Who: Tony and Nat W What: The twins see double… lines. On the pregnancy test. Oh dearrr. When: Saturday morning, 9 March 2019. Very early morning. Where: Nat's house. Warnings: Minor reference to abortion.
Tony'd had to double-check the photo Nat had sent him multiple times over the past ten minutes before he could believe he was seeing what he thought he was seeing. He hadn't actually had much sleep -- he and Kent had left karaoke for Kent's (very securely privacy-warded) bunkhouse room before midnight, but sleep hadn't been in the cards until quite a lot later than that -- but now he was wide awake. He'd tossed his clothing haphazardly back on while still not quite taking it all in, had not managed to do a thing about his hair or the prominent hickey on his neck, and on the whole he looked like a debauched mess as he apparated into their entryway.
"Nat," he called, flinging his coat off onto the nearest chair, which it promptly slid off of. "Nat!"
Nat had done pretty much nothing for the last fifteen minutes put pace the length of the house, except occasionally trying to sit down on the couch. That always lasted no more than thirty seconds, because the three pregnancy tests she'd taken had been tossed on the coffee table, and somehow having them in her vision made it worse. As if anything could make it worse.
Tony's voice drew her back into the living room, but she still couldn't make herself stop moving—or even really look at her brother. "I'm here. I'm fine." She wasn't fine. How could she be fine? But she was physically fine, unlike the previous evening when nothing more than a few sips of her usual drink had seemed to settle poorly on her stomach and then ended very unpleasantly once she got back home. "I'm freaked the fuck out, but I'll get over that, right? It's no big deal. Except what the hell, Tony? I mean. What. The. Hell. This is not a thing that's supposed to happen."
Tony stepped up in front of her and took her shoulders to stop her pacing. "Hey. Hey, hey, hey, hey. It's gonna be…" He couldn't say the word okay, because he honestly couldn't believe this wasn't some kind of big cosmic error that they would laugh about later. Instead he just pulled her into a tight hug, shaking his head. "Are you sure? There could be a mistake, right? Because how… I mean, who... I mean, it's got to be a mistake. Right?"
"No, it's not a mistake," Nat said, shaking her head against his shoulder and finally pulling back to turn her miserable expression up at him. She gestured to the coffee table. "I took three. Three. I had to apparate to Billings twice because I only bought one the first time. Because I was sure I had to be wrong."
But she hadn't been wrong. She should have known better, but who in their right mind didn't doubt undesirable outcomes at first, even if the evidence was to the contrary? "I've felt a bit off lately, but I didn't really think much about it. More tired, other things have been off...." She loved her brother and told him pretty much everything, but she had to draw the line at talking about her period with him. That was just...weird. "But then Stevie's cookies at dinner on Wednesday, and last night with the drink...."
She knew she was rambling, not making entirely coherent statements, so she supplemented by pulling her phone from her pocket and showing him the last webpage she'd viewed. "The asshole, of course," she added belatedly, realizing that she hadn't answered the question of who. "He's the only one."
Tony grabbed Nat's phone from her and scrolled down, his eyes and mouth both gaping at what he read. Okay, she had been a little weird lately complaining about the taste of things she usually liked… but that didn't mean pregnant. (No, the stack of positive tests on the table meant pregnant, and three false positives was probably a stretch to assume.) "Oh," he said weakly, and "oh" again a moment later as he absorbed more of what she was saying. "But Nat… that hasn't been since before Christmas, so how… you've been pregnant this whole time?" He gave her a dismayed face. "How did we not notice?"
He glanced down at her stomach like it would have suddenly grown a baby bump since last night. But she didn't look any different, except for exhausted and stressed out. Tony took a deep breath, trying to get his mind to calm down from the thoughts that filled it: Nat is pregnant. Nat is pregnant? Nat is PREGNANT. (We're going to have a baby!) NAT is PREGNANT?!.
He squeezed her shoulders again. "Okay. Okay, we'll… we'll figure this out. First, um… what do we do first? Do you need to get to a healer? Is that something you're supposed to do?"
"I know it's been since before Christmas." Nat groaned, because that was exactly the question she'd been asking herself: how hadn't she noticed? But the truth was that she had noticed, but all of the signs were small enough in and of themselves that she'd chalked them up to other things. It wasn't until they'd piled up so high that she suddenly wasn't able to ignore them that it had occurred to her that maybe there was a unified explanation. "Trust me, I'm very aware. I did say I'm an idiot. Though apparently not the only one, which makes me feel only minutely better. Google it. Hundreds of stories, some even worse than this one." Like the ones who hadn't realized until they were giving birth. Madness!
She laughed, and though it had a tinge of hysteria to it, it still felt good. "Now I know I'm in trouble if you're the one asking the sensible questions. I've skipped right over those and gone to the biggest question of all, which is: what the hell am I going to do with a baby? A baby, Tony!"
"A baby," he repeated, and felt a tiny swell of amazed giddiness in his stomach at the thought of it. As shocking and uncertain as this was, the idea of having a little one made him feel all kinds of warm, gooey feelings. He ran his hands over Nat's shoulders soothingly, pushing those feelings away to think about later. "Well… I don't exactly know, but we'll figure it out. Anything you need, I'll always be here. No matter what you decide."
Tony hesitated for a moment before asking, his voice a little softer. "Did you think about whether… if you want to keep it?"
