Chapter Text
It had been two weeks since he broke up with Buck, and Tommy hadn’t spoken with him since then.
It wasn’t for Buck’s lack of trying, Tommy knew and was well aware of. There were forty unanswered calls, twenty voicemails, and ninety unread text messages. Ten text messages were from this day alone. He couldn’t say why Buck was still texting and calling him. He hadn’t even opened any of the messages since three days after they broke up. Eighty of them were still on ‘sent.’
And from the little he spoke with Eddie at the basketball pick-up game last week, Buck had even roped Eddie into trying to get him to answer Buck’s calls.
It was a shame, Tommy thought. He liked being friends with Eddie, they had a lot of hobbies in common. He liked that basketball group, and had been going to it for years at this point. He would have to find a new basketball group now, or just only go on the days he knew Eddie was working. That would probably leave him only once a month if he was lucky.
It wasn’t that he didn’t want to answer the phone, talk things out, and make up with Buck. God, he wanted to. But he couldn’t.
Tommy shook his head. He had to stop thinking about this. They were broken up, eventually he knew Buck would get the picture. And even though it also hurt him exponentially each time he thought about it, he too would get over it… eventually.
Tommy let out a long and tired sigh as he reached up into his linen closet, pulling down a thick comforter from the top shelf. Once it was in his hands, he walked with it over to his bedroom and threw it on top of his bed. His mind again went to Buck as he thought about his bed.
For the first week after their breakup he couldn’t find it in himself to sleep in it. They had done so many things in it, grown so close together, he could barely walk far enough into the room to grab his clothes. He was lucky when he had furnished his place he had opted for the more comfortable, and more expensive, couch in the living room. Honestly, he could probably stay sleeping on that couch forever, but after a week he thought he was being ridiculous, it was just a bed. A bed he had slept hundreds, if not thousands, of times in without Buck.
Bringing the comforter to his bed was one thing, Tommy thought. It was the middle of November now, even in Los Angeles the temperature had started to drop slightly. As he grabbed the sweats on the floor of his closet, long since been left and forgotten about by Buck (they had been there since the first time Buck had ever come over), Tommy came to the daunting realization. He was making a nest.
Shit! He cursed to himself. He thought he would have more time to come up with a plan for his heats. He had spent the last two with Buck. He didn’t know his next was due so soon.
Then he paused. His next heat shouldn’t be due this soon. His last one was barely a month ago, right before the whole Billy Boils thing. Sure, sometimes they were a little early, but they were never over a month early.
But then why was he building a nest?
Depression? Heartbreak over the break up? No, he had never been heartbroken enough before to need to build a nest, and anyway that would have happened in the days following. Not two weeks later.
The answer popped into his mind. He shook his head, trying to get rid of the thought. But it didn’t go away. It couldn’t be… just no. Tommy shook his head. He just couldn’t be pregnant.
But it’s the only thing that would explain why he was nesting only a month after his last heat.
Shit!
He left his bedroom to walk across the hall to his bathroom. In the undersink cabinet he had a handful of pregnancy tests from a pregnancy scare he had a couple years ago. He had no idea if they were expired, or if they even could expire, but this would be the best way to quickly find out.
Male omegas could only get pregnant from heats, and since his was a month ago, the test should be able to tell him now.
As he was waiting for the test to display the results, he had a fleeting thought that maybe he wasn’t pregnant. He was no doctor, there could be thousands upon thousands of reasons he found himself building a nest this afternoon. But then his thoughts traveled back to his mother. She had told him about it a couple of times. How her first unification she might have been pregnant was when she found herself building a nest a week after her heat. And how, a couple years later when it happened again, she immediately realized she was pregnant with his younger sister. If only she was still alive so Tommy could call her.
Half an hour later, he held his head in his hands as he sat on the lid of the toilet and let out a loud moan. Because there were two little pink lines on the test.
He was pregnant.
Shit.
Tommy left the test on the bathroom counter as he walked into his bedroom, falling onto and curling up in the blankets, pillows and clothes piled upon his bed, his nest. He reached out blindly, grabbing one of Buck’s old T-shirts. It had probably been months since the man wore it, but it still held his scent.
He would call his doctor tomorrow. Have them run a test that was more accurate than the over the counter one bought three years ago. Find out if he was actually pregnant, or if the test was faulty and he had made a nest for some other reason.
