Parasite
Title: Parasite
Pairing: Steve/Danny
Rating: R
Summary: Steve’s pregnant, and struggling to hold on
Disclaimer: Don't own them, no harm intended, no profit made etc.
Warnings: Mpreg, angst, suicidal ideation
Word count: 2800
Author's note: Remember how I never write mpreg? Yes, well, here’s some more. Comes after The Overturning Moment, and it’s probably best if you’ve read that first. Be warned, though, there’s no schmoop here, no fluff, just more of me projecting personal stuff onto whumping these poor boys. Not a fic for you if you’re someone who thinks that pregnancy is always a wonderful experience.
Parasite
’Parasite (noun): An organism that lives in or on another organism (its host) and benefits by deriving nutrients at the host's expense.’
He wakes to bright morning sunshine and from the angle it’s still early, he has time to take a swim before swinging by to pick up Danny, swap the truck for the Camaro and head into work. If he’s quick he can get there before Danny’s finished getting dressed, maybe talk him into a quickie, a hand job or a blow job, get on his knees and listen to Danny try to bitch about being late for work, asshole, some of us are responsible law enforcement officers, while he sucks him off. He enjoys the challenge of trying to shut Danny up, occasionally even succeeds, and the thought has him grinning, half-hard and eager to go. He figures it’s a plan and he needs to get moving, so he rolls onto his stomach to grab the clock and check the exact time - or tries to roll onto his stomach - and that’s when the truth hits him in a crushing black wave of despair. His gut churns and his throat closes up because it’s still there, still inside him, he was dreaming, it was a fucking perfect dream where everything was back to normal and none of this had ever happened. He rolls onto his back and stares at the ceiling, all desire to get out of bed gone. Fuck.
Danny’s up and gone already, his side of the bed empty and cold and he hopes that Danny managed to sleep OK. He knows that he’s a difficult bedfellow; he’s so big now that he can’t get comfortable, tosses and turns, and even someone who sleeps as soundly as Danny gets disturbed. He’s suggested that Danny sleep in the spare room, but Danny won’t hear of it, “I don’t want to leave you on your own, babe, you’re not alone in this,” but he is, he is alone, and nothing Danny can say or do can change that. He’s tried explaining it to Danny but he’s not good with words, and Danny just doesn’t get it. It upsets Danny; he can see that, so he's stopped trying.
Or maybe Danny doesn’t want to get it, doesn’t want to face the fact that Steve is the one taking all the risks here, and that he’s doing it for Danny, even though Danny never asked him to. That’s possible.
Which is why he’s not told Danny everything.
He’s not told Danny everything, and he’s not going to, because if Danny finds out... he doesn’t want to put Danny through that. This was his choice, he made it, and now he has to live with it. Luckily for him Danny’s a busy guy with a full time job who doesn’t like the Internet, and the doc’s been making his house calls during the daytime, so Danny doesn’t know what he knows. Danny knows it’s dangerous, knows there are risks, but he doesn’t know just how dangerous.
Steve knows, though. Steve was Naval Intelligence, he does his research. Steve knows everything that could go wrong. Knows about how the male body isn’t designed for this. Knows about the possibility of rupture of the abdominal wall and internal hemorrhaging, about the risk of damage from the pressure of the fetus on his internal organs, about the pain he’s supposed to be feeling as the thing inside him grows and stretches him.
Knows about the difficulties inherent in detaching the placenta from a non-uterine place of attachment. Knows what that means in terms of his chances of surviving the surgery in good shape. Of surviving the surgery at all.
So yeah, he’s not telling Danny, because Danny doesn’t need to know.
* * * * *
The doc’s coming by every couple of days now. Steve knows that he’s still trying to figure out how the thing got in there, is desperate to know but won’t ask. Steve knows he suspects it’s some sort of top secret government project, implanted via keyhole surgery; can’t figure out why Steve’s here in Hawaii instead of in some top secret facility somewhere. Steve lets him think that, encourages it with a terse “That’s classified” whenever the doc starts asking leading questions, because after all, the truth is even more farfetched. ‘A witch did it’. Yeah, that’s really going to cut it with a medical man.
