Chapter Text
Viktor sits in the bathroom with vomit crusting around the corners of his mouth and a positive pregnancy test in his hand. There are two others, carelessly discarded on the ground by his feet – they're also positive, but Viktor is a scientist before anything else, and results must be replicable. At least three times.
He'd gotten that. The cutesy pink tipped tests are still flashing the word “YES +” at him in cruel mockery.
This was something he'd planned for. Viktor was smart enough to have contingencies in place, refusing to be caught by surprise by an aspect of his body he could control. But fate was a cruel mistress and none of his plans accounted for just how many outliers this particular case was riddled with. He couldn't tell Jayce, that was what was throwing him through the biggest loop. All the plans he’d made, and not one of them involved having to keep this a secret.
Jayce would understand. Of course he would. It wasn’t the understanding that Viktor was terrified of – it was the reaction. The hope quashed by fear and horror. The happiness that Viktor would have to swiftly snuff out because there was too much that was uncertain. He couldn’t build Jayce up just to decimate him, not when they were finally beginning to recover.
New plan then. First he needed to hide the evidence. Then, find a quick and simple solution at the pharmacy. That would be easy enough. It would either work and he'd come home no longer pregnant, or–
The idea of ‘or’ makes his stomach drop violently. He slides down off the toilet and lifts the seat to heave his stomach into the bowl.
When he finishes spitting out the bile clinging between his teeth, Viktor stands on shaking legs, looks around at the mess on the ground, takes a deep breath, and gets to work. He picks up the three tests, the boxes they came in, and the instructions he agonized over for hours, and puts them all in the trash with a satisfying thump. He hesitates at the sight of the sample jar on the bathroom counter, reasoning he can pass that off as something for his next appointment. One less thing to worry about right now. Tying off the bag, Viktor is completely still and unprepared to leave. Everything was fragile and thin, he felt like he was watching the world through hazy glass. But as soon as he left the safety of the bathroom, it would all shatter into horrible clarity. It would become too real.
Viktor's hand brushes over his stomach. Soft, careful. (Reverent? Bitter? He doesn't even understand his own feelings. He could be holding something beautiful, or something terrible, and it's the not knowing that drives him insane.)
Whatever is inside doesn't seem to notice him. It ignored him, like he'd been ignoring it for weeks. Ignoring it until it was too late.
He opens the bathroom door and steps out, and somehow the world keeps turning. As he walks down the stairs, he can hear Jayce humming in the kitchen and smell spices that would make him salivate if nausea wasn't winning out. To call it morning sickness when it happened at all hours was a crime. Viktor tries his very best to slip past the kitchen without being heard, but Jayce’s hand is suddenly around his arm and pulling him in to kiss him. Viktor manages to turn his head at the last moment, before Jayce has a chance to taste the vomit lingering on his skin. “I need to get this outside, Jayce.” he murmurs, running a hand down his arm. Jayce makes a small whine, but lets him go.
“Come try dinner when you’re done?”
“Absolutely.” The taste will mask it. He hopes.
Satisfied, Jayce lets his arm go with a kiss to his knuckles, disappearing back into the kitchen. An ache begins to grow in Viktor’s chest, spreading from his core and through his lungs, making it hard to breathe. He’s never liked lying to Jayce. He’s never wanted to keep something like this from him.
The bag thunks into the bin outside decisively and Viktor feels like he's trying to get away with murder. He shuts the lid with a heavy sound and walks away.
Back inside, he rubs at his arms to warm them. Even in the beginnings of fall, the cold was growing too much for him. His body wasn't holding heat like it should, it needed layers and layers to block out the chill. Jayce was an effective hot water bottle at night, but he couldn't do much for Viktor during the day. Still, when he notices that Viktor is shivering he drags off his cardigan and drapes it around his shoulders. “Come try the soup, it will help” he promises, guiding him by the waist. Viktor allows himself to be swept into Jayce’s current.
“You made soup…” Viktor’s voice is soft with affection. He parts his lips for the broth brought to them, savoring the taste of spice and the heat on his tongue.
