Page 4 of Pucking Inevitable: Bonus Scene

“We're moving as quickly as we can, sir.”

“Bullshit!”

“Xaden.” Cas had appeared at my side. He had been behind me since the car and was now close enough that I could hear the deliberate calm in his voice, the specific register he uses when he is trying to lower the temperature of a situation I am actively raising. “Let her work.”

“She's working too fucking slow.”

“She's working at normal human speed.”

“Normal speed isn’t fucking fast enough.”

“For what? Nothing is happening yet, she's just⁠—”

“She's in pain, Cas.” My voice came out harder than I intended. Everything was coming out harder than I intended. I had lost the ability to control it somewhere between the parking lot and the entrance, and I haven’t found it since. “She has been in pain since the car and she will continue to be in pain until someone in this building fucking does something about it and I would like that to happen before I do something about it myself.”

Silence.

The nurse had stopped typing.

Cas had gone very still.

“Sir,” the nurse said, carefully, “I understand you're worried⁠—”

“I'm not worried.” The word came out completely wrong. Wrong tone, wrong weight. “I don't worry. I solve problems. So tell me what the problem is and let me solve it.”

“Xaden.” Carnage, from my right. He had come in behind Harper and he was standing at a slight angle to me that I recognized, the angle of someone positioning themselves to intervene if they need to. “Come here for a second.”

“Fuck you. I'm not going anywhere.”

“I know. Come here anyway.”

Something in his voice cut through the static. Not calm exactly, Carnage is not a calm guy, he simply channels his energy more efficiently than most, but something grounded. I turned and looked at him and he looked back at me with the expression of a man who understood exactly what was happening and was not going to manage me about it.

“She's going to be alright,” he said, quietly. Not a platitude. He said it the way he says things he means.

“You don't fucking know that.”

“No,” he agreed. “But I know Toren. And I know she's in the right place and the right people are here and you standing up front terrorizing the intake nurse is not making any of that better.” He held my gaze. “Go be with her. That's the one thing you can actually do right now. Be calm, be her pillar of strength because she is going to need you. Let her be the one to freak out.”

I looked at him for a moment.

Then I went back in.

I lasted eleven minutes.

I know it was eleven minutes because I was watching the clock above the bed, tracking each minute the way I track variables in any situation that requires management, and for eleven minutes I stood at Toren's side and held her hand, breathed and managed, mostly, not to direct my attention toward the midwife at the end of the bed and demand an update.

Then Toren had a contraction.

I have watched Toren go through things that should have broken her. I’ve watched her absorb things that would have put other people on the floor. She isn’t a person who breaks easily and she doesn’t ask for help.

She was crying.

Silent tears, tracking down her face while she breathed through it the way they had taught her, controlled and deliberate and completely at the mercy of something that didn’t care how composed she was. She had her eyes closed and her jaw tight and she was gripping the bed rail with her free hand hard enough that her knuckles had gone white, and she was handling it.

She was handling it and I couldn’t do a single fucking thing to help.

The sound I made was not something I planned. It came from somewhere below language. The midwife looked up. The nurse near the door looked up. Toren opened her eyes and looked at me.