"Have you got another bleeding before this, Ms. Kim?"

Jisoo shook her head to the doctor's question. She was feeling a little lightheaded after the series of test and blood screening. Yixing got them a VVIP room as she got admitted, and after waiting for almost an hour the OB specialist finally came to visit with a cart of ultrasound. 

"What about spotting?" he asked her another question.

"Several times." Jisoo answered shortly.

The doctor nodded but didn't say anything when he glanced Yixing for a second. He started the examination by putting a gel and moved the probe at the lower side of her belly. Jisoo winced at the uncomfortable feeling of the pressure her doctor gave with it, but she followed as all the eyes were directed to the screen on the cart set, showing the image of the ultrasound.

Nobody made a sound for a few moments, even Yixing stood next to her folding his arm on his chest and cupping his chin with his other free hand, looking serious with his own thoughts. It took them about another ten seconds until the image showed them something,

"There you go your little baby," the doctor showed them the clear image of what looked like a bag with something like a peanut in it, except, the peanut had a head and body. The doctor captured the image and printed it out, while he measured things on the fetus' body with the buttons of the machine. Meanwhile, Jisoo felt like she was out of breath.

Looking at the screen unblinkingly, she almost had it hard to believe to see the image with her own eyes. It really did look like a baby, not just a blood clot, it's human in the making, with a perfect body. She could see its perfectly round head, even though its arms and legs were not very visible, she knew it was growing and it looked ... frail. Jisoo couldn't find the best word to describe it, nor she had any idea of what to feel about it.

"Everything's in normal size. The weight's good. It's sixteen weeks old now, your baby is probably as big as an avocado right now. And look at you, Baby, you're a fighter, just like your mom." the doctor pointed at the screen and glanced at her with a smile alternately, "Let's hear the heartbeat." with a click of a button they then heard a rushing thud sound running like a marathon.

"It's good, very nice." the doctor commented.

"How is it?" Yixing then asked, after being completely silent for hours.

"The baby's healthy, though it's barely hanging. The mom, on the other hand, needs a lot of sleep to catch on and jars of ice cream."

Jisoo's attention was divided between listening to the doctor and had the nurse clean the gel from her belly with a warm towel. She raised her eyes to meet the doctor's eyes as the man broke into a smile again, 

"Bleeding after the first trimester can be caused by various things; like stress, exhaustion, trauma, and else. But if you never experienced any kind of accident or something like this, it only means that mommy should be happier and take more rest." the doctor sang it a song, deliberately making the tone to create less stressing conversation for them. "I'm going to assign some medicine for the uterus and also vitamins, meanwhile, I hope you'd be okay for having a bed-rest for several days ahead. We're going to monitor your bleeding, and once it stops, then you're allowed to go home. Alright?"

The doctor gave her the ultrasound print-out then moved his attention to Yixing, "Let's let the mother rest. Can you please follow me, Mr. Zhang?" 

"I'll be back in a minute," Yixing gave her a comforting squeeze on her hand before he turned around to go with the doctor.

After she was left alone, Jisoo couldn't help but stare at the ultrasound image that the doctor gave her just now. The man's words repeated in her mind again, that she was sixteen weeks pregnant, that she was stressed out, that she was exhausted. That she needed a bed-rest.

Bed-rest. That sounded like a death sentence to her. 

Honestly, Jisoo had no idea what to do anymore. All this thinking had got her to her end. She thought she couldn't give up her work, but she knew that she had to choose, especially knowing that it's impossible to be pregnant and working at the same time. She looked at the little peanut at the paper, she traced with her thumb and felt the tears ran down the side of her face. 

'the baby's healthy, though it's barely hanging...' she reminded what the doctor said, and the reality just struck her like a thunderbolt.

She almost killed it. 

It was her choice to chase the path of her carrier, it was her dream. But now that she looked at the baby with her own eyes, Jisoo wouldn't invalidate that she somehow felt this kind of... connection with it. She almost lost it, and for some reason, it made her very guilty.

She had no idea what to do anymore. These mixed feelings just got her so confused because she still didn't feel like giving up anything, but for that, she knew that she had to think of a way to get through all this the safe way, with the least minimal risk. Was it possible to do? Jisoo rubbed the lower part of her stomach where the doctor found the baby was with the probe earlier, it felt so different now that she acknowledged its existence. She's going to be a mother, it's a fact that she couldn't ignore just like that no matter how she disliked the idea.

"Tell me, Baby," she said to her belly, "Do you think I can do this?"

