InsaneJournal

“It’s...an adjustment.”
Who: Sam Nishimura, Lara Croft, Claudine Renko
What: Sam's growing a life! Possibly.
When: 7/1
Where: Croft Manor, then the clinic.
Rating/Warnings: PG, Mild warnings for medical stuff.
Status: Complete!


The trip to Japan had been equal parts amazing and terrible. Sam wasn’t really sure which side it all landed on when things were said and done, especially in the face of the information Dr. Renko had given her.

Sure, there was the possibility that it was completely nothing at all, and Sam liked to daydream that that possibility was real. But the truth of the matter was that she’d kind of been feeling like shit. More tired than nauseous, though there’d been a few mornings where she really just wanted to stay in bed until her stomach stopped fucking with her. So far, she’d managed to cover her illness with excuses of jet lag, but Sam Nishimura was horrible at hiding certain things.

And this was definitely one of the certain things she was bad about hiding. The longer Sam thought about the idea that she might be pregnant, the more suspicious she started acting. At the moment, she was flipping through a gigantic binder of contracts, nervously pretending that absolutely nothing was wrong. At all. Nope, nothing was going on in her head at all.

Lara had pocky in her mouth as she came down the stairs, carrying fifteen pounds of books and thirty pounds of paper, carefully arranged to allow her to actually see where she was going. She walked past Sam on the couch, paused, and backed up, turning her head towards her lover. She looked just about the way she should, hair just a little tousled and pulled into a messy ponytail, and an ink smudge on her cheek. “All right, what’s wrong?”

"Uhm... oh, nothing, sweetie!" Sam deflected, while darting her eyes off to the side. Of course, something was obviously still wrong when she did that, and it was a 50% chance that she knew it. Sam wasn't always clued in to her own behaviour.

She held up a contract, "I was just going over all of the contracts and information. This wedding planning crap is so much more complicated than I thought it was. You know?"

Lara was, of course, being adorable. Sam realised that when she finally looked up from her gigantic binding of Wedding Doom(tm), and she couldn't help but hop off the couch to straighten Lara's hair out and make sure she didn't drop something. She rose a little too quickly and flailed one of her arms in the air, then tried to cover the motion by extending it out into a yawn, "Man, I'm sooo tired. We should get a coffee or something sweet or maybe a bubble tea. Tea. We should get tea."

If Lara hadn’t been suspicious before, she was now. Sam was failing completely at playing it cool. She just had to find out what was actually going on. Was there a problem with the wedding? Had funding for the next expedition fallen through? Did she smash something valuable? She hadn’t lost a camera or something because she’d be wailing like a baby.

“You want tea?” She quirked her eyebrows. “Sam, you only drink tea when we’re camping or when something bad happened.” Which was an amusing correlation.

"I don't know, it's kind of strange, isn't it? But I could really go for some tea right now. And something..." Sam squinted one eye a bit as she tried to figure out what it was she was craving exactly. "Something else. But I'm not sure what. Not sweets. Oranges? No. Uhm. Watercress sandwiches!"

Watercress sandwiches? Really? Who the hell even ate that? Her mother when she was trying to maintain her figure, maybe.

“What?” Lara nearly dropped her load. She moved over to a table to free her arms, then turned on Sam and grabbed her by the biceps and lifted her up so she couldn’t escape. She kissed her, but didn’t let go. “Okay Sam, what has gotten into you?”

"Hey!" Sam's fit skidded a bit, but she only put up a token fight before she was smooching Lara and then trying to come up with some kind of answer. Which mainly involved staring at Lara like a deer in someone's headlights, "How do you know that anything's wrong? I'm totally, perfectly normal right now. Everything is so very okay! It's like... better than okay. It's SUPER AWESOME."

Lara tapped Sam’s nose. “You’re being dodgy. Do I have to get it out of you or are you going to be stubborn?” She slid her hands down Sam’s side and into prime tickling position, but kept them deceptively still. “I’m going to count to ten.”

"Oh god no, not the tickling! That's not faiiiiir," Sam whined, and kept herself as still as she could, too, so that her body wouldn't come into accidental contact with Lara's hands. Even if they weren't tickling yet, they were primed to. She had to be extra careful!

