One shot: Fem! Reader x Husband! Hwang Inho
Warnings: Lore accurate Hwang Inho, Death, Angst no comfort.
Author’s Notes: Sorry guys, I was listening to Bruno Mars’ ‘All I ask’ and I thought of this, hehe:3
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The light above you is too bright, a sterile, unforgiving white that makes you squeeze your eyes shut. Every muscle in your body is a knot of fire, twisted and pulled taut around a single, unyielding point of agony. You can’t think. You can only feel the tidal wave of pressure, a demand from your own body that you are failing to meet.
A hand, warm and familiar, wraps around yours. The squeeze is almost as tight as the contraction currently locking your spine. You force your eyes open, turning your head on the sweat-damp pillow.
Inho’s face fills your vision. His dark eyes, usually so calm and steady, are wide with a fear you’ve never seen in them before. Not at the investor meeting that went south, not even when his mother was hospitalized. This is a raw, bottomless terror. It’s in the tremble of his jaw, the way he’s breathing in shallow, controlled pants as if he’s the one in labor.
“You have to stop,” he says, his voice a low, urgent rasp. It cuts through the electronic beep of the monitor and the muffled, bustling sounds of the nurses. “They can take you in now. For the surgery.”
You shake your head, a tiny, stubborn movement. You suck in a ragged breath as the pressure subsides, just for a moment. A precious, stolen moment. “No. I’m… close. I can feel it.”
“You’ve been ‘close’ for two hours,” he argues, his thumb stroking frantic circles on the back of your hand. “The doctor said—the risks—they explained it all. Baby’s heart rate is fluctuating. Yours is. Please. Listen to them.”
Another contraction begins its slow, terrible climb, starting as a deep ache and escalating into a world-ending crescendo. Your vision blurs at the edges. You arch off the bed, a guttural sound tearing from your throat that doesn’t even sound like you. Inho’s hand is the only anchor, the only real thing in the universe of pain.
When it passes, leaving you panting and trembling, you find his gaze again. “I want… to see her. I want to hold her. Right away. Not… after.”
“And I want you alive,” he shoots back, his voice cracking. A single tear escapes, tracking a swift path down his cheek. He doesn’t wipe it away. “Do you understand that? This isn’t… this isn’t choosing wallpaper or what car to buy. This is… God, this is math. Bad math. The kind where the numbers don’t add up to both of you walking out of here.”
He leans in closer, his forehead almost touching yours. You can smell his cologne, something clean and woody, utterly out of place in this room of antiseptic and blood. “There are other options. Safer ones. For both of you. Just… let them do the C-section.”
“I’m doing it,” you whisper, the words scraping your throat raw. The determination feels like a physical thing inside you, a hard, cold stone settled beside the baby. “She’s coming. My way.”
Inho lets out a sound that’s half sob, half laugh of pure frustration. He presses his lips to your knuckles, his kiss desperate. “You always win. You know that? Every argument. Every stupid debate about who left the lights on. You look at me with those eyes and I just… I fold. But not this time. Please, not this time.”
“Sir,” a nurse’s voice is calm but firm from the foot of the bed. “We need you to step outside for a moment. We need to check her dilation again.”
Inho’s head whips up. “No. I’m staying.”
“Hospital policy, during certain checks,” the doctor says, not unkindly, but with a finality that brooks no argument. “It’ll just be a minute.”
The panic on Inho’s face is immediate. His grip on your hand tightens, as if he’s physically trying to hold you to this world. “One minute,” he says to you, his eyes boring into yours. “You stay right here. You fight. Do you hear me? You fight for that minute, and then I’ll be back. Promise me.”
You don’t have the breath to promise. You just nod, a weak jerk of your chin.
He’s pulled away, his hand sliding from yours with a painful slowness. You watch him back towards the door, his eyes never leaving you, until the door swings shut and he’s gone. The room feels colder, emptier. The medical staff moves in with a quiet efficiency that suddenly feels alien, impersonal.
The cold of the linoleum floor seeps through the fabric of Inho’s trousers. He doesn’t remember kneeling. He just found himself here, his back against the stark white wall of the hallway, his hands pressed together as if in prayer. He isn’t praying, not really. The words won’t form.
His mind is a static roar, a single, looping scream.
Muffled, through the door, but he can hear you.
A low, agonized moan that seems to go on forever. Then silence. Then a sharp, strained cry that ends in a gasp.
Each sound is a hook in his chest, yanking.
A doctor in blue scrubs, an older man with a kind, tired face, had pulled him aside earlier. The memory plays behind his eyes, clearer than the hallway around him.
“Mr. Hwang, we need to be prepared for all outcomes.”
“Outcomes,” Inho had repeated, the word tasting like ash.
“If we reach a critical point where a choice must be made, we need to know your directive. Mother or child.”
Inho hadn’t hesitated. Not for a second. “Her. You save her.”
The doctor had just nodded, a somber understanding in his gaze. “We’ll do everything we can for both.”
Now, alone on the floor, the weight of that choice feels like it’s crushing his lungs. He chose you. He would choose you a thousand times over. But the thought of that tiny life, his daughter, a person he’s already loved for nine months, her future snuffed out because of his words… it coils in his gut, a sick, relentless poison.
I’m so sorry, little one.
