After the wedding, Lana and Kyungsoo decided it would be a good idea not to follow her parents any further for the night. Instead, at Kyungsoo’s insistence, the two rented a suite of their own for the nights ahead. He cleverly snatched a room on the same floor of the Venetian Resort as the newlyweds for “optimum stalking convenience,” and since there was nothing else to do in the suite, he suggested heading downstairs to check out the casino. Though Lana wasn’t sure she trusted the teen gambling, even with money that technically wasn’t even his, she readily accepted the offer. She didn’t particularly feel like spending the night watching TV or lounging in bed while her parents consummated their marriage right down the hall anyway.

Lana soon realized though that Kyungsoo wasn’t going to lose the stolen money as easily as she suspected. In fact, he seemed to have a handy knack for working the slot machines, and it wasn’t until the casino security started eyeing him very suspiciously that Lana finally convinced him to stop tampering with the game. He pouted dourly as she dragged him out of the casino, leaving the prize he had unrightfully earned behind.

It was 2:00 a.m. when the two finally started to head back up to the room for the night. The sound of bad karaoke filtered out of a nearing hotel bar. Lana turned to peek inside as they passed, only to stop dead in her tracks when she realized she recognized the drunken man standing atop the bar counter, spitting into the microphone.

“Zhang Yixing,” she gasped, nudging Kyungsoo in the side. “That’s my literature teacher!”

The frazzled teacher nearly tumbled off the bar as he emoted with growing pain, “THE WINNER TAKES IT AAALLLLLL— THE LOSER STANDING SMALL BESIDE THE VICTORYYY— THAT’S HIS DESTINYYY—”

Lana and Kyungsoo winced in unison as his voice cracked on a high note. The teens continued to watch, horrorstruck as he burst into tears and whined and moaned the rest of the song out. When the tune finally ended, he was helped off the counter by a pretty girl with dyed-red hair.

“What’s he doing here?” Lana wondered aloud as the two finally took their leave, hurrying into an empty elevator just before Yixing stumbled out of the bar in the woman’s arms. “He wasn’t in the wedding party. Did he follow my parents here?”

“Maybe he’s secretly in love with your mom!” Kyungsoo exclaimed, jabbing the button for their floor extra vigorously. “Hey, isn’t your dad biual or something? Maybe he’s the one your teacher is in love with!”

Lana shrugged, slinking back against the elevator wall. Anything was possible, she supposed.

The next day, Kyungsoo approached Lana with a terrible idea. A very, very terrible idea.

The sun was high in the sky by the time she awoke. No sooner had she sat up in bed and rubbed her eyes than the owl-eyed boy excused himself from the room, pulling his jacket hood and a pair of sunglasses on as he whistled about fetching something he had forgotten on the bus. When he rely a short while later, in his hand he had a shiny, new extra hotel key card. Lana had a horrible feeling she knew what it was for, and she hoped she was wrong. But she wasn’t.

“I got stuck in the elevator with your parents on the way down,” he informed her, sending a wave of dread crashing over her body. “They were heading downstairs to some Italian restaurant. From the sound of it, they’ll be out of their room for a while today.” He stared at his friend expectantly, eyebrows raised.

“No.” Lana shook her head and waved her arms in refusal. “No, no, no. We are not—”

“But we are,” he insisted, grinning like an idiot. “This is the perfect chance! We sneak in now and wait in the closet until—”

“WAIT IN THE CLOSET?” Lana shrieked in disbelief. She knew Kyungsoo was crazy, but she had never fathomed he was crazy enough to actually conceive such a stupid, reckless, impossibly dangerous idea as that.

“Of course. If you’re ever going to realize your parents love each other, you have to see them interact. What better opportunity than to get the insider perspective from within the hotel room closet on their honeymoon?” He crossed his arms as he added, “Come on. Nothing bad is going to happen. I know that for a fact. Why can’t you just trust me?”

“But—”

Before Lana could get another word out, she was silenced as he wrapped his hand around her wrist. Yanked out into the hall, Lana frowned crossly but decided not to raise a scene. Instead, she continued to let her resistance be known by dragging her feet along the carpet floor as she followed the boy to a room only a few doors down.

She hoped the key card he had forged wouldn’t work, but it did. The lock flashed a green light, and the door swung open with ease.

Fundamentally, the room interior was exactly like the one the teens were staying in just down the hall. The luxury suite was well kept and tastefully decorated with flowers, ornate lamps, and paintings. Unlike the teens’ room though, the newlyweds’ had been left a mess. From the looks of it, the maids had never come by to clean the suite, and the bed looked like it had been used as the ring for a wrestling match. An empty bottle of expensive champagne lay at the foot of the bed.

“Mom was drinking even though she was pregnant?” she tutted, kicking at the bottle distastefully. “How responsible of her.”

“Well, you turned out fine in the end,” Kyungsoo replied, picking up an romance novel that had been left propped open on the nightstand. He quickly thumbed through it, adding, “Do you think they’ll notice if I take this?”

Lana snatched the book out of his hands, slamming it back down on the table. “Stop touching things. The last thing we need is for my parents to start suspecting—”

“—that their teenage daughter came back from the future and decided to snoop through their personal belongings?” Kyungsoo finished with a smile. “Trust me. What we’re doing here is a lot safer than you think. You really have nothing to worry about.”

Lana grunted in reply.

