A Million Ways To Fall - Pt. IV
Ryan called Pete; Brendon wasn’t surprised. He kind of had to. He called Pete and then he walked into Brendon’s curtained-off room with Pete still on the phone to say, “we’re cancelling the show tomorrow.”
Brendon blinked up at him and shook his head frantically. “We are not,” he said, and Ryan glared at him.
“We are. You’re fucking . . .” he trailed off and waved a hand through the air to indicate ‘you’re pregnant’ and continued, “we need to figure some shit out. And where the fuck is your fucking doctor?”
Brendon hesitated to call Doctor Reed his doctor. He didn’t like the woman, he barely knew the woman, and he hadn’t seen her since Dr. Kuhn had left with the machine, which had been almost an hour ago. His head was hurting worse than ever and he wanted to sleep and wake up and realize this had all been a nightmare. A vivid and ridiculous nightmare brought on by too much weed and pizza before bed.
“We don’t have to cancel anything,” Brendon insisted, “I’m not dying.”
Ryan made a small, disgruntled sound, growled “talk to him,” into the mouthpiece, and then strode forward to shove the phone up to Brendon’s ear.
“Brendon, listen to your guitarist and get the fuck back to Vegas, okay? We’re getting a second opinion on this shit,” Pete said. He sounded more pissed off than Brendon had ever heard him.
“Because technology is so advanced doctors can fake sonograms now,” Brendon shot back, and Pete was eerily quiet for a long moment.
“Fuck,” he finally said, “just get your ass back here so we can figure out what the hell to do next.”
Brendon felt a little torn because on the one hand, he wanted for Pete and Ryan and Spencer to figure this whole thing out for him. They could tell him, “get an abortion, it’s for the good of the band,” and Brendon would do it because morals or no morals, he was good at pushing them aside if it was for a valid and particularly selfish reason. On the other hand, who the fuck did Pete think he was? Or Ryan, for that matter? It was Brendon’s body and Brendon’s fucking fetus or baby or whatever and it wasn’t their problem.
He thrust the phone back at Ryan and glared at him until he turned on his heel and left. It was a little unfair of him to have barged in anyway, especially when no one else seemed capable of coming back to see Brendon. They were all staying put on the other side of the curtain. Haley had joined them a while ago to give them an update since nobody had checked in after Dr. Kuhn left. Ryan was the first one to come in and actually talk to Brendon. If what had just happened between them could be called talking, which was actually stretching it quite a bit.
“I want to go home,” Brendon said, curling up on his side and facing Shane.
Shane nodded and leaned forward, brushing a hand through Brendon’s hair. “Yeah, I know. Soon, though.”
Brendon sighed and closed his eyes and the next time he opened them, Doctor Reed was walking in with Ryan, Spencer and Jon at her heels. She looked disgruntled and shaken, the least stoic she’d been all night, and crossed her arms over her chest.
“We need to discuss your options,” she said, cutting straight to the point.
Ryan, Spencer and Jon gathered around Brendon, careful not to look at or touch him, and Brendon bit his lip against another onslaught of completely random and pathetic tears as he sat up.
“Because this is such a . . . unique occurrence, we have no idea of knowing whether or not your body is capable of bringing this baby to term. You have a functioning uterus and what appears to be some kind of cervix, but no birth canal and so if you were to bring the baby to term, there would be serious complications in labor.”
“What kind of complications?” Brendon asked.
“Your body has provided no natural way for you to give birth. We could do a C-section and that would take care of it in theory, but as I said, there’s no real way of knowing.”
Brendon’s tongue felt thick in his mouth and he couldn’t make himself ask the question, but he didn’t have to. Jon did it for him.
“What about an abortion?” he asked curiously.
“There would still be some complications. We can’t give you a simple abortifacient because your body has no way of expelling the fetus. Any other traditional ways of performing an abortion wouldn’t work, either. We’d probably have to perform a surgical procedure.”
She said all of this matter-of-factly and Brendon felt cold and light-headed. He pressed a hand to his abdomen and thought about hands in latex gloves cutting him open and slicing away the little life he’d seen just minutes before on that black screen and he felt his shoulders tense.
“No way,” Spencer said, taking one look at Brendon’s face and shaking his head. “No way are you cutting him open for that.”
The doctor’s lips pursed and she said, “it would probably be a much safer procedure than to go through a high-risk pregnancy.”
She was just stating the facts, laying it all out there, but Brendon suddenly felt defensive.
“I think I’ll take my chances,” he said, and she blinked at him.
“Okay,” she said slowly, “if you’re sure, we’re going to need to assign a team of specialists to you. We’d like to keep you under observation and record every step of the pregnancy. We’ll also need to do some more tests so we can start to figure out how this happened.”
Her voice was clinical and it made Brendon uncomfortable. Everything about this doctor was focused on the science and as if Brendon didn’t hate shit like science enough already, he definitely wasn’t interested in being somebody’s experiment for the fucking fair.
He sat up straighter and said, “I let a guy fuck me, I got pregnant, end of story. I don’t think you need to know anything else.”
“I don’t think you understand the magnitude of this-”
Brendon swung his legs over the side of the bed and shook his head. “I don’t want to understand. I don’t give a fuck. I’m not letting you do a bunch of tests on me and I’m not living the next eight months under a microscope.”
He stood up, mostly steady on his feet, the sonogram clutched in one hand.
“You don’t know what kind of problems could arise during your pregnancy,” she reasoned. “You’ll need a team of doctors there to make sure that you and the baby stay healthy.”
“We’ll take care of him,” Ryan said, stepping in between the doctor and Brendon. “I just have one question: it’s safe for him to fly home, right?”
Doctor Reed hesitated before nodding, and Ryan curled an arm around Brendon’s shoulders and ushered him through the curtain. The doctor called after them once, but nobody looked back. They just walked right out of the hospital and into the hot, humid night.
_._
They got back to the hotel late and Brendon went to sleep immediately, glad for the first time that night that nobody seemed to know what to say to him. He was up in the middle of the night, like clockwork, throwing up in the small hotel bathroom. It was weird to know why, to rest a hand low against his belly and think baby. Brendon wasn’t sure he was ever going to get used to it because it was impossible, it was fucking ridiculous, and yet it was true.