“You were shivering all last night. Pozole will help with that.”
Viktor paws at Jayce until he offers up another spoonful with a soft sigh. This time, he spreads the broth around his mouth to wash away the lingering sourness still left. “It’s perfect.” he murmurs, turning to kiss Jayce’s cheek. “If I’d known you could cook so well, I would have married you sooner. And I might have known, if you cooked me more than instant noodles.”
“We were students!” Jayce protests. “And they were gourmet!”
“An egg cracked in the soup does not make it gourmet.”
“But it was good.” Jayce counters with a grin. Now he turns Viktor gently by the upper arm, lowering his head to try and kiss him again, and Viktor forces himself not to pull away. Lips press to his, and the warmth of Jayce’s body against his is more effective at warming him than any soup. From the fact he doesn’t reel back, Jayce can’t taste the lie in Viktor’s mouth.
When Jayce finally draws away, their mouths are pink and flushed, and Viktor’s jaw is still tingling from how Jayce’s beard rubbed against it. He feels slightly breathless, and more than a little heady from how quickly sweetness ripened into hunger when Jayce was over him.
“V…” Jayce's half-smile turns his expression lopsided and he reaches out to cup Viktor's waist, a hand on either side smoothing down until they settle on his hips. “You look so much healthier recently.”
Viktor turns very still under Jayce’s hands. Healthy? Healthy. Nothing about Viktor looks healthy to him. When he looks in the mirror he sees the dark rings under his eyes growing worse, making him look haggard and exhausted even on his best days. But he also sees the slow gain of weight he’d tried so hard to ignore, and that’s what Jayce is seeing. He sees the results of his cooking paying off and sticking to Viktor's bones. The promise of recovery from whatever chest infection last decimated him. His appetite returning. The incident no longer hanging over him and haunting his every waking moment. Any number of things that aren't true. Jayce doesn't even stop to consider Viktor's body is being forced to accommodate whatever is growing inside him.
Viktor carefully pushes Jayce’s hands away from him and stumbles to the kitchen sink where he empties his stomach again.
The heaving is violent, nothing but bile coming up and stinging his esophagus the whole way. He spits twice, makes a miserable sound and hangs his head in the sink.
“Viktor…” Jayce's warm hand rubs against Viktor's back, his knuckles rolling over the bumps of his spine. Normally he'd be hugging Viktor from behind, but after the incident Viktor couldn't handle even Jayce making him feel pressed down. If there was one thing he could say about his partner, it's that Jayce was adaptable. He'd adjusted to the shift in their intimacy while Viktor was still missing it like an ache.
“Hey…” he says softly. “I guess you're not feeling healthier?”
Viktor gives a single, humourless laugh. It feels like someone is playing a big cosmic joke on him, but there’s still no punchline in sight.
“I'm sure whatever is wrong with me this time will correct itself soon.”
Tomorrow, in fact. Find a quick and simple solution at the pharmacy, and don’t let there be an ‘or’. It was his only plan, and it had to work. It had to.
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The fluorescents in the pharmacy are so bright they make a migraine start behind Viktor’s eyes. It’s October and he’s already hearing Christmas music playing through the tinny speakers above his head which only makes the feeling worse. He's left grumbling and trudging through the aisles, scouring shelves with a glare when he can’t find what he’s looking for. It’s not kept on the shelves. Clearly. The fact that something like this has to be regulated and asked for is humiliating, the fact he has to ask at all for some semblance of control over his own body. As if he hasn’t had to kick and scream enough. Fine. He has a few prescriptions he needs to get anyway, a nice fraction of what he has to take every day.
The pharmacist at the counter greets him with a wide smile as he arrives and Viktor is already exhausted by the combination of her customer service voice and the cheer of the Christmas music haunting him. “Hi, what can I do for you today?”
“I have prescriptions for aclidinium bromide, amoxicillin, codeine and pulmozyme.” Viktor hands over a handful of prescription papers, watching as she scans each one.
