(Author's Note: You know how life can be. Honestly, it feels that whenever life gets better, it just kicks my legs out. Anywho, I really wanted to start writing again since im in a better place mentally and am getting that itch. I've got a bunch of ideas from a time travel tony stark fic that has him wake up as his teenage self after the snap. A s/i sakura haruno fic since their are like none of those i like. One about this mage who got isekaid getting eaten by a dragon and then realising he was just in a coma. One about a star fleet engineer waking up as a north korean peasant in the 1990s and like countless more ideas. But i really want to finish this fic first since well i have the outline already written. I've managed to get a bit of a buffer of like six chapters so even if their is a day or to i dont feel like writing you guys should get a new chapter everyday. Anyway toodles.)
[Cardiff, Wales – 11:52PM, 17th of September, 1925]
It had been a big decision.
One, I was still debating whether I'd made the right one.
It was rather too late to change my mind now.
Kitty was pregnant.
And I was coping with this development in the perfectly healthy and emotionally stable manner of locking myself in my laboratory for increasingly long periods of time and pretending that if I stared at enough chemistry, the problem would eventually become less terrifying.
It didn't.
Because childbirth was dangerous. People liked to talk about it as though it were simply something that happened. The mother went into labour, the baby came out, and everyone went home. That was an extraordinarily modern way of looking at it.
Even with modern medicine, childbirth could become catastrophic with frightening speed. Haemorrhage. Infection. Eclampsia. Obstructed labour. Placental complications. Embolism. Anaesthesia complications. There were dozens of ways for something to go horribly wrong.
And we were in 1924.
We didn't have antibiotics.
We didn't have modern blood banks.
We didn't have modern obstetrics.
We didn't have reliable blood typing available in the way we would eventually take for granted. We had primitive transfusion services, but nothing like the carefully screened, stored and cross-matched blood supplies of the future.
We didn't have antibiotics to throw at a bacterial infection after it had taken hold.
We didn't have modern neonatal intensive care.
We didn't have a dozen different drugs designed to keep a mother alive while doctors worked out what was going wrong.
And, most importantly, we didn't have the luxury of assuming that because someone was young and healthy, everything would therefore be fine.
A young woman could bleed to death after giving birth.
A baby could bleed internally without anyone knowing why.
An infection could begin as something almost invisible and become fatal before anyone realised what was happening.
I couldn't control most of those things.
But I could control some.
In this case, I had two targets.
Vitamin K.
And sulphonamides.
The first was for the baby.
The second was for both of them.
Vitamin K was particularly important because newborn babies were vulnerable to bleeding disorders. They naturally had relatively little vitamin K available at birth, and their immature gut bacteria couldn't yet contribute much to their supply.
In the future, we would solve that problem almost trivially.
An injection.
A small amount of vitamin K.
Done.
Currently, however, nobody knew vitamin K existed.
So naturally, I had to make the damn thing.
My first problem was obtaining it.
Fortunately, vitamin K belonged to a class of fat-soluble compounds, meaning that it wasn't going to dissolve conveniently in water and announce its presence. It would dissolve with fats, though.
Plant material was an obvious starting point.
Which was why, over the course of several months, I had somehow managed to import an absolutely absurd quantity of kale.
A truly absurd quantity.
I had ordered more than a tonne of it.
Kitty had noticed.
Of course she had noticed.
She'd stared at me.
I'd stared back.
Fortunately, I had bigger problems.
The first stage was relatively straightforward.
The plant material had to be dried, broken down and processed so that I could extract the fat-soluble fraction.
I used ethyl ether as the extraction solvent, allowing it to pull lipids and other fat-soluble compounds out of the dried plant material.
After filtering away the plant solids, I could remove the solvent.
What remained was not remotely vitamin K.
It was a horrible, oily mixture containing ordinary fats, pigments, sterols, other plant compounds and, somewhere within all that chemical soup, whatever vitamin K activity I had managed to extract.
And that was where things became difficult.
Because I didn't have a modern vitamin K assay.
I couldn't simply put a sample into an instrument and have a little screen tell me:
"Congratulations. You have vitamin K."
I had to work backwards.
Fraction after fraction. Extraction after extraction. Different solvents. Different temperatures. Different purification techniques. Adsorption onto materials such as alumina. Carefully controlled evaporation. Crystallisation where it was actually useful. Vacuum distillation where the compounds allowed it. And an absolutely enormous amount of trial and error.