But she still wasn't sure how to tell Lara what she was suspecting. How did you say something like that!? She'd had a pregnancy scare a few times when she was younger, sure, but that had been a completely different kind of conversation.

Conversations that usually led to Lara lecturing Sam about safe sex. She leaned in and smirked. “You have no choice, Samantha Nishimura. Spill it.”

Oh god, Lara was so close to her face and so very on to her. Sam suddenly felt a little nauseous. Nausea? Shiiit.

"IthinkI'mpregnant," she blurted, before she could puke all over Lara. Because that would be even worse than... really, just about anything else.

“Very funny.” Lara slipped her arms around Sam’s waist. “Pull the other one, Sam. Now what’s really going on?”

"That's what's really going on!" Sam shouted, flailing her arms in the air. She couldn't really blame Lara for not believing her, but really? Was it that hard to believe after living in Orange County for as long as they had?

She nodded her head down at her stomach, "The doctor found elevated hormone levels and then like... I don't even remember when my last period was, and I keep feeling kind of crappy, and randomly dizzy, and then like ... Okay I know it sounds stupid but I swear to god."

“...Sam, you can’t...you just can’t possibly be…” Lara started to turn as white as a sheet. “Oh no. Oh no, it was just a few days!” Barring some kind of divine intervention, there had been the whole stuck in a male body mess but the universe couldn’t possibly be that cruel. “Maybe you’re just sick!”

"It only takes one time! Any sex education class tells you that, Lara!" Sam shouted, annoyed. Mainly that Lara was trying to deny being the 'baby daddy'. Since... it wasn't like she'd been sleeping with anyone else this entire time.

"I should have made us use protection but I wasn't really thinking very clearly... But I'm not just sick! I don't think I'm just sick, anyway. I mean... we should probably get a test at least."

“I know that, but the… God we were so stupid!” Lara’s hands went up into her hair and she started to tug and tangle it as the full ramifications of what was happening hit her. Lara backed into the wall. She felt for a moment, helpless. Then she sighed and squared. “Right. Test. No use panicking until we know for sure. Then we can figure out what to do from there.”

Sam wasn't actually sure if she was as horrified over this as Lara seemed to be. A baby was a huge life changer, of course, and there was a lot of inconvenience there. Like what would they do about the wedding? What would they do about Lara's expeditions?

It was definitely scary. But Sam thought as long as Lara kept her head, they could get through anything, "Hey, it'll be alright. I mean, okay, maybe you didn't want... kids, and I never thought about it, but it's not like we weren't planning on spending the rest of our lives together, right? So even if it's positive, we'll... get through this. Like, it's not the end of the world, okay?"

Lara was thinking about her expeditions. She was thinking about how her parents had disappeared and left her in two worlds because of their own work. What if something happened to her? What if something happened to both of them? It had taken a lot of self-argument to even trust herself to love Sam. She didn’t want to orphan a child. She didn’t want to give that child the pain she’d felt.

The panic was still there in her eyes, but she was recovering quickly. In the understatement of the year, she said, “It’s...an adjustment.”

"Oh... yeah, just an adjustment." Sam nodded her head, while giving Lara a look. It was a mixture of annoyance and adoration, mostly adoration. Because the way Lara was acting was so very british that it was hysterical. "I mean... it's a huge adjustment. A huge one. A huge, scary one. I'm not pretending it isn't, I just think we're awesome enough to handle it? Maybe? I think?"

“An adjustment,” Lara repeated. She pulled Sam over to the couch and sat down heavily, pulling the woman into her lap and kissing the side of her face. She fought off the urge to hyperventilate.

“How are we going to explain this to anyone? If I’ve really managed to….” She gestured at Sam’s stomach. “It’s like something out of a really bad internet fanfiction.”

"Or one of those, like... b-movie things they show on SyFy sometimes, yeah." Sam agreed. She leaned against Lara and nuzzled against her. She'd had quite a few more days to come to terms with this than Lara had, but the words still sounded pretty ridiculous now that they were actually coming out of her mouth, "I mean it's not even like we created it in a test tube, you know? Though I guess that's what we'll have to say... something like, my clock was ticking and we decided to inseminate me or..."

Sam laughed a bit, "Oh god that's just nothing we'd ever say though, especially YOU."

