Three weeks more.
That's all the time he had left to prepare himself for the biggest change in his lifetime. 21 days, give or take a few hours, stood between him and the biggest, lifetime challenge he would ever face.
To say he was a mess would be underestimating his capabilities to completely fall apart. He was a massive wreck — the kind of absolute disaster where he couldn't tie his shoes right because his hands were shaking so much, where he put salt in coffee instead of sugar, and where he was considering investing in his own concealer to hide his growing eye bags — but, dammit, he was trying his best to hold it together. There were times when a man really had to be strong and this was one of them.
The moment Minoru had walked up to him with a tiny stick in her hands and tears in her eyes, whispering a breathless "guess what," he swore he was going to pull together all the flailing fibers of his being and become the type of man she (and their forthcoming child) could depend on. He would become the blanket that would protect the both of them from the coldness of the world, even if he could hardly handle it himself.
His new-baby-coming-surge of heroic-level confidence only lasted so long. Well, lasted until he opened his very first "what to expect" book — past the foreward, the introduction and the section about questioning if you're really pregnant, because please he wouldn't have picked up this God-forsaken book if Minoru wasn't pregnant — and suddenly he was floating in the perilous head space of too many choices, too many decisions to make and far, far too many "what ifs" lingering.
The only reassurance he felt in that moment was knowing he wasn't capable of dying from anxiety, because if he could die from it, he'd be dead already. What would Minoru do then? Pregnant and widowed before 35; his poor wife. He just couldn't do that to her.
And so, while things were generally okay in the first month of knowing about the pregnancy, weekly breakdowns about all the possibilities for failure on his part became the norm — as did the sight of Minoru hunched over the only toilet in the apartment, trying to sooth her husband in between heaves as he fretted about the frequency of these bouts and whether his wife was hydrated enough to ensure both her and the baby's health.
As if going grey over all the possible ways the two of them could possibly (and not probably) mess up during the pregnancy, the deeper he delved into the world of education on child rearing, the more frequently he tugged out his hair tie, digging his fingers through his hair before standing up to pace around their home.
It didn't even help that Minoru seemed to have this unwavering confidence in him because it just seemed so unfounded. Like, how could she believe that he'd make a good dad when every time he even thought about life on the other side of pregnancy he'd have to take to writing kanji on his palm just to ease the swelling tide within him.
"What if I don't have what it takes," he had asked her, seven months in, while they relaxed on the couch together, watching some subtitled Netflix original about young love. "What if you die and leave me alone to raise our child and they get their heartbroken by some kid they accidentally sent a love letter to? What will I do then? I'm too much of a mess to help someone else!"
"I highly doubt that specific scenario will play out for you, baby," Minoru responded, shifting her feet a bit on the pillow in her husband's lap.
"But it could!" he argued. "Or what if we have a son and he asks me how I scored his mom? I don't even know. I could end up cursing our son with a loveless life due to taking his dad's dating advice."
"Asahi," she cut in suddenly, sitting up and pausing the movie. "Do you love me?"
For just a brief moment, Asahi took his eyes off the ground and looked at Minoru with an absolutely incredulous look. What kind of question was that?
"Yes," he answered. It was the first thing he felt unequivocally sure of.
" And do you love this baby," she asked, placing a hand over the swell of her abdomen where a printed white volleyball snugly wrapped around the curvature of her belly.
"Uhm, I mean ... I don't know? I haven't met the kid yet," he stuttered out as his wife stifled an affectionate laugh. "But, yeah. I think I do."
"Then we have nothing to worry about," she said with an air of finality and optimism that Asahi was sure he could never match. It was the kind of definitive statement that quelled all the storms inside him in mere seconds. That was her power.
But the calm can only last for so long.
The bouts of doubt resurfaced — their frequency so consistent Asahi could have marked time by them — and as the due date crawled closer he could feel the nervous anticipation slowly replacing every other source of energy in his body.
That's how, three weeks out (21 days give or take a few hours) Minoru came out from bathroom, after a comically long bath due to her struggling to find a way to exit the tub without assistance, to find her husband sitting on the edge of their grey couch with his head between his knees, muttering something about the importance of placing the ballads at the beginning of the birthing playlist.
"Awwwhh," Minoru chuckled, moving toward the kitchen to finally chop up that watermelon she'd been promising to slice for the last three days. "But I was really hoping "Bleeding Love" would play during the pushing phase."
"But the study said upbeat music helped better with pain management," he said, trailing off.
"Sorry Leona," she muttered before slicing into the fruit before hunching over slightly and closing her eyes with a small 'oof.' "Our little athlete is moving around a lot today. I bet you're just so ready to escape!'
Minoru smiled down at her bump, using her free hand to pat it twice before returning to the watermelon.
