Chapter Text
They hadn’t really been trying to get pregnant. They had been married for two years, together for five, and while Mrs. Bennet had begun to drop more and more obvious hints, especially after Jane and Bing’s son was born, they hadn’t been precisely trying to add to their family. But they hadn’t not been trying, either. It was still somewhat unexpected when there were two pink lines on the test Lizzie took one morning, but not as unexpected as it might have been.
William is still surprised, although he knows he shouldn’t be. He buys a copy of What to Expect When You’re Expecting and studies like he hasn’t since his junior year in college. Lizzie mentions, a week after they find out, that the smell of onions is really beginning to trigger her morning sickness. In response, William eradicates onions from their apartment and spends forty weeks feeling uncomfortable even walking down that aisle in the grocery store, even after she gives him the all clear.
For the first six months, every time they sit down to a meal he starts nagging her about whether she's getting enough protein or fresh fruits and vegetables. Or he googles what she's ordered to make sure the ACOG says it's okay for pregnant women to eat. She has horrible morning sickness for a while and all she can keep down is Kraft mac n' cheese, and he frets that she isn't getting a varied enough diet. By about the sixth month Lizzie is sick of it, and she finally hits him with his copy of What to Expect... and reminds him that the OB told them that as long as she took her pre-natal it didn't matter right now if her diet was kind of limited.
It's not that he doesn't believe the OB, or he doesn't trust that Lizzie can handle the pregnancy. But there are still times when he wakes up in the middle of the night and goes into the still-empty nursery and sits in the glider and looks at the crib with the bedding Jane picked out. And he promises the baby that he will always be there, that he will teach her-- because they have found out that they are expecting a girl, which alternately thrills and terrifies him-- to throw a ball and drive a car. But he remembers the phone call he got his junior year in college, and his own father’s funeral, and he's just really afraid that he won't be able to stay, he won't be able to keep Lizzie and the baby safe and watch over them.
It's at this point that Lizzie finds him and drags him back to bed, promises him that she and the baby will still be there in the morning, and tells him if he's really that worried he can call the lawyer and revise the trust agreement, but she has never for a second doubted that he would be there and she doesn't intend to start at three in the morning. As he curls up around her and her increasingly unwieldy stomach, the baby wakes up, and she grabs his hand and guides it to where the baby is kicking. He falls asleep like that.
When he wakes up the next morning, Lizzie is still sleeping. He sits up and his heart gives a dull thump, like it still does sometimes, when he sees her there in his bed and realizes she is his now. He squeezes her hand and she stirs and opens her eyes. "I know you're scared," she says. "So am I, a little bit. But you're going to be such a good dad," she smiles blearily at him. Her confidence is enough to carry them both, at least for a little while longer.