Tony's words didn't exactly make Nat feel any better, mostly because they weren't anything new. She knew he'd be there; there was never a doubt in her mind about that. His question gave her pause, though, and she looked up at him again with a furrowed brow. "I hadn't thought about...well, that, honestly." Could she? It wasn't as if she'd ever researched any of this before, but she was pretty sure there were timeframes involved, and by her count this was three months in already....
She was quiet for a moment, and then finally shook her head. "I can't...do that. I know it's not the same, but it'd feel too much like...." She gestured between them, the words lost between her head and her mouth—or maybe swallowed by her heart. Maybe she hadn't wanted it, but that wasn't the baby's fault. Wasn't that what she'd told herself about her parents all these years?
Tony frowned at her gesture to the two of them, knowing what she was implying and not liking it. He tugged her in for another close hug, cupping the back of her head for a moment. "Okay," he said finally. "Then… we're gonna have this baby in, what, six months? We'll figure it all out by then. But first we should get you to a healer and find out what we should be doing to keep her healthy. Don't you need, like, vitamins? And, oh my god, you've been drinking this whole time. But that's not as bad as they used to say, right? And we'll talk to Jesse and find out how much time you can take off once she comes. Oh my god, Nat, I'm going to be an uncle. You're going to be a mom!"
It was a lot to take in, and he hadn't entirely processed it all yet. He did stop to have a passing thought that in order to have a baby, first there had to be a father, and he released Nat to look down at her. "Are you gonna tell him?"
Nat clung to him, because there was little else she could do when they were discussing this. They were actually discussing this. A baby. She was having. A baby. The mention of Jesse sent her brain off in a whole new panicked direction, not because of telling him, but because of the implications attached to work. The excitement in Tony's voice was enough to push that down for the moment, but she knew it wasn't going to stay away for long. "I'm assuming it's the healer's job to tell me all that stuff." Then his phrasing hit her, and she pulled away to look at him, raising an eyebrow. "Her, huh?"
And that sense of weirdness hit her again. That there was even something that needed a gender attached to it.
She sighed and ran a hand over her face. "I should, shouldn't I?" Her ex may have been an asshole, but that didn't make him a generally bad person. And much like the other, she wouldn't deprive a child of knowing its father, if there was a chance that it could. She groaned. "I really, really don't want to talk to him. Why can't this be the sort of thing where a text message is appropriate?"
"Well… you don't have to tell him right now. You could send a letter or something, or I could talk to him for you, but we'll figure that out later, okay?" Tony couldn't imagine, if an unplanned baby happened to him, not wanting to be involved every step of the way, but those were thoughts for later, too.
He kissed Nat's temple and pulled back to smile at her. his gaze dropping again to her stomach. Nope, still no extra roundness, even if it felt like there should be. "I just can't call her an 'it'. That's my niece in there. Or she can be a nephew if she wants. She can be whatever she wants." That melty warmth was really hard to push down, the more they talked and the realer this whole thing got. He was getting a little choked up just thinking about it, and his eyes were a little damp as he added, soft and awed, "Oh my god, Nat. We're having a baby."
Later sounded good. It sounded very good. She only had so much capacity to handle the things that were starting to pile onto her, and talking to her ex was not one she cared to prioritize.
"Oh no, don't go doing that," Nat said, and leaned forward to rest her forehead on his shoulder. She wasn't hiding the fact that her eyes had gone a little wet, too, but rather giving herself a moment to find composure again. Except, how could she be composed? So much was swirling through her mind, from the repercussions on her life to doubts of her own abilities to wishing she could make her feelings come out in that tone that her twin had.
"Thanks for coming home," she said instead, because while emotions attached to this baby—BABY!—were still very mixed up, there was nothing confusing about just how much she needed Tony right now. Always did, really, but especially now. "Sorry for dragging you out of Blake's bed so early." She managed a rather watery chuckle of amusement at the tease.
Tony sucked in a shaky breath, smoothing Nat's hair back from her face as she leaned against him. "Anytime. I mean it, literally, anytime, anywhere." She already knew that, but it didn't hurt to say it out loud. "And Kent will be fine missing me for a while. Always leave 'em wanting more, right?" He smiled, blinking the bit of moisture out of his eyes. "Anyway, we're thinking about you today. And your baby. So let's go to a healer first thing and make sure we know what we're dealing with, okay? You want to see one on the reserve, or should we go out to Laramie?" He raked his hand through his hair, and winced as his fingers brushed over a sensitive spot under his ear where Kent had sucked a bruise into his skin last night. "We could go this morning, I've just got to shower. And, uh, put on some bruise paste."
Nat managed to get the tears under control and pushed back from him once again. "You do look pretty thoroughly 'roughed up' this morning," she said with a snort of a laugh and a light shove to his shoulder. "So yes, please do get cleaned up. Though...you really don't have to come with me. I mean, I know I'm a mess right now, but I'm really still capable of getting myself to a healer."
Right now. This morning. Good god, this was moving fast. She pressed a hand over her eyes. "But yes, in town is fine. Not like it'll be secret for long. Let's get this over with. Then I've got some plans to make. Revise. Ugh. Not thinking about that yet." She kissed Tony on the cheek. "I'm going to get ready, too. Then let's do this."