The worst part was that I couldn't simply judge success by appearance. A clean-looking fraction wasn't necessarily a useful fraction. A beautifully clear oil could contain practically nothing of what I wanted. A slightly coloured fraction could contain exactly what I needed.
So I had to develop a crude biological way of determining whether I'd actually concentrated the relevant activity. It was slow. Painfully slow. But eventually, I had a fraction sufficiently enriched that I was confident I had what I needed.
Then came the formulation.
I needed something suitable for injection.
Something stable.
Something that wouldn't immediately destroy the compound.
Something that wouldn't itself cause problems when introduced into a newborn.
I settled on a carefully prepared oil-based formulation, using purified plant-derived oils as the carrier. The final preparation went into dark glass ampoules. Vitamin K was light sensitive, so light was the enemy, and the containers had to protect the contents from it.
And the entire thing had to be prepared with obsessive attention to cleanliness.
The actual administration would be comparatively simple.
A small intramuscular injection into my newborn child's thigh.
That was it.
No miracle.
No futuristic machine.
Just a tiny injection that could prevent a newborn from suffering potentially fatal bleeding.
I stared at the finished ampoule for a long time.
I'd just dragged an entire branch of medicine several years into the past. The frightening part was that I still had to do it a second time.
Sulphonamides.
These were harder.
Not because the underlying chemistry was necessarily beyond me, but because producing a compound that was chemically correct and producing a compound that was pure enough to give to a human being were two very different things.
My knowledge of antibiotics was limited.
I knew the broad history.
I knew what penicillin was.
I knew roughly what it did.
I knew enough about microbiology to understand why it worked.
But I couldn't simply walk into my laboratory and manufacture modern penicillin from memory. I didn't have the biological infrastructure. I didn't have the strains. I didn't have the fermentation equipment. I didn't have modern purification technology.
And I certainly wasn't going to improvise an injectable antibiotic from a Wikipedia article that existed in my head.
Sulphonamides were different.
Their chemistry was something I could actually work with. And, historically, one of the great breakthroughs had come from an extremely strange direction.
A German pharmaceutical company had been investigating synthetic azo dyes. One of those compounds, Prontosil, was a brilliant red azo dye originally investigated as a dye, not as some revolutionary antibacterial medicine.
Yet experiments eventually demonstrated that it could protect animals against certain bacterial infections. The truly important discovery came later: the active antibacterial component wasn't the red dye itself.
The body could break the compound down, releasing sulfanilamide.
And sulfanilamide was the part doing the real work.
So, in a rather roundabout fashion, my brilliant plan was to invent a red dye approximately a decade before anyone else was supposed to discover its medical significance.
It was something I could do.
I began with the aromatic chemistry.
Aniline and related aromatic compounds gave me a starting point, and from there the process became an exercise in carefully controlled reactions and purification.
One particularly important step involved diazotisation.
That sounded much more frightening than it actually was.
Essentially, I was chemically converting an aromatic amine into a diazonium compound, temporarily replacing the amine functionality with a highly reactive group that could then participate in another reaction.
The important thing was control.
Temperature.
Acidity.
Concentration.
Order of addition.
Purity.
All of it mattered.
Because if the conditions were wrong, I didn't get the compound I wanted.
I got a mixture.
And mixtures were my enemy.
The resulting intermediates could then be coupled with another aromatic component to produce the azo structure I was after. And then came the part that made me want to repeatedly bang my head against the laboratory bench.
Purification.
Again.
And again.
And again.
Wash.
Separate.
Filter.
Concentrate.
Test.
Repeat.
Every stage introduced another opportunity for contamination or incomplete reaction.
And I had no modern chromatography system sitting on the bench waiting to tell me exactly what I'd made. So I had to rely on the analytical chemistry available to me, combined with everything I knew about the expected physical and chemical behaviour of the compounds.
It was slow.
Painfully slow.
And I was exhausted.
I had spent months thinking about this.
Months of watching Kitty's pregnancy progress while knowing that there was a clock running in the background.
Eventually, I had something.
Not perfect.
Not remotely as pure as what a modern pharmaceutical laboratory would have produced. But sufficiently characterised, sufficiently purified and sufficiently reproducible that I could finally convince myself I wasn't simply holding an interesting chemical mixture in a glass vessel.
I sat down.
Put my head in my hands.
And laughed.
Not because anything was particularly funny.
Mostly because I was exhausted.
I'd done it.
Two medicines.
Two completely different problems.