Lara rubbed her face with one hand, her other gripping Sam a little harder. “County shenanigans for those in the know. For those not in the know, artificial insemination will have to do. I’m sure there’s some experiment about fusing eggs out there somewhere.”

"I actually might have like... seriously, extensively researched this. And fusing eggs is totally possible, but it only makes girls. So I guess we have to pray that we're having a girl?" Sam's idea of 'extensive research' involved hitting up google and wikipedia, but whatever. She figured Lara could do the more in-depth research if it mattered.

After a pause, she squeezed Lara's hand and added, "IF I am, I mean, we should probably go get some pee sticks. Unless you want to do this official and go down to the clinic? She wanted to do tests anyway."

Lara stared at Sam, then shook her head in utter and complete amusement. “You never fail to surprise me, Sam. And I think we should get it done officially. I’d feel better than trying to decipher one of those things. Remember in the dreams? That one time in Uni we spent two days panicking because the bloody things were worse than sanskrit!”

"Oh man, you don't even know... I had to do it a few times here in this life, too, and it's always like... super confusing trying to figure things out. They didn't have those simple ones back then that gave you a clear 'yes' or a clear 'no'!" Sam flailed one arm in the air while she talked, memories of the scares she'd had filling her with a kind of nervous energy.

Then she smooched Lara on the cheek and hopped up off of her lap, "Come on, Sweetie. Let's go see if you knocked me up!"

“Wait why didn’t you ever tell me?” Or had Lara just been completely oblivious? She got up and followed Sam, grabbing the car keys before her girlfriend could get it into her head that she ought to be driving.

"Because I knew what the lecture was going to sound like if I did, and honestly, Lara? I was feeling like enough of a slut without having to hear it from you in more polite terms," Sam repied, while grabbing her purse. She didn't sound angry, more like she was repeating the facts as she saw it. Lara would definitely have given her the 'wear condoms more often and if you'd just trim down how many partners you had...' speech, and she knew it.

Of course Lara always drove when it was the two of them, and Sam had almost fallen into the easy pattern of allowing Lara to grab the keys before she could.

She still liked to pretend to, just to freak Lara out sometimes.

“I’ve never called you a slut,” Lara said, looking aghast. She would have called her out on not using protection, but that was entirely because she worried about Sam. Especially back then. She’d once had a nightmare about losing Sam to something like that. She’d just never told her.

She spent most of the drive to the clinic trying to mentally get herself up to dealing with the potential circumstances.

"No, you wouldn't have called me a slut. But you would have expressed concern over my lifestyle and the fact that I don't use protection, Lara. You would have done that. And that would have made me feel like a slut," Sam replied, before she got in the car.

Her own car ride was spent pulling up lolcat pictures and trying to show them to Lara at the stoplights. Because hey, the drive definitely needed some levity.

She was glad when they finally got the clinic, since it meant there'd have to be something to break the silence. Glad, and a little sick to her stomach.

“Well you should use protection,” Lara muttered. She didn’t mean it in a slut-shaming way but in a ‘please be safe because I can’t lose you and you’re usually smarter than that’ way. “That’s all moot point now.”

Lara let Sam show her the pictures, even though she had to keep her eyes on the road. But then they were at the clinic and she felt faint.

Normally it was Lara who 'wore the pants' in these kinds of situations, but Sam thought her fiance was about ready to pass out. Which was still amusing to her, considering she was the one who was potentially growing a life.

So she pulled herself up by her bootstraps and marched up to the front desk like a woman with nothing to hide and absolutely no shame, "Hello there! We need to see Doctor Renko? I think I might be pregnant!"

Lara’s facepalm was so epic it echoed through the room. “Saaaaam!” It was more of a hiss and not a yell. A very embarrassed hiss.

The nurse chuckled. “She’s waiting for you, if you’ll come back this way?” She opened the door for them, letting them through. “She does love children.”

If Sam really was pregnant, she was pretty sure that Lara was going to have to get over the embarrassment. Sam figured they might as well start working on that now! Because the embarrassment was only going to get worse when she started to show.

She headed through the door, "I never thought I'd be having any of my own, but I can't say I hate kids? It's just... you know... super unexpected."

Lara sighed, taking Sam’s hand as they walked into the examination room. She waited for Sam to hop up onto the bed, and then leaned against it. She assumed it was just going to be blood withdrawal. She only wished they could get an answer right now instead of in a day or two after tests were ran.

