Leland Hawkins was...less enthused then he should be.
He heard his wife's screams from the other end of the door, and the gentle, yet somewhat panicked, coos of the nurses and doctors. A family friend--the only one on the planet--sat next to him, looking at him with almost sympathetic eyes, as though to ease a worry he didn't have.
He tried, though, to feel concern, compassion, worry, anxiety, for his wife and his almost-born child. He couldn't find it. That fatherly spark his own father had warned him about, that unbreakable bond one feels for their son. Neither for his wife, he found, was he truly wary. He just felt...nothing.
Maybe when he actually saw the child, it would come.
The screams and shrieks continued, until they spiraled down into a long gasp, and a different shriek. He supposed it would be more of a cry, but for any reason, Leland couldn't see it that way. It was a shriek, a wail suitable for the most ragged of space creatures, and he winced.
The nurse came out, and motioned for him to follow. He did.
Sarah was...glowing, he believed. Glowing. Sparkling. A smile someone could only get when they really fell in love for the first time. One only a new mother could manage. One he just couldn't muster.
Instead, he quirked his lip at the little thing. A blob was what he saw, with arms and feet and a little, scrunched nose, covered in a towel, hints of afterbirth still in the crevices between it's squirming fingers.
The whole pregnancy had gone on in a blur. Like watching a stranger for nine months. He didn't find himself quit happy, nor quit upset. When he found out, his very first thought was something along the lines of , "Crap."
He told himself to muster it, be a man, he said to himself, it's not going away.
He figured by the time it actually came, he'd find some kind of excitement, or love, or something along the lines.
The thing--the baby, he corrected--squirmed in his mother's arms, still squealing like a pig. It was, to Leland, one of the most...disturbing things he'd seen in a good long while.
Sarah, however, looked down at it lovingly, as though it were the most beautiful thing to ever grace her life. The doctors smiled as well, some nurses looking at him expectantly, waiting for him to make a comment. He took the three steps next to his wife, and the stiff, unnatural smile remained plastered to his face.
"Isn't he beautiful?" Sarah whispered, making a face at the baby, somewhere between and kiss and and grin.
Beautiful?
"Yes," Leland said, stiffly, "beautiful."
Sarah seemed oblivious to his indifference, blind to all but for the child. She touched his nose, and it squealed. Leland wondered if it did that alot.
"What should we name him?" she asked, glancing at him for the slightest of moment. She, certainly, looked far more concerned with the matter then him.
He put his hand across Sarah's shoulder, his eyes twitching to the nurses who seemed to glare at him.
"Er...You pick." he said, clearing his throat.
Again, this went unnoticed, and she hardly seemed to think before she said, as though in some kind of prayer, "James. I like James."
James? How original.
"James it is then." he said. He waited for that spark. Nothing.
Now, he was worried. A detached, frightening indifference overwhelmed him, and he couldn't find anything in the little blob other then another mouth to feed and, figuratively, an extremely large anchor to his ship that would roll back up.
"James," she said again, and he saw it in her. He saw she was meant to be this, a mother. She would love this thing, she would care for it and feed it and gladly spend hours with it, not feeling a moment of regret.
The thing hadn't been alive for moments, and already Leland regretted everything he'd done from the moment he left home. Every last thing.
This blob, he knew, would become a toddler, then a child. Soon, a teenager. He'd been one, and it wasn't something to be enjoyed. Something he was supposed to love unconditionally, but he knew it would be barely tolerated, if even that. It would want to do things--with him. He couldn't, and he wouldn't, spend every minute worrying about it.
It was his blood, his flesh, yet he felt nothing for it. No attachment, no protectiveness. Nothing.
A/N This was for a contest on LiveJournal...