It had taken approximately two-point-eight seconds for shit to hit the fan after Jason had calmly spilled the beans, and not in any of the ways that Dick or Bruce had predicted.
"Look, I'm telling you, Bruce," Tim repeated himself for the twelfth time in the previous forty minutes, irrationally clinical and dismissive—as if Bruce was obviously the one who wasn't seeing sense and not himself, and Jason gritted his teeth at how far the conversation had devolved. "It's not possible. I can't be pregnant."
They were down in the Media Room, again. The proper location was the first thing that Jason had insisted on after he'd asked Dick a million questions (which Dick had basically just shrugged his shoulders and made noncommittal noises of confusion at), and stolen the lab results out of Dick's back pocket so that he could look them over for himself. Dick had been confused when Jason had mentioned the Media Room at first, especially when Jason had detoured up the staircase that led to the private rooms instead of going straight for the one that led down to the basement; but then Jason had pushed the door open to Tim's room and started gathering up blankets and clothing and pillows, and shoving them into Dick's arms, and Dick understood.
The nest that they'd built could never have been as good as one that Tim would have made, but Jason had hoped that it would at least give Tim a safe feeling environment to process the news in, and the act of wandering around the Mansion, finding everything they needed and dutifully carrying it back down to the Media Room where Dick agreed they should go, gave the two mates time to talk everything out and come up with best plan of action before they moved forward.
The biggest point of contention was whom all Dick and Jason should let in on the secret before they talked to Tim—if they told anyone at all. Dick felt like they should wait until everybody could come home and tell Tim altogether, while Jason cautioned doing something like that might make Tim feel like he was being ambushed, and that was a thing he wanted to avoid (both for Tim's safety, and their own). For all of the hype about alphas being protective and hormonal, omegas were vicious and resourceful when they felt like they'd been backed into a corner, and not only would Tim fight his way through them, he would run once he finally felt like he was free and the only person who would be able to find him was Conner.
If they were lucky.
Unfortunately, Alfred had ambled by in that quiet little way that he had while Jason and Dick were still discussing the subject, and the conversation had quickly come to a close as Alfred dropped the vase of flowers in his hands, and both Jason and Dick had sighed as they turned to fill him in on the rest of the gory details. Bruce had come along next—maybe twenty minutes after a visibly distressed and uncertain Alfred had excused himself to go finish the rest of his preparations for dinner—wandering the halls in search for an explanation as to why the precious butler hadn't been able to answer any of Bruce's questions with anything more than shakes of his head and half-incoherent 'mhmms' that didn't actually answer any of Bruce's questions—and after a quick debate on the best course of action with simple changes of body language and twitches of lips, Jason gave into Dick's unerring loyalty and respect, and begrudgingly broke the news.
To say that Bruce was surprised would be an understatement. He stood looking back and forth between Jason and Dick with his arms crossed over his chest like he didn't believe Jason for a full minute, but a brief examination of the test results later only seemed to confuse Bruce more than anything, and he eventually agreed to help, joining in on Jason and Dick's dialogue about what to do next as he bent down and picked the growing pile of blankets up off of the floor.
Damian had been the only one who hadn't questioned it. He'd come up on Jason, Dick, and Bruce with raised eyebrows and his arms crossed over his chest—wondering what all of the fuss was about and why "Todd" was still "stinking up" the Manor. He and Dick had moved out to have their own space "for a reason, after all". Dick had rolled his eyes, and Jason had snarked back at the youngest of them, but Dick had also given Damian the benefit of the doubt and explained to him what was going on. The three eldest had been expecting Damian to laugh or make some kind of a spiteful comment, but much to everyone's surprise, he'd simply stared back at Dick for a couple of moments before he sighed and walked out of the room, only to come back a couple of minutes later with a stack of blankets and shirts and artifacts of his own, because "if you're going to do this, do it right, you absolute imbeciles".
Dick and Jason had exchanged raised eyebrows at that, but even Jason was strapped for what they were supposed to do, and Damian seemed pretty set in his way, so they had just shrugged and let Damian go about rearranging everything in the nest as they finalized the rest of their plan.
