Title: Week 160: (Alternative Epilogue to The Result)
Summary: Yuki discovers an article about Tohru's former obstetrician and gynecologist in the newspaper that turns their perfect world upside down and then sideways.
Genre: Romance/ Family
Rating: T
Word Count: 1,803
Their day began as a typical Sunday morning. Tohru hovered before the stove, making breakfast, and Yuki sat at the kitchen table, skimming a newspaper with Emi seated on his lap. Emi occasionally snatched a page of the newspaper out of his hand to scribble on with her bright red marker and then toss aside after the black and white paper bled with red scratches. Perhaps it wasn't normal, however, since Yuki had decided to wake up before Tohru had to send their two-and-a-half-year-old daughter up to jump on him until he decided to get out of bed with his arms raised in surrender, and maybe that should have signaled to Tohru that she would soon receive some shocking news that would overturn her perfect world, but she obliviously hummed to herself as she started to set the table and serve breakfast.
Once she had finished cutting up a pancake for Emi, Tohru lifted the small toddler off of Yuki's lap and set her into her high chair, allowing Yuki to salvage the news article he had been trying to keep out of Emi's reach and away from the tip of her marker. Tohru didn't have the opportunity, however, to ponder over Yuki's strange absorption in the article- he usually just browsed through the headlines while he waited for food. She had to focus on helping Emi eat as her daughter was trying to shove fistfuls of the fluffy breakfast into her mouth at a time. She had barely gotten Emi to pick up her small, plastic fork and take smaller bites that could actually fit in her mouth before Yuki grasped her shoulder to get her attention, turning her around to face him with an unreadable expression across his face.
"Tohru, was she, by any chance, the gynecologist that diagnosed your condition?" he asked, pointing to a picture of a middle-aged woman in the newspaper.
"Yes, she was. Why?" Tohru queried in response.
She peered quizzically at the familiar face in the picture, trying to find answers as to why her gynecologist was in the paper without lifting both her eyes a few inches to skim the bold printed headlines. Yuki frowned as he laid the article across the table for Tohru to read.
"Apparently that condition doesn't exist. Your gynecologist and our former obstetrician were running some sort of scam with baby product companies to increase pregnancies," Yuki explained warily.
Seeing her face pale and her arms freeze, partly outstretched toward the newspaper, Yuki could feel his heart stop as the color similarly drained from his face in alarm. Maybe he should have waited until she had something in her stomach before he told her? After all, she had been mentioning that she hadn't been feeling well for the past few days. As her eyebrows knitted together in disbelief and pain, she gaped at the bold words on the page, repeatedly reading the lines over and over again.
Worried, Yuki gripped her arms tightly. Quickly leaping out of his seat, he urged her onto the wooden chair, and she just sat there, staring blankly at the article. Panicking, he stepped over to the sink and filled up a glass of water only to have it crash to the ground when it slipped through Tohru's shaky fingers when he tried to give it to her. He could only mentally thank Emi for making a hobby of climbing onto the table and knocking over everything, making them convert all their silverware to plastic ones so there was no shattered glass on the ground, before Tohru glanced up at him.
"W-What does that mean?" Tohru choked out in a shaky voice.
"That there's nothing wrong with your… reproductive system. You can still get pregnant," he answered a bit uncomfortably.
Tohru remained silent at this point, clutching the thin sheet of paper before her with trembling hands. She opened her mouth a few times as if to protest in anger or weep in desperation but quickly pressed her lips back together before anything coherent could spew forth. A minute later, she pressed her top teeth into her quivering bottom lip in attempt to calm herself enough to fully process this new knowledge, but her actions only seemed to make her lip turn white and to speed the accumulation of tears building behind her dark brown eyes. Scrambling to find how to comfort her and starting to regret not letting Emi scribble all over this newspaper page, Yuki shifted from foot to foot, standing beside Tohru before setting his hand on her shoulder with a grimace when he noticed the tears that had begun to trickle out of the corners of her eyes when she lowered the paper.
"W-Why would they lie like this?" she weakly questioned.
"Money. Another pregnant woman is another patient for an obstetrician, and another baby means more products sold…" he trailed off, feeling as if he were corrupting Tohru's naïve view of the world.
"…I-I didn't have to have Emi. I didn't have to be pregnant in high school. I didn't have to go through all of that so fast. I-I…" she stuttered, her eyes widening by the second and the streams of tears running down her cheeks steadily increasing.
"No, no you didn't," he confirmed, not sure what else he could say.
"But I love Emi."
"I love her too."
