mid-morning crush of people; the water in the bay was tinted its usual cerulean under the sunlight.
Eri, relieved to be out of the house and doing something normal had fully expected for her and Chrono to have taiyaki together. She'd marked it in her mind as a white flag, a momentary retreat from the new tension which bristled between them, and though she could not grant herself the luxury of being excited, she was at the very least hopeful. However, when the time came, Chrono said nothing. Simply walked on in the direction home as though having forgotten completely about the taiyaki.
Albeit, Eri didn't say anything to remind him – she only accepted quietly and gracefully this unspoken snub, this awful but inevitable fate. Still, it left her hollow. It drove her to sit for hours afterwards in her and Kai's bedroom, knees to her chest, head hung heavy.
She didn't eat dinner that night. Nor did she have breakfast the next morning.
And of course, Kai saw it all. From the first moment. The way Chrono and Eri avoided each other's eyes, the way they avoided his.
Surprisingly though, he didn't bring it up with Eri like she'd thought he would. Rather, the whole thing inspired fits between him and Chrono. They started bickering about stupid things. Kai became dismissive where Chrono became irritable.
"This is exactly what I told you would happen," Kai had hissed one night while he and Chrono sat drinking sake in the living room. "Now look. Eri is upset. You've been acting maudlin over that Russian whore, and she's noticed."
"Don't talk about Anya like that."
"She's trash. I never wanted her around in the first place."
"And yet, here we are."
Kai sighed. "Really. I can't pretend to understand why you're so shaken up about the whole matter. She was bound to rip you up at some point. It only took longer than I expected, but nonetheless."
At any moment, Chrono – ghosting about like a frail afterimage of who he'd been mere days ago – could have told the truth. And knowing this, knowing he could collapse without warning and spill everything, ruin everything, Eri assumed a constant, fresh fear on top of her guilt and her longing. And because of the way these feelings knotted themselves acutely in her stomach, she thought nothing of how the seams of her being began to alter and diminish, and even disappear entirely.
Indeed, it didn't seem very strange at all that after some weeks of suffocating anxiety her appetite shrank until she could barely stomach even the thought of a cup of tea.
She began to wake up in the middle of the night with crippling nausea.
She was always tired, sometimes dizzy – naturally, didn't it make perfect sense that she should be weak when she teetered daily on the face of an abyss? When she pined nightly for Mirio like he was the food she wasn't eating and the sleep she was missing?
He was so close!
He was so far!
And everything inside of Eri began to hurt. Enough so for Kai and Chrono to start noticing.
"You're pale."
"Why have you been crying so much?"
"You've gotten thin."
"Stop squirming. It can't hurt that badly."
It did hurt that badly. Every time Kai touched her, Eri felt about sure she would split in two. His hands became too heavy on her skin, like two cups full of poison. He'd claw at her breasts and she'd want to scream; his hips grating against hers in the middle of the night became more unbearable than ever, too full and raw. And no matter how much she asked him to stop, he didn't stop. On the contrary, he would go harder. Harsher, until Eri was gasping through tears and reeling against a piercing new bout of nausea.
Was it really so excruciating to miss somebody? Doubts and qualms began to dig themselves into her.
It took vomiting into her own lap before Eri was forced to admit that something was actually wrong.
They'd been producing. She was in that slick, cold chair with her wrists strapped down and the skin peeled off from her forearms so that her muscles were bared raw and brilliant beneath the LED lighting. There were machines drawing out her blood and plasma, there were wires pumping unnamed solutions into her veins. Obviously, these things had always been sapping. There were always weird side effects: numbness, pain. But not like this.
"Kai."
He was busy with her skin at one of the tables, plucking it apart like it was a piece of deli meat.
"Kai."
"What, Eri?"
"I don't feel well."
"It's not much longer now," he said gently. "Bear it for a few more minutes."