Neither Cass nor Steph were anywhere to be found, and that made sense, considering they were supposed to be somewhere in the Amazon, wrestling pythons or panthers or whatever it was that two Lady Bats did whenever they weren't babysitting their male counterparts, and Jason and Dick eventually ruled out picking up the phone and calling them before they got a chance to talk to Tim. Jason had considered it because the more people they had around to keep an eye on Tim, the better, and Cass had always been particularly adept at keeping Tim calm and doing whatever Tim needed to do for Tim's own good, but even under the best of circumstances it would have been hard to contact the girls on their satellite phone, and Bruce didn't want to risk anyone intercepting the call with what was at stake. As it was, they'd already deprived Tim of breaking the news to his brothers and his father figure (as inadvertent as the reveal had been), and Jason didn't want to take that joy away from Tim anymore than they already had. If the girls were closer—at home or at least on the same continent—his answer might have been different, but as it was, he thought they'd made the right decision, and nobody was in favor of putting off telling Tim any longer than it would take him to get home from Wayne Enterprises that evening.
Babs was a little different. She was still at home in Gotham, but when Bruce rang her to garner her advice, she hadn't answered, and Bruce had been willing to leave it at that. They'd always had the option of calling her 'emergency' number, and Dick had mentioned it, but in the end, if she hadn't answered her personal phone it was for a reason, and neither Jason nor Dick had tried to argue with Bruce.
The only questions that had remained after all of the conversations had been over with were Conner and Clark, and just about the only thing Jason could agree with others on there was that if Clark hadn't already heard them talking and come to investigate, he was probably busy as well, and none of the three of them felt like reaching out to him without consulting Tim first.
Not with how the two had left off the last time they'd spoken.
None of the family had thought the conversation was going to go well, but Tim's reaction was exceeding even the wildest of their predictions—and not in a good way. They'd waited until after Tim had dropped his briefcase and his daily notes into the office beside his room and showered, before Bruce had directed him down to the Media Room. Dinner had been served without mention of what was going on, but Tim had known the second he'd stepped into the room that something was off because of all of the things that had been gathered around in the nest, and it had done little in the end to help calm him once the news was out.
Jason had gone about mentioning the change as gently as he could—the blood work report already folded up in his hands for when Tim asked—but Tim had rejected the notion as soon as it had been brought up, and little had changed in the time that had passed since. He'd consented to reading the test results instead of soliciting them, and listened to the theories that Dick and Bruce had concocted with a patience that bordered on politeness, but Tim had struck each and every single one of them down with an almost chilling accuracy as they'd been presented to him, and things had only gone down hill from there. Dick and Bruce kept trying to get him to see sense (because even though Tim kept poking holes in their theories, he hadn't been able to offer up any indisputable evidence that he wasn't pregnant, either), and Tim kept getting more and more agitated, the more that Dick and Bruce tried to argue with him and the less time they gave to each of his counter arguments in their own mounting frustrations.
"Look, Tim," Bruce continued to try to reason with the omega, regardless of the fact that he was getting nowhere. "I know you keep saying that, but the numbers don't lie—"
"I don't care what the numbers say," Tim responded, annoyance and frustration clear in every inch of his being as he sat even farther forward in his seat. "I know my body, and I know Kryptonian biology! It's impossible! Kon's sperm and my eggs aren't harmonious! They haven't been from the first time we got together, and nothing has changed since then. I'm not pregnant!"
"Yes, Timothy!" Dick butted in, surging forward to grab at Tim's arm in a desperate attempt to try to make him see sense. "Yes, you are! It's not a bad thing! You just—you have a baby growing inside of you and you're going to be a parent in a couple of months! It's okay! It's—"
"No, it's not!" Tim jerked back out of Dick's grasp, tipping Dick off balance and sending him to the floor as he did so. "I'm not…I'm not with child, Dick; and even if I was, it wouldn't be a good thing!"
"Tim—" Dick choked out, staring up at his little brother, even as Jason dropped down to his knees at Dick's side and wrapped a protective arm around Dick's torso and instinctively pulled Dick back to his chest as he shot a warning snarl over Dick's head at Tim. Jason lost track of the conversation for a moment, as Tim turned his attention back to Bruce, and Bruce kept talking, but Jason knew that he should have stuck to his guns and insisted that they wait for Conner to get home so that the alpha could have helped calm Tim down.
"Look at the data, Tim!" Bruce more or less yelled as he shoved the folded and crumpled test results under Tim's nose, yet again. "Look at it! It's right there in front of you! Even if your hormone levels were normal, the number of Kryptonian Cells floating through your blood stream is off of the charts! Not once have we ever recorded levels this high in a human being—"
"That hardly means anything—" Tim looked like he was seconds away from pulling his own hair out as he gestured with his hands and knocked the paper away.