After exploring the room, the teens nonmutually decided it was time to hole up in the closet and stakeout. Thus the waiting game began. As the hours ticked by, Kyungsoo pulled a deck of cards out of his jeans pocket so the two would at least have something to do. Twenty rounds of a game he called “Go Fish” later, the hotel room door finally clicked open.

Lana quietly set the cards down and inched closer to the closet door, peeking through the slits as young Kris entered the room alone. It was hard to make out through the narrow gaps in the door, but he looked visibly annoyed—for what reason, Lana had no guesses. With arms crossed and an irritated frown spread across his lips, he proceeded to pace the room for several minutes until it finally opened again.

In stumbled Yunee. She was pale white, like she had just seen a ghost, with puffy eyes that suggested she had just spent a great deal of time crying. Lana wondered if the two had gotten into a fight on the way back to the hotel room. She quickly shook the idea off though, realizing it didn’t make much sense. If they had been together for the past few hours, they would have returned to the hotel room at the same time, not several minutes apart. Whatever he was peeved about must have been a separate matter than the one Yunee was crying over.

Kris quickly broke the edgy silence as his wife stepped through the door. “Yunee,” he pressed, sounding more like an interrogator than an adoring husband, “why are there two hundred dollars worth of charges from a pharmacy on my card?”

Lana blinked in confusion. It wasn’t like her father to get so upset about money. Mom blew cash all the time—on video games for Sam, on new clothes for Dad that only Mom would end up wearing anyway... He had to have been upset about something else. Perhaps he was just worried that she had injured herself?

“Two hundred dollars?” Yunee mumbled, sounding equally baffled by her husband’s annoyance. “That’s like twenty thousand won.”

“No, it’s more like two hundred thousand.”

“Oh,” was all the young mother-to-be could say, biting her lip back like a child being scolded. She peered up at him with eyes that threatened to spill tears again at any moment.

Kris ran a hand through his hair, ruffling it edgily. “Well,” he sighed, “what did you buy?”

There was a long pause as Yunee stared at the ground, nervously pointing her toes together. Unconsciously mimicking her husband’s motion from seconds ago, she grabbed a tuft of her hair and swirled it around her fingers, as if busying her hands would somehow buy her more time to come up with an excuse. Finally, she sighed and dropped her arms to her sides, mumbling, “Pregnancy tests.”

On hearing those two little words, Lana felt her heart sink to the bottom of her chest. Why would Mom be taking pregnancy tests now, the day after their wedding, when she already knew Lana was growing inside her? The only reason Dad even married Mom was because she was pregnant. It didn’t make any sense.

But Kris was clearly just as surprised as Lana. As soon as the words left his wife’s mouth, his eyes widened noticeably and his mouth fell open. He quickly pulled his face back into a frown and grumbled, “What?”

Without looking up from the ground, Yunee nodded.

“Well, what did they say?” he insisted, crossing his arms again as he unhappily shifted weight to one leg.

“They all said yes,” she squeaked weakly, sounding like her voice would give out at any moment.

“How?” he demanded.

“I might have forgotten to take the Pill.”

If Yunee had the strength to look her husband in the eye at that moment, she would have trembled at the bloodthirsty, vindictive look on his face clear as day even from inside the closet. Even Lana shrank back, blinking back tears as he hissed, “You forgot? Yunee, this isn’t like forgetting to take out the trash or wash the dishes. This is a baby. Everything about our life is going to change now.”

Yunee finally broke down. As she burst into tears, so did Lana. She fought not to make a sound as Kyungsoo pulled her into his arms, caressing her back consolingly.

“This is why I didn’t want to tell you!” the young wife choked between tears. “Because maternity clothes are ugly, and I’m going to get stretch marks like Bacon said, and you’re going to stop loving me, and—”

She was cut off by Kris. His face softened as he sighed, “Don’t be ridiculous.” Placing his hands on his tiny wife’s shoulders, he guided her to the bed, sitting beside her on the edge of it and nudging her chin to face him. “I’d love you regardless, Yunee. It’s just... I don’t really like kids. I didn’t think we ever wanted to be parents. Are we really ready for this?”

“We don’t really have a choice,” she mumbled.

“But we do,” he insisted. “We can get it done while we’re here in the States and forget this ever happened. That way, it’ll be just you and me, and we won’t have to worry about taking care of anyone else. We can keep living the way we do now, just the two of us.”

Yunee gazed up at her husband, bottom lip trembling as tears slid down her cheeks. “You don’t understand,” she whispered just loud enough to hear from the closet. “I’m not killing your baby.”

It was only then that the crushing realization finally hit Lana.

Kyungsoo was right all along. Her parents did love each other, but her father never wanted her, and her mother was the one who saved her.

Author's Note
Woo! An Yixing cameo! Could he and his ’80s karaoke have anything to do with my latest fic? ;D If you haven’t already found my next story, 1987, please go subscribe now! I’ll be writing that fic once I’ve finished up DTTWB!

If you read TRHW, you may have noticed I changed a little bit in this chapter. We wanted to make Kris’s intent a lot more explicit and obvious than it was in the original conversation. (Sorry, Kris. ;O; I don’t mean to make you sound evil!)

Anyway, please enjoy! And comment! And subscribe! And subscribe to 1987 as well! Let me know what you think about Lana’s shocking revelation! Thank you!