deep_red_bells | I need you to know that we'll be okay, together we can make it (rp for <lj site="livejournal.com" us

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I need you to know that we'll be okay, together we can make it (rp for <lj site="livejournal.com" us

She had no idea what she was going to say. 'Just spit it out' sounded lovely and all, but it was much, much easier advised than put into practice. She sat curled up on the farthest end of the couch, Ruhun at her feet and Irina laying quietly at her side, a throw pillow clutched to her chest like a shield, a piece of armor. Her stomach churned in ways that she was sure had more to do with nerves than any sort of pregnancy related sickness...though her sudden aversion to Julian's aftershave disturbed her quite a bit. It just kept getting more and more real. She'd like to have told herself that it was all in her head, but she didn't see much point in self-deluding. Part of her knew. She didn't need a doctor to confirm it.

Now she just had to face the music and tell her fiance they were going to be parents.

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Baileigh's meltdown over the toast had been...worrisome, but they'd both been under a great deal of stress the past few weeks, he figured. The vacation was going to be good, just get away, spend some time together. No more crying in showers or over toast. Why he needed a second shower when all he'd done since his last one was email a few clients about putting jobs on hold until March, he wasn't sure, but he didn't argue, taking another and happily not putting on aftershave again, since they were in for the night.

Pulling on jeans of all things and a sweater and a pair of socks, hair still wet, he came downstairs. Julian paused in the living room door to watch her, the way she was curled up, the puppy and Ruhun and the general air of nervousness. His stomach clenched and it felt like his heart dropped. She wanted to talk. She looked like, quite possibly, the world was going to end. She'd been crying. She'd given up Slaying...and now she was upset. He'd asked too much of her somehow and there was only one conclusion.

She was leaving.

He tried to steel himself for it, moving to sit next to her, or as next to her as he could be with Irina there. Teeth worrying at his lower lip for a moment, he watched her, then arched one eyebrow. "So...what is it you need to say?" Best to just get it over with, he supposed.

She couldn't make herself look at him, clutch the pillow to her chest tighter as her throat tried to close again. She cleared it, swallowed hard, wished like hell she'd thought to get a glass of water from the kitchen. Her mouth was parched. "Julian, I--" Her voice cracked, and she cleared her throat more firmly and tried again. "Yesterday, I sort of...I was...while I was packing. I noticed something wh--when I was..." It was coming out all wrong and not making any sense and she still couldn't seem to put words together properly.

Spit it out. That's what everyone kept telling her to do, even though they didn't know what, exactly, she was trying to say. Just spit it out. Fine. She'd spit.

"I'm--probably, ninety-nine point nine nine nine percent sure that I'm...pregnant."

That was so very far from what he'd been expecting her to say, that he just stared at her. The fact that she wouldn't look at him, was just clutching the pillow, that the tension was palpable enough in the air to make the puppy twitch...all of that seemed to cloud the air as well. It was all twisted up in with his dire expectations as well. His mind darted to Slaying matters, and demons and people with abilities and apocalypses and bombs and assassinations and possessions and kidnappings and tortures and all the things that kept going on in their world, and somehow those two little words didn't make any sense against all of that.

It was such a very normal thing that women had been saying to men throughout history.

Normal didn't happen to them.

He was fairly certain he was supposed to say something, rather than just stare at her, but the words still weren't coming, because her words weren't right somehow. There had to be some catch, something else to them, some "and..." but nothing was forthcoming, so he swallowed, tried to say something, found he couldn't quite speak, so tried again.

"I'm sorry...what did you say?"

She bit her lower lip hard and ducked her head, hair falling over her face and concealing the fact that she was trying very, very hard not to cry. It was perhaps a full minute before she could swallow past the lump in her throat and manage to repeat herself, her voice strained with the effort.

"I t--I took an EPT yesterday. And another one this morning. They were both positive. False positives are really, really uncommon, and I've been so tired, and--"

She hiccuped softly, curled in on herself tight enough that Irina whined softly and lifted her head in obvious concern. "And your aftershave smells awful," she finished in a tear-choked rush.