The doc's pleased with his progress. The expected complications haven't materialized... yet, and Steve privately figures that's the witch's doing, the vindictive bitch wants to make sure that his life is fucked up for as long as possible, is taking no chances with him losing the fetus and it all being over too soon. Despite how well things are going the doc has decided that the thing... the baby, Steve forcibly corrects himself... the doc has decided that the baby should be delivered early, just in case. Four weeks early, to be precise, a balancing act between what the baby needs and the potential damage to the host.
To the father. Another correction. He needs to focus. He can't afford these slips, can’t afford to let Danny find out how he feels about all this, how much he hates it all.
Can’t afford to let Danny know how fucking scared he is.
* * * * *
He's going stir crazy, stuck in this house, between these four walls. He knows every inch of the place now, every peeling flake of paintwork, every dusty corner of every closet, how each floorboard creaks when he steps on it, the clink of the loose tile in the shower, the way the kitchen faucet drips if you don't screw it that extra quarter turn tight. He's got all the dimensions mapped out in his head, how many steps it takes to cross each room, the most efficient route from A to B, the choke points if the place were to be attacked, how he'd defend it single handed or with a force. He’s got the kitchen organized for defense, the items most useful as weapons easily to hand. He checks the perimeter every hour, pacing his boundaries like a wild thing caged.
He has nothing to do. He’s tried doing research, casework, but he doesn’t have the computing power that Chin has at HQ, and not being able to follow up on his findings frustrates him. There’s a TV, but he doesn’t watch it, can’t bear to see the outside world when he’s confined here. If he was at the beach house he’d work on the Marquis, even if he is too big to lean over the engine, but he’s not there, and getting it towed up here would risk too many awkward questions. He’s fixed every single fucking thing that needs fixing in the place, has even resorted to taking things apart just to put them back together again. He’s tried reading books, but that’s too passive, he needs to be doing something so that he doesn’t have time to think. He’s even tried reading the pregnancy book that Danny’s got tucked into the drawer of his nightstand, but it seems to him to be mostly focused on all the things that could go wrong, and he’s got enough of that in his head already.
He misses the ocean so fucking much.
He's been here for fourteen weeks now, hidden away, his world closed down to this, and he hates it, for all that this place is his sanctuary, the only place he's safe. The only place the Press won't spot him, won’t sink their teeth into his ‘story’ and out him to the world as the freak show that he really is. As prisons go it's a comfortable one, a secluded property high in the hills, somewhere he won't be spotted. Most of his colleagues and acquaintances believe he's been reactivated, deployed on some secret mission of an unknown duration, no questions allowed, and that's a convenient lie for Danny and the other Five-Os, cuts awkward questions off before they're even asked.
He's trained for this, trained to endure capture and imprisonment, trained to deal with isolation under duress. So why is this so fucking hard?
* * * * *
In his more objective moments he suspects that he’s not really sane anymore. He knows that the pacing, the obsessive behavior, the nightmares, all these things aren’t normal, most women don’t behave like this when they’re pregnant, and he hates it, hates himself for it, hates being weak. He’s a SEAL, selected for his mental and physical toughness; he should be able to handle this.
Danny’s excited about the baby, he can tell. He sees the way Danny looks at him, hears the way Danny talks, catches the softness in Danny’s eyes when he smoothes his hand across Steve’s belly trying to feel the baby kick. He knows Danny wants to talk about it, wants to make plans, to choose names, to think about the future, and he wishes he could give that to Danny too, but he can’t. He wishes he could get inside Danny’s head, see what Danny’s seeing, feel what Danny’s feeling. Wishes he could understand.
But he doesn’t understand. He’s got this alien thing growing inside him, taking over, controlling everything he does, and all he can think about is being rid of it, and he’s a bad person because that’s not how it’s supposed to be.
