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Hob is kneeling in front of the hospital bed, naked, because he stopped giving a shit about the same time they came here, with Dream behind him pushing his thumbs into the divots of his hips. He's been doing this for eight hours, and even if the start of it wasn't that bad, Hob is just about done with it now. He's afraid of actually asking how he's doing though, in case they tell him he's got to do this crap for another eight hours. Instead, he reminds himself to relax his jaw and hums open-mouthed through the next contraction. His midwife sticks her head through the door and asks if he wants to try the bathtub in the other room. Hob considers for a moment, and then says yes.
The water accentuates the pain, makes it sharper, like a knife's edge. It makes the breaks heavenly, like a floating cloud. It makes his head woozy. During the contractions he slams his fist repeatedly on the edge of the tub, to move something, to clench something different so he can keep his stomach and jaw relaxed. Dream is kneeling in front of him, outside of the tub. He's talking, because Hob has asked him to, so that he has something to tether him. Hob can't bear to be touched right now, not in addition to the too warm water. His groans are growing deeper, like they're trying to reach into his belly.
He holds out for ten, maybe twelve contractions and then his head is swimming so bad that he thinks he's going to pass out. "I want to get out," he says, and drags himself out of the water by the handle on the wall, when he feels the next one coming. He stops halfway up, and lets it wash over him, focusing inwards.
"I think I'd like something for the pain now," he tells the nurse who's holding out a towel, and he takes Dream's hand to steady himself.
Back in his room, they start him on a drip. Hob is thankful, but unsure if it's actually working or not, because either it's not, or the pain is getting worse and the painkiller they're giving him is shaving away the top of it to the level he was at before. Dream is holding his hand, cradling his face, giving him water.
His consciousness slowly splits into a part that is able to think very clearly, and a part that is hurting very badly, an animal part that wants to hide and be somewhere safe and dark. Thank heavens the lights are already dim. The first part, the thinking one, is watching the latter, telling him what's going on, reassuring him.
He's a creature made entirely of sound and pressure and pain now, and that's why, when the nurse presses her fingers in to check, he screams. It's not that it particularly hurts, per se, in the grand scheme of things, it's just that it's a kind of pressure, and now pressure means his body makes a sound. She had asked, and he wasn't having a contraction, but it hardly matters.
He gets on his hands and knees on the bed, the headboard turned up high, clutches the bar at the top with both hands. With the next contraction, his consciousness fragments further, there's his thinking, and the pain, and now a third part that feels awfully like the minute before one feels when one has to barf, jaw cranked open and drooling, stomach heaving helplessly, like being squeezed out. Only in the wrong direction. Relax your jaw, his thinking chuckles. The wave comes. The sound starts at his toes this time, rolling up through his whole body, a deep Aaaaaaaaaaaa that doesn't stop and gets louder the longer it goes on. The pain sears through him and his body starts heaving down. It rolls out, stops, and he unclenches his white fingers from the handle. Takes Dream's hands and puts them into his hair, onto his shoulders, and Dream pets him. "You're doing so well," he says, "you're being so strong."
The soft, hiding animal he has become relaxes somewhat at the praise. He's being good. It's okay. It's okay. His body heaves. One more, he thinks, just one more. He forcefully bats Dream's hands away and grips the top of the bed. The sound comes. The pain wrenches him like a wet towel, winding the pressure tighter. He wants to scream instead of letting the vibrating sound out, wants to sob and cry and plead for it to stop, but he's already so full with the pressure and his thinking and the sound that there's no more space for it inside of him. The wave lets him go. He drags Dream's hands back onto his body, to ground himself, to experience something other than the violent force of nature that shudders through him every few minutes, to counter it with something soft.
The core of his body heaves. He bats Dream's hands away. One more, he thinks, just one. He doesn't let himself think past that, because all three parts of him know, without doubt, that he would die. That he would give up and cease existing if he'd think about two or five or another hour. The vomiting downward feeling in his lower half distracts him from how the pain has ticked up again, because it takes up a part of the finite space of things he can experience at once. The pain ceases. He reminds himself to unclench his fingers and breathe.
By the next contraction, Dream has understood and takes his hands away as the sound starts deep in his body. Hob is thankful. He has space for thinking, detached, flowing, but no longer space for words. His throat feels raw, but he doesn't know how to ask for water except thinking it. The wave leaves him.