He stood up and stared at himself blearily in the mirror and wondered just how his genes had gotten this fucked up. And then he wished desperately that he’d avoided that party in June, that he’d gone home with a girl instead of letting himself be played and fucked over by a guy. A guy whose name he didn’t even know. Brendon was like some kind of cautionary teenage pregnancy tale with the added bonus of “this is what happens if you have gay, unprotected sex” attached to the usual moral of the story.
It was stupidly ironic, Brendon thought, that he’d had sex with guys twice and both times he’d managed to brush it off and pretend it had never happened and now he didn’t have that option. There was no going back. He, Brendon Urie, had been fucked up the ass and now he was having some other dude’s baby. Maybe it was a strange Mormon curse, a way of knowing who was gay in the church, a way of weeding them out. It was certainly effective. Now anyone would be able to look at Brendon and know and all the work he’d done to hide it and ignore it and pretend it wasn’t there had been for nothing.
A sharp stinging in his palms brought Brendon back to the present, into the sour smelling bathroom with its harsh lighting, and he realized he’d been clenching his fists so hard his nails had cut into his skin. There were raw crescent moons in his palms when he uncurled his fingers, only two of them actually bleeding. He stared until his stomach stopped aching and until his head stopped swimming and forced himself to walk back out into the hotel room.
He made his way back to the bed he was sharing with Shane in the dark and buried himself under the blankets. He was curled up on the far side of the bed, but a hand snaked out and tugged him so that he rolled into Shane’s body.
“Hey,” Shane said, his voice sleepy and slow, “you okay?”
Brendon inhaled shakily and rested his head on Shane’s chest. “No,” he whispered.
Shane pulled him in tighter. “You know we’re gonna figure this out, right? We’re gonna take care of you.”
Brendon wrapped an arm around Shane’s midsection and didn’t say anything. They fell asleep that way and Brendon had nightmares, weird dreams that left him shaking and terrified when he jerked himself awake.
The next morning passed mostly in silence. It took Brendon about five minutes to figure out that Jon wasn’t talking to him, not just because he didn’t know what to say but because he was pissed. Brendon had been on the receiving end of the Jon Walker Silent Treatment often enough to know what it felt and looked like, and he was relieved when Jon didn’t linger in their hotel room for long before making himself scarce. It was just one more thing that Brendon didn’t want to deal with.
But that set the pattern for the rest of the morning. The others communicated with Brendon mostly through Shane. Brendon tried to be understanding; they didn’t know how to react to him and that made perfect sense. If Brendon had been in their shoes he would have done the same thing, probably. It still hurt, especially when they were all forced into the same space on the way to the airport and they still wouldn’t talk to him. They seemed to have gotten over their inability to look, though, and Brendon could feel their eyes on him all the way into the airport terminal.
Keltie was the first one to break the silence. She pulled away from Ryan’s side and sat next to Brendon, offering him a small smile.
“So,” she said slowly, “I’ve already got a game plan, Mr. Mom.”
Brendon snorted, some of the tension leaking from his shoulders, and raised his eyebrows. “Do share.”
She pulled out a sheet of hotel room note paper and snapped it in front of her dramatically.
“First things first, we need to get you a doctor who isn’t a cold, opportunistic bitch,” she said, her smile widening when Brendon nodded emphatically. “Second, prenatal vitamins. Those are really important for you and baby. Third, we are going to shop the hell out of Whole Foods. Fourth, we are demolishing the Ben & Jerry’s section at the grocery store. Are you having any weird cravings yet? Because that’s number five: satisfying your wacky pregnant cravings.”
Brendon said, “why does the game plan revolve around food?”
“I was kinda hungry when I wrote it,” she answered, eyes twinkling, and Brendon laughed for what felt like the first time in days even though it had only been hours. “Actually,” she said, folding the list and tucking it into the pocket of her jeans, “I didn’t come up with it on my own. I called my mom and told her a friend’s pregnant, what the fuck do we do now? So, it’s kind of the mommy list. She also suggested buying baby books? Like, What to Expect When You’re Expecting but that’s kind of the thing, right? We don’t know what to expect.”
Her eyes flickered down to Brendon’s belly which didn’t look all that different underneath his hoodie. It felt different, though. It was probably all in Brendon’s head because the baby, fetus, whatever, was too tiny to be felt. It had been making its presence known for the last few weeks, but anything could have made him puke and given him headaches and fatigue. This was different. Brendon was now hyperaware of his body in ways he’d never been before; he felt like there was a sixth sense growing, one that was attached to the life nestled deep inside of his body.
“This is so fucking crazy,” he said with a sigh.
“Well, yeah,” Keltie said, reaching out to rub his shoulder. “It’s . . . well, it takes a lot of getting used to.”
Brendon glanced at her sideways because if she was having a hard time, how did she think he felt? Her mouth twisted in sympathy.
“Of all the pregnancy scares I’ve gone through,” she said, “this is definitely the scariest.”
Brendon huddled deeper in his hoodie and tried not to think about it that way. It wasn’t a pregnancy scare anymore, it was an actual pregnancy. It was still fucking terrifying, but it would be okay. Right? He just had to keep telling himself that it would be okay.
_._
Pete was in Ryan’s condo when they got back to Vegas. Brendon seemed to be the only one who was surprised to see him sitting in the living room with Hobo in his lap. It wasn’t actually that unexpected in retrospect.
“Okay,” Keltie said, looking from Pete to Ryan to Brendon and back, “I think we’re going to run out and do some shopping.”
Haley nodded on Keltie’s other side and the two of them left the room quickly. Shane lingered awkwardly for a minute before following their lead, leaving Brendon alone with his band and his boss.
Pete said, “I’m really hoping this is an elaborate joke you guys are playing on me. If it is, you’re all fired, but that’s what I’m hoping.”
Brendon could feel everyone’s gaze swing to him and he winced, crossing his arms over his chest and trying to make himself as small as possible.
“It’s not a joke, Pete. It’s not fucking funny.”
Pete stared at him for so long Brendon started to feel himself shrinking, and then he said, “you can’t be fucking pregnant, dude, it’s fucking fifth grade science.”
“Yeah, well apparently fifth grade science doesn’t apply to me,” Brendon shot back.
Pete’s eyes widened and Brendon almost felt bad. And then Pete said, “okay, so how do we get rid of it?”
