Hi there! Some of you will probably know me from my work over on the Lost boards. Some of you might remember me from my unfinished high school fic, 'Evolution' (which I may find time to complete depending on how this goes). Many of you will have no clue who I am. I started this fic because I've seen ones where Booth agrees to sleep with Brennan so that she can have a baby, but none that explore what it would have been like for him if she decided to go ahead with the plan to use him as a sperm donor, which I know is something most of us would have LOVED to have seen. (Like he could ever father a child and walk away). Chapter two is mostly written, along with a couple of others. Feel free to let me know if you have any suggestions for pregnancy/childrearing situations you'd like to see them dealing with and I'll do my best to work them in, if I haven't already. ;)
Chapter 1.
"So, when are you going back to the clinic?" Booth asked, folding his arms where he stood at a safe distance from the table, watching his partner work on the skeleton the FBI had sent over that morning. He tried not to sound too interested, when in reality, it was all he could think about since she'd first announced her intentions.
She didn't look up, using a pair of tweezers to pick something from the victim's eye socket. "I've made an appointment for Tuesday. I should be ovulating then."
Tuesday was only five days away. "That's really soon. Are you sure you don't wanna wait until next month? Just so you're sure," he added carefully, aware of how delicate the situation was. The last thing he wanted to do was to offend her by sounding like he was being unsupportive, even if he kind of was.
"I am sure," she insisted, oblivious, as usual, to what he was really trying to say. For an intelligent woman, she sure could be stupid sometimes.
"I just don't think you realise how much having a kid is gonna change your life," he continued. "No more drinks after work. No more research trips to Rwanda. No more casual sex." Which she really shouldn't be having anyway. Didn't she know how dangerous that was?
"You seem to do just fine in that department," she pointed out, glancing up at him with a smirk.
"Yeah, well, Parker doesn't live with me," he reminded her. "Your kid's gonna be around all the time." She'd never spent more than five minutes alone with a child, and now she wanted to be solely responsible for one? "Are you sure you're ready for that?"
She seemed to pick up on his reluctance, even if she couldn't possibly understand the true cause. "If you've changed your mind, I can find another donor," she told him without any outward sign of emotion as she returned to her examination. He couldn't tell if it was because she was upset and trying to hide it, or because it really didn't matter to her whose sperm she used.
Either way, she was giving him an out. All he had to do was take it. He could back out now, no harm, no fowl, but she was still going to go through with it, and just the thought of her carrying another man's child made him feel sick to his stomach. He could lie to himself, and her, but the truth was, he didn't want her to have a baby unless it was his. Not that he could ever tell her that. She would never speak to him again. "What? No. Of course I still wanna do it," he assured her defensively. "I'm just making sure you've really thought this through."
She put her instruments down then, focusing on him for the first time since he joined her on the platform. "I have, Booth. This is what I want. I want a baby."
The resolution in her tone made it impossible to argue. Clearly, her mind was made up. "Okay, but I wanna go with you. When they... " He still couldn't bring himself to say the word. "You know, for moral support." Technically, this was his child. It felt too weird not to be there.
She stared at him for a long moment, mentally dissecting him; just when he was beginning to feel like one of her decomposing corpses, she looked away. "That really isn't necessary, Booth. It's a very simple procedure. The doctor will insert a catheter into my—"
He held his hands up to silence her. "Whoa! Stop right there." He didn't need to hear this. It was unnatural, if you asked him. Maybe it was all due to his Catholic upbringing, but as far as he was concerned, but that wasn't how babies were supposed to be made – in a lab with microscopes and Petri dishes – not unless you'd exhausted all other options, and she definitely hadn't. What was wrong with waiting and doing it the old fashioned way when she found someone that she wanted to share it with? "No need to go into all the gory details."
"I was merely explaining—" Seeing that she still hadn't gotten the message, he covered his ears, causing her to sigh and roll her eyes heavenward. "I don't understand why you're so embarrassed," she was complaining when he tuned in again. "You're already a father, so clearly you know how human reproduction works."