"Right. Sorry." That was automatic. Apologize. Didn't mean to offend with the aftershave he'd always thought she loved but clearly didn't anymore because things smelled differently when women were ... He'd heard that somewhere. "I won't wear it anymore."

He probably should address the larger issue, the calmer, rational, crisis oriented part of his brain said. The part that kicked in and handled things when everything went wrong. It also informed him that saying everything was wrong was probably a very bad idea. However, even it ran out of ideas for things to say for a moment, which he thought was highly inconvenient.

"I...you..." He stopped. "We." That was better, right? We, them, together. "We're...having a baby?"

Baileigh had the urge, for just a moment, to hit him, because out of everything she'd just said he focused on the aftershave. Luckily, the rational part of her brain overrode the hormonal part. He was shocked. She had been too. The brain didn't always function just right and found ridiculous things to fixate on.

She nodded a bit, turned her head slightly to hesitantly peer at him through her hair. "That's...pretty much what 'I'm pregnant' means, yeah."

"Oh." He was fairly certain he was supposed to say something more than that. Something like "Yay!" or something along those general celebratory lines. Except they'd never really planned on the whole parent thing. She'd been as emphatically against it as he, and the puppy was not baby training, except now, apparently it was. But they'd agreed. They were not cut out to be parents. They'd be rotten at it. Their lifestyles...and bullets...and demons...and not using the baby for cover from the CIA.

Except, now all of that was out the window, and he was trying to think of something to say, because she was clearly upset. He reached out a hand, hesitantly, to smooth back her hair, and still there weren't words. Not real ones.

"All right...um...how? When?" Valid questions, yes? There'd been a plan, now it was derailed, so. Clearly something had happened?

She winced visibly and let go of the pillow in favor of tucking her knees up to her chest. "I...forgot. When I forgot. I didn't...I didn't take my pills. I didn't realize it or I would've...had, used, backup. I didn't--I'm sorry." Because she felt she should apologize, she should've realized. It hadn't been what she'd wanted, either, or at least not like this. Not without some sort of planning. "God, I am so sorry..."

Her apologizing hurt, and he finally pushed Irina off the sofa and shifted closer, putting his arms around her. "It's all right." It clearly wasn't. "It will be all right." Somehow. "We'll figure it out." They always did, didn't they? "There's nothing to apologize for, love...I should have thought as well, and I didn't."

She leaned into him but refused to uncurl from her defensive little fetal position, still biting into her lower lip hard to keep from bursting into tears. "They're punishing me," she whispered tightly. "The Powers. Because I quit. They're punishing me."

"What?" He blinked at that, head tilting down to look at her. "No...Baileigh, no. There's no mystical punishment going on, love. We just..." He sighed, closing his eyes and rested his head on top of hers. "These things happen, and we were neither of us careful or thinking about the pills or anything else." Thus had millions of children been born the world over, really. "It's not a punishment."

It was hard to see it that way, considering the timing. Harder still not to blame herself. What the hell were they gonna do with a baby? That it was a unique and very effective form of punishment seemed like a reasonable conclusion to her. "I'm sorry," she repeated, unable to keep from it.

He held her a bit closer and kissed her hair again. "It will be all right." Maybe if he said it enough, she'd believe him? "We'll figure it out." She apologized, he reassured, it might be a loop, but it was all he could think to do.

Nothing was right. This wasn't supposed to be something that a woman cried over, it was supposed to be something big and bright and happy. And yet it truly felt like the world was ending. "I don't see how when we don't even have ourselves figured out," she pointed out, wincing and pulling away from him because it seemed like she could still smell that nauseating aftershave.

"People...do this the world over," he said, a touch desperately. "People far less together than us, with far less resources than us. We have...we're more than financially secure. We have a home that's fully paid for. We have a strong support network, plenty of people to help us out. It will...we'll figure it out."

He was, of course, lying through his teeth that he really believed any of that, but he'd at least managed to get his wits back around him, and they were all perfectly logical, persuasive arguments for why this was going to be all right.

She stared at him and blinked, amazed that she didn't outright laugh at the absurdity of the statements. It was all well and good for Claire to insist that everything was going to be just fine, for him to say it was completely ludicrous. He knew better. He should've known better than to try and feed her the same lines. He was an assassin and a spy. She was a goddamned vampire Slayer.