* * * * *
He scares himself, really scares himself sometimes. One afternoon he gets the big kitchen knife out, sharpens it until it has an edge that would split a hair, then sits on the kitchen floor thinking about how it would be to cut the thing out of him. Thinking how it would feel to draw the edge of the blade across the stretched skin, how the taut skin would pull apart so easily, considering whether a transverse or a vertical cut would be more efficient. He lays the blade flat against his swollen abdomen, turns it just enough to nick the skin and then gets hit by a wave of revulsion and horror as the first beads of crimson well up and start to run down towards the floor, and he throws the knife away from him across the kitchen. When Danny gets home he makes him take all the knives and lock them in the trunk of the Camaro, and Danny looks at him with worried eyes, but says nothing.
All the knives except for one, that is. He's keeping his options open.
* * * * *
Danny goes to work each day, continuing the pretense of a normal life, and each time he drives away Steve feels himself sinking a little further, straying a little further off the path. He hides it as best he can from Danny, watches the clock for his return and plans what he’s going to say, how he’s going to ask about Danny’s day, about the cases he’s been working on, about the things that Danny does out there in the normal world.
Sometimes he hates Danny for being able to go out there and go about his business as though nothing’s changed. He hides that from Danny, too.
The weekends when Danny has Grace are the worst, because then he’s completely alone. Grace doesn’t know yet, thinks Uncle Steve is on a mission somewhere, and Danny spends those weekends at the beach house with her. He’s always quieter when he comes back after those weekends, and Steve wonders if he feels guilty for leaving Steve alone or for enjoying carefree time with Grace. Chin and Kono have offered to come and stay on those weekends, but he turns them down, pretends he enjoys the peace and quiet.
The truth is, the more time he spends alone, the harder it gets to connect with anyone from outside, with anyone from before. The harder it gets to think of anything to say to them. Increasingly it seems to him that the only thing anyone wants to talk about is the baby, the thing inside him, and he just wants to forget about it.
He talks to it, though, sometimes, when he’s alone and he feels it squirming in his gut and he can’t ignore it. He feels sorry for it, in a strange and detached sort of way, it didn’t ask to be made, didn’t ask to be put there, and in its way it’s as much of a freak as he is. At least Danny wants it, at least Danny will love it or that’s what he tells it, although whether that’s true, whether Danny will still want it after what it’s going to do to Steve he doesn’t know.
He’s starting to suspect that Danny wants the baby more than he wants him, though. That maybe Danny will be happy to get what he wants and not have to put up with Steve and his irritating habits and lack of regard for procedure any more. So maybe it’ll work out fine for the baby after all.
Steve’s almost sure that he shouldn’t be thinking this way. But he can’t help it; it’s starting to make more and more sense to him.
* * * * *
His body disgusts him. He's lost some muscle definition, he can tell that and worse, there's some breast tissue development - not much, Kono's still bigger than him, but he can see the change. His stomach is huge, the skin stretched tight over the thing inside him, and he hasn't been able to see his dick for weeks. He still gets hard, though, his body still demands that he jerk off sometimes, although it's awkward with the bump in the way, and he swallows down his revulsion that his body still wants this, despite everything, and takes care of it mechanically. It's a natural biological process, after all.
The thing that really screws him up is that Danny still wants him, still gets hard when he holds him, doesn't seem to notice how he's changing. Or maybe Danny likes him like this, soft and swollen, and that thought makes him dry heave. But really, he doesn't want to push Danny away right now, this is all for Danny, so when Danny curls around him at night, hands stroking across his skin, curving around his belly to stroke his cock, he lets Danny fuck him, gets on his hands and knees or on his side, the only positions he can manage comfortably now, and pretends it's good as Danny thrusts into him slow and gentle. Pretends it gives him pleasure to be touched and held, to still be wanted, stills Danny's worries until he falls asleep next to him. He can't figure out why Danny wants him like this, but at least one of them is getting something out of it. At least he can still give Danny that.
