Chapter Text
Nick was getting real tired of everyone’s bullshit. At first, he’d passed it off as nothing. A bad zit on his face, maybe. Or a ridiculous rumor, though why anyone would gossip about him, he didn’t know. But the thing was, it didn’t stop. And it wasn’t just directed at him either. There was something more to all the clandestine glances and giggles than he could piece together.
When Nick asked Bobby about it, he only shook his head, clasping hands over his mouth to keep from either laughing or spilling before he ran away. When Nick asked Harvard about it, he only gave Nick a knowing look and told him, not reassuringly at all, you’ll see. When he asked Eugene about it, his eyes had slid over to Seiji, who was warming up for practice, a huge and also not reassuring grin growing on his face as he did. Then he’d laughed, not even polite enough to try and hide it from Nick.
Nick had gone three days with all those knowing, amused, excited gazes and all that laughing and now he was fed up. All the guys were giving Seiji a similar treatment—and oh boy was that worrying—but Seiji was good at tuning this stuff out. Nick knew all the nasty rumors about him, knew all the bizarre ones, and all the ones that made him out to be a god. Kings Row was a breeding ground for that shit. But Seiji never acknowledged any of it. He’d gotten used to it, probably. But Nick wasn’t used to it. So whatever this was, he was dealing with it worse.
“Move it, Zero.” Speak of the devil. And Seiji was; the devil. He could easily have gone around Nick, there was plenty of room. But now, just for that, Nick moved to block the entire doorway into the locker room.
“Make me,” he challenged.
“Do you ever get bored of being so predictably contrary?”
“If it’s so predictable, why’d you tell me to move? Dumbass.”
“What did you just call me?”
“Dumbass. It’s my cute new nickname for you, to match yours for me.”
“You’re not half as funny as you think you are.” Seiji had this way of looking bored and angry at the same time.
“You’re right,” Nick nodded solemnly. “I’m at least twice as funny as I think I am. But I’m also very modest.”
“Would you like to know what else you are?”
“Tell me, I love listening to you speak.”
“You’re obnoxious, loud, messy, and in my way.”
“Oh no, you poor baby, how does it feel to be inconvenienced for the first time in your life?” Nick mocked, pulling on a baby voice.
“Better than it feels to be an inconvenience to everyone all the time.” That was uncalled for and Nick’s cheeks went hot.
“Fuck you, I’ll show you who’s an inconvenience,” Nick growled, lurching forward to attack only to find himself hauled backward. Nick twisted around to see Harvard, face set in stern disappointment. “It’s all his fault,” Nick said uselessly.
“You guys better start getting along,” Eugene said, poking out cheerfully from behind Harvard. “You know, for the baby’s sake.”
“The what?” Nick asked, completely thrown by this comment.
“Get ready to fence,” Harvard heaved Nick into the locker room and thoroughly out of Seiji’s way. “I don’t want any more fights, understood? It wastes my time and everybody else’s. So get it together.”
“Yes, Captain,” Nick said and heard Seiji echo the sentiment.
Despite what Nick and Seiji had promised to Harvard, it wasn’t even a full day before they were back to bickering. They’d had a disagreement in class over the roles they’d been assigned to read in English and they brought it with them to the lunch table. It was mandated once the team had been announced that they all sit together, though Tanner and Kally still ate with them too.
“It’s all your fault,” Nick was telling Seiji again.
“My fault? How? You’re the one at fault,” Seiji protested as he sat down next to Kally. Nick followed right after. “I was well within my rights to keep my part despite your whining.”
“But you’d be a terrible Mercutio! I’m perfect for the role and you had no right keeping it from me.”
“It’s an in-class reading of Romeo and Juliet, not a stage production! It doesn’t matter what part you get.”
“Then why couldn’t you have traded me for Benvolio?”
“Because Mercutio was my assigned part,” Seiji said, much like he’d said ten minutes before when they were still in class: slow and enunciated, like maybe Nick was just too stupid to understand this thing, which was actually quite simple.
“Aw, was wittle baby scawed to get in twouble—,”
“As I remember it, we both got in trouble when you started throwing a fit. Your immaturity got me punished.”
“No, your stubbornness got me punished.”
“Guys,” Kally broke in, voice placating. “Inside voices, please.”
“I thought I told you to stop fighting,” Harvard added.
“We know your crime,” Eugene said, “so tell us, what is your time?”
Nick and Seiji exchanged loathing glares and let the question hang until Nick finally said, “We both got assigned new roles.”
“That’s not so bad,” Kally smiled hopefully.
“We were given the least sought after parts in the entire play as punishment for questioning Ms. Kingsley’s casting,” Seiji expanded on Nick’s explanation, scowling.
“You can’t mean…?” Kally asked. Nick and Seiji’s angry silence answered that well enough. “But she always assigns new students to be Romeo and Juliet each class. Everyone has to read for the titular characters, it’s tradition.”
“We broke it,” Nick said. “I think it was me calling Seiji a stuck up cunt that put her over the edge—,”
“See?” Seiji jumped in. “You admit that it was your fault.” Shit.
“Did not! I said I pushed her over the edge, but you were the one being a stuck up cunt,” Nick reasoned but Seiji wasn’t buying it.
“And now we get to read for star-crossed lovers. If you’d just sat down, shut up, and dealt with being Benvolio, I wouldn’t have to learn so many lines. Do you have any idea how many soliloquies Juliet has?”