“What?” Brendon said, too shocked to believe what he’d just heard.
Pete flailed his arms a little and stood up. “Well, you can’t have it. You’re barely old enough to drink, let alone having a fucking baby. Not to mention the fact that you’re in a band,” he added, ticking the items off on his fingers, “you’re supposed to be going on tour in a few months, you know jack shit about babies, and, oh yeah, you’re a fucking dude.”
“Pete,” Ryan said slowly, but Pete held up his hand to hold him off.
“I’m talking to Brendon,” he said. “How do we get rid of it?”
Brendon was getting really tired of the fucking we that kept getting thrown around. Shane and Ryan had said we’ll take care of you, but so far nobody could even stand to look him in the eye. Pete was asking how we were going to get rid of the baby, but as far as Brendon knew, he was the only one pregnant.
“We don’t,” Brendon said quietly, and Pete’s jaw dropped.
“We- we what? What do you mean we don’t?”
“I mean,” Brendon told him slowly, “we don’t get rid of it. I’m not killing my fucking baby.”
“It’s not a baby, it’s a fucking fetus and chicks do it all the time,” Pete said, and Brendon was pretty sure he didn’t mean to be an asshole, but that was definitely what he was accomplishing in that moment.
“I’m not killing it,” Brendon said again, more steel in his tone this time.
“This is a fucking Mormon thing, isn’t it?” Pete said incredulously, and Brendon had never wanted to hit somebody so hard in his life.
“It doesn’t matter. It’s my fucking body, it’s my fucking baby, and nobody’s cutting me open to kill it. End of story.”
“Well then you’d better figure out what the future of your band is. I didn’t sign you so that you could fuck up and get yourself pregnant and then be an idiot about it later.”
Brendon could feel his cheeks heating up and he swallowed hard. He opened his mouth, unsure of what to say to that, but Jon cut in.
“Jesus, Pete, could you be a bigger asshole right now?” he asked, voice loud and with an edge to it that Brendon had never heard.
Pete glared at Jon and then looked back at Brendon and whatever he saw there caused him to deflate. His shoulders sagged and his head fell back until he was staring at the ceiling. Brendon chewed on his lip and jumped when Jon turned to him.
“And you! Fuck!” he said, yelling now. “How could you be so stupid?”
Brendon blinked. “I . . . oops?”
Jon’s eyes narrowed and his voice dropped about sixty degrees below zero. “You are so fucking lucky you’re pregnant because if it was HIV I would kill you. Wear a goddamn condom next time, you dumb shit.”
There was a moment of ringing silence and then Jon made a frustrated sound and turned on his heel to stalk off. Spencer reached out to stop him but he just jerked his arm away and said, “I need a minute.”
Brendon watched him go, his whole body cold and his back tensed to the point of pain.
“He has a point,” Spencer said softly.
His tone was misleading; when Brendon looked up, he was glaring just as hard as Jon had been.
“What do you want me to say?” Brendon asked, a little desperately.
“Maybe you could start with telling us when you started fucking guys in the first place,” Spencer told him, tucking his hands in his pockets, “because I don’t know about anyone else but that one was a surprise for me.”
Brendon sighed and ducked his head. “I don’t know, it was just the once,” he said, because he wasn’t going to tell them about Shane. That was totally irrelevant and none of their business. “I’m not gay,” he added.
Pete scoffed and Brendon lifted his head to frown at him.
“Well, you’re kind of pregnant,” Pete said, “so, I mean, sorry if I’m not buying the ‘I’m not gay’ line.”
“Okay,” Ryan said, “seriously, Pete, knock it off. Can we talk to Brendon alone?”
He made it sound like a question, but the way he looked significantly from Pete to the door indicated that it wasn’t so much a request as an order. Brendon didn’t breathe any easier when Pete left the room; he had a feeling that Pete was probably eavesdropping anyway, but at the very least he didn’t want the guy in charge of his band’s future making things any more tense than they already were.
The three of them stood in the middle of Ryan’s living room for a few minutes, not saying anything, not meeting each other’s eyes, and eventually Ryan asked, “are you going to keep it?”
Brendon hadn’t actually thought that far ahead. Just deciding to have the baby was scary enough; trying to decide whether or not to give it away to somebody else was almost too much to handle thinking about.
“I don’t know,” he said honestly.
“Well,” Ryan told him, voice calm, “you need to figure it out, because if you don’t keep it we just have to hold on for nine months. If not . . . we’ll have to see what happens with us.”
It was Ryan’s careful tone that told Brendon how scared he was. Ryan only ever spoke that cautiously, that matter-of-factly, when he thought something was going to be taken away from him. It was how he’d sounded when he first suggested that maybe they were going to have to accept the fact that Brent needed to be kicked out, like maybe that would be the last decision they ever made as a band. It was how he had told them about the biggest fight he and Keltie had ever had, like he was just waiting for her to call and tell him they were over.
Brendon had known Ryan long enough to recognize that it was his way of steeling himself for the inevitable heartbreak that he assumed was coming his way.
“Dude,” Brendon said, “this isn’t going to end the band. It’s not going to be over just because I have a baby,” he said as earnestly as possible. Ryan just looked at him and Brendon turned to Spencer imploringly. “It’s not,” he said again.
Their silence was more placating than anything, like they knew Brendon believed that and they didn’t want to tell him he was wrong. It was just way too much. Between Pete and Jon and now this, not to mention the part where he was pregnant, Brendon just couldn’t handle it anymore. He sat down heavily on Ryan’s couch, head in his hands.
“I can’t lose you guys,” he said, his eyes burning with frustrated tears. “I’ll give it away, okay, I promise, but this can’t be over yet.”
Brendon sat there, his head pounding, blinking back tears, terrified down to his bones that his fuck up was going to result in the end of his band, scared of what would happen if he couldn’t make music, couldn’t tour, couldn’t be with these guys nearly every day. He was trying so hard not to cry that he didn’t hear Jon come back in.
“What’d you do to him?” he asked, and he sounded overly casual so he was still pissed, but when Brendon lifted his head, Jon actually looked at him and there was warmth in his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” Brendon said softly, and then he said it again, looking at Ryan and Spencer, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.”
Jon crossed his arms and sighed, “don’t beat yourself up about it, okay? I hear wallowing in guilt isn’t good for unborn babies.”