* * * * *
He wonders what will happen after the baby’s born, after they’ve cut it out of him. Whether he’ll survive the surgery, and if he does, what condition he’ll be in. He’s not afraid of dying, never has been. He’s more scared of living right now. Scared of living on, handicapped perhaps, damaged and broken, of being a burden, of seeing duty in Danny’s eyes rather than love, of watching Danny draw away into the perfect family he’s always wanted, with no place for Steve. Scared of the fact that, even if by some miracle he comes through the surgery unscathed, everything will be changed. He’ll be a father, and he doesn’t know how the hell to do that, his only role models are his own father and Danny, and he doesn’t think he can be either of those. He’s scared of the expectations and of still not being good enough.
It might be better for everyone if he dies. But that’s defeatist thinking. He’s not supposed to think like that, he’s supposed to be positive about this new life he’s carrying, this new beginning. So he keeps his thoughts to himself. It’s not like it’s anything Danny needs to hear, anyway. Or wants to hear, Steve’s sure of that.
It might be better if he dies.
* * * * *
”Two more weeks, babe,” Danny says, running his fingers softly across the bump as he slides his arms around Steve’s waist. “Just think, two weeks and we’ll be meeting him. Or her. It’s going to be amazing, you’re amazing.” He angles his head to plant a kiss on Steve’s cheek. He looks happy, despite everything, and Steve’s never felt more alone in his life.
Two weeks to go. He’s got two more weeks until they deliver the baby. Two more weeks holed up here, and then they cut him open and take this thing out of him. Two more weeks of this life, two more weeks to get through, two more weeks of being a fucking incubator for this thing inside him, and then everything changes, live or die.
He can do this. He is a fucking Navy SEAL after all, trained to endure all sorts of shit. He can give Danny this, if it’s the last thing he does.
Part of him sort of hopes that it will be, and that’s what scares him most of all.
Next: Disconnect
Pairing: Steve/Danny
Rating: R
Summary: Steve’s pregnant, and struggling to hold on
Disclaimer: Don't own them, no harm intended, no profit made etc.
Warnings: Mpreg, angst, suicidal ideation
Word count: 2800
Author's note: Remember how I never write mpreg? Yes, well, here’s some more. Comes after The Overturning Moment, and it’s probably best if you’ve read that first. Be warned, though, there’s no schmoop here, no fluff, just more of me projecting personal stuff onto whumping these poor boys. Not a fic for you if you’re someone who thinks that pregnancy is always a wonderful experience.
Parasite
’Parasite (noun): An organism that lives in or on another organism (its host) and benefits by deriving nutrients at the host's expense.’
He wakes to bright morning sunshine and from the angle it’s still early, he has time to take a swim before swinging by to pick up Danny, swap the truck for the Camaro and head into work. If he’s quick he can get there before Danny’s finished getting dressed, maybe talk him into a quickie, a hand job or a blow job, get on his knees and listen to Danny try to bitch about being late for work, asshole, some of us are responsible law enforcement officers, while he sucks him off. He enjoys the challenge of trying to shut Danny up, occasionally even succeeds, and the thought has him grinning, half-hard and eager to go. He figures it’s a plan and he needs to get moving, so he rolls onto his stomach to grab the clock and check the exact time - or tries to roll onto his stomach - and that’s when the truth hits him in a crushing black wave of despair. His gut churns and his throat closes up because it’s still there, still inside him, he was dreaming, it was a fucking perfect dream where everything was back to normal and none of this had ever happened. He rolls onto his back and stares at the ceiling, all desire to get out of bed gone. Fuck.