He looks at Dream, who picks up petting and reassuring him again and notices the red rim around his eyes, the clean, straight track of tears downwards from each eye, unbroken, because Dream only has time to think of Hob. He raises his thumb and wipes them away and Dream's breath hitches with a sob. The pain builds. Hob grabs the headboard, thinking, One. You can bear one more. Just one. The deep groan crescending in a hoarse scream is something he registers as there. It's the sound of his body, but he has no control over producing it. The pain passes.
"Do you want to try a different position?" the midwife asks him, and adds, "You're doing marvelous." Hob thinks several things at once, firstly how he does not want to hear about how he's doing past Dreams deep, murmured good because he can't think of this as a process, because then he will start thinking of the end, and when he thinks of the end he'll ask when and he can't bear it being further away than one more, only one more. Secondly he thinks that he's not doing anything, that this is being done to him rather than by him, that he's just along for the ride and barely holding on, and thirdly he thinks he's forgotten how to move in a conscious manner, forgotten how to make his body do things that are not instinct. The fourth and last thing he thinks is should I move? Is something wrong?
"Yes," he rasps out. He slowly climbs from the bed with trembling thighs, holds onto the edge of it with one hand and to the loop of fabric that's dangling over the end of the bed from the ceiling with the other. As his second foot touches the ground the sound starts up from his belly, and the pain of the contraction drives him over like a train. He lets himself fall into the looped fabric, lets it catch him. He will look at himself in the hospital mirror in the bathroom a few hours later as he wobbly steps into the shower and notice a large bruise on his shoulder where the fabric had dug in.
Standing and letting his upper body hang from the small swing the fabric makes is so much better than being on his hands and knees. He doesn't have to hold his own weight. This is marvelous, he thinks, and if his brain was whole right now, he might have laughed.
The sound starts. The pain starts. His hips feel like they're carrying a large red-hot lead brick, like his bones are being stretched apart like taffy. The mental image makes him want to laugh again, except everything hurts and the sound still coming out of him is hoarse and gravelly, his throat raw. There's a flurry of activity around him, loud, encouraging voices, there's anticipatory tension in the room. Hob doesn't like it. He needs it to be quiet and dark and without tension. The wave leaves him, the pain stays, crouched low in his pelvis. The sound doesn't stop either, climbing higher. He feels woozy. Well. More woozy. Then there's Dream's face in front of his, blue eyes like glaciers, and he wants to climb in and let them soothe the heated pain. "Breathe," he says, "Hob, breathe."
Hob remembers how his lungs work, and the sound stops as he takes small, gasping breaths, every exhale a pained ah. "I know, it hurts, I know. You're doing so, so good." Hob has never loved him more than in this moment and thinks, You don't know shit. His most recent exhale sound picks up into his by now familiar rough screaming as the new wave presses further into the still existing pain, wrings more agony out of some hidden creases Hob was not aware existed. He spends an eternity like this, hanging, Dream teaching him how to breathe again after pain wipes his mind blank.
He is mid scream when it just stops. He sways and lets go of the fabric and watches as a small, tiny, bloody part of himself, still connected to him, is put on the bed directly in front of him and all he can do is breathe into the sudden space inside himself and not keel over. He watches as it is patted dry and then his daughter is brought up to his belly and someone's hands help him onto the bed as he brings up his own to hold her warm body to his skin. He feels a tug between his legs as he moves, still connected to her, him-not-him, his daughter. All the space in his body is currently occupied with not being in pain, the absence of it, scraped out until his skin feels thin and bloody from the inside. When he is finally laying down, the familiar weight still on his stomach but outside now, he desperately, selfishly, wishes for a pause button. Not to preserve this moment, like he's seen in movies, to gaze at his baby with doe-eyes, but to just stop everything and sleep, for a week or two, before he has to experience something new, before he has to think of responsibility again.
Life decides to be a bitch and does not give him a pause button. Pale hands cut the white cord with scissors. The nurse kneads part of his belly and asks, "can you push for me again?" He does, barely even feeling it under the weight of his child, who is making little mewling sounds now, and something slides out of him with a, frankly, disgusting feeling. He chuckles weakly, because it is objectively funny that he can still feel appalled about something after going through all of this.
There's a small, disbelieving sound beside him and now he remembers that Dream exists, in addition to his wrung out body and their daughter. He's looking at Hob with big eyes, pushing his wet hair away from his forehead, his fingers blessedly cool. "Why are you laughing?"
Another chuckle rasps through his poor throat. "That," Hob says hoarsely, laughing, "was disgusting." The midwife and nurse laugh.
Dream just stares at him for a while, and then kisses his sweaty forehead, his cheek, his nose. His mouth. "Hob Gadling," he says, "you are incredible."