Brendon smiled weakly. “You’re making that up.”
Jon just shrugged and looked pointedly at Ryan. They had developed this weird ability to look at each other and communicate without words, which had annoyed Brendon initially but he was getting used to it. Whatever they were saying to each other, it prompted Ryan to sit next to Brendon on the couch and nudge him with his shoulder.
“We’ll come up with a plan. In the meantime, you just need to take care of yourself and, you know, the baby.” He paused and then added, voice soft and uncertain but definitely determined, “you’re right. This isn’t going to be over. We’re not going to be over.”
Spencer sat on Brendon’s other side and tangled his fingers in Brendon’s hair. “Yeah. I mean, if Gwen Stefani can do it, you can too, right? She’s only got Gavin. You’ve got all of us.”
Brendon tilted his head until it was resting on Ryan’s shoulder and they all looked at Jon who finally, finally smiled.
“We’re gonna be uncles,” he said. “That’s kind of awesome.”
He sat down on Ryan’s other side and they all huddled together on the couch, arms tangled together, and for the first time since he’d gotten the news, Brendon felt like he could breathe.
_._
“Hey, did you know there’s a website called ‘What to Expect When You’re Expecting’?” Shane asked.
Brendon peeked into the living room to see him hunched over his laptop staring wide-eyed at the screen.
“You already bought the book,” Brendon pointed out, going back to searching the kitchen for something sweet and salty and maybe a little crunchy.
“Yeah, but the site’s interactive,” Shane said. “You totally need to register, though. Should I register you? You can have a pretty girl’s name. You can be Lola.”
Brendon laughed and rolled his eyes to himself. So far, Shane was handling this whole thing pretty well. He wasn’t the only one, but he was the only one who didn’t continually freak out and either call Brendon in the middle of the night to make sure he was still alive and well, or sit and stare at his midsection for awkwardly prolonged amounts of time. Shane claimed it was because he was good at compartmentalizing, whatever that meant. Brendon figured it was because Shane had smoked a lot of weed in his day and this was probably not the wackiest situation his brain had ever come up with.
“I don’t want to pretend to be a girl on a website,” Brendon said, and Shane made a small disappointed noise.
There was the distinct sound of fingers flying over computer keys and Brendon could only hope Shane was doing a new search and not trying to come up with a last name complimentary to Lola. Brendon left Shane to it and continued his fruitless search, turning up pudding cups, celery sticks, some other organic shit that Keltie and Ryan had insisted on buying for him, a ton of saltine crackers (the morning sickness wasn’t letting up and those were Brendon’s favorite way of making it bearable), and other assorted snacks but nothing that was, at once, sweet, salty and crunchy.
“I would kill for some pretzels,” Brendon groaned, leaving the kitchen and flopping onto the couch next to Shane. “Like, really salty pretzels and chocolate icing. Do you know what I would do for those?”
“Um,” Shane said, glancing up from his laptop, “since you just said you’d kill for some, I’m going to guess it involves homicide.”
“Really violent homicide,” Brendon agreed. “Or, oh shit, you know what would be even more awesome than that? Tortilla chips and chocolate frosting.”
“I was cool with the pretzels, the pretzels sounded good, but you are really grossing me out, now.”
“No, no,” Brendon said, leaning forward to try and get Shane to see what an amazing idea it was, “it would be like fucking nachos, but with chocolate. And for toppings there could be, like, sprinkles. Oh, and honey roasted peanuts.”
Shane raised his eyebrows and said, “what, no jalapeños?”
Brendon wrinkled his nose. “Don’t be disgusting.”
Shane laughed and Brendon would have felt a little awkward about it except for the fact that he wasn’t really being laughed at, not in any way that made him self-conscious. Shane was actually really hard to feel self-conscious around which had always been the case. Despite the fact that he was cooler than Brendon would ever be in so many ways, he’d never made Brendon feel like less of a person, or whatever. It wasn’t like high school when Brendon always knew he was never going to be able to compete with other boys his age. It wasn’t even like with Ryan and Spencer and Jon where Brendon knew he was always going to be the immature spaz.
Shane just let Brendon be himself and he didn’t ever seem to have a problem with it. Somehow he was carrying that over into this, the being pregnant thing, and Brendon was both grateful for it and awed by it. Not even his bandmates had made him feel this comfortable in his own skin. Truth be told, Brendon felt more comfortable about the whole thing when he was with Shane than when he was by himself. By himself he wanted to freak out, with Shane he was okay with just . . . living with it.
Brendon rested his head on Shane’s shoulder and watched him google baby names. It was way too early to be thinking of those, and Brendon had already expressly stated that he wasn’t going to even consider naming the baby until much, much further down the line, but Shane liked looking at them anyway. He wasn’t the only one; Ryan liked them, too, and Brendon was pretty sure they’d been texting possible names to each other for the last week. He couldn’t prove it, but he was almost positive.
“Pete said he found a doctor,” Brendon said quietly.
Shane paused and then closed his computer and leaned back against the couch. “Yeah?”
“Yep,” Brendon said, following him and resettling against his side. “He called this morning to tell me about this doctor he found who did some work with abnormal pregnancies and stuff. He’s supposed to be really good. And discreet.”
“When are you gonna meet him?” Shane asked.
“This weekend.” He paused and then added, “What if he tells me I can’t do this? What if he can’t help?”
Brendon waited, eyes glued to the blank screen of the television, for Shane to either tell him his worries were useless or to tell him it was entirely possible. Instead, Shane just squeezed him once.
“Why don’t you try not to freak out about it until you actually meet him?” he asked reasonably.
“That’s probably a good idea,” Brendon muttered and Shane nodded sagely.
“I know. I’m a goddamn genius.”
He shifted a little, rising to his feet and leaving Brendon curled halfway into the back of the couch. Brendon was too lazy to move, even if he did already miss the warmth of his Shane-shaped pillow, so he just watched the other man move around the room, toeing on a pair of shoes and grabbing his keys and wallet off of the table.
“Where are you going?” Brendon asked curiously.
“You said you wanted chocolate nachos, right?” Shane said, lips curved up in a soft smile.
Brendon grinned and shook his hair out of his eyes. “Yeah, oh my God, those still sound amazing.”