Danny’s up and gone already, his side of the bed empty and cold and he hopes that Danny managed to sleep OK. He knows that he’s a difficult bedfellow; he’s so big now that he can’t get comfortable, tosses and turns, and even someone who sleeps as soundly as Danny gets disturbed. He’s suggested that Danny sleep in the spare room, but Danny won’t hear of it, “I don’t want to leave you on your own, babe, you’re not alone in this,” but he is, he is alone, and nothing Danny can say or do can change that. He’s tried explaining it to Danny but he’s not good with words, and Danny just doesn’t get it. It upsets Danny; he can see that, so he's stopped trying.
Or maybe Danny doesn’t want to get it, doesn’t want to face the fact that Steve is the one taking all the risks here, and that he’s doing it for Danny, even though Danny never asked him to. That’s possible.
Which is why he’s not told Danny everything.
He’s not told Danny everything, and he’s not going to, because if Danny finds out... he doesn’t want to put Danny through that. This was his choice, he made it, and now he has to live with it. Luckily for him Danny’s a busy guy with a full time job who doesn’t like the Internet, and the doc’s been making his house calls during the daytime, so Danny doesn’t know what he knows. Danny knows it’s dangerous, knows there are risks, but he doesn’t know just how dangerous.
Steve knows, though. Steve was Naval Intelligence, he does his research. Steve knows everything that could go wrong. Knows about how the male body isn’t designed for this. Knows about the possibility of rupture of the abdominal wall and internal hemorrhaging, about the risk of damage from the pressure of the fetus on his internal organs, about the pain he’s supposed to be feeling as the thing inside him grows and stretches him.
Knows about the difficulties inherent in detaching the placenta from a non-uterine place of attachment. Knows what that means in terms of his chances of surviving the surgery in good shape. Of surviving the surgery at all.
So yeah, he’s not telling Danny, because Danny doesn’t need to know.
* * * * *
The doc’s coming by every couple of days now. Steve knows that he’s still trying to figure out how the thing got in there, is desperate to know but won’t ask. Steve knows he suspects it’s some sort of top secret government project, implanted via keyhole surgery; can’t figure out why Steve’s here in Hawaii instead of in some top secret facility somewhere. Steve lets him think that, encourages it with a terse “That’s classified” whenever the doc starts asking leading questions, because after all, the truth is even more farfetched. ‘A witch did it’. Yeah, that’s really going to cut it with a medical man.
The doc's pleased with his progress. The expected complications haven't materialized... yet, and Steve privately figures that's the witch's doing, the vindictive bitch wants to make sure that his life is fucked up for as long as possible, is taking no chances with him losing the fetus and it all being over too soon. Despite how well things are going the doc has decided that the thing... the baby, Steve forcibly corrects himself... the doc has decided that the baby should be delivered early, just in case. Four weeks early, to be precise, a balancing act between what the baby needs and the potential damage to the host.
To the father. Another correction. He needs to focus. He can't afford these slips, can’t afford to let Danny find out how he feels about all this, how much he hates it all.
Can’t afford to let Danny know how fucking scared he is.
* * * * *
He's going stir crazy, stuck in this house, between these four walls. He knows every inch of the place now, every peeling flake of paintwork, every dusty corner of every closet, how each floorboard creaks when he steps on it, the clink of the loose tile in the shower, the way the kitchen faucet drips if you don't screw it that extra quarter turn tight. He's got all the dimensions mapped out in his head, how many steps it takes to cross each room, the most efficient route from A to B, the choke points if the place were to be attacked, how he'd defend it single handed or with a force. He’s got the kitchen organized for defense, the items most useful as weapons easily to hand. He checks the perimeter every hour, pacing his boundaries like a wild thing caged.
He has nothing to do. He’s tried doing research, casework, but he doesn’t have the computing power that Chin has at HQ, and not being able to follow up on his findings frustrates him. There’s a TV, but he doesn’t watch it, can’t bear to see the outside world when he’s confined here. If he was at the beach house he’d work on the Marquis, even if he is too big to lean over the engine, but he’s not there, and getting it towed up here would risk too many awkward questions. He’s fixed every single fucking thing that needs fixing in the place, has even resorted to taking things apart just to put them back together again. He’s tried reading books, but that’s too passive, he needs to be doing something so that he doesn’t have time to think. He’s even tried reading the pregnancy book that Danny’s got tucked into the drawer of his nightstand, but it seems to him to be mostly focused on all the things that could go wrong, and he’s got enough of that in his head already.
