Lily Fox (artisticbouquet) wrote in genome_project, @ 2010-05-20 22:56:00 |
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Current mood: | worried |
Entry tags: | may 2010 |
Who: Alec and Lily Fox
What: Lily investigates why she isn't feeling so hot
When: Tuesday 18th May (backdated to before the drama)
Rating: Low (but there's talk of pregnancy)
Three minutes isn't a very long time. Not in the grand scheme of things. One hundred and eighty seconds in comparison with an hour is nothing. It should have passed in the blink of an eye. But when those three minutes were spent staring at two sticks waiting for them to determine the course of your life? Well, then three minutes feels a lot like eternity.
Lily Fox blew out a breath and put the sticks down on the top of the cistern. She stared at them some more. Somewhere in the recesses of her mind she could hear her mother's voice scolding her 'A watched pot never boils, Lily'. For the first time in a long time, Lily thought that maybe her mother was right about something. Really, she needed to do something to distract herself. But what if she missed the change? What if she turned her attention away and missed the symbol appearing? The other sticks around her had already given their answer. It was all pinned down on these last two. She wanted to use them all, just to be sure. The more she used and checked, the less chance of it being wrong, right? Before she bothered Laura with this. She wished her husband were in the bathroom with her. She clasped the sink with both hands and just watched them a little more. Nothing was happening. She glanced at the door. She really wished Alec was here.
Instead, he was downstairs, probably completely concerned about the state of his wife's mental health. After all, she had come home from the pharmacy with a paper bag filled with eight home pregnancy tests. She hadn't at all sounded confident or happy when she'd seen him, saying weakly, "Hey, I'll just- I'm just going up-" and then she'd kind of just disappeared up the stairs.
A very large part of her wished that Alec would come up to check she was okay. Not that he could get in, the bathroom door was locked. She changed her mind a second later and turned her back briefly to unlock the door. She was in the ensuite bathroom off the master bedroom. There was no worry of Luke coming in.
A glance at her watch told her that only a minute had passed. She looked at the ceiling, then at the other sticks. They all said the same thing. She didn't know what she wanted the two in front of her to say. She desperately wanted them to agree with the others, but at the same time, she was scared. If they did, though, then she was pretty positive that the answer was right.
Lily's hand touched the handle, pulling it open slightly before another glance at her watch made her change her mind and she pushed it shut again. No point leaving the room now. Two minutes to go. She wouldn't miss the symbol fading in. Whatever the symbol happened to be.
She wasn't entirely sure how long she'd been in the bathroom, listening to the ticking of her watch. It had to have been about half an hour since she'd had to wrestle with the packing, and the first six sticks she did one at a time, waited in agonising silence for the results. She sat down heavily on the closed toilet lid (because her household had the seats down, no matter how much her husband and son may protest) and stared at them a little more. As if that would make a difference.
It felt like she had waited for so long that all the air had been sucked out of the room in her aniticipation by the time the symbols faded in.
They read: + +
She felt shell shocked and excited, terrified and ridiculously happy. Contradicting emotions that the scientist in her was telling her to reign in and get under control. The woman won out for now though: she could tell Alec. She should tell Alec. He should know. She needed to text Nora and Quinn. God, she needed to tell Luke. She was going to have a baby.
She'd crossed over to the door and opened it again when she had to sit back down because she was overcome with a kind of light-headedness.
"Alec?" she called, hating that now that what was happening had sunk in, she was staring to feel - and sound - a little frightened. "Alec?!"
To be completely honest his wife's behaviour as of late had been both erratic and worrying, especially as she seemed determined not to make eye contact and had rushed into the house with a bag clutched to her chest.
Women, as much as Alec thought he knew about them there were still some things he would never ever understand. And then there was the fact she'd been texting somebody the other day and at some point during the text conversation she'd gone a strange shade of white before muttering that she needed some air at which point she vanished.
He may or may not have been watching the bathroom like a hawk, avoiding the hallway when Lily peeked her head out, squinting around the corner a second later. What? He was worried, his wife was acting weird and he wasn't sure what was going on.
It was only when Lily called his name in that sharp shrill kind of way that he moved from his lurking position, hurrying to the bathroom. He didn't bother knocking, he just opened the door, ready to... well, he'd work that out in a second.
Lily looked up from where she was sat on the closed toilet seat. She blinked up at her husband, reaching out and picking up one of the sticks that were around their bathroom, on the counter, on the sink... (all on tissues because Lily didn't like the idea of pee'd on stick spreading across counters unchecked).
"Look at this," she said softly, holding it out to Alec. The square inside the main body of the stick had a small symbol in it, the same as all the others. She had tested positive. She chewed her lower lip. They'd talked about a baby, hypothetically. That they might want one at some point, a biological baby of their own. But she was surprised. She was having a baby. And it wasn't like they weren't safe. It would be ridiculously ironic if they hadn't been considering the repeated things they'd told Luke.
