Stavanger Bay It must be true, the pains are only half the battle. (birthing thread)

His self-awareness had only surfaced recently, but his barely-developed brain did not possess the facilities to understand his position in the world just yet. All he knew were feelings--warmth and movement mostly, and so when his reality seemed to shift into an overwhelming presence of squeezing and shifting, he could do nothing but let it happen. He had no real understanding of time, so he didn't know how long the uncomfortable feelings lasted, but soon there was only the absence of all warmth and movement and an intrusive, cold hardness underneath him. 

It didn't last long, though. Soon, he felt a soft, repetitive motion moving along his back, and then everything was freezing, and he felt too exposed. A cry left his tiny mouth, an instinctive reaction to discomfort he hardly even had to think about before the panicked sound left him. He felt the movement again down his back; it was so warm and oddly comforting that his tiny legs began uselessly paddling towards it. He wanted to bask in the feeling and forget the coldness. Then he felt a strong force pushing his tiny body and regardless of how he felt about, it seemed he had no choice in the matter, so he let himself be moved. The force pushed him against a mass of softness and warmth, and suddenly he could smell something so enticing that he could no more resist it than the new urge to fill his lungs with the coldness. His tiny, velvet nose rooted around until he found the source of the scent, instinct guiding him again to attach and draw in the life-sustaining substance. Its heat spread over his entire body and soon he drifted into a peaceful slumber, registering the wriggling of something of similar size next to him just before he was lost to his fragmented puppy dreams, too young to care about anything other than keeping the coldness away and making sure he had a lot more of the warm substance that came from the large comforting mass of what he had yet to register as a parent. Her scent and energy made him feel safe and content, though, and so he slept peacefully against her, occasional twitches jolting his tiny frame as he dreamed.