The toast, for Christ's sake, she wanted to scream. The toast.

"Sure," she murmured flatly, shifting to rest her chin on her knees. "Sure. Everything'll be fine."

He sighed. He was trying? He could just freak out utterly, which is what he was feeling like doing, truth be told. In fact, he could feel the hysteria rising, even as he tried to stay close to her, because of course it was all ridiculous and it was going to be insane and he most certainly wasn't suited for this. But.

He'd run out of things to say.

She fell silent as well, trying to sort through and untangle the thoughts in her too full mind. She was afraid, and she didn't know what was a perfectly normal fear and what was her going to ridiculous extremes, continuing to insist that the Powers were trying to punishing her. There were all the normal reasons, certainly, the I can't do this, I don't know how to be a mother, the fear of just being pregnant and not knowing what to expect, but there was much more than that. Whatever thread of tentative happiness might be running through everything else, she shoved aside quite violently and refused to acknowledge, afraid that if she dared to even think it, that this little being growing in her was half of her and half of him and how badly she wanted to meet it, They would take it away from her. Likewise, if she was foolish enough to wish it away, They would still take it away from her and leave her with the crushing guilt.

And she couldn't tell him any of this, because if he said everything was going to be fine one more time, she was going to lose it.

He needed to get out. Out side, out of the whole awkward moment of where he had no idea what to say and everything he said kept coming out wrong. But he knew, knew, that would be wrong. He couldn't just go running out the door because she'd said she was pregnant. What sort of message would that send? But breathing wasn't coming easily, and he needed to figure out how to do that again. He didn't know how to be a father. He'd never had one, or rather, he'd had one that no child ever should have. He was a crap role model. He knew that, too. This...was wrong on so many levels.

He couldn't do this.

But he loved her, and so he had to do this, and he had to...figure out how to breathe. It wasn't working very well.

Had he just came out and said it, she would've understood, completely. 'Get the hell out' had been her first instinct, too, and the thick blanket of silence wasn't doing either of them any favors.

"Claire--I told Claire," she murmured, just grasping for something to say to break the silence. "She--when I found out--I had to talk to someone--I didn't know how to tell you--I'm sorry."

He nodded a little. "I...it's all right. I understand. I..." He closed his eyes.

"I think I might need to..." Freak the hell out in a way he couldn't with her, because he really didn't want her to see him that way, and remember that. "Would you mind...if I went to see Sylar?"

It was a stupid thing to ask, probably, but he needed to find a way to deal.

"I promise, I'll be back. I'm not...going anywhere. Just...I need to think."

She bit her lower lip and nodded, curling in tighter on herself. There was a flair of panic centered around the mad thought of He won't come back, but she cut it off fairly quickly. He promised he'd be back, he'd be back. He wasn't running away.

"I'll--I should call Annie," she remarked with a bit of a wince. Fuck, if Annie found out she'd told Claire before her, she'd be livid.

He nodded again, wrapping his arms around her tighter and tilting her head up for a moment to kiss her fiercely.

"Call Annie. Have her come over. And I'll be back in just a little while, I promise."

"You better," she whispered, threading her fingers through his hair and kissing him one more time, unable to keep from clinging to him a little before finally letting go.

He brushed her hair back when she let him go, eyes searching hers for a moment. "I will be," he promised one more time before leaning in to press a kiss to her forehead, and then he really had to leave before she saw how panicked he'd become.

"Okay." She tried to smile to reassure him and had no idea if she managed it or not, gathered up the throw pillow and held it against her chest again, in no real hurry to get up and call Annie just yet. "Be careful."

"I will be. No...going off to do anything. Just...talking." And probably getting royally drunk. "I'll see you later...I love you."

And then he was retreating, fast, needing out of there, fresh air, something where he could make himself breathe again.

"I love you too," she called to his retreating form, hoping he really meant that, that he just needed to talk, not go do something stupid. Again.

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I need you to know that we'll be okay, together we can make it (rp for <lj site="livejournal.com" us

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