"Yes, it does!" Bruce insisted, ignoring the set in his second youngest son's jaw and the steel in his vibrant blue eyes as he did so. "It means everything! You are pregnant, Tim! Pregnant! And nothing you say or do is going to change that—"
"Father," Damian interrupted him with a sharp bark of his voice, and a petty part of Jason derived a sick sort of pleasure from the way that Bruce's shoulders stiffened—even as his own did the same, and his lips pulled back over his teeth even further.
"What?" Bruce rounded on his youngest expectantly, but Damian stayed calm as Tim's fists clenched tightly against his own thighs.
"While, I agree that you are right, and Timothy has absolutely lost what little of a mind I thought he had by rejecting this idea so vehemently, yelling isn't going to do anybody any good," Damian kept his arms crossed tightly over his chest as he made his way around Bruce to Tim's side, not looking away from Bruce once as he did so—not even when he had to step around Dick's head—and Jason watched him move with his free hand on the hilt of the knife on his waistband. "This latest development would be emotional and fear inducing for even the healthiest and most well-endowed person, not to mention all of the added risk factors that Timothy faces due to the child's potential parentage. Timothy does bring up some good points, and I think we would all be better served by taking a moment to sit down and breathe before we reconvene and agree to actually listen to each other, as opposed to deciding who is right based on how loud they can state their supposed 'facts'."
Bruce obviously didn't like Damian's plan—neither did Jason nor Dick, if Jason was being completely honest—but Damian didn't seem to care. He just sat himself down on the couch beside Tim and glared up at Bruce until his father threw his hands up in the air and walked away—putting a good ten or so feet between himself and Tim, before he started pacing himself a circuit over top of the carpet and drug his hands back through his hair as a way to help release some of his own frustration.
Things were quiet after that, aside from Bruce's foot steps and Tim's frustrated noises as he slumped back into the couch cushions and rubbed his hands over his face, and after a moment or two of looking between the two of them, Jason turned his attention back down to the alpha in his arms and slid his knife the rest of the way back into its sheath.
"You okay, babe?" he asked, running his thumb over the soft cotton of Dick's t-shirt.
"Yeah, Jaybird—I'm fine," Dick gave a small smile and nodded his head, reaching up to run his fingers overtop of the back of Jason's hand soothingly, and Jason had to resist the urge to keen as Dick's baby blues flicked up to his. "He just took me by surprise is all."
"Are you sure?" Jason forced his eyes away from Dick's in order to look over the rest of his fiancé's face for cuts or scrapes or bruises. "Because you fell, and I'd hate for you to have—"
"Really, little wing," Dick's thumb brushed over the skin of Jason's cheek bone, and Jason nuzzled into the gesture and relaxed before he could stop himself. "I'm okay."
"Okay," Jason found himself whispering, shifting his grip on Dick so he could bring the alpha closer to kiss at his lips. "Okay, Dickie-bird. You're okay."
"Hmm," Dick gave a happily little pleased sound as he kissed Jason back, and Jason let himself relax for a moment before he let out a small sigh and pulled away.
"C'mon," he held out a hand, and Dick took it immediately. Jason hoisted both of the two them back up to their feet, hesitating one more second just to make sure that Dick was moving okay, before he dropped Dick's hand and reached down to grab the edge of the coffee table and dragged it a couple of feet closer to the couch. Dick kept his distance as Jason politely plopped himself down on the edge of the table and faced Tim, but he did step close enough that he could rest a hand on Jason's shoulder after Jason had gotten himself situated, and Jason was thankful for that as he sat forward with his forearms rested across his knees. "Talk to me, Tim."
"I just don't understand it, Jay," Tim sighed, pushing the heels of his palms into his eyes. "I just—I don't—"
"I know, baby bird," Jason soothed calmly. "I know. I'll admit I'm a little confused myself, but the numbers don't lie. At the very least, something is going on with you—you realize that, right?"
"I—yes," Tim nodded his head, his eyes flicking back open as his hands flopped back down into his lap. "Obviously, there's something wrong somewhere, but I just don't know what it is—"
"So, talk me through it," Jason offered, and gesticulated as much as he could with his upper arms supporting some of his weight. "When was your last heat?"
"About two months before yours—like always," Tim answered, his frustration clear in his voice.
"Okay," Jason stayed calm, though, knowing that was the key to calming Tim down. "And I take it all of your blood work has come back normal until now?"
