"You're pregnant." states the doctor.
The revelation does not come with a heavenly choir, just the low hum of fluorescent lights. Outside examination the doors were beeps from other machinery and the bustling of other people. In and out, just another day.
"...you're kidding."
The woman in the chair clenches her purse hard enough her knuckles turned white. It was pink at the band of the finger her wedding ring was. An angry pink.
Her well-manicured hands weren't smooth. Clearly, they were full of old scars, marks, and just the general lines and spots of aging. Solid hands, ones that probably could get stuff done. No one, especially not a physician, was going to judge until she started drying blood with them.
Maybe her own with the way she was clenching her nails so hard into the palm.
"I understand your concerns. But no, we wouldn't joke, the results are rather conclusive." the doctor assured her.
"But...But how could this have happened?" a hand goes up to hold her head, frazzling through her hair.
"Mrs. Takeda, do you and your husband..." the doctor didn't want to state the obvious too bluntly. It was understandable for anyone to be shocked by the news, especially for more advanced age.
"I know, of course, I'm sorry but....I'm 48 years old!?!"
She didn't scream but she might as well have with how she was feeling.
"It's true that fertility does go down with age but it's not as uncommon to naturally conceive as you may believe. Congratulations, you're about 15 or 16 weeks along. Now I understand this would be your first pregnancy-"
She felt herself slump over in her chair. If she wasn't already seated she could have easily fallen over. But she couldn't do that because it would so easily harm the baby.
A baby?
Pregnant? Her!?
She didn't think it was ever a possibility for her. Just like how she thought she would never marry. A lot of things were like that. She felt she was long past her prime, hell she doubted that she ever had a prime.
The milestones that she thought would completely pass by her were coming later on in her life. Her youth wasn't easy, and her early adulthood proved even harder.
It wasn't until later on that she picked up and turned around her own life. It came with a lot of hard work, heartbreak, and revelations- but it was her life, god damn it.
Even if it was out of spite, she was going to do something with it.
Sure she wasn't the luckiest or even average, but there was a difference between moping to her early grave and accepting fate enough to actually do something about it.
So she did.
And she kept it up, oddly.
And she got lucky.
She met her husband later than most. Both of them were already well into their middle age when they had met. It certainly wasn't love at first sight. Hell, it was arguably not all that romantic. It was downright boring.
Maybe that's why it worked. They were a boring old couple and god did it work. It worked so beautifully. It was something she never thought she would have in life. Not her.
Sure she made it with work, and it was a lot of hard work but that was different.
That was an effort she could see. Countless hours behind a screen, editing, tweaking. Perfecting a craft that few ever noticed or cared about in the background. Editing till the final product was something showable to the world. She had tried her hand at just about every kind of popular digital media editing. When she saved up enough and gave up any sense of professional work to branch out on her own, she got even luckier lucky. The media landscape was favorable to her boring videos. She could do as she likes and the ad revenue covered enough.
But love was a different thing.
Hell, love and support. Her husband supported her stuff. It was great. Something she rarely felt in her life, ever.
To this day she wasn't all that close with her family. Or well, what 'family' she had left. But that was in the past, and the future was coming.
The future was so exciting. All so much better.
There was a baby inside her? What?
She was beside herself. What to do first? What?
Through the overwhelming haze of it all, she thought of her husband. Rightfully the first person she had to tell. The first and most important person that she wanted to tell. He was on her mind the whole time as she walked out of the hospital.
God. They were going to have a baby? At this age?
Apparently not because it was around this moment that the world turned dark. Give or take.
Now she wasn't quite sure what killed her. The explosion? The impact of debris? The swirling fire? Some other madness? It was probably everything, yeah. Such major incidents tended to be a factor of a lot of things.
And so she died.
At least she wasn't run over by a random truck that dragged her bloody body down the street. Or kidnapped by a sadistic serial killer. A serial killer with a truck? Yeah, there were a lot of worse ways to go.
Life was unpredictable indeed.
At least it was too quick to hurt. Or well it should have been.
The fact that she was still somewhat capable of waxing thoughts, terrible thoughts, was probably the first sign. When she started feeling the dull pain in her head and across her body, she suspected that she wasn't really all that dead.
It was awfully painful, and the only way to lessen it seemed to be to lay as still as possible. That wasn't an option she opposed. Some more rest and sleep would be great. Without opening her eyes she could guess she was in a semi-soft bed. It felt awkwardly small and stuffy, so possibly a hospital bed. That was good. That meant she was getting treatment. She just hoped nothing was too wrong....
The baby.
Just like that, she jolted awake. Her hand flailed to grasp her stomach, though it was still flat this early on as if that would somehow protect the growing life inside her.
Except what she grabbed wasn't flat at all.
It was huge?!
Oh dear Lord, had she been in a coma and grown to full term or something?! How long had she been asleep?
But it wasn't just her stomach that was bulging. Everything felt off. Everywhere she touched was an awkward and stiff sort of feeling, too full and swollen to properly move. At first, she chalked it up to being in an accident, to maybe being bedridden for so long.
But this wasn't a hospital room. It wasn't even a hotel room and it certainly wasn't home.
Home?
It was a far cry from her home.
It looked like a dusty memory, tinged in grey-coated ash. Pink walls and oil stains. Overstuffed toy animals and too small too large clothes scattered about the room. Pink curtains that failed to block out the sunlight, only stream it in a suffocating pink. The scent of sweets, sweat, and something tinglingly nostalgic.
Her childhood bedroom.
Everything about it made her want to vomit. Just at this very moment though, it made her want to both sneeze and cry. A dust cloud of filth and unfulfilled dreams.
She didn't even need to stumble into the mirror to know what she would face. She felt it. She felt it like the sinking feeling of going home to a home you didn't want to be in. Of waking up uncomfortable in your own body, your own skin. The reality of every single day of her young life. The reality she tried so hard to forget.
"Bunny! Bunny dear, are you up yet?" came a somewhat voice muffled through the walls. As if it was called by a tired parent downstairs.
That name? That awful nickname?
Sure it was cute to some but not on her. Not 'Chubby Bunny' her.
Shaking, she lifted her hands up to her face. It was to her horror that she saw her skin was taut and smooth, as full and soft as little pillows. That was exactly it, fluffy little pillows enlarging every digit of childishly soft hands, both too large and too small.
The most heartbreaking of all was the missing wedding ring.
There wasn't even a mark. As if it was never there. Never existed. As if her life had all just been a long painful dream.
"Bunny! Mom and dad said get up! It's summer and all but it's past lunch. Wake up you lazy thing! "
She crumbled.
She crumbled into herself, into this morbidly large body. The body of the most insecure and unhappy little girl to ever grace her memory. Herself.
This couldn't be real. She couldn't be alive, and certainly not back to this? This was hell, right? She died and was thrown into the bad place?
"Wake up!"
The door slammed open and there stood the aged down nightmares of her life, shocked still at the sight of her uncontrollable sobs. Tears and cries she didn't even know she was making until this moment. Wetness rolling hot and itchy down her full cheeks and curving down into her neck. The heat of everything, the summer sun, the stuffy room, and her heaving, made it impossible to breathe.
Her stepsister's lovely face twisted, part in confusion and part in just the general disgust at what was in front of her. As if it were a great inconvenience to even look at.
"Uhhhhh ok, have fun with that ugly. "
The door slammed closed again, kicking up a cloud of doom and gloom into the room. She couldn't breathe. The sobs wouldn't stop and she couldn't breathe either way, even if she screamed.
She was 13 again.
This was not the kind of surprise she could deal with. Not today, not ever. Screw life.