I Found a Door to the Elven Realm

Chapter 203: A Very Healthy Baby

Friday came up cold and clear and they left before the sun was properly up.

He didn’t take the farm pickup. That big diesel thing was built for hauling cinder blocks and bags of feed up a dirt track and it rode like a tractor and drank fuel worse than Rury drank well water. For six hours of highway with a pregnant woman, no chance. He’d called the same rental place in town the day before, the one that already had a fake-friendly file on him, and swapped a few thousand lira for a Nissan crossover, grey, quiet, with seats that didn’t try to break your spine on every pothole.

"This one’s softer," Emily announced the second she climbed in, running her hands over the dashboard like she was checking a horse for soundness. "I like this one better than the loud farm one."

"It’s Japanese. They’re good at making things comfortable." He pulled out onto the empty coast road. "The pickup is for work. This one’s for not making your back worse."

She had her beanie on, black, pulled low, the sour-cherry juice between her knees and a bag of the apple-pears she refused to leave home without. She’d dressed in the loosest thing they owned and still looked, in the grey morning light off the water, like something that didn’t belong on a Turkish highway.

The Aegean ran silver on their left for the first hour. Emily watched it the whole time without saying much. She always went quiet around the sea, like it was a problem she hadn’t solved yet.

"It really doesn’t stop," she said eventually.

"Told you. Goes all the way to Greece and past."

"I know. You said." She popped an apple-pear in her mouth. "I still don’t believe it."

They talked about small things as the coast fell behind and the road turned inland through olive country and then up into hills. She wanted to know what a hospital ultrasound actually did and he tried to explain sound waves and pictures of the inside and she decided it was magic and he decided not to fight her on it. She wanted to know if his grandmother would cry about the belly. He said his grandmother liked anyone who ate, which meant the baby was already family too.

She asked, careful, not looking at him, whether the doctors would be able to tell the baby was half-elf.

"No," he said. "Ears are covered. Everything else just looks like a really healthy baby. They’ll think you’re some athlete from out of town." He reached over at a red light and squeezed her knee. "We’re fine. Kalina set it up clean."

Somewhere past the second hour Emily fell asleep with one hand on her belly and her cheek against the cool window glass. Any moving thing knocked her out these days. Her beanie slid up while she slept until the tip of her left ear poked free into the morning light and at the next set of lights Eren reached over and worked it back down without waking her, same as always.

The road climbed toward the interior and the lights of the next town came up ahead through the windshield, looking almost stupidly normal after months of glowing forests. A pregnant elf was asleep beside him, a jar of fruit from a dead orchard rested at her feet, his whole impossible family was waiting at the top of the map and a hospital appointment had a fake name on it. For one stretch of empty highway it felt almost like the life of a normal man driving his wife to see a doctor.

Eren drove and let himself have it.

..

The traffic started a full hour before they expected!

Two lanes became four and then six and everybody in all six of them drove like the road owed them money. Emily woke up around the first big interchange and spent the next twenty minutes with her forehead almost touching the glass, watching the buildings grow taller and the gaps between them disappear.

"How many people live in this place?" she asked.

"Fifteen, sixteen million. Honestly nobody knows the real number."

She went quiet and did the math against a village of two hundred and sixteen and he could almost hear the number breaking something in her head. "That’s not a city," she decided in the end. "That’s a herd that forgot how to stop growing."

A taxi cut across three lanes without signaling and four different cars honked at the same time.

"..six lanes and everybody’s still angry," Eren muttered at the windshield.

"I like it." Emily watched the taxi disappear between two buses. "Everyone here drives like they’re hunting something."

The hospital came up on a hill above the water, a tall white private building with a logo that looked expensive even from the road. He spiraled the Nissan down into the underground garage and took the ticket from the machine on the third try because the machine was positioned for people with shorter arms and bigger patience.

"Minus two," he said quietly to himself while locking the car. "Minus two.. don’t make a pregnant woman walk around a garage because you forgot a number.."

In the elevator he reached over to check her beanie and she slapped his hand away before it arrived.

"I know how to wear a hat, silly." She fixed it herself, one centimeter, exactly where it already was. "Worry about your own ears."

The reception floor was all marble and quiet, with the carpet smell of money. Eren gave the name Kalina had booked and a woman with perfect nails typed it in without looking up, then pointed them toward a waiting area with leather seats and a water machine that offered three kinds of water.

The smell got him before anything else did.

Every hospital on Earth smells exactly the same. Antiseptic and floor cleaner and something faint underneath that’s probably just other people’s fear. The last time Eren had been inside one this clean he was fourteen and had sprinted face-first through a glass door that somebody had cleaned too well. He remembered lying in a corridor that smelled like this one while his mother switched between crying over him and promising to kill him, sometimes inside the same sentence. The doctor had pushed his nose back into place with two thumbs and told him it would heal a little crooked and his mother said good, maybe the crooked nose would remind him that doors existed.

It did heal crooked. It never reminded him of anything.

Eleven years and they’re still using the same floor cleaner. Respect for the brand loyalty I guess.