For now, he was just going to wallow and comfort himself here. If he had Buck’s old T-shirt pressed up against his face the entire time, no one had to know
🌨️ 🌨️ 🌨️ 🌨️ 🌨️
Luckily, or maybe unluckily, Tommy figured it would all depend on the outcome, his doctor had an opening for an appointment right after lunch.
“Well, Mr. Kinard,” Doctor Anna Nance, a nice omega specialist who Tommy had been seeing for years, said as she turned around from her computer. A smile was on her face. A smile that could mean both good news or bad news. Although if he was honest with himself, Tommy didn’t know which of the possible two outcomes here was the good news and which was the bad news.
That was what had been plaguing his mind all morning.
If he was pregnant, and that was still a big if, how was he supposed to feel about it? What was he supposed to do?
Was he going to tell Buck? He knew that Buck liked kids, just watching the way the man interacted with Jee and Chris and any number of other kids, there was no doubt that that man wanted kids.
He knew he should tell Buck, obviously.
But still…
If he was pregnant, he knew that Buck would try all the more to get back together with him.
Tommy knew that if Buck knew he was pregnant, Buck would insist they get back together, beg him for another chance.
That was the thing though, Tommy couldn’t give Buck another chance when Buck didn’t do anything wrong in the first place. Tommy was just… a stepping stone for Buck, even if Buck still couldn’t or refused to realize this.
Tommy didn’t want to stop Buck from doing that by telling him about this potential kid, Tommy didn’t want to trap him. That was why he hadn’t answered any of Buck's calls or messages to begin with. A kid was only going to trap Buck.
He had no idea what he was going to do if he was pregnant.
“So let’s see here,” Dr. Nance’s voice knocked him out of his spiraling thoughts as she turned around to face the computer screen on the desk. She pulled up a file with a number of lines and numbers and percentages. At first glance, Tommy had no idea what he was looking at.
“As you see here,” Dr. Nance indicated a line of test values from the blood test they had taken from him earlier, “this line indicates that you are pregnant. Congratulations!” she said, a smile bright on her face.
Tommy could only blink and stare blankly at the screen. Pregnant… pregnant…
He was pregnant… actually pregnant.
He had a child growing inside of him.
Tommy had honestly never given thought to whether or not he wanted to have kids. When he was younger, he always told himself that he would have them if his partner wanted them.As he got older, forty now, and didn’t have any longer term or forever partner, he figured that ship had sailed, especially if it was him who was going to be carrying said child.
He had long since come to think he would never be in this position, but now that he was… he wanted this kid… Tommy knew that.
“So would I be correct in assuming this kid would be the partner’s you told me about in your last appointment?” Dr. Nance continued, again knocking Tommy out of his thoughts.
“My partner?” Tommy asked, his eyebrows pinching together.
“Yes,” she nodded. “At your last appointment three months ago, you said you had a new partner you were spending your heats with. And that you were in a romantic relationship with him. Am I correct in supposing he is the father?”
“Um…” Tommy swallowed a large lump in the back of his throat. His heat partner, Evan Buckley. He was romantically involved with his heat partner. Not anymore, however.
Dr. Nance must see what his silence and lack of reaction meant, for she quickly schools the emotions she had been displaying on her face. “If- If you don’t want to continue forward with this pregnancy, you’re only four weeks along. You have options-”
“No,” Tommy shook his head. “I want to keep it. I want to have the baby.”
There were a lot of unknowns and decisions he was going to have to make in the following days, what with his job, his relationship status, even his living situation (he had finally gotten around to starting the kitchen renovation he had been thinking about for years after the breakup two weeks ago), and as of right now he didn’t know what decision he was going to make. But if he knew one thing for certain, he was going to be having this baby.
“Okay,” Dr. Nance gave him another smile, this one calmer and more relaxed. “Well then, how about we get an ultrasound machine in here? Let you see this baby we’re having?”
“Yeah,” Tommy nodded his head, his throat again choking up with emotions, he could blame this on the pregnancy now, he guessed. “That sounds great.”
Being only four weeks along now, the ultrasound didn’t show that much. A small blob really. If the nurse hadn’t told him explicitly that that was his baby he was looking at, Tommy could say that it looked like part of his intestine or maybe his appendix or kidney. He might have an EMT certification, but beyond that, he knew nothing about the human body.
“It’s about the size of a walnut right now,” the nurse said as she smiled over at him.
A walnut, huh? Tommy was going to need to make a stop at a grocery store on the way home. He needed to know how big a walnut was exactly.
She printed out a roll of images for him, and as Tommy walked out of the office to his truck, he looked down, studying them. He still had to say they looked nothing like a baby.