“That will take–”
“Ten minutes.” He finishes for her. “Thank you.”
She gives him a pleasant smile and Viktor feels more than a little guilty for letting his poor mood make him irritable. The pharmacist wasn't the one to put everything he needed behind a shelf. She's just doing a job. He has his ten minutes to compose himself before she calls out “Talis?” and gestures him over. “Here you are. You can take them straight over to the counter.”
“Thank you. Ah – also, do you have levonorgestrel back there?”
“Of course!” Her voice is far too cheery for a woman about to hand him Plan B. Viktor rubs at his eyes when she turns away to scan the shelves, the migraine only growing worse the longer this process draws out.
“Here.” The pharmacist hands over a packet of levonorgestrel and Viktor finds himself wincing slightly at the packaging. It was… huge. Bigger than his own hand. And for one pill? It hardly seemed necessary at all. A big, blaring sign made specifically to judge him for something he never wanted. Never asked for.
Viktor turns the packet, reading the instructions. One pill within 3-5 days after unprotected sex. He thinks in his head, counts back the days to the incident. Seven weeks. 7 x 7 = 49, round it up to 50 just to be safe. 50 ÷ 3 ≈ 16.6, round that up to 17. He thinks over the math again, decides the figures add up as well as his migraine will allow, and nods his head. “I'll take seventeen of them, then.”
The pharmacist hesitates, her eyes darting across the room like someone might come and help her out of this situation. “I’m afraid I can’t give you that many at once.”
“You can.” Viktor says, splaying his hand on the counter. “In fact, I would really appreciate it if you did, so I don't have to go to seventeen different pharmacies just to get what I need. It would be terrible for my leg.”
Her gaze lowers down to look at the brace on his leg, the cane in his hand. It might be a low blow, but Viktor has never been opposed to fighting dirty to get what he wants. Most of the time, living as he did, it was required just to get what he needed to survive.
Viktor holds the pharmacist’s gaze, keeps his jaw tight and his eyes slightly narrowed. Not enough to be aggressive, but more than enough to be assertive, to prove he's not going to back down. When she turns around, he knows that medication is coming with her and his demeanor softens considerably — mostly in exhaustion.
He picks up all 17 Plan B tablets and his handful of drugs in their stupid basket with a begrudgingly thank you because he's not a monster and the woman is just doing her job, and he carries them to the counter. The woman behind the register raises a brow at him as she rings him up. “Sounds like you’re having fun out there.” she says. Viktor grinds his teeth slightly and gives a placid smile.
“Oh yes. An absolute riot.”
He walks back to his car with a bag full of morning-after pills and drives himself to the closest coffee shop. There’s no going home with these, the pregnancy tests were pushing his luck enough. If Jayce found these, this many of them, he’d be in utter hysterics. Nice as it would be to sit for a moment and enjoy the quiet hum of life inside, he doesn’t think they’ll be very amenable to him having a meal with his drink. So he orders a chai to go, winces when he sees it’s made on water instead of milk, and sits down in his car to start popping out the pills. As far as he could tell from a cursory Google search, you can’t overdose on levonorgestrel - or at least it’s incredibly rare to. The odds are firmly in his favor, so far as poisoning himself more than usual goes.
Once all seventeen pills are sitting on his thigh, he starts to take them two at a time, downing them with his chai. Around the sixth pill and almost halfway through his drink, he can feel himself getting a little queasy. Probably nothing. Probably just the richness of milk hitting his empty stomach wrong. All it takes to soothe himself is a few deep breaths and his head tilted down against the steering wheel, letting the leather cool his skin. Once he recovers his breath, Viktor picks his drink back up and tries to down the last of the pills before he can lose his nerve.
That leaves him a quarter of his drink left that he actually has a chance to enjoy. Cracking open the door to cool the car down more, he hangs a leg lazily out the side and looks out at the sky through the windscreen. Despite the chill and the cloud cover, there was still no sign of rain. It couldn’t come fast enough for him – a winter without rain felt like a spit in the face. Cold sunlight. Jayce would enjoy it, but Viktor would spend the entire time grumbling about how it should be warm when the sun is shining.