"That makes one of us," Asahi muttered with his wife immediately responding with a lighthearted "everything's going to be fine." No matter how many times she repeated those words to him, though, they never seemed to make him feel better and he really couldn't understand how she could remain so calm — hell, she was over there cutting up fruit in the midst of being kicked in the gut by an almost-human.
"How are you not freaking out right now," he asked her, finally. She shrugged through her chopping, briefly making eye contact to judge his level of anxiety before setting her eyes back on the cutting board.
"There's only so much that we can prepare for," she rationalized. "After a certain point we're just going to have to count on instinct and hope for the best."
Asahi didn't know how to respond to that or, really, he didn't know where to start with all the issues he had with relying on his instincts and leaving the rest of it to fate. He wanted to talk about how he had terrible luck; how he couldn't even be trusted to hold a vase without trembling hands and a high probability of dropping it; how he had secretly practiced putting a diaper on Sugawara's kid only to leave the poor child crying before he'd even gotten the flaps loose; about how he'd taken a solo trip to the supermarket to sneak into the baby needs isle and had sunk into a mild panic attack looking at the sheer number of different wipe brands that only had a one or two ingredient difference.
His stream of consciousness came out in a jumbled mess as he jumped from fear to fear while Minoru continued cubing watermelon innards with precision. The words kept flowing out of his mouth, no matter how hard he tried to stop their momentum and it was somewhere around him pontificating about how luck was not going to ensure that a car seat was set up properly, that her chopping ceased without him noticing, despite half of the melon remaining uncut.
"Asahi, baby," she said with a strain in her voice that he couldn't quite place. "I need you to calm down."
"Minoru, you don't understand," he pleaded, his face still angled toward the ground. "I'm really freaking out here and I just need to get it all out of my system."
"I-I understand s-sweetie. Really, I-I do," she struggled through the words, her head bowed below the edge of the bar top. "But you're going to have to be strong for me, okay? 'Cause I'm pretty sure my water just broke."
His reaction was immediate — springing up from the couch with a look on his face that was somewhere between unbridled panic and disbelief as he stumbled over his own feet on his way over to her. He let out one, powerful 'what' before taking a look at her face, rubbing her back with three gentle swipes, and then sprinted down the hall to throw anything important he could think of into the black duffel bag laying at the bottom of their shared closet.
Minoru hobbled her way to the front door before leaning against it heavily and watching her husband sprint around the house in an attempt to put together the birth kit they had promised each other they would "plan out tomorrow" every day over the past month. At just about the fifth time he returned from the bedroom, only to run right back, she closed her eyes and concentrated on breathing deeply through newly forming contractions.
"Do you want the pink, fuzzy blanket or the green, fuzzy blanket," Asahi called from down the hall.
"I-I really cou-couldn't care less, Asahi," she responded, her raised voice cracking. "Ju-just don't forget th-the toothpaste and yo-your charger."
He grunted back a response and it felt like he had only just blinked at the clock on his nightstand and suddenly they were in their car, speeding toward the hospital. The inside of the sedan was eerily quiet as neither of them had moved to turn on the radio — Asahi trying to focus on not jerking the car around and Minoru trying her best not to make it look like she was in pain.
There were very few moments in Asahi's life where he swore he had blacked out, missing significant portions of time, but as he drove the car into the hospital parking lot, he couldn't recall how he got there. It was a solid 15 minute drive between their home and the nearest delivery room but it was like they had teleported and he had to wonder if he had blown through any red lights (or any pedestrians) as he pulled into an open parking space not remembering a single turn or stop.
The pair sat in relative silence outside the hospital after Asahi hastily threw the car in park and despite his wife's discomfort, clear on her face, refused to move an inch as his knuckles turned white from gripping the steering wheel so hard. His knee bounced rapidly as he tried to will himself to take deep breaths but the thoughts in his head were so numerous and moving so rapidly that there was hardly space left for his brain to process normal functions.
"Are you sure you want me in there with you," he asked, for probably the tenth time since they got in the car.
Minoru attempted to let out an exasperated sigh but it came out more like a garbled groan as another wave of pain radiated from her abdomen.
"Yes," she breathed through gritted teeth.
"It's just that, Suga said his wife screamed at him during delivery, and well," he paused for a second, his face turning slightly white as his wife writhed in the passenger seat. "You're really scary when you're angry."
Minoru shot her husband a look that stilled all his nervous movements — a look that practically screamed "I'll be angrier if you don't get your ass in that hospital right now." The glare was brief and quickly replaced by a shaky half-smile as she took Asahi's hand in her own and gave it a teasing squeeze.
"You were strong enough to help make this kid. I think you'll be strong enough to help raise it," she joked, releasing his hand and moving to open her door. "So, come on Ace, it's time to meet our new teammate."