"No… I really don't–"
He turned to glare over his mask. "I said–"
She got sick all over herself. Or not herself, exactly, but close enough for her to be ashamed of it. Chrono had been paying enough attention to have grabbed a large bowl and thrust it into her lap before she made a mess. She hadn't eaten. The only thing that came up was bright yellow bile and a ghastly burn through her throat. It kept coming. There was nothing in her stomach. But it kept coming, and Eri tasted chemicals, smelled her innards, felt her face grow wet with more tears. Then she sort of blacked out, and was only hazily aware of Chrono cleaning her face and Kai carrying her to bed.
The next day, she was in a doctor's room with Chrono. The walls were a pale grey, basking in natural light and hung with an abstract print that looked either like mountains or a naked woman – to avoid looking at Chrono, Eri spent a long time considering the picture seriously. Not only the art, but the anatomical diagrams hung around it too, and the textures on the walls themselves, and the grain of the doctor's desk. Leather seats. A warm smell like winter coats and old lady perfume to mask the familiar power of disinfectant.
They hadn't been waiting long – no longer than five minutes perhaps – but Chrono was antsy, and fidgeting in his seat next to Eri. He sighed, neither impatiently nor with any particular relief when the doctor finally walked in, a thin folder in hand.
An old man, he looked softly at Eri and smiled. "Hello young lady," as though they were perfectly familiar with each other. He greeted Chrono too with no less mildness as he rounded them and took a seat on the other side of the desk, opening up the folder and considering the form Chrono had filled in at reception. "Yorinaka…" he murmured their fake surname ponderously. "A new patient! Lovely to have you. I'm–" he said his name. Eri forgot it immediately. "What can I do for you today?"
Both he and Chrono looked expectantly at Eri, and for a moment her mouth hung open. "Uh– uh- I've been feeling... strange."
"Mmm? Strange how, my darling?"
"I don't know. Just strange."
"Tell him your symptoms, Eri."
The doctor cocked his head at her and continued to smile, as though he had all the time in the world, while Eri offered up her symptoms slowly and sheepishly – having hardly considered them to be 'symptoms' until now. He prompted her on with nods and careful hums, and occasionally looked away to scribble notes into his folder. Eri stared in fascination at his handwriting. It was the worst she'd ever seen. Even worse than Kai's, which was a confused hieroglyph at the best of times.
"Are you on any medications?"
"Umm… A few?" She looked to Chrono.
"Some supplements. Prescription painkillers."
The doctor made another note. "Have you recently experienced any changes in lifestyle, Eri?"
"Changes?"
"Anything that could have disrupted your usual routine, sweetheart. It could be something as simple as a new diet, all the way to the loss of a loved one."
She blinked, and stewed for a moment on the loss of a loved one. Did foiled affairs count? She shook her head. "No."
The doctor leaned in towards her, hands sewed together over the folder. There were a few more neutral, easy questions which Eri was able to answer with simple nods and simple head shakes. Sometimes she'd have to look to Chrono for help.
At last, the doctor closed his folder. He considered Eri gently, as though she were the only other person in the room. "Now, the next few questions are perfectly routine considering your symptoms, but they are of a sexual nature and may be sensitive." His eyes flashed with surprising pointedness towards Chrono, and then back. "Would you prefer to answer them privately?"
"I'll be staying with her," Chrono said sharply.
The doctor's smile did a funny twist. "Is that alright with you?"
Eri shrugged half-heartedly.
"Eri, it's up to you."
She glanced to Chrono, who gave her a loaded look in return. "Please can he stay," she murmured.
"Alright." There was a pause in which the doctor looked between the two or three pages of forms and notes. "Are you sexually active?"
She nodded.
"Do you use any contraceptives?"
"Uh – no – not… really."
"Not really?"
Chrono cut in, "Eri had an oophorectomy a few years ago."
"Ah." It surprised Eri that the doctor didn't seem very surprised. Maybe he hadn't heard Chrono correctly, because the next question he asked was clear and unshaken, "Have you considered the possibility that you might be pregnant?"
