Hello everyone! So this is yet another angle I've decided to use in the Crumbs-verse, and tell the story from an Alexis point of view as she investigates her own mystery with more than a few surprises in store! Here we go!


For some, the morning after a party is the recovery period with friends, a time to relive the what-was-I-drinking or you-did-what moments of the night before. For others it's a race against the clock to leave the residence of their one-night stand before the awkwardness of drunk sex set in and more people on the street would see the infamous walk of shame.

And for some, like Alexis Castle, it would be a day she would never forget.

When she awoke on New Year's Day, it was with a disgusting candy-coated feeling in her mouth, courtesy of way too much un-spiked punch and the single glass of champagne her father had permitted her at midnight. She rolled over in bed to stare at her clock, saw it was just past nine. Why was she up so early? She was one of the sucks who'd passed out around two-thirty in the morning while the party had raged on downstairs.

With a yawn she sat up, swinging her feet to the ground – and nearly kicked Lanie Parish in the ear. A hazy snapshot of the night before came back to her, as she remembered the good doctor whispering in the over-emphasized whisper of a drunk that she was just going to curl up on Lex's floor; she'd snagged one of the throw pillows from the over-stuffed armchair and the matching throw blanket, and curled up comfy as a kitten in front of the closet.

A sudden twinge of muscle pain flickered across Alexis' belly, making her groan. It was moments like these she cursed female biology; of course Mother Nature had picked her vacation to bestow her period on her. Carefully picking her way around the doctor – who'd also somehow found Twigs the Beanie Buddy giraffe and tucked it under her arm – Alexis headed for the bathroom in search of Midol.

Relief was joyous when she found the bottle in the cabinet, a little beacon of hope in capsule form. With a drink from the tap like it was a fountain she washed the pills down and waited for the cramps to subside as she sat on the closed lid of the toilet. The silver lining of it had been that her boyfriend Patrick hadn't been at the party as he'd flown to Cancun with his family for the holidays, so she hadn't had to worry about looking puffy and bloated in her party dress. She pouted a little, wondered if any of the Fab Four women in her life ever felt this, or her grandmother, when she...no, Alexis thought, not going there.

She reached for the bottle of painkillers and realized she wasn't fully awake as she knocked the bottle into the trash bin with a rattling KLANG.

'Ew, ew, ew,' she grumbled as she gingerly picked around the used Kleenex and dental floss, when her fingertips bumped against something hard and plastic. At first Alexis thought maybe she'd also inadvertently knocked her toothbrush in as well, but when she saw it in the rack, her curiosity was pique and she pulled out the mystery object.

And felt her jaw drop open in shock.

She was glad she was already sitting down because the way the blood drained from her head meant she would surely have passed out as she saw what she was holding .

It was a Clear Blue pregnancy test. And it was positive.

Alexis furrowed her brow. That hadn't been in there the day before, she was certain of it, as her dad had made her clean the upstairs bathroom to a high-glossy shine while he dealt with caterers. It was the one luxury her father could afford and never spent money on – hiring his own housekeeping staff. While he claimed it was because he liked to teach Alexis how to be self-sufficient, Alexis tended to think it was more so that ex-maids or cooks couldn't write insider tell-all books about her father's private life since the press already had tonnes of fun chewing on what they did know about him.

Questions began to tumble through her brain like socks in the dryer. Who did it belong to? Was it Beckett's? Was she going to have a younger sibling at age seventeen? Or was it another one of the party goers? Was it a happy baby? Or an oops-there-it-is baby? Or a bastard baby?

Before she had wits enough to put it back where she found it, there was a knock on the door and Castle opened the door a crack.

'Lanie? Everything all right?'

'It's me, Dad.'

'Oh, I thought you were Lanie. She was hitting the daiquiris pretty...' He trailed off, felt every ounce of colour leave his face as he saw his own worst nightmare come to life – Alexis looking horrified as she held a pregnancy test in her hands. 'Lex? Something I need to know?'

She glanced up, saw her father was close to blacking out. 'Oh, Dad it's not what you think-'

'How do you know for sure? Should I take you to the emergency room? Or fly to Mexico to kill that little Patrick bastard?'

'Dad!' Alexis stood up, tossed him the bottle of Midol. 'You bought that for me along with some Tampax yesterday remember? And not that it's your business but Patrick and I don't do...that.'

Castle shut his eyes, remembered his discomfort when he'd been at the precinct and received the text from Alexis asking her to stop at Duane Reade for her on his way home from the precinct. Beckett had teased him mercilessly, while Ryan and Esposito had gleefully pointed out that even if Alexis had been getting freaky with her boyfriend, at least she wasn't a teen mom-to-be. He'd wanted to tie them to the nearest set of subway rails and wait for the Q-train to turn them into chutney, especially Esposito. Ever since he'd started seeing Meredeth, his usually friendly teasing of Ryan had diffused to everyone in earshot.

'I'm sorry, Lex, I forgot, but you can understand my shock at seeing my seventeen year-old with a pregnancy test. Any idea what it's doing here?'

'No clue. But it's positive.'

Castle scratched the back of his neck. 'Well whose is it?'


R&R&Enjoy!