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Jack Vessalius was Lacie Baskerville’s best friend, and so when Jack begged Lacie on bended knee to get him out of his brother Oscar’s Christmas party by going into premature labor, she had smiled and laughed and said that she would see what she could do before going immediately to Levi and informing him that she would be going into labor an hour after Oscar Vessalius’s Christmas party concluded, and not a moment sooner, and it was up to him to figure out how.
Jack, of course, would not be called over until after the party had been over for at least an hour. As far as Lacie was concerned, he would remain stuck at Oscar’s Christmas party, and would remain so all night; even once the party was over, he would be staying at Oscar’s house in order to take full advantage of his brother, the living wallet, and the excellent Christmas gifts he was sure to buy for Jack.
This did not mean that Jack liked it at Oscar Vessalius’s house. Jack hated his brother as much as his brother loved him—unconditionally. When Oscar had gotten married to his high school sweetheart, Jack had recruited Lacie for help editing the wedding photos so it looked like they were both dying horribly the whole time. When they had learned that Lacie’s due date was a few weeks after Christmas, Jack had begged her to induce labor on the 24th so that he could miss Oscar’s Christmas party without having to give up any of the things he kept his brother around for.
Lacie happened to like Oscar Vessalius a good amount. She had no intentions of ruining his evening; though she did not draw the line at photoshopping images of his painful and untimely death, she did draw it at interrupting his Christmas party. On Christmas Eve morning, a few hours before the party was due to start, Lacie and Levi made their moves. First they destroyed Oswald’s phone; next they locked him in his bedroom; finally they got down to work. This was so that Oswald would not panic and contact Jack early. Of the many things that Nii-sama was, ‘overprotective’ was perhaps the most apt descriptor; upon learning that Lacie was going into early labor on purpose, he was entirely likely to panic early and call Jack over. Once that was over, they made their way into the kitchen and Levi opened the refrigerator to produce the fruits of his study.
“Right, according to Reddit, this should work,” he said cheerily, pulling a syringe out of their refrigerator and examining it with a cheerful eye. “Messing with your hormones should at least get the process started. Otherwise, I can reach up in there and see if I can’t grab little Junior myself.”
“Excuse me?” said Lacie.
Levi shrugged. “Those are the easiest at-home ways to induce labor,” he said. “I don’t know what to tell you. Everything else is more dangerous or illegal.”
“How do they rate on a creepiness factor?” Lacie said sweetly.
“Nothing at all is creepier than your skincare routine,” said Levi, “so don’t even worry about it!”
“Oh, but Levi, if I don’t spend my days worrying about you being a creep, how could I ever fill my time at all?” said Lacie. “It gives so much of my life meaning. —Hand that over, let me shoot up. I’m sick and tired of being pregnant.”
“And soon, my dear, you’ll be sick and tired of having a baby,” said Levi, doing as he was told, “and you’ll sell it on the streets for pocket change.”
Lacie stuck the needle in her arm and pushed the syringe down. “I most certainly will not,” she said. “I’ve named it after Nii-sama for a reason. I fully intend to get attached to the thing and become completely insufferable about it—you see if I don’t.”
“Well, you did also name it after Jack—no, what am I saying, you’re also insufferable about how much you like him,” said Levi, “despite how much that brother of yours would love to skin him alive for knocking you up.”
“Oh please,” said Lacie, “I’m not the one who designed the family Christmas card this year to feature Jack, and only Jack, dressed up like a children’s party clown. If I’m insufferable about him, you’re intolerable. —Do you think that was a contraction?”
“How should I know?” said Levi. “I’ve never given birth.”
“Really?” Lacie said. “Then how on earth did you get your hands on me and Nii-sama?”
“Sears catalogue,” said Levi. “Dear Reddit. How—long—after—administering—straight—heroin—intravenously—Lacie, how do you spell ‘intravenously’? —Never mind, spellcheck has it—does—a—woman—give—birth?”
Levi paused, eyeballed his question, and then typed (17 F) into the question field.
“That was not fucking heroin,” said Lacie. “My baby is not starting its life high as balls. I don’t want it to turn out like you.”
Levi rolled his eyes. “Don’t worry, it wasn’t real heroin,” he said. “Just the hospital junk. Pure straight hormone. Guaranteed to induce a birth—hopefully. I don’t want to touch your junk any more than you want me to, unless you’ve been secretly thirsting for me for years, in which case I don’t want to touch your junk any more than sweet Miranda Barma yearns to be a cottagecore tradwife married to Raymond Nightray.”
