Page 6 of Pucking Inevitable: Bonus Scene

“Xaden.” He stepped in front of me, making me stop. He had both hands slightly raised, the universal position of someone attempting de-escalation, and he looked at me with the expression he gets when he is about to say something I am not going to want to hear and he knows it, but he is going to say it anyway. “I understand what this is. I know what it feels like to stand outside a door you can't go through when someone you love is on the other side of it. I know what it does to you.” A pause. “But this is not that. She is not in danger. She is in labor and it hurts. She has the right people with her and in a few hours you are going to be holding your baby. What you need to do right now is be here, in this corridor, not in pieces, so that when she calls you back in, you can be what she needs.”

I looked at him.

“I hate this, I’m never doing it again,” I said.

“I know.”

“Every single second of this.”

“I know.”

“I don't have anything to do with it. There's nothing, there's no move, there's nothing to calculate, I can't make it faster, better or safer, I am completely⁠—”

“I know,” he said, again. Quietly. “Welcome to the rest of your life.”

I stared at him.

“That's not helpful, asshole.”

“No,” he agreed. “But it's true. The baby is going to be sick and you are going to be scared. It’s going to be hurt and you are going to be murderous. Even when the baby is fine, you will still find something to be scared about because that's who you are now and there is no going back from it.” He dropped his hands. “The question is whether you let the fear drive you or whether you learn to stand in it.”

I stood in it.

Barely.

But I stood in it.

The anesthesiologist took nineteen minutes to arrive.

I know it was nineteen minutes because I had been tracking time since Cas steered me out of the room and nineteen minutes is not ten minutes, which is what Carnage had told me when he came back from making calls. Carnage had told me ten minutes and it had been nineteen and I was standing at the end of the corridor when the fucker finally came through the ward doors and I had him stopped before he'd taken three steps.

“You're late,” I sneered.

The guy looked at me. He was somewhere in his fifties, unhurried, carrying the particular composure of someone who had been doing a high-pressure job for a long time and had stopped being rattled by the people in the corridors. He looked at my hockey gear. He looked at my face. He made some calculation.

“I came as quickly as I was able,” he said.

“That's not an answer to what I said.”

“Xaden.” Carnage appeared at my shoulder.

“Another patient required my⁠—”

“I don't care about the other patient,” I said. “There is a woman in that room who has been in pain for nineteen minutes while you were on another floor and I need you to go in there and make it fucking stop. That's what I need from you. Can you do that or should I find someone who can?”

“Sir—”

“He can do it,” Cas said, stepping forward and redirecting the man with a hand on his shoulder in the direction of Toren's room. “Room four. Thank you.” He turned the fucker toward the door and the cunt went, with the speed of someone who had decided that whatever was in the corridor was best left behind him.

Cas turned to me.

“You need to shut the hell up and stop fucking talking to the medical staff,” he snapped.

“Fuck you, you don’t give me orders, Vought.”

“You threatened the anaesthesiologist.”

“I asked if he was capable of doing his fucking job. That's not a threat. That's a performance review, motherfucker.”