“Then give me twenty minutes.” He grinned one more time before leaving.
Brendon bit his lip and stared after him for a long time.
Previous
Next
Brendon blinked up at him and shook his head frantically. “We are not,” he said, and Ryan glared at him.
“We are. You’re fucking . . .” he trailed off and waved a hand through the air to indicate ‘you’re pregnant’ and continued, “we need to figure some shit out. And where the fuck is your fucking doctor?”
Brendon hesitated to call Doctor Reed his doctor. He didn’t like the woman, he barely knew the woman, and he hadn’t seen her since Dr. Kuhn had left with the machine, which had been almost an hour ago. His head was hurting worse than ever and he wanted to sleep and wake up and realize this had all been a nightmare. A vivid and ridiculous nightmare brought on by too much weed and pizza before bed.
“We don’t have to cancel anything,” Brendon insisted, “I’m not dying.”
Ryan made a small, disgruntled sound, growled “talk to him,” into the mouthpiece, and then strode forward to shove the phone up to Brendon’s ear.
“Brendon, listen to your guitarist and get the fuck back to Vegas, okay? We’re getting a second opinion on this shit,” Pete said. He sounded more pissed off than Brendon had ever heard him.
“Because technology is so advanced doctors can fake sonograms now,” Brendon shot back, and Pete was eerily quiet for a long moment.
“Fuck,” he finally said, “just get your ass back here so we can figure out what the hell to do next.”
Brendon felt a little torn because on the one hand, he wanted for Pete and Ryan and Spencer to figure this whole thing out for him. They could tell him, “get an abortion, it’s for the good of the band,” and Brendon would do it because morals or no morals, he was good at pushing them aside if it was for a valid and particularly selfish reason. On the other hand, who the fuck did Pete think he was? Or Ryan, for that matter? It was Brendon’s body and Brendon’s fucking fetus or baby or whatever and it wasn’t their problem.
He thrust the phone back at Ryan and glared at him until he turned on his heel and left. It was a little unfair of him to have barged in anyway, especially when no one else seemed capable of coming back to see Brendon. They were all staying put on the other side of the curtain. Haley had joined them a while ago to give them an update since nobody had checked in after Dr. Kuhn left. Ryan was the first one to come in and actually talk to Brendon. If what had just happened between them could be called talking, which was actually stretching it quite a bit.
“I want to go home,” Brendon said, curling up on his side and facing Shane.
Shane nodded and leaned forward, brushing a hand through Brendon’s hair. “Yeah, I know. Soon, though.”
Brendon sighed and closed his eyes and the next time he opened them, Doctor Reed was walking in with Ryan, Spencer and Jon at her heels. She looked disgruntled and shaken, the least stoic she’d been all night, and crossed her arms over her chest.
“We need to discuss your options,” she said, cutting straight to the point.
Ryan, Spencer and Jon gathered around Brendon, careful not to look at or touch him, and Brendon bit his lip against another onslaught of completely random and pathetic tears as he sat up.
“Because this is such a . . . unique occurrence, we have no idea of knowing whether or not your body is capable of bringing this baby to term. You have a functioning uterus and what appears to be some kind of cervix, but no birth canal and so if you were to bring the baby to term, there would be serious complications in labor.”
“What kind of complications?” Brendon asked.
“Your body has provided no natural way for you to give birth. We could do a C-section and that would take care of it in theory, but as I said, there’s no real way of knowing.”
Brendon’s tongue felt thick in his mouth and he couldn’t make himself ask the question, but he didn’t have to. Jon did it for him.
“What about an abortion?” he asked curiously.
“There would still be some complications. We can’t give you a simple abortifacient because your body has no way of expelling the fetus. Any other traditional ways of performing an abortion wouldn’t work, either. We’d probably have to perform a surgical procedure.”
She said all of this matter-of-factly and Brendon felt cold and light-headed. He pressed a hand to his abdomen and thought about hands in latex gloves cutting him open and slicing away the little life he’d seen just minutes before on that black screen and he felt his shoulders tense.
“No way,” Spencer said, taking one look at Brendon’s face and shaking his head. “No way are you cutting him open for that.”
The doctor’s lips pursed and she said, “it would probably be a much safer procedure than to go through a high-risk pregnancy.”
She was just stating the facts, laying it all out there, but Brendon suddenly felt defensive.
“I think I’ll take my chances,” he said, and she blinked at him.
“Okay,” she said slowly, “if you’re sure, we’re going to need to assign a team of specialists to you. We’d like to keep you under observation and record every step of the pregnancy. We’ll also need to do some more tests so we can start to figure out how this happened.”
Her voice was clinical and it made Brendon uncomfortable. Everything about this doctor was focused on the science and as if Brendon didn’t hate shit like science enough already, he definitely wasn’t interested in being somebody’s experiment for the fucking fair.
He sat up straighter and said, “I let a guy fuck me, I got pregnant, end of story. I don’t think you need to know anything else.”
“I don’t think you understand the magnitude of this-”
Brendon swung his legs over the side of the bed and shook his head. “I don’t want to understand. I don’t give a fuck. I’m not letting you do a bunch of tests on me and I’m not living the next eight months under a microscope.”
He stood up, mostly steady on his feet, the sonogram clutched in one hand.
“You don’t know what kind of problems could arise during your pregnancy,” she reasoned. “You’ll need a team of doctors there to make sure that you and the baby stay healthy.”
“We’ll take care of him,” Ryan said, stepping in between the doctor and Brendon. “I just have one question: it’s safe for him to fly home, right?”
Doctor Reed hesitated before nodding, and Ryan curled an arm around Brendon’s shoulders and ushered him through the curtain. The doctor called after them once, but nobody looked back. They just walked right out of the hospital and into the hot, humid night.
_._
They got back to the hotel late and Brendon went to sleep immediately, glad for the first time that night that nobody seemed to know what to say to him. He was up in the middle of the night, like clockwork, throwing up in the small hotel bathroom. It was weird to know why, to rest a hand low against his belly and think baby. Brendon wasn’t sure he was ever going to get used to it because it was impossible, it was fucking ridiculous, and yet it was true.