Eri would have laughed had Chrono not interceded again, this time more insistently, "She's not pregnant. I've already said she had a–"
"Stranger things have happened, Yorinaka-san," the doctor said with a tender force that seemed to take Chrono aback. "Perhaps a hundred years ago an oophorectomy would have made things clear-cut. But in this day and age, it's not quite so. The body is capable of some fantastic things, no? Now, this is only a consideration amongst a number of others, my darling, so there's no need for you to look so alarmed." The doctor closed his folder. "If you'll take a seat on the table for me, I'm going to do some simple checks. Then I'll take samples for blood tests."
Chrono, less confident now, asked quietly, "How long until we'll know the results?"
"Oh," the doctor nodded, "I'll be able to give them to you in about fifteen minutes once I have the necessary samples."
They were given permission to wait in his office while the tests were conducted – apparently their appointment made provision for the time it would take, so it was no imposition to any of the other patients. Chrono sat in stolid silence, legs crossed, his eyes glued to a magazine he'd fetched from the waiting room though it was clear he was doing no reading. Eri couldn't sit so still. She moved between the posters stuck to the wall: the muscular system, the skeletal system, the brain. She read names and forgot them immediately. She looked at the photos on the doctor's desk – he had a wife (assumedly) who looked older than him, and three daughters or nieces or… what had Mirio called them again? God children?
The doctor may have been open to the idea that Eri was pregnant despite the obvious facts. But even if the quirked body could do such spectacular things, Eri's was not so special as that. She wasn't pregnant. She wasn't worried she would be, nor was she excited by the possibility. Not in the slightest.
"Kurono-san."
"Mmm?"
"What if–?"
He didn't look up from his magazine. "There's no what if. You're not pregnant."
Of course she wasn't. He was perfectly right to be so collected, so utterly unruffled by the doctor's suggestions. Yes, it was strange that Eri's symptoms were exactly like the early signs – the doctor had pulled up a charmingly illustrated chart and pointed out exactly why pregnancy would make food unappealing, why it would make Eri so tired and sore as though every inch of her were bruised. He'd even gone so far as to ask if Eri had experienced any 'spotting'. Spotting? Implantation spotting. And with a breathless shock, Eri had thought of the blood in her underwear after that last night with Mirio. She'd cut up the material and had thrown it away (just in case) and had thought nothing more of it.
There'd been so little blood anyway, and she'd only put it down to the fact of having slept with someone new. Someone who'd felt rather, well, bigger than what she was used to. Really, that would easily explain the blood. So she told the doctor no, she hadn't had any 'spotting' even though something started screaming inside of her and had left her face flushed hotly.
"Do you like kids, Kurono-san?" Eri questioned absently, picking up the picture of the doctor and the three girls – teenagers in the photo, all with clouds of curls about their faces and bright, wide smiles redolent of the doctor himself.
Chrono looked at Eri with an ambiguous expression. "What do you mean?"
"Just."
He blinked at her. "I've never thought about it." And he looked back to the magazine, made a thin attempt to seem like he was reading by turning the page.
Eri hadn't ever thought about it much either. Whether she liked children, that is. But as a teenager, she'd day-dreamed enough about being a mother that she could only assume she probably did like children even though she knew close to nothing about them and would probably have made a terrible mother – good thing she wasn't going to be one. Right?
The clocks in the room ticked. One on the wall. A digital one on the desk. On Chrono's phone, which he checked doggedly and more frequently the more time went by. Eri sat down when the sense of creeping nausea began to ooze about her insides, and she breathed measured breaths without fully feeling the oxygen reach her lungs. The fifteen minutes passed. Another five. Longer still.
Everything inside of Eri screeched to a smoking, sickening halt when the door opened at last. When the doctor held her gaze with calm, unreadable smiling. The door closed again. Chrono's fists were clenched in his lap just as Eri's ribcage seemed to close in around her heart.
"Well," the doctor said, and laid out a number of papers across the desk. "We did a double check to be certain."
"And she's not pregnant," Chrono said.
The doctor didn't bother looking at him. Once again, he only looked at Eri. "You are pregnant, sweetheart. Five weeks along."