"Sex. I know how sex works," he corrected her. There was a huge difference. Sex was passionate, an act of love – or at least, lust – but what she was proposing was cold and clinical, impersonal. Trust her to find a way to take the most intimate experience two people could share and turn it into some into a kind of scientific experiment to satisfy her own curiosity. It definitely wasn't how he'd imagined his next child coming into the world. Then again, he thought he'd be married to the mother this time.
He decided to try a different approach, one that was guaranteed to win him the argument. "You're gonna need someone to drive you home after, right?" he reminded her, steering the conversation into less sensitive territory before it escalated into a fight and they both wound up feeling hurt. "They'll probably want you to take it easy for a while." He wondered what she would do if he just set up camp in her apartment from now until the end of her pregnancy. That way he could be there for her whenever she needed him, whether it was for midnight runs to the grocery store or just a shoulder to cry on when her hormones got the better of her. He wished he understood why she was so determined to do this alone when he could offer her something so much better, if only she would stop being so damn stubborn.
"I hadn't considered that," she confessed. Her expression softened into a smile and she nodded, conceding, as always, once she saw the logic in this plan."Thanks, Booth. That would be very helpful."
That was how he wound up in the waiting room of the fertility clinic five days later, flipping through the pages of a trashy magazine in an effort to avoid thinking about what they were doing with the catheter she mentioned.
He must have checked his watch a thousand times before she finally reappeared, dressed in her own clothes, looking exactly as she had when she left him an hour ago, only now… He was torn between nervousness and relief as he watched her walk casually over to the reception desk and pay for the appointment: nervousness that this would change things between them and relief that it was finally done. Whatever happened now, it was out of his hands.
When she was finished, she turned, scanning the room for him, breaking into a smile when she saw that he was still there.
"What happened?" he asked her, standing as she approached him. "Did they...?"
"You mean did they complete the insemination?" she supplied as she returned her wallet to her purse and closed it, slinging it back over shoulder.
He felt his mouth go dry. "Yeah." That.
"Yes," she agreed, as if what they were talking about were nothing more serious than a trip to the dentist. "We should know if I'm pregnant in a few weeks." She started for the door, leaving him standing there by the row of chairs, stunned.
"Wow." So that was it. The sperm that he'd agonised over giving her was now somewhere inside her body. That meant that right at this very moment, she could be pregnant, pregnant with a child that was, genetically, half his. He knew he should feel good about helping his best friend, but his stomach was twisted up in knots.
She paused with her fingers on the door handle, fixing him with a confused frown. "Aren't you coming?"
He shook himself out of it, trailing after her to the lift, where they stood in awkward silence, waiting for the car to take them back down to the lobby. The whole situation was so strange that he didn't know what to say to her. In fact, for all the tension between them, they might as well have had sex. It certainly would have been a lot more fun than what was happening now.
"Do you think it worked?" he asked her finally.
Instead of answering his question, she launched into one of her rehearsed sounding spiels. "The statistical likelihood of—"
But when she moved to step out, he caught her arm gently. "Bones." He didn't want to hear about statistics. He wanted to know what was going on inside that brilliant mind of hers. Surely he wasn't the only one freaking out.
It was the same dance that they'd been doing for years: she tried to suppress her emotions with facts and he refused to let it go until she confronted them. He knew that he'd gotten through to her when her she slumped back against the wall. "I thought I'd feel different afterwards, but I don't," she confessed, and for the first time, it occurred to him that maybe this was about more than just passing on her genes. Maybe she really did have her heart set on being a mother. Stranger things had happened. "What if it that means it didn't work?"
Oh God. She wasn't going to cry, was she? He hated it when she cried. Wasn't that what had gotten him into this situation in the first place? He didn't want to disappoint her. Her family had done enough of that.
He wrapped his arm around her slim shoulders, pulling her into his side, pleased as always when she rested her head against him. He wasn't sure why, but she trusted him above all others. That was why he couldn't afford to let her down. "Then we'll try again next month," he promised, despite his reservations on the subject. If having a baby was that important to her, then he was going to do everything in his power to make that happen. She deserved to get everything that she wanted from life, regardless of his personal feelings. "And we'll just keep trying until you are pregnant."