“You have a true talent, Levi,” said Lacie, “for making each word out of your mouth more disgusting than the last. Of course I don’t want your fingers up my pussy. It was bad enough when Jack stuck his dick up in there, and I’m sure it will be at least equally terrible when Oswald Junior crawls out. But I’m really not interested in becoming a connoisseur of ‘things stuck up my vagina’; you, the world’s leading expert in ‘things stuck up an asshole’, are really all this family needs in that regard.”
“I resemble that statement,” said Levi, faux-indignantly. “I’m hardly the world’s leading expert on things up my asshole. For one, Sheryl Rainsworth is so up herself I’m honestly shocked that she has room for Rufus Barma up in there, too. For two—”
“Levi, remind me what contractions feel like,” Lacie snapped, and Levi paled. He switched to another tab on his phone.
“According to Reddit, a combination of bad period cramps, gas, and diarrhea,” he reported, “though someone also mentioned that it felt like getting stabbed repeatedly in the back—so you’ll finally be getting at least a little payment for what your brother, Jack, his brother, and I have all endured from you over the past seventeen years. Also, you’ll eventually shit yourself.”
“No, thank you,” said Lacie. “I’ll take a shit on the toilet now, then, and hope that removes the danger of that.”
“It won’t,” said Levi, grinning like an idiot.
“Then I’m going to make Nii-sama bake Jack some Ex-Lax cookies and he can share the glorious experience of shitting yourself in public with me,” Lacie retorted, heading upstairs. While she was occupied on the toilet, she checked her texts: five from Jack, begging her to get him out of this party by hook, crook, or miscarriage; one from Oscar and Sara Vessalius, wishing her a merry Christmas Eve and offering her their well-wishes; one from Miranda Barma, upping her previous offer for Lacie’s baby to $72,000. It seemed she assumed that, because its name was to be Oswald Junior, Oswald himself was the baby’s literal father, and because of this Miranda had expressed a very strong desire to eat the baby.
Lacie thanked Oscar and Sara, flashed Jack, and told Miranda to go desecrate a corpse.
When she was done with her business—hopefully—she went and knocked on Oswald’s door.
“Nii-sama,” she said, “I have a job for you, if you promise not to freak out.”
“I won’t,” her brother said. “I have never freaked out in my life.”
“Well, that’s a lie,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Levi has informed me that giving birth means shitting myself in public, so I need you to make laxative cookies that we can trick Jack into eating so that he shares that delightful experience with me.”
“Very well,” said Oswald, which was a surprise: he and Jack got along very well, and Lacie had thought that getting him on board with essentially drugging Jack without his knowledge would be much harder. “You ought to have informed me of this sooner; I could have found a way to infect him with cholera.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Nii-sama,” said Lacie. “Cholera would just take his attention off of me. Laxatives alone are enough.”
“As you will it,” said Oswald; satisfied with his response, Lacie removed the padlock from his door and let him out. It was clear that her brother was stressed—very much so—perhaps this was why he was so agreeable about dosing his best friend with laxatives.
Well, better not to look a gift horse in the mouth.
“Levi,” Lacie announced once they made their way back downstairs, “take Nii-sama to the store to get ingredients for Jack’s laxative cookies. I’ll stay here and keep trying to induce labor on my own.”
“Have fun with that,” Levi said immediately, standing up so fast Lacie was a little shocked he didn’t fall over. “We’ll be back when it’s over. Bye!”
“She’s not giving birth alone, Levi,” said Oswald.
“Of course not, Jack will be there and she’ll be making him miserable the whole time,” Levi said. “I just won’t be.”
“You don’t need my help to be miserable,” said Lacie. “You’re stuck with yourself forever. —Don’t worry, Nii-sama, I’ll let you know if my water breaks while you’re out.”
Oswald frowned. “You broke my phone,” he said. “How…?”
“Smoke signals,” said Lacie. “Go on. I want those cookies ready by the time Jack escapes from Oscar’s party. You can do it!”
“How will I see the smoke signals?”
“I’ll torch the hospital,” said Lacie. “Go on, Nii-sama. It’s alright. Odds are I’ll still be waiting by the time you get back, but the longer you wait the less likely that will become.”
Oswald went, trailing on Levi’s heels out the door like a morose hound. Lacie waited until she was well and sure they were gone before continuing on her day’s mission. She thought that she might be contracting, though she wasn’t sure; she hoped that it would become clear sooner rather than later. Ideally, it would become clear just in time to ruin Jack’s night the same way that Oscar’s party had ruined his day; Lacie had endured months upon months of back pain and illness and strange cravings and disrupted sleep because of him, and she fully intended to get her own back however possible. It wasn’t like Jack didn’t deserve it; a few months ago, Oscar had gravely admitted to Levi that there was a high chance that Jack had tampered with the condom he’d used when he and Lacie decided to mutually chuck away their virginities, and Lacie had dedicated her pregnancy to ruining Jack’s day ever since. Unfortunately, most of the time he didn’t notice, and even seemed to enjoy her day-ruining activities; the timing of this labor, then, was meant to be somewhat of a last hurrah and to give Jack every reason to regret knocking her up before the baby came and any and all regrets flew out the window.