“Yeah, Seiji, it’s always been my dream to play star-crossed lovers with you,” Nick deadpanned. “And why the fuck would you have to learn anything? Like you said, we’re only reading parts out loud in class.”
“If you think I’m going to stumble over my lines in front of the whole class, you’re mistaken.”
“And you’re insane.”
“Cut it out,” Harvard intervened before they lost track of their ‘inside voices’ again. “It’s not that big of a deal. So you’ll have to read some more lines. Make sure to bring water and you’ll be fine.”
“Go easy on our freshmen, Harvard,” Aiden said. Both Seiji and Nick cut eyes to him. Why was Aiden on their side? Short answer, he wasn’t. The real question was what the hell is he up to? “After all, can you blame them? Poor things are so stressed with the baby on the way.”
“Pardon me?” Seiji asked.
“Okay, what the fuck is going on?” Nick asked, but no one was even listening to him. They were all too busy laughing, even Harvard. Orange juice exploded from Tanner’s nose, he was laughing so hard. “That’s the second baby joke. I don’t understand—,”
“Well,” Tanner said, orange juice more or less out of his system. “When a mommy and a daddy love each other very much—,”
“Oh, haha,” Nick snapped. “Fuck you.”
“So you do know about the birds and the bees,” Aiden jumped in. “I was starting to worry the baby might not be yours.”
“It’s not! Wait, fuck. What baby?” But it was useless. The table was full of giggling and nothing more could be gotten out of anyone there. Nick looked over at Seiji and saw that he was just as confused as Nick was.
“Do you think it might be a rumor about us?” Nick asked Seiji after another long practice enduring giggles and weird jokes about babies that made no sense.
“As they’re all making cryptic references to something neither of us understands and they can’t stop staring at us, I’d be inclined to say yes.” So he did notice it, he was just good at ignoring it. “But I’ve no idea what the rumor could possibly be.”
“I think it might be about…” god, was he going to say this out loud? “Y’know, that we’re…uh…”
“What?” Seiji asked impatiently. So Nick shrugged and demonstrated with some crude hand gestures. Seiji stared at his hands in distaste, then moved his eyes up to stare at Nick with nothing short of disgust.
“It’s the only thing I can come up with,” Nick said, flushing because of Seiji’s nasty stare. Nick didn’t think he was that bad. “I’m not happier about this than you are. But the weird baby jokes? I don’t get it. Why go right to mpreg?”
“Mpreg?”
“You know what, don’t worry about it. Do you think they’ll ever tell us?”
“Doubtful. People don’t like to say it to your face when they can say it behind your back. But rumors have a way of making it to you. Eventually. We’ll just have to wait. And hope they all lose interest in us.”
“Yeah, I guess.” But Nick’s attention wasn’t with the conversation anymore. It had wandered off to edit his previous thoughts on Seiji. Because it now seemed to Nick that Seiji wasn’t so unaffected and unbothered by the rumors about him after all.
“Alright, listen up,” Ms. Kingsley called everyone to attention just after the tardy bell during Thursday’s class. Nick fully expected her to tell them to pull out their books and start in on the Shakespeare stuff. But that was not at all what she said. “Every freshmen class is getting the same spiel during your second-period classes today. So you get to hear it from me.” Murmurs broke out around the room and Nick glanced at some of his classmates. They all looked as confused as he was, some even looked worried. “Starting on Monday, your class of two thousand and twenty-two will be on a morning assembly schedule. That whole week, you will be attending special classes in the morning, which means our time together Monday, Wednesday, and Friday will be shorter than usual. I start Romeo and Juliet during this time each year on purpose so that we can spend the entire shortened period reading.”
“What special classes are we going to?” One of the other guys asked.
“Healthy relationship workshops and parenting classes,” Ms. Kingsley answered. Nick was sure she’d crack a smile and reveal she’d been kidding. “From this Monday to next Monday, you will all be given a baby and taught how to care for it.”
“A baby?” Nick accidentally said it real loud. But he couldn’t help it. This had to be it! The reason for all the baby jokes and snickering.
“Not a real baby,” Ms. Kingsley finally cracked that smile but it was clear this wasn’t a joke. “Kings Row has had an intensive one-week family-life course for our freshmen for many years and a huge part of that is raising a fake baby. It’s tradition.” She was smiling way too big. “We’ve used regular baby dolls in the past, but in the last couple of years, we invested in some hyperrealistic ones. They’re still just dolls but they simulate the experience of a real baby. You’ll have to take care of it for a week.”
“Sounds lame,” a boy named Tim said from behind Nick. “I’m not doing it.”
“It’s required. And you will be graded. We let you pick what class you’d like the assignment to be added to, which can either boost or drag down your grade in that class as a result. And a number of you could do with a boost in my class, so consider that, Timothy, before you ditch the classes and ignore your baby. It tracks how often it cries, how long before you interact with it to calm it down, how often you change its diaper, if you feed it, if you shake it, and so on. You’ll learn how to care for it on Monday when you and your partner are assigned a baby.”
“Partner?” Nick asked but he had a sinking suspicion that he knew all about that already. “Please say we get to pick our partner, Kingsley.”
“I’m afraid not, Nicholas,” she told him, wicked smile back in place. “Since you will be caring for the baby for seven days and seven nights, of course it only makes sense that you’d co-parent with your roommate.”
So he had a baby on the way with Seiji Katayama and it was due to arrive Monday. Great. Fan-fucking-tastic.