She wrapped her arms around her sides as she curled up on the bed, crying. She let the tears fell while her heart was deciding, it's one or the other. It's her dream or the baby that Yixing wanted the most, she had to choose. At the bottom of her heart, she was aware of what's going to happen in the end, but Jisoo just couldn't imagine how she would live this without having regret for the things that she couldn't do in the future. It's her fault that she got pregnant, she did this to herself, so the only one she had to blame for all this was no one by herself. And now she had to live with the consequences.

Jisoo wiped away her tears and slid the printout image under her pillow when she heard Yixing entered the room. He pulled a chair and sat by the bed, right on her side that Jisoo had no choice but to face him. Yixing didn't say anything at first, he took her right hand, one which was free from the IV-drip to hold tight and rested his cheek on it with his eyes closed. And Jisoo let him.

"Can you not be mad at me again? I miss you." he asked several moments later. "At first, by letting time passed itself I thought you're going to change your mind. I never thought that you are this unhappy."

Jisoo was listening to him, meeting his gaze when he opened his eyes to look at her. "I did all this for you, Baobei, but I don't want you to be unhappy."

He did that for her? Oh, why did she find it hard to believe? Because she had this thought and she was certain that there's more that he didn't say to her.

"I thought you did this for your mother," she told him what was on her mind. Yixing unlatched his cheek from her hand as he pulled himself away, but still holding her hand with his both hands, "You're a filial son, Yixing, a very good son, that I won't be even surprised if you made me bear your child to make her happy amidst the pain she was conquering."

"That's not true."

"Come on, Yixing. Even if it's not true, that is what I want to believe." the tears came down to her cheek again unconsciously.

Yixing paused, even if he looked confused he tried to hide it with his perfectly stoic face like he was trying to read through the lines, that something was off with they she said it. "Why would you do that?" he then asked.

"Because I need someone to blame." 

Because she couldn't stand the fact that she had to keep blaming herself for all the things that would happen to her in the future, though she was totally aware that it was all her own fault to get herself into this situation.

Jisoo unclutched her hand from his grip to put in on the side of his face, she sniffed for the snot that came with her sob.

"If you want me to keep the child, let me at least do that."

Yixing rose from his seat to climb onto the mattress and laid next to her. Wrapping his long arms around her, he pulled her into his tight embrace, rubbing her back up and down in comforting caress as she shed all her emotion onto his chest. When was the last time she could get a hold of him like this? It seemed like a long time ago. She never gave him the chance to be this close to her for the past two months, but only heaven knew how she had been missing him so much for all those times she kept him away .

She never meant it when she said she hated him. She was too emotional when she blurted that, and she was too proud to admit that she'd been missing him for the moments after that. She loved him, it's the situation that she hated the most. But now she saw an opportunity where she could give Yixing what he wanted, it was only because she loved him, and because the life that grew inside her was his child that she started to consider the possibility to actually live with it.

Besides, she couldn't get her doctor's words out of her mind, that her little baby was a fighter. She almost lost it, but it's hanging. And Jisoo couldn't ignore the fact that maybe, it wanted her to let it live. And she wanted to give it a chance. She wanted to give herself the chance to see how far she could survive this.

She loved her husband so much, but she couldn't bear this alone. When they wanted something, they always came with a price to pay. Jisoo knew the price she had to pay when she decided to let the child live, but she was scared to imagine how Yixing would have to pay for his. Because she had to hurt him for that.

"I just want you to be happy." she heard him say after a while, he pulled away from her and leaned down to see her face. He wiped away her tears with his hand and brushed the wet hair on her face to the back of her head with his other hand. "As long as you stop being mad at me I can handle everything else." 

Jisoo sniffed again to pulled his face down so she could kiss his lips, "I won't stop being mad at you, Yixing. But I don't hate you anymore."

"I can handle that," he pulled her in again to his arms, letting her fall into her deep slumber as the medicine started to work in her blood system.

The second day at the hospital, Jisoo was fighting with the morning sickness. It wasn't that bad like yesterday that it made her want to puke, but was bad enough to get her grumpy for the whole morning. It didn't help with Kyungsoo's visit to reorganize her schedule completely for the whole semester, he managed to make her cancel four conferences and pushed back two research plans (or to be precise, he told her what to do while Jisoo just let him because she was too nauseatic to say anything) that got her almost tearing up.

The doctor came to check on her again this morning, Jisoo had been skipping her breakfast because of the turmoil feeling inside her belly, and he gave her an anti-nausea medicine that only worked for only an hour. Maybe what made all this didn't really work just fine for her was because he actually came with another bad news. Her blood screening test came out last night, and the results showed that Jisoo apparently didn't have the inherited protein that normally was found on the surface of the red blood cells, or more simply, she had rhesus negative in her blood. They did a blood test on Yixing right then to check his rhesus, which came back positive two hours later.

The doctor examined her, doing another test, including the antibody screen, that told her that the baby