It wasn’t quite like the movies and television shows had led Cheyenne to believe it would be. There was still a hell of a lot of screaming, of course, but it came later. Once her water broke, there was actually a reasonably long time before anything else really happened. The contractions were slow to come at first, starting surprisingly small, though in time they ramped up to what she had expected.
It also wasn’t quick. She didn’t scream her head off for ten minutes and then pop out a baby and mosey on her way. Oh, no. Cheyenne was in labor for nearly twelve hours, spending the entire time alternating between tossing back and forth in the hospital bed and hobbling back and forth along the hallway outside of her hospital room, accompanied by either Daphne or Harry. At first, she simply felt uncomfortable more than anything, though the discomfort was interrupted by occasional bursts of agony.
She napped a few times, until a contraction hit and ripped her out of sleep each and every time she managed to nod off. Daphne slept on the window seat, curled up like a cat, until Cheyenne’s screaming, whenever a contraction hit, woke her up. (Cheyenne was going to assume she did not actually have a concussion or anything like that, since she seemed reasonably functional and she still woke up after falling asleep. Which was good news, of course, but it was not news they acquired through anything even resembling the appropriate means.)
Harry, on the other hand, seemed largely incapable of sitting still and resting, even with the assurance that if something went wrong, it would be more or less impossible for him to not know. Instead, he sat in the chair beside the bed, and his knee bounced enough that Cheyenne swore people on the floor below them could probably hear it, and she almost felt like she should go down to find whoever or whatever was beneath her room and apologize to them.
And at some point—Cheyenne didn’t want to say, “without warning” considering everything that had happened from the time her water broke was technically the warning—everything seemed to get flipped into fast forward, as the contractions that had been gradual but increasing grew to be nearly constant.
There was a doctor standing at the foot of the bed, between her legs (and she almost felt embarrassed for a moment, but it didn’t last long) and a nurse standing beside her, both of them coaching her through it, and frankly, she was pretty sure that she could live her life without ever hearing the word ‘push’ ever again, and she would live a happy, happy one.
The biggest departure from what media had shown her, though, was that once she heard crying, she still wasn’t done. Oh, no. There were still two more for her to push out, red in the face as she shouted and swore and rambled off bodily threats to everyone she knew and a few people she had only heard of in passing.
By the time all three of them were out, blinking and shrieking in the hospital lights, Cheyenne was exhausted. She had just enough left in her to meet the three of them and for the doctor to assure her that all of them were in perfect health—and to learn that the doctor had been astounded a C-section hadn’t been necessary, considering the number of babies being delivered—and then Cheyenne happily passed out for a very long time.
*
Cheyenne’s children were beautiful. Granted, she was perhaps a little bit biased, but she didn’t care. As far as she was concerned, all three of them were the most beautiful children she had ever seen or would ever see, and no one was going to convince her otherwise.
She had three little girls, though they weren’t identical as Cheyenne had sort of assumed they would be. They had skin like cocoa, and while one of them had Harry’s eyes, two of them had Cheyenne’s. One had Harry’s hair, one had Cheyenne’s, and one was smack in the middle. Or at least that was what Cheyenne was assuming; at that moment, all of them mostly just had a bit of fuzz on the tops of their heads (which were still a little oddly shaped, though the nurse assured Cheyenne that was normal from being squeezed through the birth canal, and the bones of their skulls would settle in a more natural position before long).
Cheyenne hadn’t put much thought into their names before then, and she sort of regretted it once she was awake enough to actually contemplate it. She hadn’t known if they were going to be boys or girls or some combination, and it had all just slipped her mind. In her defense, though, she had spent the last few months rather thoroughly distracted by basically everything.
After what seemed like nearly an eternity of Cheyenne, Harry, and Daphne tossing names back and forth, they picked their favorites of the lot.
And, all things considered, everyone was remarkably healthy. Even Cheyenne was more or less right as rain, though she felt a bit off balance considering the amount of weight that had been offloaded the night before. But despite that, it wasn’t long before she was being wheeled out of the hospital, Daphne pushing her in a wheelchair as Cheyenne held two infants and Harry carried the third while he walked beside them.
Maybe she just got lucky. Maybe there was something about the girls’ father being a were-bear that made the pregnancy and the birth easier than everyone had expected. How was she supposed to know?
Cheyenne wasn’t going to complain, though. It had been a very stressful, very eventful couple of days up to that point, and she was happy for it to finally stop, so she could ground herself again and stop feeling like she was going to get launched out into space without a moment’s notice. She was more than happy to bring little Annabelle, Felicity, and Dakota home.