"Yes," Tim nodded his head, crossing his arms over his chest. "Everything up until the blood samples I gave this morning before I left for work have been normal—urine samples, too."
"So, questions number one and two if you're pregnant are how far along are you, and how you conceived off of your cycle—"
It wasn't completely unheard of for omegas to become pregnant when mated outside of their heats, but it wasn't exactly common either, and Jason wasn't sure how Kryptonian DNA and semen factored into that equation.
"—But before we get to all of that," Jason pushed on quickly when he saw Tim open his mouth to argue. "You're on an insane birth control regiment, aren't you?"
"I—yes," Tim closed his mouth and nodded his head, as Jason clearly surprised him with the slight change of subject. "I have to stay on oral because the implanted ones make me sick, but Bruce and I recalculate my dosage every cycle."
"Okay," Jason nodded his head as well, quickly thinking over the possible sources of error that presented him. "Are you sure that you didn't miscalculate or just flat out miss a dose in the last couple of weeks or months?"
"No," Tim shook his head, but some of the tension had eased out of his shoulders. "I'm absolutely positive. Alfred doses out my medication and I have a container I keep it in where each pill of my cycle is sectioned out where I can see whether I've taken it or not at the end of the day, and besides all of that—Kon can smell when I haven't taken them. He won't even kiss me if he comes home and I haven't taken my meds yet."
If there was one thing that Tim could have said that Jason wouldn't have questioned, it was that. Jason, of all people, understood overbearing and over concerned alphas better than most people gave him credit for, and as much as it might have irked him at times, Kon worshipped the ground that Tim walked on and would never willingly do anything that he knew Tim wouldn't approve of, and touching Tim while Tim wasn't one-hundred-percent protected against unexpected pregnancies was definitely something Tim wouldn't approve of.
"Okay, so question number three if you're pregnant is figuring out how you got pregnant while you were on birth control," Jason had a harder time letting that question go as he mulled over possible theories in his head. At first glace, he would have put his money on Kryptonian semen with how anal Bruce and Tim were when it came to medication regiments, but there was always the possibility of a bad batch of birth control. "I'm not an expert on such things, but I think you should probably come off of it until we get this figured out, okay? I agree that your symptoms are vague, and we won't be able to confirm all of this one way or another without some more testing, but between the increased levels of Kryptonian Cells and the particular mix of hormones you have floating around in your system right now, the best working theory we have is that you're pregnant, and I think we should err on the side of extreme caution until we know more."
"Yeah, okay, I'll come off of my birth control if you want, but I'm still telling you I can't be pregnant—the numbers don't support it—"
"Tim, you've seen the blood results yourself—"
"Not those numbers," Tim snapped irritably at being cut off as he waved a dismissive hand towards the paper still folded across his left knee.
"What numbers, then?" Jason furrowed his eyebrows in confusion.
"Kon and I's fertility numbers."
"Your fertility…numbers?" Jason questioned, still not understanding.
"Numbers, chance, likelihood, whatever words you want to use," Tim huffed. "The probability of a successful combination of Kon and I's DNA. Not even factoring in the complications of me trying to carry a Kryptonian child, there is no factor of compatibility between Kryptonian's and humans—even less so between Kon and I. It is quite literally impossible for our gametes tocombine and form a zygote—"
"How do you know that for sure?" Jason cut Tim's ranting off, even more confused by Tim's explanation than he had been before Tim started defending his position. "Where are you getting your data from?"
"You—I," Tim struggled for a moment before he finally just huffed. "Give me my tablet."
"Timmy, I don't think that's a good idea—"
"My tablet, Dick," Tim snapped, looking past Jason at the alpha who had tried to argue with him, and the hand on Jason's shoulder disappeared as Jason listed to Dick sigh, before it was back a couple of seconds later as Dick's left hand passed the requested tablet over to Tim. "Thank you."
Tim's temper had calmed some with the acquiesce to his demand, and a couple of seconds later he was shoving the tablet underneath of Jason's nose, and Jason was leaning back a bit as he reached up to take it.
"What am I looking at?" he asked, immediately picking up words like "sample"; "insufficient match"; "terminated"; and "failure" as he scrolled through the various reports and notes and graphs that awaited him there.