He stood up and stared at himself blearily in the mirror and wondered just how his genes had gotten this fucked up. And then he wished desperately that he’d avoided that party in June, that he’d gone home with a girl instead of letting himself be played and fucked over by a guy. A guy whose name he didn’t even know. Brendon was like some kind of cautionary teenage pregnancy tale with the added bonus of “this is what happens if you have gay, unprotected sex” attached to the usual moral of the story.
It was stupidly ironic, Brendon thought, that he’d had sex with guys twice and both times he’d managed to brush it off and pretend it had never happened and now he didn’t have that option. There was no going back. He, Brendon Urie, had been fucked up the ass and now he was having some other dude’s baby. Maybe it was a strange Mormon curse, a way of knowing who was gay in the church, a way of weeding them out. It was certainly effective. Now anyone would be able to look at Brendon and know and all the work he’d done to hide it and ignore it and pretend it wasn’t there had been for nothing.
A sharp stinging in his palms brought Brendon back to the present, into the sour smelling bathroom with its harsh lighting, and he realized he’d been clenching his fists so hard his nails had cut into his skin. There were raw crescent moons in his palms when he uncurled his fingers, only two of them actually bleeding. He stared until his stomach stopped aching and until his head stopped swimming and forced himself to walk back out into the hotel room.
He made his way back to the bed he was sharing with Shane in the dark and buried himself under the blankets. He was curled up on the far side of the bed, but a hand snaked out and tugged him so that he rolled into Shane’s body.
“Hey,” Shane said, his voice sleepy and slow, “you okay?”
Brendon inhaled shakily and rested his head on Shane’s chest. “No,” he whispered.
Shane pulled him in tighter. “You know we’re gonna figure this out, right? We’re gonna take care of you.”
Brendon wrapped an arm around Shane’s midsection and didn’t say anything. They fell asleep that way and Brendon had nightmares, weird dreams that left him shaking and terrified when he jerked himself awake.
The next morning passed mostly in silence. It took Brendon about five minutes to figure out that Jon wasn’t talking to him, not just because he didn’t know what to say but because he was pissed. Brendon had been on the receiving end of the Jon Walker Silent Treatment often enough to know what it felt and looked like, and he was relieved when Jon didn’t linger in their hotel room for long before making himself scarce. It was just one more thing that Brendon didn’t want to deal with.
But that set the pattern for the rest of the morning. The others communicated with Brendon mostly through Shane. Brendon tried to be understanding; they didn’t know how to react to him and that made perfect sense. If Brendon had been in their shoes he would have done the same thing, probably. It still hurt, especially when they were all forced into the same space on the way to the airport and they still wouldn’t talk to him. They seemed to have gotten over their inability to look, though, and Brendon could feel their eyes on him all the way into the airport terminal.
Keltie was the first one to break the silence. She pulled away from Ryan’s side and sat next to Brendon, offering him a small smile.
“So,” she said slowly, “I’ve already got a game plan, Mr. Mom.”
Brendon snorted, some of the tension leaking from his shoulders, and raised his eyebrows. “Do share.”
She pulled out a sheet of hotel room note paper and snapped it in front of her dramatically.
“First things first, we need to get you a doctor who isn’t a cold, opportunistic bitch,” she said, her smile widening when Brendon nodded emphatically. “Second, prenatal vitamins. Those are really important for you and baby. Third, we are going to shop the hell out of Whole Foods. Fourth, we are demolishing the Ben & Jerry’s section at the grocery store. Are you having any weird cravings yet? Because that’s number five: satisfying your wacky pregnant cravings.”
Brendon said, “why does the game plan revolve around food?”
“I was kinda hungry when I wrote it,” she answered, eyes twinkling, and Brendon laughed for what felt like the first time in days even though it had only been hours. “Actually,” she said, folding the list and tucking it into the pocket of her jeans, “I didn’t come up with it on my own. I called my mom and told her a friend’s pregnant, what the fuck do we do now? So, it’s kind of the mommy list. She also suggested buying baby books? Like, What to Expect When You’re Expecting but that’s kind of the thing, right? We don’t know what to expect.”
Her eyes flickered down to Brendon’s belly which didn’t look all that different underneath his hoodie. It felt different, though. It was probably all in Brendon’s head because the baby, fetus, whatever, was too tiny to be felt. It had been making its presence known for the last few weeks, but anything could have made him puke and given him headaches and fatigue. This was different. Brendon was now hyperaware of his body in ways he’d never been before; he felt like there was a sixth sense growing, one that was attached to the life nestled deep inside of his body.
“This is so fucking crazy,” he said with a sigh.
“Well, yeah,” Keltie said, reaching out to rub his shoulder. “It’s . . . well, it takes a lot of getting used to.”
Brendon glanced at her sideways because if she was having a hard time, how did she think he felt? Her mouth twisted in sympathy.
“Of all the pregnancy scares I’ve gone through,” she said, “this is definitely the scariest.”
Brendon huddled deeper in his hoodie and tried not to think about it that way. It wasn’t a pregnancy scare anymore, it was an actual pregnancy. It was still fucking terrifying, but it would be okay. Right? He just had to keep telling himself that it would be okay.
_._
Pete was in Ryan’s condo when they got back to Vegas. Brendon seemed to be the only one who was surprised to see him sitting in the living room with Hobo in his lap. It wasn’t actually that unexpected in retrospect.
“Okay,” Keltie said, looking from Pete to Ryan to Brendon and back, “I think we’re going to run out and do some shopping.”
Haley nodded on Keltie’s other side and the two of them left the room quickly. Shane lingered awkwardly for a minute before following their lead, leaving Brendon alone with his band and his boss.
Pete said, “I’m really hoping this is an elaborate joke you guys are playing on me. If it is, you’re all fired, but that’s what I’m hoping.”
Brendon could feel everyone’s gaze swing to him and he winced, crossing his arms over his chest and trying to make himself as small as possible.
“It’s not a joke, Pete. It’s not fucking funny.”
Pete stared at him for so long Brendon started to feel himself shrinking, and then he said, “you can’t be fucking pregnant, dude, it’s fucking fifth grade science.”
“Yeah, well apparently fifth grade science doesn’t apply to me,” Brendon shot back.
Pete’s eyes widened and Brendon almost felt bad. And then Pete said, “okay, so how do we get rid of it?”
“What?” Brendon said, too shocked to believe what he’d just heard.
