"I love you. I love you. I love you. Open your eyes. Please don't do this."

Carlos groaned, his hand like a lead weight as he tried to reach out to comfort Teddy. Everything hurt.

"He's coming around," a stranger's voice said.

"Blood pressure is stable," someone else added.

He tried to ask what the hell was going on, but it came out a low moan. Everything felt far away right up until the stabbing pain shot through his gut. Even that was barely enough to wring a whine out of him when he wanted to be screaming. The pain ricocheted around his body, looking for some escape, but there was nothing.

"Teddy," he gasped, adrenaline powering his mouth to shape sounds.

"I'm here, sweetheart." Icy fingers wrapped around his hand, squeezing until he could feel the bones grind together even over the waves of pain. "We're almost to the hospital. Just hang on."

Something wet landed on his cheek, and he pried his eyes open just enough to know that everything was too bright. He could hang on. He could do that.

Pain ripped through his stomach again, radiating from his back across the tight skin of his stomach. The babies. Now he remembered.

"Keep him breathing," one of the voices said. Paramedic, judging by the chilly, impersonal fingers that checked his pulse a moment later. It made sense if the wailing noise that had been rising and falling in the distance was a siren.

"Carlos? I need you to breathe for me. In and out, just like we learned at birthing class." Teddy's voice was insistent, piercing through the haze of pain. "In and out."

"Easy for you," he said, gasping as the pain refused to fade away. It intensified until he could feel tears dripping down his cheeks.

"Central says the doctor is waiting for you. Everything is going to be okay," the other paramedic said, a warmer pair of hands pressing something sticky to his chest.

Finally, the pain let up. Teddy's fingers holding him tight were the only things keeping him from floating away as he sucked in huge, gulping breaths. "The twins," he said, forcing every sound through numb lips.

"They're ready to get out of there," the first paramedic said, "but other than that, everything looks good. Minimal distress considering they're all dressed up with nowhere to go. Heartbeats are steady, and just going off of the size of that baby bump, you've got some good-sized darlings waiting to make your acquaintance." She patted his arm, her gloves crinkling, and something inside him relaxed.

"Thank God," he whispered. He dragged his free hand, the one he could feel cold, impersonal tubes tangled around, over to rest on his taut belly.

"I love you," Teddy said again, and his breath caught.

"Love you, too, brujo." It was getting easier to make his body do what he wanted, so he cracked one eye open. He was definitely in an ambulance, the sterile chaos of the interior imprinting itself on his eyelids in the split second before Teddy's face came into focus.

He looked as bad as Carlos felt. Tears flowed freely down his face, leaving clean tracks through the thick gray dust that clung to his skin. There was a bandage on his forehead, a tiny spatter of blood showing through.

"Hurt?" he asked, almost biting his tongue as his insides twisted, pain swelling like a wave until all he could do was try to get enough breath to curse.

"We're here," someone said while he was shouting the kinds of words that would have made his mother slap him with her fly swatter. The world swayed, and gentle, impersonal hands steadied him.

The air was crowded with voices all talking at once. They faded in and out at random, words like 'prepped' and 'operating room' lingering while long strings of numbers and letters that made no sense whatsoever raced by before he could grab hold of them. He clutched tight to Teddy's hand, gripped with terror the alpha would be taken away from him. Even when the pain faded to a dull ache at the small of his back, there wasn't enough time to do more than hang on. He just had to hang on.

"Mr. Ramírez, can you hear me? Has he been conscious?" Someone was talking to him, loudly. Before he could work up the energy to reply, cold fingers pried his eyes open, a bright light shining down. "Mr. Ramírez?"

On reflex, Carlos shoved the light away, planting clumsy fingers in the doctor's face. It was indeed a doctor; as he stumbled back a little, he could see the ID clipped to the man's pocket.

Teddy caught his hand before he could get even more tangled in the wires that surrounded him. "It's all right," he whispered, pressing a kiss to Carlos' hair. He'd been cleaned up in the last few...Seconds? Minutes? Every speck of dust was gone from his pale skin, and while his eyes were still red, the tears had dried up.

The doctor grinned at Teddy, and Carlos wanted to growl. "Don't worry about it," he said, leaning over them again. "I get that a lot. My name is Nick, Mr. Ramírez, and I'm going to be performing your c-section today. The nurse is going to give you a very, very small dose of something that is going to help you relax." He handed something off over the top of Carlos' belly, smiling all the while. "Then my good friend the anesthetist is going to be giving you whatever painkiller you and your regular doctor have written in your birth plan, okay? If you start to feel a tingling or numbness in your extremities, that is normal, but I want you to let me know anyway so we can keep track of the flow of the meds. Can you tell me what you're supposed to do if you feel any tingling or numbness?"