He misses the ocean so fucking much.
He's been here for fourteen weeks now, hidden away, his world closed down to this, and he hates it, for all that this place is his sanctuary, the only place he's safe. The only place the Press won't spot him, won’t sink their teeth into his ‘story’ and out him to the world as the freak show that he really is. As prisons go it's a comfortable one, a secluded property high in the hills, somewhere he won't be spotted. Most of his colleagues and acquaintances believe he's been reactivated, deployed on some secret mission of an unknown duration, no questions allowed, and that's a convenient lie for Danny and the other Five-Os, cuts awkward questions off before they're even asked.
He's trained for this, trained to endure capture and imprisonment, trained to deal with isolation under duress. So why is this so fucking hard?
* * * * *
In his more objective moments he suspects that he’s not really sane anymore. He knows that the pacing, the obsessive behavior, the nightmares, all these things aren’t normal, most women don’t behave like this when they’re pregnant, and he hates it, hates himself for it, hates being weak. He’s a SEAL, selected for his mental and physical toughness; he should be able to handle this.
Danny’s excited about the baby, he can tell. He sees the way Danny looks at him, hears the way Danny talks, catches the softness in Danny’s eyes when he smoothes his hand across Steve’s belly trying to feel the baby kick. He knows Danny wants to talk about it, wants to make plans, to choose names, to think about the future, and he wishes he could give that to Danny too, but he can’t. He wishes he could get inside Danny’s head, see what Danny’s seeing, feel what Danny’s feeling. Wishes he could understand.
But he doesn’t understand. He’s got this alien thing growing inside him, taking over, controlling everything he does, and all he can think about is being rid of it, and he’s a bad person because that’s not how it’s supposed to be.
* * * * *
He scares himself, really scares himself sometimes. One afternoon he gets the big kitchen knife out, sharpens it until it has an edge that would split a hair, then sits on the kitchen floor thinking about how it would be to cut the thing out of him. Thinking how it would feel to draw the edge of the blade across the stretched skin, how the taut skin would pull apart so easily, considering whether a transverse or a vertical cut would be more efficient. He lays the blade flat against his swollen abdomen, turns it just enough to nick the skin and then gets hit by a wave of revulsion and horror as the first beads of crimson well up and start to run down towards the floor, and he throws the knife away from him across the kitchen. When Danny gets home he makes him take all the knives and lock them in the trunk of the Camaro, and Danny looks at him with worried eyes, but says nothing.
All the knives except for one, that is. He's keeping his options open.
* * * * *
Danny goes to work each day, continuing the pretense of a normal life, and each time he drives away Steve feels himself sinking a little further, straying a little further off the path. He hides it as best he can from Danny, watches the clock for his return and plans what he’s going to say, how he’s going to ask about Danny’s day, about the cases he’s been working on, about the things that Danny does out there in the normal world.
Sometimes he hates Danny for being able to go out there and go about his business as though nothing’s changed. He hides that from Danny, too.
The weekends when Danny has Grace are the worst, because then he’s completely alone. Grace doesn’t know yet, thinks Uncle Steve is on a mission somewhere, and Danny spends those weekends at the beach house with her. He’s always quieter when he comes back after those weekends, and Steve wonders if he feels guilty for leaving Steve alone or for enjoying carefree time with Grace. Chin and Kono have offered to come and stay on those weekends, but he turns them down, pretends he enjoys the peace and quiet.
The truth is, the more time he spends alone, the harder it gets to connect with anyone from outside, with anyone from before. The harder it gets to think of anything to say to them. Increasingly it seems to him that the only thing anyone wants to talk about is the baby, the thing inside him, and he just wants to forget about it.
