The Prompt: Gohan's Birth: Giving birth is one of the most disgusting and painful things a woman can experience. Chichi is trying hard to hang on to her calm to get through it, and Goku is deeply disturbed and useless.

The fill:

Halfway through the birth, while her own father screamed, while her husband wept as he hadn't done even while a green-skinned demon had been torturing him, Chi-Chi understand that she should have gone to a hospital.

Goku wept like a hurt child, crumbled on a chair too small to comfortable fit him. Sometimes, he would bury his face in his hands, and she would block out another rising cramp by imagining pulling out that ridiculous hair. Strand by strand. Until he was completely as bald as some of his friends. Immediately, she would move onto his eyebrows, to leave him completely free of any hair whatsoever.

Then maybe he would understand her agony her on the bed, back arched, another scream welling in her throat, wordless.

The father of her child turned away, eyes the color of fresh painful bruises. "Oh Kami, Mister Popo, make it stop!"

Maybe, it was her fault. On some level. She had after all gotten cocky about this baby.

As soon as she'd discovered herself pregnant, after screaming in delight, then weeping in delight, Chi-Chi had immediately began plotting this child's future. Just touching the gently swelling lump she could sense the baby's sweet gentle nature, so like his father. And later from the way they kicked as she read the latest medical journals and scholarly quarterlies, and when Goku would watch Jeopardy and other similar game shows while she tried to play classical music, you could tell their child was going to be intelligent.

Now she suffered from her arrogance. Like some fable you'd tell, tell—kids- "Oh god I'mgoingtoslaughter you—Goku!"

He hadn't even understood what this had meant. To be pregnant. He'd just scratched his head, nodded with a bemused smile. 'That's nice, Chi.' Then he went back to chopping wood, the ax he used resting easily in his calloused hands. For a moment, in the peaceful home they'd built together, she had admired the simple strength and gentleness of him that was noticeable even when cutting down trees. The muscles moving beneath his pale skin that he might have passed onto their child, those arms that would soon hold his child.

Now, as dizzy shapes spun beneath her fevered eyelids, she remembered on the sixth month throwing that ax at his head. And hitting him. Hard enough to make him go cross-eyed and stumble back as the sharp metal edge's pieces fell to his feet.

His fault.

"Goku, Goku, Goku—"

The stomach that now felt as though it were being chopped open like she were one of those trees, but there were no axes anywhere now, how Goku had prodded that stomach. 'How come it's so big?' His refusal to believe that she was actually giving birth, the confusion over what that meant, when he'd tried to play along in such a tone of voice that she'd actually slapped him, 'Sure, Chi-Chi, a little person's going to come out of there, uh-huh.'

On the sweat soaked pillow, as her father ran out to vomit again, Chi-Chi remembered the moment that gotten them into this mess, if not the exact time. The way he smelled of pine and strawberries on his breath from desert, beneath her all solid and heavy, panting, 'are you sure we're supposed to do this?' Her gentle kiss of confirmation, the brief wrestling as his fighter instinct took over and the crea-eak of the bed breaking and the similar noises their cute side table, and the west wall that so lit so prettily when the sun rose, and the breakfast table with its small burn from where he'd set down an urn of coffee, unprotected.

Where had all those kind moments gone? How had such screaming, never-ending pleasure that had her scrapping her nails against his shoulders turn to this?

"Chi-Chi, I think the baby's stuck."

Goku still hadn't fully understood the implications of his wife carrying their child until last night, in the dead of night, when she'd grabbed his arm and twisted it hard enough to wake up. He'd finally understood her scream to retrieve her father, and stumbled downstairs for the Ox King. 'She says the…baby's coming…'

"I think we should get Baba." Her large, ashen-faced father managed out from somewhere in the bathroom.

Goku nodded his head, "Yeah, we need someone; someone has to be here, to stop making her scream like that."

He sniffled. "Or maybe Bulma? Or Master Roshi? Krillin and Yamcha and Tien. Launch, the nicer blue one, she knows how to put bandages on. All of them. Right. Now."

"No! No! No one else." Chi-Chi glared up at them both, trying not to pass out as another claw of pain ran through her entire core. "This is my baby. And I am having it here. Without any help.

"You useless—oh god ohgodohgod—"

The Ox King burst into fresh tears. "My poor baby's going to die!"

"YOU'RE NOT HELPING!" She panted for a few moments, smelling the blood on her thighs and on the sheets. "This child in coming, now!"

And then she pushed. And pushed until her lungs burned and her hair stuck to her cheeks and she could feel every muscle in her body tensing, cramping, blind deaf numb to everything but that pain. And then she had to push again.

"GET ME BABA RIGHT NOW!"

The birth of her child was mostly a blur after that. What she could remember was a crooked smile that revealed hardly more teeth than the screaming baby that was wrapped in a blanket and the snip of the umbilical cord being cut, Goku weeping, "oh, Kami, she was telling the truth!," as he was handed his baby, her own father's more general crying. The way her child squirmed and screamed, the twitching tail wrapping itself around her wrist. The dark curls across the misshaped head and the scrunched little red face.

"Here's your son, Chi-Chi."

Her son's tail tightened around her arm. That tiny face was smoothing out as much as it could, the features soothed by something she couldn't name. Blind, unopened eyes beginning to twitch beneath the silky skin of his eyelids.

Goku nearly fell into her, and the baby. Their son. "I can't believe that came out of you."

"I know. I know."

In a few short months, it was supposed to be their anniversary.

"Never, never again!"

Goku nodded, tears still hanging off his face like shiny ornaments. Chi-Chi nearly touched them. "Yeah. Never again."

They collapsed into each other, holding, hanging off each other and nearly falling off the bed, until their son began to cry.