On the way home, Dark made sure to drive slowly as they passed the horses again. He didn’t know that Xander loved them, but he did find his earlier lie about ‘military forces’ suspicious, so he slowed down—the sight of the teenager’s grin in the rearview mirror confirmed it was the right choice. Daizi sang along to the music playing in the car, and when they got home she slipped away upstairs to take a nap.
Later that week, she went in for her procedure, and neither she nor Dark went to work. Ultimately, although it was important, and could literally mean life or death for one bean-sized embryo, it wasn’t serious. She didn’t even need to go to a hospital, it was done right in her doctor’s office. But they took the day, just to be safe. In case there was a complication, and there wasn’t, Daizi wanted to be at home and she did not want to be alone. But everything went great, and they were feeling good. Emotionally.
Physically, for Daizi, things took a turn. She had been pregnant before and in the past had felt maybe slight food aversions and mild nausea. Fair enough, it started there. But it did not stay there. At first, they were able to play it off as food poisoning, and then maybe the flu.
Trying to excuse two weeks of what seemed like near constant running to the bathroom was much more difficult to explain away. There were some days where she felt too awful to go to work, which was unlike her, and many more where she’d come home early, which—as Alec pointed out the first time she did so, back in January—was unlike her.
Her morning sickness (a name she resented every time she swiftly left the dinner table) did give Dark a chance to show his character. If he was around when Daizi hurried off, so long as he wasn’t occupied with something that could not be temporarily set aside, he followed her to hold back her hair and rub her back. Whereas prior to this period of sickness, the two of them were occasionally caught not exactly keeping their hands, or tongues, to themselves, for lack of more delicate phrasing, these days they were more likely to be spotted on the bathroom floor, since when time is of the essence, taking the time to shut the door wasn’t a priority. Daizi would look rather like a clock in a Dali painting, draped pitifully across her husband who held her tenderly until she felt prepared to reemerge.
It wasn’t like she was sick from sunrise to sunset every single day over those weeks, but she also was never totally herself, and had slowed down a lot, and she was sleeping a lot more. Sometimes, at night, when she and Dark were alone, they argued about if it was better to just tell the twins already or if it was better to wait just a little bit longer, because they didn’t want them to be anxious about her, but also Daizi was scared. Not just of if they’d react poorly, but because if something went wrong, which wasn’t an impossibility, then there would be two more people she’d have to tell, and that would only make it harder for her.
But thankfully, her morning sickness disguised smaller symptoms of her “condition.” She had always been her dog’s favourite, so his new intense obsession with her didn’t seem too out of the ordinary, and with everything else going on, it seemed unlikely that the twins would notice how she wasn’t… exactly fitting into her old bras, although she figured that even if she was feeling totally fine, they’d have to more worry about them noticing Dark noticing her than anything else.
Regardless, it was still hard that these past few weeks were not as easy or comfortable as they had been, and she and Dark both felt guilty about it. And then, the day after her third doctor’s appointment in four weeks, Daizi went to work in the morning, but by the time the twins came home from school, she was already lying face down on the couch in the living room with one hand limply on her dog’s head. For the first time, in all the months she had known them, she seemed weak.