Carlos wanted to roll his eyes, but he was too tired. "Tell you," he mumbled, the words slurring.

"Excellent. You might feel a slight burn as this medicine goes in, but it's going to relax your muscles so we can safely make our incisions, okay?" He was making notes on a clipboard that appeared out of nowhere, one eye on something behind Carlos' head.

If there was a burn, it was so small he didn't notice it over all the other signals flooding his nerves. What he did notice was the warm, slightly gooey sensation that crept over his body until he felt like wax had melted into the rough hospital sheets.

"Feeling good, huh?" Dr. Nick asked, his smile stretching into a smirk. It was a silly twist of his lips that softened the lines on his forehead and made him look young and charming, a little bit like a TV star and exactly like someone named Dr. Nick. "I only give my patients the good stuff."

The ache in his back oozed away as he sank deeper into the thin mattress. There were quite a few people moving around the room, now that he had the brain power available to notice them. At some point, someone had propped a sheet up over his chest, blocking him from seeing what was happening below his chest. All the lights in the room, what seemed like a hundred, were focused on the other side of that sheet.

Teddy was sitting on his left, those vague, dreamy blue eyes glued to Carlos' face. He was tall enough, though, that even sitting, he could see to the other side of the sheet.

"What are they doing?" he asked, his tongue getting tangled up in his teeth.

Glancing over the sheet, Teddy blinked as a mask was hooked onto his ears by a nurse with a no-nonsense glare. "They're smearing orange stuff all over your stomach. Is it cold?"

Carlos blinked slowly, trying to decide if it was or not. He couldn't actually feel it, he realized. He couldn't feel his belly, or his toes, or the bruise on his hip where he caught the edge of the door getting out of the van.

"I don't know," he said. "I can't feel it."

"Were you that enormous this morning?" Teddy asked him with a confused frown. "You look like you wouldn't fit through the front door."

"I hate you," Carlos said, pulling his hand out of Teddy's so he could swat him with it. Teddy just laughed and grabbed it back.

"We're ready to begin," Dr. Nick said cheerfully. "Take a few deep breaths for me, Mr. Ramirez, and get ready to meet your twins."

"Carlos," he muttered. "If you're going to be digging around in my guts, you might as well call me Carlos."

"All right Carlos," he said, "if you feel anything other than pressure or the occasional tug, you let me know immediately." He gave Teddy a pointed look over the top of his mask.

"I'm supposed to distract you," Teddy said immediately, blinking those big blue eyes innocently as the nurses groaned. "What?"

"Don't think you're supposed to tell me, brujo," he said, squeezing the alpha's hand.

Teddy shrugged. "It's not like you wouldn't have noticed."

"I have enough drugs in me right now, that I might not have," Carlos said, but even he had to concede he probably would have. "What do you want to talk about?"

Ducking his head, Teddy pressed a kiss to Carlos' hand, his ears slowly darkening until they were almost glowing red. He tilted his head thoughtfully, but the angle wasn't quite right.

"Why are you stalling?" Carlos narrowed his eyes and glared, and behind him, the beeping machines beeped a little faster. What?"

Teddy swallowed, looking over the sheet and letting his eyes trace whatever was happening over there. He looked embarrassed, not worried, so Carlos focused on breathing and waiting him out.

"I was wondering," Teddy said slowly, turning back just as there was a pull against Carlos' stomach. "You have a lot of muscle. They're having to cut through it all," he added.

"You were wondering," Carlos prompted, unwilling to be distracted.

He sighed, his fingers tapping a gentle rhythm against the back of Carlos' hand. "I was wondering... Just something to think about, and you don't have to give me an answer right now, but maybe you'll have a good idea..." He blinked, distracted by what was happening on the other side of the sheet, and the nerves receded enough for him to finish. "I was wondering where you'd like to go on our honeymoon."

There was another strong tug, this one somewhere deep inside Carlos' gut, and he gasped. The words filtered through his brain like a lightning strike until he was staring open-mouthed at Teddy. Behind him, the beeping machines went haywire, and in front of him, a baby wailed.

Heart in his throat and everything else forgotten, Carlos craned his neck until he could see a squirming form being wrapped in a towel.

"It's a boy," Dr. Nick said with a grin. "Give me ten seconds, Carlos, before you go rushing off to hold him. There's still one more little thing we have to take care of." He winked, turning back to Carlos' belly.