Pete flailed his arms a little and stood up. “Well, you can’t have it. You’re barely old enough to drink, let alone having a fucking baby. Not to mention the fact that you’re in a band,” he added, ticking the items off on his fingers, “you’re supposed to be going on tour in a few months, you know jack shit about babies, and, oh yeah, you’re a fucking dude.”
“Pete,” Ryan said slowly, but Pete held up his hand to hold him off.
“I’m talking to Brendon,” he said. “How do we get rid of it?”
Brendon was getting really tired of the fucking we that kept getting thrown around. Shane and Ryan had said we’ll take care of you, but so far nobody could even stand to look him in the eye. Pete was asking how we were going to get rid of the baby, but as far as Brendon knew, he was the only one pregnant.
“We don’t,” Brendon said quietly, and Pete’s jaw dropped.
“We- we what? What do you mean we don’t?”
“I mean,” Brendon told him slowly, “we don’t get rid of it. I’m not killing my fucking baby.”
“It’s not a baby, it’s a fucking fetus and chicks do it all the time,” Pete said, and Brendon was pretty sure he didn’t mean to be an asshole, but that was definitely what he was accomplishing in that moment.
“I’m not killing it,” Brendon said again, more steel in his tone this time.
“This is a fucking Mormon thing, isn’t it?” Pete said incredulously, and Brendon had never wanted to hit somebody so hard in his life.
“It doesn’t matter. It’s my fucking body, it’s my fucking baby, and nobody’s cutting me open to kill it. End of story.”
“Well then you’d better figure out what the future of your band is. I didn’t sign you so that you could fuck up and get yourself pregnant and then be an idiot about it later.”
Brendon could feel his cheeks heating up and he swallowed hard. He opened his mouth, unsure of what to say to that, but Jon cut in.
“Jesus, Pete, could you be a bigger asshole right now?” he asked, voice loud and with an edge to it that Brendon had never heard.
Pete glared at Jon and then looked back at Brendon and whatever he saw there caused him to deflate. His shoulders sagged and his head fell back until he was staring at the ceiling. Brendon chewed on his lip and jumped when Jon turned to him.
“And you! Fuck!” he said, yelling now. “How could you be so stupid?”
Brendon blinked. “I . . . oops?”
Jon’s eyes narrowed and his voice dropped about sixty degrees below zero. “You are so fucking lucky you’re pregnant because if it was HIV I would kill you. Wear a goddamn condom next time, you dumb shit.”
There was a moment of ringing silence and then Jon made a frustrated sound and turned on his heel to stalk off. Spencer reached out to stop him but he just jerked his arm away and said, “I need a minute.”
Brendon watched him go, his whole body cold and his back tensed to the point of pain.
“He has a point,” Spencer said softly.
His tone was misleading; when Brendon looked up, he was glaring just as hard as Jon had been.
“What do you want me to say?” Brendon asked, a little desperately.
“Maybe you could start with telling us when you started fucking guys in the first place,” Spencer told him, tucking his hands in his pockets, “because I don’t know about anyone else but that one was a surprise for me.”
Brendon sighed and ducked his head. “I don’t know, it was just the once,” he said, because he wasn’t going to tell them about Shane. That was totally irrelevant and none of their business. “I’m not gay,” he added.
Pete scoffed and Brendon lifted his head to frown at him.
“Well, you’re kind of pregnant,” Pete said, “so, I mean, sorry if I’m not buying the ‘I’m not gay’ line.”
“Okay,” Ryan said, “seriously, Pete, knock it off. Can we talk to Brendon alone?”
He made it sound like a question, but the way he looked significantly from Pete to the door indicated that it wasn’t so much a request as an order. Brendon didn’t breathe any easier when Pete left the room; he had a feeling that Pete was probably eavesdropping anyway, but at the very least he didn’t want the guy in charge of his band’s future making things any more tense than they already were.
The three of them stood in the middle of Ryan’s living room for a few minutes, not saying anything, not meeting each other’s eyes, and eventually Ryan asked, “are you going to keep it?”
Brendon hadn’t actually thought that far ahead. Just deciding to have the baby was scary enough; trying to decide whether or not to give it away to somebody else was almost too much to handle thinking about.
“I don’t know,” he said honestly.
“Well,” Ryan told him, voice calm, “you need to figure it out, because if you don’t keep it we just have to hold on for nine months. If not . . . we’ll have to see what happens with us.”
It was Ryan’s careful tone that told Brendon how scared he was. Ryan only ever spoke that cautiously, that matter-of-factly, when he thought something was going to be taken away from him. It was how he’d sounded when he first suggested that maybe they were going to have to accept the fact that Brent needed to be kicked out, like maybe that would be the last decision they ever made as a band. It was how he had told them about the biggest fight he and Keltie had ever had, like he was just waiting for her to call and tell him they were over.
Brendon had known Ryan long enough to recognize that it was his way of steeling himself for the inevitable heartbreak that he assumed was coming his way.
“Dude,” Brendon said, “this isn’t going to end the band. It’s not going to be over just because I have a baby,” he said as earnestly as possible. Ryan just looked at him and Brendon turned to Spencer imploringly. “It’s not,” he said again.
Their silence was more placating than anything, like they knew Brendon believed that and they didn’t want to tell him he was wrong. It was just way too much. Between Pete and Jon and now this, not to mention the part where he was pregnant, Brendon just couldn’t handle it anymore. He sat down heavily on Ryan’s couch, head in his hands.
“I can’t lose you guys,” he said, his eyes burning with frustrated tears. “I’ll give it away, okay, I promise, but this can’t be over yet.”
Brendon sat there, his head pounding, blinking back tears, terrified down to his bones that his fuck up was going to result in the end of his band, scared of what would happen if he couldn’t make music, couldn’t tour, couldn’t be with these guys nearly every day. He was trying so hard not to cry that he didn’t hear Jon come back in.
“What’d you do to him?” he asked, and he sounded overly casual so he was still pissed, but when Brendon lifted his head, Jon actually looked at him and there was warmth in his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” Brendon said softly, and then he said it again, looking at Ryan and Spencer, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.”
Jon crossed his arms and sighed, “don’t beat yourself up about it, okay? I hear wallowing in guilt isn’t good for unborn babies.”
Brendon smiled weakly. “You’re making that up.”