Once Alec had taken it, she was expecting the confusion that would follow. It had taken her three tries of reading the leaflet before she worked out just what it meant. The information was contradictory at first glance. "They all say the same thing. All eight of them."
Alec's gaze flicked from one stick to another, noting the amount and all the placements, apparently she'd been doing this a while. Eventually his eyes found his wife in all the madness of what could only be pregnancy sticks.
He ventured into the bathroom and took both stick and leaflet, tilting his head as his gaze narrowed on the instructions. For crying out loud he could put a table together in less than ten minutes, knew how to change a tyre, could rewire the house, even program the DVD player, and yet he he was fumbling with the instructions on a simple (hah!) pregnancy test.
It was only after he worked it out that his eyes widened and he looked up at Lily. "You're..."
"Yeah," Lily said softly, nodding her head. Her lower lip was snagged by her teeth as she looked up at him. Nerves sat behind her eyes, along with a kind of excitement. "I am." She glanced at another couple of the stick before she just held her hands out for Alec.
He didn't look freaked out, but then her husband was like a swan: calm and graceful on the surface and kicking furiously under it. Sometimes he was very easy to read, other times? Not so much. Right now, apart from her knowledge that he was frustrated with the ridiculous instructions, she didn't quite know what was going through his mind.
"We're gonna- it-" she wet her lower lip and tilted her head at her husband. She took a deep breath. She hadn't said it aloud. "I'm pregnant."
Alec swallowed hard and just looked at the stick again, mind whirring as he tried to work out how this had happened, they were always so safe. He placed both stick and instructions to one side and closed the distance between himself and his wife, taking a hold of both her hands.
He pulled her to her feet and into his arms, curling them tightly around her before kissing her temple. Give him a second and he'd be able to work out how he was feeling, he certainly wasn't... as freaked out or worried as he thought he would be if he was given this news.
"You're pregnant," he repeated quietly before his lips curled in the corners and he leaned back to cup her face in both hands. "You're pregnant, beautiful. You're having a baby. We're having a baby. This is- This is incredible."
Lily hugged him as his arms went around her. She hid her face in his chest and just breathed, letting his touch reassure and comfort her before she met his eyes again, feeling his hands on her face. She curled her fingers around his wrists, sliding her touch up his arms and to his shoulders before her hands moved restlessly down his sides.
"We're having a baby," she repeated, standing up on her toes to press her lips against Alec's in a brief kiss. Her hands rested at his hips, squeezing gently as she leaned back from the chaste kiss. Her heart was thumping behind her ribs. Nerves and excitement and love warred for the opportunity to be the dominant emotion. "You and me, we're- I'm pregnant, Alec."
Alec's smile couldn't have been bigger if he'd tried and his genuine delight was evident in the depths of his blue grey eyes. "This is- This is fucking amazing, Lily." He always thought he'd be scared or nervous when a woman told him that she was pregnant with his baby, but right now that couldn't have been further from his mind if he tried. He was just... exhilirated.
He pulled Lily close and placed a slow very loving kiss on her lips, only pulling back to exhale a soft laugh, one that came from the depths of his chest. "God, baby, this is incredible."
Lily mimicked the laugh, feeling relief coursing through her, even as she kept her lips against his. She opened her eyes to look up at him and pressed a kiss to his chin and then tucked her head into the crook of her husband's neck, nose nudging his throat. "I love you," she mumbled against his skin, resting the hand that wasn't curled loosely in the back of his shirt against his chest, feeling the strong beating of his heart underneath her palm.
She smiled and pressed a kiss to Alec's pulse. "So much." She thought about Luke, how would he react to knowing that she was pregnant? That they would be having another child? There was a big age gap, she wondered if that was a good thing or a bad one... What if they sucked with raising a biological child? Her fingers curled a little tighter in Alec's shirt, the hand against his chest flexing a couple of times, restlessly. "I need to make an appointment with Laura."
"I love you too," Alec answered easily as he held Lily close and basked in the fact they were having a kid. An actual child, one of their own.
He nodded his head. "Yeah, definitely. Find out the way forward and what we need to do to bring a nice healthy baby into the world." Alec already had it in his mind to rip apart his study to make room for a baby room as it wasn't like they had another room for it. His study was great, but a baby room would be better.
Lily's eyes flashed and then her expression pulled into a frown. She even took half a step backwards and put her hands flat on her stomach. It was still flat at the moment, no sign of a baby bump. Not yet. It would take a while. She brushed her thumb over her shirt and looked down at her stomach, like she was protecting it from some invisible enemy.
"They can't have it."
Alec moved the moment he realised what Lily was afraid of and simply wrapped his arms around her, pulling her close. "It's okay, Lily. They're not going to touch our baby." And with that he kissed her head and held her closer than ever before.
They were having a baby, their very own baby.