He sees that, too. Sees the fear. Sees the question I can’t quite ask.
Am I going to live? Is the baby? Did we run out of time?
“Aleksei.”
“I’m here.” His voice is rough already. Barely holding.
I shake my head once, breath catching. “No, listen to me.”
His face changes. “Zatanna?—”
“Please.”
That stops him.
The bed keeps moving, the lights keep passing over us, but for one second everything between us goes still.
I look at him and know I have no choice left. If I die with this lie in my mouth, I will damn us both with it. Tears blur my vision.
“You have to take care of my baby,” I whisper.
His jaw tightens. “I will.”
“No.” I drag in air that doesn’t feel like enough. “Not mine.Yours. Your son.”
The words hang there. He goes absolutely still.
I can feel the shock leave him vertical.
I keep going because if I stop now, I won’t finish. “Our baby,” I say, voice breaking. “Aleksei, please. If something happens to me, you take care of our child.”
The world drops out from under his face. For one terrible second, he looks like a man who has forgotten how to breathe. Then all of it hits him at once. The restaurant. The timeline. The lie. The reason I ran. The child.
His child. His hand tightens around mine so hard it almost hurts. “Zatanna?—”
I’m crying openly now. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I just thought if you knew, you’d force me to stay, and I couldn’t, I couldn’t do it then, but now—” My voice fractures. “Please don’t let my baby be alone.”
His whole expression changes. Not anger.
Something deeper. More devastating.
He leans over me, one hand braced on the moving bed, the other still locked around mine, and for the first time since I’ve known him, he looks completely undone.
“Our child,” he says, like he has to hear the words out loud to survive them.
I nod, sobbing now, beyond pride, beyond fear, beyond anything except this one unbearable need to make him understand before I’m gone. “Yes.”
His face crumples for half a second, then sets again with something terrible and absolute. “No,” he says. The force of it cuts through everything.
“No, what?” I whisper.
“No to any of this ending here.” His forehead almost touches mine. “You are not dying. Do you understand me?”
I want to believe him. God, I want to.
He cups my face with shaking fingers and says, lower now, like a vow made straight into my skin, “You are going to live. Our child is going to live. And when you wake up, we are going to finish this conversation properly.”
The certainty in his voice is the only thing keeping me from shattering completely. They start to pull the bed farther away.