Emi turned at the sound of her name, pausing her pancake hunt to peer at her parents. Tilting her head to the side in confusion and blinking her large gray eyes, Emi furrowed her eyebrows and pursed her sticky lips in obvious displeasure at the sight of her mother's tears. Dropping the crushed pancake fraction from her chubby fingers, Emi thrust her arms forward in Tohru's direction. When neither Yuki nor Tohru took her out of the high chair or even spared a look in her direction, Emi began to flail her arms about in frustration and squeaked impatiently until she accidentally knocked half a pancake onto Yuki's bare foot. Though he sent her a stern glare, he was sure that Tohru's picking Emi up and setting her on her lap was what really settled her down enough to quietly lick the crumbs of pancake and syrup off her face and fingers while her parents turned back towards one another.
"I don't know how I feel about this, Yuki-kun," Tohru admitted, gently stroking Emi's soft brown locks.
"That's fine," he assured her.
"I think I'm angry. Because of this, everyone ridiculed me in high school for being pregnant. That hurt so much. And I wasn't ready to have a baby yet! I was only sixteen!" Tohru exclaimed.
"We can sue them, if you want. There's a number to call to report this," Yuki added, extending a finger to direct her attention to a phone number written in a bold box at the bottom corner of the page.
"But I don't want to sue them. I'm… I'm also grateful. Without them, I would have never had Emi, my beautiful, lovely daughter, and I wouldn't have you. I wouldn't have this perfect life I have now," she breathed.
"You've always had me," he murmured.
Tohru ignored him with a slight shake of her head before continuing, "And it's not like they jeopardized me or Emi. They helped me have a successful pregnancy, and everything went fine. I think I might just be happy because this means Emi doesn't have to be my only daughter. This means we can have another child if we wanted."
"Yeah. We could."
"Wow… This… this is wonderful news," she smiled, blinking away her tears.
She lifted her eyes to meet Yuki's and Emi's matching eyes with a bright grin. Yuki could only smile when Emi grabbed the last surviving newspaper page from Tohru's arms and scrunched it up, smudging the inky letters with syrup and saliva before Yuki himself could slide it out of Tohru's fingers and dispose of it himself. He chuckled under his breath and lifted Emi out of Tohru's grasp and brought her to the sink to rinse off her dirty hands before setting her back in her high chair to finish her breakfast. He then slinked back over to Tohru and draped an arm around her shoulders and planted a kiss on her cheek, obviously relieved by her optimistic reaction. Her cheeks flooded with color momentarily only to drain of it a second later when she hopped to her feet with wide eyes and her mouth agape.
"Oh! Oh…" Tohru gasped.
"What? What's wrong, Tohru?" Yuki questioned, instinctively scanning the room for danger.
"Y-you know how I haven't been feeling well these past couple of days?" she started hesitantly.
"Yes? What about it-"
"I don't think that it's the flu anymore," she choked out in a whisper.
Time seemed to pass lethargically, seconds feeling like minutes as he slowly cranked his head over to Tohru's and locked eyes with her. He seemed to be processing this realization at different rates in different parts of his being. His heart seemed to acknowledge this fact quite easily, quickening its beats in a mixture of shock, anxiety, and excitement, yet his mouth wanted to scream out in disbelief, and he felt a slight haze as his brain buzzed blankly while his eyes softened at the sight of a similar set of mixed emotions across Tohru's face. Despite their obvious incredulity, a grin soon dominated Tohru's face, and Yuki's heart seemed to calm the slightest bit and his brain cleared enough for the news to sink in. He wasn't sure if it was forced, but he smiled nonetheless as he helped Tohru to her feet, lightly grasping her elbow.
"Let's go to the drug store," he suggested breathlessly.
They both rushed out of the house, discarding their breakfast on the table. Hurrying into the car, they tossed the doors open and practically threw themselves into their seats, but Yuki couldn't even start to shove the key into the ignition before they both turned around to the backseat to find the car-seat empty.
They both gasped, "Emi!"
Quickly unbuckling their seatbelts, they both darted out of the car, wrestling with keys and doors before stumbling back inside to the kitchen to find their child sucking on her syrupy fist obliviously. With a relieved smile, Tohru lifted Emi out of her seat, hugging her tightly and ignoring the sugary liquid that soon soaked through her white blouse. Yuki's arms soon followed, trapping Emi in a two-way embrace, while Emi struggled in vain to return to her syrupy plate. So Emi was left, whimpering with her arms up-stretched and her breakfast at arms length for about five minutes until she was finally lifted up and taken further away from her breakfast as her parents buckled her into her car seat.
Started ages ago. I apologize for the affliction I have known as laziness. I am about two oneshots behind. I intended to update at least weekly, but we can all see that I am failing. I hope this makes the story line in The Result a little more plausible? Thank you for reading.