The nurses were rushing around with his baby, their hands professional and caring, but not his, not family. Only the reminder he still had one more baby to keep safe kept him still.

"He's a good weight," Dr. Nick said, his voice muffled as he took things from the nurses and stuck them into the area below the sheet. There was a vaguely nauseating shift in the region of Carlos' belly button, and he almost missed the next words. "They're both good sized, ten fingers, ten toes."

"Do you want to hold him?" a softer voice asked, and Carlos turned to find a nurse at his head with a tightly wrapped bundle. Dr. Nick sighed, sounding exasperated, but she just rolled her eyes and winked at Carlos.

He was reaching for the baby before he could even process the request, cuddling him against his chest. His son. He was so small, his wrinkled face curled in an unhappy grimace.

"Oh."

Carlos blinked away tears and smiled at Teddy. The alpha was staring at the baby, his mouth hanging open and the whites of his eyes shining in the operating room lights.

"He's beautiful," Teddy said, raising one shaking finger to touch the barest edge of the blanket.

"He really is." There was a brief thought he should ask if Teddy wanted to hold him, but he discarded it immediately. There would be time later. He was the one who'd done all the work, he was going to hold his son for as long as he wanted.

"It's a boy," Dr. Nick announced, just as the other baby let out a hiccuping squeak.

Against Carlos' chest, the older of the two gave an angry wail, flailing his little arms in search of his brother, but the little one didn't cry at all as the nurses took him away. Carlos felt his heart skip a beat, unconsciously tracking their progress until one of the nurses smiled.

"He's just quiet," she said, her eyes on the monitors behind Carlos' head. "Sometimes they're like that. Maybe the other one makes enough noise for the both of them."

He forced himself to settle against the bed, but it wasn't until the second bundle was cuddled in his other arm that he felt the knot of fear untangle.

"Ten more seconds," Dr. Nick said, smiling as Carlos shifted, trying to hold his babies closer. "I'm just putting in the last few stitches."

He hadn't even realized that the doctor was stitching him up, so distracted by watching the curve of tiny mouths and noses. The oldest boy, in a dark green blanket, was larger than his brother, swaddled in soft yellow. The little one had more hair, though.

"If you've got names picked out," one of the nurses said, scribbling on a clipboard, "I can take them down now, or you can do it later."

"We're ready," Carlos said, glancing at Teddy. The alpha didn't even seem to realize they were there, all his attention on the two bundles. Carlos couldn't help but chuckle at the dazed expression on his face.

The shift disturbed the boys, the older one glaring angrily as he sucked in a deep breath to scream. In the harsh light, his skin was more tomato than tan, and his tiny eyes glinted a brilliant, grassy green.

"Theodore William Ramírez-Connelly IV," Carlos said, stroking his cranky little cheek and laughing tearfully as one tiny hand caught at his finger.

Teddy sucked in a breath, his hands shaking where they rested on the blankets, just shy of touching their sons. "Oh," he said again, his voice cracking.

"And for you," Carlos said, watching his younger son stare out at the world curiously, his pale, golden yellow eyes unfocused. "León Victor Ramírez-Connelly." He coaxed one tiny hand to take hold of his thumb, his breath catching at the barely there pressure.

"Good names," the nurse said, and he startled slightly. He'd completely forgotten there were other people in the room.

"We're going to move you guys to a recovery room now," Dr. Nick said, pulling down the sheet to reveal a much smaller mound of blankets over Carlos' midsection. "There's going to be a nurse coming around to help you feed your boys, and when you're ready, she'll put them into their cribs. We've found that babies do better when we leave them near their families, so we won't be taking them out of the room without you unless absolutely necessary."

"Thank you," Carlos said when Teddy just sighed, stroking the blanket gently. "Get up, brujo," he said teasingly. "Go call your grandmother."

"I already did," Teddy said, never taking his eyes off his sons. "You were too busy cursing. They're probably here already." He lifted his head a little, as if coming out of a fog. "Thank you, Doctor." He swallowed hard, leaning down to press a trembling kiss on Carlos' hair. "I love you."

Carlos smiled, a fresh flood of tears dripping down his cheeks. "Sap," he said, trying to rub his cheeks without disturbing the babies. "I want to go to Europe. For our honeymoon." His voice cracked as Teddy's attention snapped to him.

"I can do that," Teddy said softly, his eyes glowing with something a lot like hope. "I like Europe. They have great architecture there."

Carlos laughed, just cuddling his sons closer as Theodore protested loudly. "I love you, brujo. I don't know why, but I do."

Teddy just smiled.