After all, Jack wanted this baby. He had threatened to kill himself if Lacie didn’t have it. Once it was out in the world, it would probably be the one and only thing on earth Jack loved, so there wouldn’t be any more opportunities to make him regret his actions.
Oswald and Levi returned about an hour later, carrying plenty of groceries and arguing over whether or not Oswald had been hurrying Levi too much; to gratify her poor worried brother, and to make sure he didn’t chicken out and tell Jack about her plans, Lacie paced in the kitchen and watched as Oswald made the laxative cookies. She was definitely contracting now, or at least having severely bad cramps; hopefully, the timing would continue to work out and her water wouldn’t break until after midnight, when Oscar’s party was sure to be over and Jack would be relaxing after a painful party of faking and socializing.
Hopefully Oscar would do him a favor and drive him to the hospital. Hopefully he would stick around to support Jack as he became a father at sixteen. Hopefully, no matter how painful the birth got, Jack would remain the most miserable person in the room throughout.
When the cookies were out of the oven and cooling, Lacie and Levi briefed Oswald on their attack plan for keeping Jack uncomfortable. The boys would take shifts keeping Jack awake through the night and day and however long it took Lacie to take the baby home from the hospital after giving birth. Lacie would get sleep if she could; if she couldn’t, she would join in on keeping Jack awake and stressed out. If the doctor suggested she hold someone’s hand while in labor, she would do her best to break both of Jack’s; there were of course and as always the laxative cookies. These would come out on Lacie’s signal, when she wanted Jack gone from the room so that she could have her brother by her side while in pain, regardless of whether or not she’d lost control of her bowels at that point in time. Levi would follow soon after, under the pretense that he’d said the wrong thing to Lacie and got kicked out of the room for his troubles, and ensure that Jack got no peace and couldn’t leave.
The plan wasn’t entirely foolproof, of course; if Oscar stayed, he would be Jack’s ally, and they would have to find a way around his presence without tipping him off to the fact that the three Baskervilles were working together to ruin Jack’s night, day, and following evening. Jack could also leave at any moment and thus escape his scheduled torment—but in doing so, he would also lose his chance to appear on the baby’s birth certificate. It was a lose/lose situation for him, the perfect situation for him to be in.
Lacie couldn’t entirely blame Jack for messing with the condom, of course. Had she been in his situation, having just learned of babytrapping and then getting the opportunity to fuck a girl, she probably wouldn’t have been able to resist giving it a shot, either. On top of this, Lacie, who had always wanted a pet and who was a Baskerville and as such could actually afford to have a baby without giving up anything for it—not even her time, if she didn’t want to.
Still, it was an annoyance. And he hadn’t even told her himself; she’d had to hear through the grapevine about it. And pregnancy was uncomfortable—hellishly so. If Jack had wanted to be forgiven for babytrapping a Baskerville, then he ought to have knocked up Oswald instead.
The sun set. Lacie’s contractions worsened. She grit her teeth against them, paced around the house, tried not to worry Oswald. Oscar’s party was in full swing now: Jack would be happy to get the call that Lacie had gone into labor and have an excuse to flee. She couldn’t have that. She was making Jack miserable.
At ten, Jack texted that the party was finally over and could he please come to the house. Lacie left him on read and told Oswald to say, if questioned, that she was tired. At eleven thirty, he texted her goodnight, which she did not even open; she was busy digging her nails into her brother’s hand and breathing in, and out, and in, and out, again and again. She hoped that Jack fell asleep fast; quite frankly, this experience was miserable. It wasn’t the worst pain she’d ever felt in her life—she had cancer to thank for that—but this experience certainly was up there.
You can tell that Junior is a product of me and Jack, she thought. Not even born yet, and he’s making things as painful as possible.
Lacie would have been proud, if she wasn’t clenched in agony. She rather thought that she would be proud, very soon, once the baby was out and making things painful for everyone, not just her.
At one in the morning, her water broke, an event heralded by Levi making piss jokes until Lacie literally rubbed his face in it as Oswald made for the home phone like a man lit physically on fire and calling Jack to leave a desperate voicemail about how Lacie was going into labor right now, almost a month early, and did Jack have anything to do with this, and if he did and Lacie or the baby died then he was going to hunt Jack down, rip him limb from limb, and encase the pieces of his body in resin for the Baskervilles to admire for all eternity.