"Elif Kaya?"

A nurse with a clipboard scanned the waiting area. Nobody moved. The nurse said it again and Eren elbowed Emily in the arm.

"That’s you."

"I knew that." Emily pushed herself up from the leather seat in three stages and made all three look intentional. As an Elf and a bloody hunter, Emily wouldn’t mind this scene much actually. But after living on Earth for a while now, she was a bit embarrassed. But she still didn’t stop her act like this was a scene from her favorite Turkish drama shows.

The female doctor, Doctor Banu turned out to be a small woman in her fifties with reading glasses pushed up into her grey hair and the unhurried hands of somebody who had done this ten thousand times. She didn’t ask about insurance or paperwork or where exactly this glowing healthy foreigner had received her care until now.

She did actually but when Emily didn’t want to answer some of the questions, she just checked the fake medical record Kalina made for her and didn’t insist for more details. Her nephew said she owed a friend - as Kalina was really made this situation weird and hard to understand. And because her nephew begged the doctor, she was tolerant for this weird case.

"They explained your situation," she said, patting the exam bed. "So I won’t ask you anything. Let’s just check the baby."

Emily lay back and pulled the loose sweater up herself before anyone asked and Eren’s brain stalled for a second on the bare curve of her belly and the pale line of her hip above the waistband.

Emily caught Eren’s face and saw him as really nervous. She found that funny but didn’t make any comment about it.

She was also very nervous..!

The gel made her whole body flinch and her right hand snapped toward her hip, toward a katana that was hanging on a wall six hours south of here. Then her fingers remembered where they were and settled flat on the bed.

"It’s cold," she informed the doctor in the tone of someone filing an official complaint.

"It’s always cold," Doctor Banu said, pressing the probe down. "Forty years and nobody’s fixed it. Now let’s see.."

The screen filled with grey static and shifting shapes and for a second it looked exactly like the old TV at the Zekeriyaköy house when the antenna cable came loose and his father smacked the side of it instead of fixing the cable. Then the shapes organized themselves and there was a head, a curled spine, a tiny fist near a tiny face.

Then the sound came on.

The heartbeat filled the whole room, fast and loud, a galloping drum, way too strong for something that small. Emily went completely still, the same hunter stillness she used when something important moved in the forest and the whole world narrowed down to one point. Her eyes locked onto the screen and her hand found Eren’s and closed around it until his knuckles ground together.

"..that’s a whole person in there," Eren whispered to nobody.

"That’s a very strong heartbeat," Doctor Banu said, moving the probe slowly. "Excellent rhythm. And the baby’s big. Very well developed, very active. Look, there." A small blurry leg kicked out on the screen and Emily’s grip somehow got tighter. "Is the mother an athlete?"

Called it.

"She does sports," Eren said.

"I hunt," Emily said at exactly the same time, eyes still on the screen.

Doctor Banu looked at the two of them over her reading glasses, decided the extra fee covered this too and went back to the monitor. "Sports. Wonderful. Whatever it is, keep doing the walking version of it." She clicked something and froze the image. "Measurements are beautiful. Strong heart, good fluid, good position. Would you like to know the sex?"

"No." Emily answered before the sentence even finished landing, in her perfect television Turkish.

"Are you su-" Eren started.

"We wait, mister." She didn’t look at him. A small smug curve appeared at the corner of her mouth, the one she got when she knew something the rest of the room didn’t. "Some things you don’t ask a machine."

The doctor printed the pictures and Emily took the little black-and-white photo with both hands, careful, the same two-handed grip she used for skill books. In the elevator down she studied it from three different angles.

"It’s got your nose," she said finally.

"It better not."

They left with a pharmacy bag of iron pills and prenatal vitamins, a follow-up date written on a card and one piece of medical advice that ruined Emily’s entire afternoon.

"Less sugar," Doctor Banu had said at the door, friendly and merciless. "And fruit juice counts as sugar."

Emily took that sentence personally. She was still processing it in the passenger seat half an hour later, the ultrasound photo resting face-up on her belly, the half-finished bottle of sour-cherry juice held against her chest like the doctor might appear in traffic and take it.

"One glass a day isn’t sugar," she said to the window. "It’s medicine for my mood."

"Take it up with the professional."

"Your planet’s cherries are really good.." She was smiling and was chilling..

The afternoon traffic crawled north through the city and his phone buzzed against the dashboard for the third time since the parking garage. His mother had called to ask how far away they were, called again eleven minutes later and then sent a photo of a table already half covered in food at two in the afternoon.

Somewhere at the end of this road his whole family was orbiting a kitchen and his ninety-one-year-old grandmother was probably supervising everything from her chair, rejecting every offer of help before it finished.

Emily looked down at the photo on her belly and smiled at it without noticing she was doing it. Eren drove north through sixteen million angry drivers feeling like a blessed man.

I am going to be a father..!

This was the first moment he really realized how he was almost a father and had so much responsibility.

Not everything was about money, other worlds or magic anymore.

He didn’t know it yet but far behind him in Evon Universe, something massive and dangerous was getting ready to wake up early.