He talks to it, though, sometimes, when he’s alone and he feels it squirming in his gut and he can’t ignore it. He feels sorry for it, in a strange and detached sort of way, it didn’t ask to be made, didn’t ask to be put there, and in its way it’s as much of a freak as he is. At least Danny wants it, at least Danny will love it or that’s what he tells it, although whether that’s true, whether Danny will still want it after what it’s going to do to Steve he doesn’t know.
He’s starting to suspect that Danny wants the baby more than he wants him, though. That maybe Danny will be happy to get what he wants and not have to put up with Steve and his irritating habits and lack of regard for procedure any more. So maybe it’ll work out fine for the baby after all.
Steve’s almost sure that he shouldn’t be thinking this way. But he can’t help it; it’s starting to make more and more sense to him.
* * * * *
His body disgusts him. He's lost some muscle definition, he can tell that and worse, there's some breast tissue development - not much, Kono's still bigger than him, but he can see the change. His stomach is huge, the skin stretched tight over the thing inside him, and he hasn't been able to see his dick for weeks. He still gets hard, though, his body still demands that he jerk off sometimes, although it's awkward with the bump in the way, and he swallows down his revulsion that his body still wants this, despite everything, and takes care of it mechanically. It's a natural biological process, after all.
The thing that really screws him up is that Danny still wants him, still gets hard when he holds him, doesn't seem to notice how he's changing. Or maybe Danny likes him like this, soft and swollen, and that thought makes him dry heave. But really, he doesn't want to push Danny away right now, this is all for Danny, so when Danny curls around him at night, hands stroking across his skin, curving around his belly to stroke his cock, he lets Danny fuck him, gets on his hands and knees or on his side, the only positions he can manage comfortably now, and pretends it's good as Danny thrusts into him slow and gentle. Pretends it gives him pleasure to be touched and held, to still be wanted, stills Danny's worries until he falls asleep next to him. He can't figure out why Danny wants him like this, but at least one of them is getting something out of it. At least he can still give Danny that.
* * * * *
He wonders what will happen after the baby’s born, after they’ve cut it out of him. Whether he’ll survive the surgery, and if he does, what condition he’ll be in. He’s not afraid of dying, never has been. He’s more scared of living right now. Scared of living on, handicapped perhaps, damaged and broken, of being a burden, of seeing duty in Danny’s eyes rather than love, of watching Danny draw away into the perfect family he’s always wanted, with no place for Steve. Scared of the fact that, even if by some miracle he comes through the surgery unscathed, everything will be changed. He’ll be a father, and he doesn’t know how the hell to do that, his only role models are his own father and Danny, and he doesn’t think he can be either of those. He’s scared of the expectations and of still not being good enough.
It might be better for everyone if he dies. But that’s defeatist thinking. He’s not supposed to think like that, he’s supposed to be positive about this new life he’s carrying, this new beginning. So he keeps his thoughts to himself. It’s not like it’s anything Danny needs to hear, anyway. Or wants to hear, Steve’s sure of that.
It might be better if he dies.
* * * * *
”Two more weeks, babe,” Danny says, running his fingers softly across the bump as he slides his arms around Steve’s waist. “Just think, two weeks and we’ll be meeting him. Or her. It’s going to be amazing, you’re amazing.” He angles his head to plant a kiss on Steve’s cheek. He looks happy, despite everything, and Steve’s never felt more alone in his life.
Two weeks to go. He’s got two more weeks until they deliver the baby. Two more weeks holed up here, and then they cut him open and take this thing out of him. Two more weeks of this life, two more weeks to get through, two more weeks of being a fucking incubator for this thing inside him, and then everything changes, live or die.
He can do this. He is a fucking Navy SEAL after all, trained to endure all sorts of shit. He can give Danny this, if it’s the last thing he does.
Part of him sort of hopes that it will be, and that’s what scares him most of all.
Next: Disconnect