“Impressive threat, Nii-sama,” Lacie said from where she was busily kicking Levi while he was down. “There’s hope for you yet—now keep calling him, he’s bound to pick up sometime.”
Oswald nodded and called five more times, leaving equally impressive threats on each occasion—that he would plunge a city into hell and then frame Jack for it, that he would start a cult specifically dedicated to smearing Jack’s name across the entire world, that he would seal Jack’s soul away for a hundred years of agony and guilt, that he would pull a Miranda Barma and desecrate Jack’s severed head while his soul was still connected to it enough to feel every ounce of humiliation and disgust, that he would have someone write down all of Jack’s shameful family secrets and then read them out in front of an entire government agency.
Somehow this still wasn’t enough to get Jack to pick up the phone. Irritated with her friend and more than ready to be over and done with the entire process of giving birth, Lacie picked up her phone, called Jack’s number, and cussed him bodily out.
Gratifyingly, he picked up on the second ring, and when she stopped to breathe, he said, “Hi, Lacie! What’s going on?”
“My water just broke, you condom-puncturing freak,” Lacie snapped. “Now get your sorry ass to the hospital before I send Nii-sama to make good on all those threats he’s been leaving in your voicemail.”
“They really are impressive threats!” said Jack. “Did you school him on them today?”
“No, Nii-sama thought all those up himself,” said Lacie. “I was impressed too. My guess is he’s probably a little upset that you asked me to go into labor to get you out of your brother’s party.”
“You told him?” said Jack.
“More or less.” Lacie smiled a little cruelly. “What did you expect, that I’d do it in secret all on my own? Don’t be a loser, Jack.”
“Well, not on your own,” Jack conceded, “but I thought maybe you’d only tell Levi. Oswald can’t lie, and if Oscar asks any inconvenient questions—”
“That is your problem and not mine. If you aren’t at the hospital within a half hour of my arrival I’m calling him myself,” said Lacie, and then she hung up. “Nii-sama, Levi, let’s go,” she ordered. “Whatever Jack does is his business right now. He’ll deal with the consequences. I’m getting the baby out.”
Unfortunately it wasn’t as simple as all that, even though Levi ran every single red light on their way to the hospital and then got in a race with the cops until they realized that he was the head of the Baskervilles. The hospital seemed to think that it was a problem that Lacie went into labor a little over a month early, and this worked Oswald up into a panic spiral bad enough that Jack got him alone long enough to eat the laxative cookies, so Oswald had to leave the room instead of Jack. On the bright side, Levi had brought along an airhorn; during the long night of labor, whenever Jack showed signs of nodding off or Levi thought things were getting too boring, he would honk it as loud as humanly possible, until Lacie herself had had enough and told Jack to drag Levi out of the room by his hair. That was hilarious; it was a nice distraction from the unending and dull labor pains. The night passed in this fashion and so did the next day, and then most of the morning after that, until late in the afternoon the baby finally came out noiselessly, like the dying gasp of an ancient ghost. She wasn’t even able to hold it before it was taken off to the NICU. Health complications, she was told, from the baby being born prematurely.
Lacie curled her hands into fists and waited for Jack Vessalius to get within arm’s reach of her so that she could make him really regret his life. The nurse was talking, saying something about routine checkups and common health issues for preterm babies. She was saying something about how sometimes babies were born premature without there being a clear reason—except there was a clear reason, and it was all Jack’s fault. If only he could have just sucked it up about his brother’s stupid party—if only he hadn’t been an annoying ass who poked holes in his condom, Lacie wouldn’t have needed to get back at him and her baby would not be possibly on the verge of dying right now.
She would make him regret this if it was the last thing she did. Just see if she didn’t. If the baby died she would make her best friend’s life a living hell for at least a week, if not two or even an entire month, and he would deserve it. She shot a dark glare at Jack, who was sitting there innocent as could be, as Oswald talked to the nurses about medical care and concerns and Levi messed around with his phone—probably updating his heroin Reddit post, or something stupid like that. The whole situation was stupid, really, stupid and infuriating and humiliating and Lacie just wanted to dig her nails into something until they bled and screamed and brought the goddamn baby back to her. She hadn’t even gotten to see it yet. If it died she would have no reason not to accept Miranda’s money. If it died she and Oswald would probably kill Jack and leave his body in a dumpster, and then where would they be, friend-wise? Freaks like Jack didn’t come a dime a dozen. You were lucky if you found even one on the underside of a rock somewhere. And babies you had to grow yourself, and fuck if Lacie was ever doing that again. It was a hassle and annoying and they took the baby from you in the end, and it was all Jack’s fault.
So Lacie fumed; so Oz was born.