Please be strong like your mother.
The scream from behind the door is different this time. It’s not just pain. It’s pure, unadulterated effort, a sound ripped from the very core of your being. It’s followed by a flurry of activity he can hear through the door—voices raised, not in alarm, but in urgent encouragement.
Inho lurches to his feet, pressing his ear to the cool metal of the door.
His heart is a frantic drum against his ribs. That’s it. That has to be it.
Not the silence between contractions. This is a deep, hollow, absolute silence. No moans. No strained cries. No encouraging shouts from the staff.
Just the faint, electronic beep… beep… beep of a monitor. Then a pause. Then a long, flat, uninterrupted tone.
Inside, the world had shrunk to a tunnel. The bright light, the masked faces, the metallic taste of fear—it all faded into a distant hum. There was only the pressure, the impossible, splitting need to push. Your body was a vessel cracking at the seams.
You were so tired. A deep, marrow-level exhaustion that promised a sleep you knew you couldn’t afford. The doctor’s voice was a faint echo. “Stay with us. You have to push now.”
But your mind was slipping away, seeking refuge. It replayed a film of better, easier days. The first time you saw Inho, not across a crowded bar, but in a quiet bookstore, his fingers tracing the spine of a poetry collection you loved. Your first date, the nervous way he’d spilled his wine and spent the rest of the evening trying to make jokes about it, his ears turning red. The day you told him you were pregnant, the way his face had gone utterly still before crumbling into a joy so profound it made you cry.
You clung to those memories. They were your anchor, the reason you were here, breaking apart.
“She’s crowning! Big push on the next one!”
You gathered every last shred of will. You thought of your daughter’s face, a tiny, imagined blur. You thought of Inho’s smile. You pushed.
And something gave way. A sudden, shocking release of pressure. But with it came a strange, floating lightness. The pain didn’t vanish, but it receded, as if someone had turned the volume down on the world.
You heard a sharp cry. A tiny, indignant, beautiful wail.
A wave of pure, unadulterated relief washed over you, so powerful it was itself a kind of exhaustion. You did it. You won. You got your way.
You tried to turn your head, to look towards the sound of that cry, but your neck felt too heavy. The bright lights above were softening, dissolving into a warm, welcoming grey at the edges of your vision. The frantic voices around you sounded like they were underwater.
“We’re losing her! BP’s crashing!”
“Get the crash cart! Now!”
“Heart rate’s dropping on the infant! She’s not breathing effectively!”
The words didn’t register as alarm. They were just… words. Distant announcements. The grey at the edges was spreading, seeping into the center of your sight.
You could still hear your daughter crying. It was the most wonderful sound you’d ever heard. You wanted to tell Inho.
You wanted to see him hold her.
Just a little rest first.
The grey became everything.
The sounds faded away, even the beautiful, indignant cry.
There was only a profound, silent warmth, and the fading echo of a memory—Inho’s laugh, bright and clear, on a sunny afternoon that felt like a lifetime ago.
The door to the delivery room burst open. Inho stumbled back, his heart leaping into his throat. It wasn’t a doctor coming to give him news. It was a nurse, her face pale, sprinting down the hall towards the nursing station, yelling something about a “code blue” and “neonatal crash cart.”
The flatline tone from the monitor was still screaming in his head.
He stood frozen, a statue of dread, as a tsunami of medical personnel flowed around him and into the room. He caught glimpses of the chaos inside—people crowded around the bed you were on, someone doing compressions on a small, pale form on a separate warmer. The small form wasn’t moving. The tiny, indignant cry he’d heard just moments before was gone, replaced by grim, focused silence.
An eternity passed in sixty seconds.
Finally, the lead doctor, the one with the kind face, walked out. His scrubs were stained. He approached Inho slowly, his shoulders slumped with a weight that told the story before his lips could move.
Inho’s mouth was desert dry. “My wife?”
The doctor’s eyes held an ocean of sorrow. “Mr. Hwang… we did everything we could. The hemorrhage was too severe. The strain on her heart… We couldn’t revive her.”
The words didn’t make sense.
They were sounds, empty of meaning.
“And the baby?” Inho heard himself ask, his voice belonging to a stranger.
The doctor looked down, a gesture of defeat. “I’m so sorry. The distress was too profound. She was without oxygen for too long during the final moments. We tried resuscitation for over twenty minutes. There was nothing we could do.”
The doctor’s voice became a dull buzz.
Inho took a step back, his shoulder hitting the wall. He slid down it, the world crumbling into sharp, shattered pieces around him. The stone of dread he’d been carrying for hours didn’t vanish; it exploded, filling him with a shrapnel of pure, directionless agony.
And in the end, it didn’t matter.
The universe, in its cruel, random math, had taken everything.
He didn’t cry. The tears were frozen somewhere deep inside, trapped under the ice of shock. He just sat there on the floor, in the exact spot he’d been praying, staring at the closed door where his entire life had just ended.
Somewhere, down the hall, a different baby cried, a healthy, robust sound.
All he could hear was the silence, vast and complete, where your voice and your daughter’s first cry should have been. It was a silence that felt like a physical presence, settling over him, smothering and absolute. It was the sound of the future he’d dreamed of, dying before it ever got the chance to draw breath.
