What’s happening to me ?
Title: What’s happening to me ?
Prompt: Pregnancy (male or female)
Fandom/Characters: Doctor Who: Pete’s world. John Smith (10.5), Rose Tyler, and an alternate Jack.
Medium: fic
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: None that I can think of.
Summary : Rose and John are living happily together in Pete’s world, but one day the missing piece shows up.
Word count: 1025 more or less.
Note: This challenge is taking me to very strange places. There will be three sequels to this fic. All written for Schmoop Bingo.
Beta: rabecka
Jack woke up slowly. Two hands were entwined on his belly and neither of them was his. It felt nice being cared for like this. It was something he wasn’t going to get tired of anytime soon. Just thinking about it brought tears to his eyes.
As if he sensed Jack’s change of mood, John moved a bit closer, crowing him on his left side. On the other side, Rose snuggled into is shoulder. He was nicely trapped but had to go to the loo. He tried to carefully disengage the two hands, so to crawl gently out of the bed without waking his two partners. He failed miserably.
John gave him a questioning look.
“Baby’s playing with my bladder,” he mumbled.
John gave way, and Jack went to release the pressure. As he went to wash his hand he found himself face to face with the large bathroom mirror and didn’t recognise the man looking back at him.
He looked more like a big eunuch-slug than the fit 51st century male he remembered. Not that he was really fat, no he was only five months on, and had lost a lot of weight during the first two months. But the hormones had given him feminine characteristics, and not in the good way. He was kind of flaccid as if all his muscle had melted. Even his splendid jaw line was now sloppy. The only thing still firm was his expending belly.
“Hey, sweetheart, wanting the place,” a still sleepy Rose mumbled from behind him. “You’re gorgeous,” she added tenderly hugging him before heading for the loo.
Rose was pregnant too. Two months. And she was amazingly beautiful.
At the very beginning, three month ago, when they had adopted him so thoughtfully, he had believed they were only interested in the baby. Rose and John had been together for five years but had no kids. It turned out that they just hadn’t had time to truly think about it. Jack’s arrival changed that and now Rose was pregnant too.
Even so, he was still there, still cared for as he had never been in his whole life, not even during his childhood. So why was he still feeling out of place, with that knot of insecurity gnawing perpetually in the pit of his stomach?
“Hey, coming back to sleep?” Rose said, taking his hand to lead him back into the bed.
He sighed. He was not going to cry again. He was tired of crying, weeping with no reason at all, all day long. He bit hard on his lower lip. How could they bear it? He managed to get back to the middle of the bed without losing it. It was his place, as if they were afraid he’d run away in the middle of the night. At least, he had stopped being sick. He settled comfortably between his two lovers and released a new sigh as John arranged the duvet on top of them.
................................
“So, how are you doing?” the medic asked.
“You’re the doc. You tell me.” Jack answered.
Doctor Owen Harper was the Institute medic watching over Jack’s pregnancy. Jack hated to have to come to the Institute; it made him feel like he was some sort of freak.
“Still jumpy?”
“I’m not jumpy. Rose is jumpy,” Jack answered. “As for me, I’m just annoyingly weepy.”
“No improvement?”
He sighed. In fact, lately he was sighing more often than he was crying.
“Perhaps,” he admitted reluctantly.
“Your hormonal levels are stabilising. It should become better every day now,” Harper said. “Did you choose a name?”
“Tino.”
The medic looked up from his file, with a questioning stare.
“That a boy name,” the medic said, “In fact it’s not even a name, but-“
“I like Tino, and John and Rose like it too.” In fact, Rose and John had also tried to tell him that Tino wasn’t a good match for a baby girl, but probably got so tired of seeing him cry that they gave up before it came to that again.
“Okay. So let’s have a look at little Tino,” the medic said beckoning him to an alien scanner. “No other disturbing side effects?” he asked.
“Besides getting up twice a night to go to the loo, weeping like a three-year-old, not being able to see my dick, which by the way, is failing me undisputedly? No nothing new.”
“You didn’t mention the nausea,” the medic noted. “Does that mean, it stopped?”
“Let’s just say that, I managed to keep my last three breakfasts.”
“That’s an improvement, no?”
“Yeah, may be.” Jack said, studying the image on the monitor.
“Looks like little Tino is doing fine,” the medic said, not turning off the scan. “I got someone waiting in the other room, I’ll be back in five minutes,” he said, and leaving the room he added “You two need a little privacy.”
Jack was not really listening. He was going to have a baby. Until now, he’d always avoided looking the screen, not wanting to acknowledge the small human being growing in his belly. Finding out that he was pregnant had been a shock; male pregnancy was highly risqué even in his time, and as a defence mechanism he had blocked out this part. He was going to be a mum. This time when the tears came, they didn’t force their way out, threatening to overwhelm him once again. No, they just gently ran down his cheeks.
He was feeling disturbingly happy.