WaM: 068. This isn't supposed to happen.

[deep_red_bells]

She’d been looking forward to for the last week. Obsessively checking the weather in Orlando, taking a ridiculous amount of joy in choosing the clothing she was going to take with her, buying new sandals--flats and a couple new pairs of Marc Eckos as well as heels, since they’d be doing a lot of walking, but she was very much looking forward to wearing bright colors and lighter materials for a week. Just being somewhere with a steady temperature above seventy degrees, even without the added fun of theme park rides and watching Julian’s reaction to the park-meandering Disney characters, would be her idea of heaven.

The loss and regaining of her memories, the whirlwind of emotions that had followed that, the decision to step away from the calling, and then the tentative excitement of preparing to go someplace warm for a while...through all of that, she hadn’t noticed the seven days of pills that she’d forgotten to take during that awful, empty period of time when she wasn’t herself until she grabbed a box of tampons from under the sink, intending to take them with her, just in case, because...

...Huh.

She paused. Frowned. Tossed the box into the bag with the rest of her toiletries and took the pack of birth control pills out of the bathroom medicine cabinet. Realization sank in bit by bit, and she thought back, brow furrowed with concentration as she ticked the days off on her fingers.

She bit her lower lip. Counted again. And a third time.

The packet fell from her hand and clattered into the sink.

There was no need to panic. She told herself that, at least, but naturally the panic ignored her completely and began to coat her stomach with ice and tie knots in her chest. There was no reason to panic, she thought frantically, she was only a day late.

But she was never late. Never.

She thought of excuses, things that could reason it away. Stress. Stress could cause her to be late, and oh, she’d had plenty of cause to become stressed in the past few weeks. It could be something as simple as that. Except that she’d been plenty stressed in the past and she was never. Late.

It could just be a result of missing those pills, being thrown off of her schedule. That was highly possible. She just had to find out for sure. Because it was probably nothing. She was probably overreacting. But she had to know. That was the sensible thing to do. Rule it out. Right.

It took a great deal of control not to break into a run and instead walk at a normal speed out of the bedroom and down the stairs. She gave Julian a quick kiss on the cheek and an excuse for stepping out that she wouldn’t be able to remember later, and tugged on her coat, and went to the nearest drug store.

======================

She knew she wasn’t a very good liar, but she had, at one point in her life, aspired to be an actress. So long as no direct questions were asked, she could fake it. She could hand him a to-go cup full of coffee from the charming little nearby café they’d discovered and both liked, she could smile sweetly and give him a kiss and say that she was going to go take a hot bath and not think too much about the box marked "EPT" tucked into her inside coat pocket. So she did. Because it was probably nothing (she kept repeating that in her mind, it’s nothing, I’m overreacting, it’s nothing) and there was no need to tell him especially after what they’d just went through...and dear God, he’d freaked out once before just because pickles flavored chips and ice cream were mentioned within five minutes of each other. No. She’d just go upstairs, and take the damn test and put her mind at ease and then sneak over to Annie’s and throw all of the evidence away. Or maybe burn it. Better safe than sorry.

They were simple enough instructions that the stupid wadded-up paper pamphlet just had to make way more complicated. Pee on the stick. Put the cap back on. Wait two to five minutes. Simple. She listened to the bathtub fill up with water and counted seconds in her head, once Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi. She paced. She forced herself not to look until those two minutes were up. She gave up counting and went back to reading the ridiculously overdone pamphlet, thinking that it should kill plenty of time. She read the bit about how the test worked and what, specifically, it was testing for the presence of without really absorbing the information. In fact, the only thing that did stick was the part on how to read the results. A plus sign, positive. A minus, not. Also very simple. Very straightforward. Very...

...There were two blue lines intersecting. A very clear positive result.

Oh.

Shit.

The ice in her stomach spread. That couldn’t be right. False positives…were rare, but they happened. They did. There was no way, there was no way she could be pregnant. Except, there was. Because she was stupid and careless and didn‘t think and she should‘ve thought, even if she had very good, very understandable reasons for forgetting. And because the Powers had a sick, twisted, horrible sense of humor. Okay, Slayer, you want to quit on us? Here’s a real good reason to stay benched for the next nine months. Have fun with it.

And oh, God, she’d been so tired. And hadn’t been able to figure out why she was sleeping so much more than was the norm for her, and that was one of the earliest of early symptoms--

Her shaking knees finally gave. She sank to the floor beside the bathtub, blindly reached out to shut off the taps before the water overflowed. This wasn’t supposed to happen. They didn’t want children. They weren’t even married yet. They were getting married in a few months, they were going out of town, they were...

This wasn’t supposed to happen.