Jon just shrugged and looked pointedly at Ryan. They had developed this weird ability to look at each other and communicate without words, which had annoyed Brendon initially but he was getting used to it. Whatever they were saying to each other, it prompted Ryan to sit next to Brendon on the couch and nudge him with his shoulder.
“We’ll come up with a plan. In the meantime, you just need to take care of yourself and, you know, the baby.” He paused and then added, voice soft and uncertain but definitely determined, “you’re right. This isn’t going to be over. We’re not going to be over.”
Spencer sat on Brendon’s other side and tangled his fingers in Brendon’s hair. “Yeah. I mean, if Gwen Stefani can do it, you can too, right? She’s only got Gavin. You’ve got all of us.”
Brendon tilted his head until it was resting on Ryan’s shoulder and they all looked at Jon who finally, finally smiled.
“We’re gonna be uncles,” he said. “That’s kind of awesome.”
He sat down on Ryan’s other side and they all huddled together on the couch, arms tangled together, and for the first time since he’d gotten the news, Brendon felt like he could breathe.
_._
“Hey, did you know there’s a website called ‘What to Expect When You’re Expecting’?” Shane asked.
Brendon peeked into the living room to see him hunched over his laptop staring wide-eyed at the screen.
“You already bought the book,” Brendon pointed out, going back to searching the kitchen for something sweet and salty and maybe a little crunchy.
“Yeah, but the site’s interactive,” Shane said. “You totally need to register, though. Should I register you? You can have a pretty girl’s name. You can be Lola.”
Brendon laughed and rolled his eyes to himself. So far, Shane was handling this whole thing pretty well. He wasn’t the only one, but he was the only one who didn’t continually freak out and either call Brendon in the middle of the night to make sure he was still alive and well, or sit and stare at his midsection for awkwardly prolonged amounts of time. Shane claimed it was because he was good at compartmentalizing, whatever that meant. Brendon figured it was because Shane had smoked a lot of weed in his day and this was probably not the wackiest situation his brain had ever come up with.
“I don’t want to pretend to be a girl on a website,” Brendon said, and Shane made a small disappointed noise.
There was the distinct sound of fingers flying over computer keys and Brendon could only hope Shane was doing a new search and not trying to come up with a last name complimentary to Lola. Brendon left Shane to it and continued his fruitless search, turning up pudding cups, celery sticks, some other organic shit that Keltie and Ryan had insisted on buying for him, a ton of saltine crackers (the morning sickness wasn’t letting up and those were Brendon’s favorite way of making it bearable), and other assorted snacks but nothing that was, at once, sweet, salty and crunchy.
“I would kill for some pretzels,” Brendon groaned, leaving the kitchen and flopping onto the couch next to Shane. “Like, really salty pretzels and chocolate icing. Do you know what I would do for those?”
“Um,” Shane said, glancing up from his laptop, “since you just said you’d kill for some, I’m going to guess it involves homicide.”
“Really violent homicide,” Brendon agreed. “Or, oh shit, you know what would be even more awesome than that? Tortilla chips and chocolate frosting.”
“I was cool with the pretzels, the pretzels sounded good, but you are really grossing me out, now.”
“No, no,” Brendon said, leaning forward to try and get Shane to see what an amazing idea it was, “it would be like fucking nachos, but with chocolate. And for toppings there could be, like, sprinkles. Oh, and honey roasted peanuts.”
Shane raised his eyebrows and said, “what, no jalapeños?”
Brendon wrinkled his nose. “Don’t be disgusting.”
Shane laughed and Brendon would have felt a little awkward about it except for the fact that he wasn’t really being laughed at, not in any way that made him self-conscious. Shane was actually really hard to feel self-conscious around which had always been the case. Despite the fact that he was cooler than Brendon would ever be in so many ways, he’d never made Brendon feel like less of a person, or whatever. It wasn’t like high school when Brendon always knew he was never going to be able to compete with other boys his age. It wasn’t even like with Ryan and Spencer and Jon where Brendon knew he was always going to be the immature spaz.
Shane just let Brendon be himself and he didn’t ever seem to have a problem with it. Somehow he was carrying that over into this, the being pregnant thing, and Brendon was both grateful for it and awed by it. Not even his bandmates had made him feel this comfortable in his own skin. Truth be told, Brendon felt more comfortable about the whole thing when he was with Shane than when he was by himself. By himself he wanted to freak out, with Shane he was okay with just . . . living with it.
Brendon rested his head on Shane’s shoulder and watched him google baby names. It was way too early to be thinking of those, and Brendon had already expressly stated that he wasn’t going to even consider naming the baby until much, much further down the line, but Shane liked looking at them anyway. He wasn’t the only one; Ryan liked them, too, and Brendon was pretty sure they’d been texting possible names to each other for the last week. He couldn’t prove it, but he was almost positive.
“Pete said he found a doctor,” Brendon said quietly.
Shane paused and then closed his computer and leaned back against the couch. “Yeah?”
“Yep,” Brendon said, following him and resettling against his side. “He called this morning to tell me about this doctor he found who did some work with abnormal pregnancies and stuff. He’s supposed to be really good. And discreet.”
“When are you gonna meet him?” Shane asked.
“This weekend.” He paused and then added, “What if he tells me I can’t do this? What if he can’t help?”
Brendon waited, eyes glued to the blank screen of the television, for Shane to either tell him his worries were useless or to tell him it was entirely possible. Instead, Shane just squeezed him once.
“Why don’t you try not to freak out about it until you actually meet him?” he asked reasonably.
“That’s probably a good idea,” Brendon muttered and Shane nodded sagely.
“I know. I’m a goddamn genius.”
He shifted a little, rising to his feet and leaving Brendon curled halfway into the back of the couch. Brendon was too lazy to move, even if he did already miss the warmth of his Shane-shaped pillow, so he just watched the other man move around the room, toeing on a pair of shoes and grabbing his keys and wallet off of the table.
“Where are you going?” Brendon asked curiously.
“You said you wanted chocolate nachos, right?” Shane said, lips curved up in a soft smile.
Brendon grinned and shook his hair out of his eyes. “Yeah, oh my God, those still sound amazing.”
“Then give me twenty minutes.” He grinned one more time before leaving.
Brendon bit his lip and stared after him for a long time.
Previous
Next