They're in labor. He says it so briskly, tone short and curt the way it usually is when he speaks to them. It's sounds so familiar, so mundane in its cruelty, that the true gravity of his words doesn't become apparent to them until another surge of painful contractions flings them into orbit. That's not how you tell someone they're in labor. It's too momentous an occasion, the first tenuous moments of what will become the very axis around which Kurt's existence will revolve forever. Surely the start of the rest of their life deserves more gravitas, more emotional weight than that.

But that's not the world they live in anymore. Here, it doesn't matter that they're scared. It doesn't matter that they have no idea how to give birth, what being in labor even means, how to have the child they're currently having without killing them or themself. Here, they're just an inconvenience to their Alpha. Their blistering pain and raw, confused panic just earns them a smack to the head and a stern command barked by the wolf responsible for it all.

Through a torrent of tears and gasped, keening sobs, Kurt tries to focus and count the seconds between each wave of pain. But it's hard—they don't even know which painful flutter or spasm or jerk of muscle is a contraction or not, whether what they're feeling is normal or a sign that something has gone horribly wrong. The sheer agony of their muscles working definitely feels wrong.

This can't be what it's supposed to feel like. This cold, lonely terror, this bewildering pain, like splintering from the inside. As they try to count, try to breathe, Kurt sobs out mindless, desperate pleas through their own blood and tears, "C-Can't, I can't, I can't d-do this alone, please, not alone, I c-can't do it, I can't do it alone, please not alone—!"