It had been impossible lately to have a single thought without Jayce entering it somehow. After the incident, he had become a fixed point that Viktor orbited, coming closer, further away, but never truly leaving its radius. In some ways, he was handling things far better than Jayce was. He could be on his own without obsessively checking his phone. He could go a whole day without having to call to make sure Jayce was alright. He could end a conversation without having to hear “I love you.” out of fear it might be the last time it’s said. Smothering had always been Jayce’s reaction to trauma – it was a wonder that he was even going to work right now, but Viktor insisting he would go insane if Jayce hovered over him for one more day finally pushed Jayce back into the office three weeks ago.
But Viktor has his own forms codependence. Relating Jayce to every thought. Keeping constant track of his schedule mentally to know where he’d be and what he’d be doing. It was around 3pm, Jayce’s meetings for the day would be finished and he’d be sitting at his desk with a coffee, looking over reports until the clock hit 5. Then he would call Viktor to tell him he was coming home, and be back by 6:30. Viktor would only worry if anything deviated from schedule, with a five minute grace period. Which was perfectly normal. Any partner would do the same.
Viktor’s stomach lurches, and he grips at the wheel to take a slow, deep breath. It’s nothing. He’s working himself up with hypotheticals. Nothing was wrong. And he was going to keep these pills down. His grip turns bone-white, his other hand shakily searching out the cupholder to set the last dregs of his drink down. After four more breaths, Viktor shoves the door open properly to lean over the side and retches so violently he feels his stomach seize and hollow out. Even after the chai is long out of his system, he doesn’t stop until he’s spitting out yellow bile and gasping for breath. His lungs burn. His stomach is in horrible pain. His head feels like it’s going to split open.
He’s starting to think that maybe this was a bad idea.
Viktor takes a moment to stare at the mess on the parking lot ground and go through his plans again. Like countless other times, he can't find one that will work, so he throws them all out and makes a new one.
Ask a friend what to do.
Defer the difficult decision.
That sounds reasonable and well adjusted. Better than anything else he can come up with while the world is still spinning.
Driving feels… like a bad idea right now. He can feel himself getting sick again, the headache behind his eyes growing into a migraine and a persistent dizziness that makes him think operating heavy machinery is inadvisable. If it’s an overdose, it doesn’t feel dangerous at the very least, but still something to be careful with. Swallowing down his pride, Viktor pulls out his phone and puts his head down between his knees.
“V?” Jayce’s voice is like a breath of fresh air.
“Hello, Jayce. I know you’re busy with work but do you think you could come and drive me home?”
“... Yes.” There’s a slight delay before he answers. Jayce is still in work mode, everything is lagging slightly. Viktor wishes he was there to see it in person. He wishes he was well enough to go back to the office. He wishes so desperately that the idea of walking the halls didn’t make him feel like he was going to throw up again. “Yes, I can do that. Where are you?”
“The coffee shop by the pharmacy. Across from the Asian grocer.”
“Okay. I’ll take you home in my car and catch an Uber to pick up mine.”
Viktor huffs a soft laugh, risking straightening up his aching spine. “You’re a very smart man.”
“That’s why you married me, right?” There’s the telltale jingle of the bell on Jayce’s keys – he must be locking the door to his office. “And you’re okay? You’re not in danger, are you?”
“Not unless my vomit decides to come alive and attack me.”
“Oh, V… I’ll be there soon, I promise. I love you.”
That was another habit of Jayce’s now. He had to end every conversation with I love you. When he left for work, when they fell asleep. When Viktor left the room. And if Viktor didn’t say it back, Jayce would get restless and panic. He’d follow him into the bathroom, or call him on the way to work, or gently shake Viktor awake and say I love you again. Say it back. Please?
Viktor nods his head to no one and says “I love you too, Jayce.” so he can hear him sigh in relief before the line goes dead.