“Well good afternoon!” Claudine swept into the room. She looked like she hadn’t slept much and her coat was on askew, and she talked as though she were out of breath.

Lara raised her eyebrow. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine, thank you.”

"Are you sure, 'cause you're kinda... you know. Disheveled. Like 'I just boinked a hot nurse in the broom closet' disheveled." Sam asked, with a bit of a sly grin. Like she was totally onto Claudine. Obviously, Sam saw the entire world through a pair of 'sex goggles'.

Claudine blinked her eyes and laughed. "You could certainly say that. He's a bit of a... wild man." She winked. "Lets get this over with shall we?"

Lara actually gaped. She couldn't believe the doctor had admitted that, that Sam had been right, and that she was here doing medical stuff. She blurted. "Is that sanitary?!."

"Oh sweetie, of course it's sanitary. It's just the broom closet and she's going to use gloves when she pricks me anyway," Sam replied, trying to sound encouraging.

She held her arm out so that Claudine had better access to it to take her stats, "Is it true about early pregnancy and coffee? Because I think I might actually kill myself if it is."

“And I cleaned up of course.” Claudine winked at them, then started to draw blood. “It’s unfortunately true. You should avoid caffeine as much as possible, and if you are pregnant I have so many pamphlets!.” Oh and she couldn’t wait to get some fetal fluid….

"Yay, Lara! Pamphlets! Aren't pamphlets cool?" But Sam sounded less than enthusiastic about this now that she was seriously going to have to give up coffee.

If she was pregnant.

Sam was pretty sure she was pregnant. She just had this feeling like she was. And there was a part of her, deep inside, that was smugly happy about it.

Orange County knew how to turn Lara’s life upside down. She watched the blood get drawn, and then Claudine bottled it up and passed it off to a nurse. She felt faint, taking Sam’s hand in an effort not to fall over. “Yes. Pamphlets are cool.”

She wasn’t ready to be a mother. Look at her own parents!

"So how long will it be until we know for sure? Is there anything I should be doing in the meantime? I mean, besides quitting coffee which is really going to suck." Sam squeezed Lara's hand a bit more tightly than before. She honestly wished the could have an answer today. For everyone's benefit. Mainly Lara's. She was pretty sure Lara was going to forget to breathe over the next few days.

“A day or two at most. We run all our tests here, so we should have the news tomorrow!” Claudine clapped her hands. “This is all very fascinating! We’ll do everything we can to make sure you have the healthiest baby possible!”

"It's going to be alright, right? I mean, if there's one in there. Lara being a guy for a few days didn't do something strange to the... cells or whatever? To give it webbed feet or something?" Sam blurted, as if that thought had only just sprung to mind.

Mainly, because it had.

“I don’t have much data on what happened there, but if she was able to fertilize the egg than I’m sure it will be normal. I can’t tell you if she had an XY DNA or XX DNA though. Chances are high on a girl.”

“Bugger,” Lara muttered. Girls were trouble.

"What do you mean, bugger? Girls are AWESOME! You can play dress up with them and teach them not to be subjugated by our male dominated society. You know, by kicking ass better than them and rock climbing and stuff!" Sam's mind was already reeling with ideas. She really wanted a girl. Girls were awesome and she had nothing in common with boys unless they were having sex with each other.

But she grinned sheepishly and added, "But I will totally love a boy all the same. We'll make sure he looks awesome and is super sensitive but not so sensitive that he cries when someone squishes a fly or something."

“Sam could you imagine trying to raise a girl who was like either of us?” Lara raised her eyebrows meaningfully, but she was smiling. Grinning, really. Still nervous and a little freaked out by everything. But she was getting into this idea.

"Pffft, so what if they are? They'd just get all of our best qualities. And come on, who better than a Croft to keep track of a crazy Nishimura, anyway? It's like we were made to raise kids just like us." Sam grinned at Lara, and then smiled at Claudine, "Okay, so lets get those pamphlets and stuff! I am so super excited to learn all about how horrible the next nine months could be."

After a pause she added, "You know. Potentially. If I'm actually growing a life in there."

Sam looked a little sheepish and a little nervous, but mostly she was glowing. It was almost patently obvious that she was, in fact, growing a life in there. Now all they needed was proof.