One intended to protect my child from a bleeding disorder that nobody in this century even had a name for yet.
The other intended to give doctors something far more effective against bacterial infections than anything they currently possessed.
Neither one was going to make childbirth safe.
I wasn't that arrogant.
Women would still bleed.
Infections would still happen.
Eclampsia would still exist.
Obstructed labour would still exist.
Things could still go catastrophically wrong.
But the odds were better.
And that was all I wanted.
Better odds.
I looked at the two finished preparations sitting on the bench.
For the first time since Kitty had told me she was pregnant, I felt something approaching relief. Then I remembered that I still had to actually get through the birth.
I put my head back on the desk.
"Fuck."
[Cardiff, Wales – 01:07AM, 11th of March, 1926]
The child was here.
I kept calling her the child in my head.
I knew that was probably strange, maybe even a little horrible.
But I'd always had trouble connecting to people I hadn't actually met. If someone existed somewhere else…someone I hadn't seen, hadn't spoken to, hadn't looked in the eyes…I could understand intellectually that they mattered, but emotionally?
There was just… Nothing.
I could know that I should care.
I could know that I would care eventually.
But until I'd actually met the person, there was always a strange distance between the idea of them and the reality of them. And now there was a very real person.
My child.
I'd refused to leave the room during the birth, of course. That particular historical practice of having the father wait somewhere else while the woman went through labour seemed spectacularly stupid to me. If Kitty was going through this, I was going through it with her.
Besides, I'd already spent months preparing for every conceivable medical disaster.
I'd built medicines, studied childbirth, researched complications and probably read more about obstetrics in the last few months than most people in the country had in their entire lives and somehow, none of that had prepared me for actually being there.
The night after Kitty won Le Mans had been memorable.
Very memorable.
And, apparently, nine months later, it had consequences.
At least this child hadn't been an accident.
That was something.
I'd thought about the possibility of a boy or a girl more times than I cared to admit.
Which would be harder?
A son?
A daughter?
Would it matter?
No. I never comprehended how parents could have favourites based on gender.
Strangely enough, the birth itself went far more smoothly than I'd expected. I'd spent months preparing myself for hours of labour, complications, emergencies, doctors shouting, and everything else my increasingly paranoid imagination had managed to invent. Instead, things progressed remarkably quickly.
Apparently, sometimes it just did.
Even with a first child. There was no grand medical crisis, nor dramatic emergency, nor moment where everything suddenly went wrong.
It was simply difficult, exhausting and painful, and then…She was here.
Kitty was utterly exhausted.
I couldn't blame her.
She'd just done something that I was fairly certain no human being was supposed to be capable of doing while remaining conscious. The room eventually became quiet. And then someone placed the baby in my arms.
Charlotte Sullivan.
I looked down at her.
She was tiny. She had a tiny face, tiny hands, and tiny fingers that curled almost instinctively around themselves. For a moment, I just stared.
This was my daughter.
My child.
Charlotte.
I'd imagined this moment so many times. And now it was actually happening. Most stories would probably say that this was where everything changed. That I'd looked into her eyes and suddenly understood the meaning of life. That some overwhelming wave of love had crashed over me. That I'd finally understood what it meant to be a parent. That the world had somehow become brighter. That every sacrifice I'd made suddenly became worth it.
Something like that.
It didn't happen.
I just looked at her.
I just didn't feel the overwhelming emotional connection everyone seemed to insist was supposed to happen.
And, honestly, that bothered me a little. I'd always been like this.
People had died.
People I'd known.
People I'd cared about.
And there had always been that strange numbness.
Not that I didn't understand that they were gone.
I did.
I understood perfectly well what death meant.
I just didn't always feel it in the way other people seemed to. I'd spent enough time wondering whether there was something wrong with me because of that.
Maybe there was.
Maybe there wasn't.
I didn't know.
I looked down at Charlotte again.
She yawned.
The tiny movement that was almost absurdly human made me smile.
"Hello, Charlotte."
She obviously didn't answer. She just stared vaguely in my direction since the newborn's vision took weeks to even be able to detect outlines of objects; right now I was a monochrome shadow. She was apparently far more interested in existing than in whatever profound emotional moment I was supposed to be having.
Fair enough.
I adjusted my grip slightly, making sure her head was supported.
Either way, Charlotte was here now.
And she was mine.
That was enough.
"Now darling, I'm rather sorry for this…"
I held her as the midwife prepared the vitamin K injection. Charlotte had not cried after being born…but definitely had a few moments later.