""A Complete Genetic Work-Up on the Compatibility of Timothy Jackson Drake-Wayne and Kon-El Kent in Regards to their Abilities to Reproduce"," Tim rattled off, and Jason forwent rolling his eyes in favor of continuing to read over the file in front of him—ignoring Tim's dictated conclusions in favor of reading over the data itself. "There were five anonymous samples to compare the data against—both caste and beta—as a control, and they all supported the deductions that Kon would never be able to produce an offspring without genetic alteration, but the study sample was too small to say for sure."
"When did you do all of this?" Jason vaguely registered Tim's words and their implications in the back of his mind, but he mostly ignored them in favor of being dumb-founded by the sheer amount of time and effort that Tim had put into the experimentation and research behind his report.
"About a year and a half ago," Tim answered, his body language falling in on itself as he melted back into his seat, and Jason's head snapped up immediately. Tim was looking down at his hands, his fingers playing with themselves as he refused to meet anybody's eyes for more than a couple of seconds as he went on, and Jason watched him intently. "We had a…there was a…Kon and I had a scare, right back after I let him mark me. My Kryptonian Cell Concentration Test came back abnormally high…not quite as high as this one did, but still. The day that Alfred took our samples, I'd been called in to clean out a burning apartment building earlier in the night and I was a little dehydrated. Alfred used an oral swab for what tests he could so that he wouldn't have to take so much blood, and the sample that he ended up taking was…contaminated."
Tim's cheeks burned red, and he'd gone from only looking up every couple of seconds to not looking up at all, and Jason didn't want to ask, but he knew he needed to anyway.
"Contaminated?"
"Kon had swung by for dinner because we were still going through withdrawal, and you know how I get kind of sore after my heats, and Kon just smells so good when he's still rutting and—"
"Yeah, okay, Tim—I get it," Jason cut Tim off as gently as he could, because he could put two and two together, and if Tim didn't want to say it out loud, Jason wasn't going to make him. "The sample wasn't viable."
"I guess that's a good way to put it," Tim gave a half-little tilt of his head as he accepted Jason's explanation before he went on. "But either way, it didn't take us very long to figure out what had happened—well, I mean it did, but not the not-pregnant part. Alfred took a blood sample because it would be more accurate, and…yeah… That whole misunderstanding got Kon and I talking a couple of weeks later, and I did the testing that you see there, but no matter what I did…everything came back negative. Bruce already knows that. I can't—I shouldn't be pregnant."
"I get what you're saying there, Tim, but—"
"If you're so sure that you shouldn't be pregnant, than why are you so careful with your birth control?" Dick spoke up from behind Jason again, confusion clear in his voice, and Jason turned just the slightest bit so he could see the alpha over his shoulder.
"Have you met me?" Tim's voice was thick with sarcasm, but that at least, Jason knew Dick could handle, and as loathe as Jason was to get Tim worked up again, Jason also knew it might be good for him to blow off a little more steam given the circumstances. "I'm kind of neurotic."
"Yes, Timothy," Dick drawled. "I know that, but—"
"Hey, guys!" Jason stiffened as Conner called from the door, and instantly spun around on the table so that he could look at the Kryptonian. The kid was still in his Superboy shirt—fresh off a shift on the Watchtower with the League, and beaming like he was the sun itself—and Jason cursed internally. "What's…up?"
"Conner," Bruce was the first one to greet the young alpha in a clipped tone as Conner stepped into the room, and Jason thanked every God he'd ever known that Conner picked up on the tension in the room and stopped as his eyes fell on Tim's form from across the room. Jason had another half-second at most to take in the resulting blanch on Conner's face before Dick's arms were wrapping up underneath of his ribcage and Jason was being lifted up off of the table as Tim hissed.
"You," Jason floundered for a moment with his feet, unprepared for the sudden change in position, but he didn't miss Tim's eyes narrowing as they locked onto Conner's.
"What?" Conner asked, as Jason got his legs back underneath of himself. "Me? What about me? Why are we all looking at me—"
"You did this to me," Tim let out a feral snarl as he sat forward in his seat, and Damian relinquished his spot at Tim's side in favor of slinking over behind Bruce where it was indisputably safer for the young alpha.
"No, I didn't," Kon shook his head, looking the very picture of guilty as he took a step back towards the door, but froze in place as a growl ripped its way out of Tim's chest.
"Yes, you did," Tim pushed on, sitting up straighter and flexing his muscles until he was the biggest he could be (which, admittedly, wasn't very big, but terrifying nonetheless). "This is most definitely your fault, Conner Kent. You're the one with the dick and the knot who insisted upon shoving them up my ass every chance you got. You're the one with the Kryptonian Cells fucking up my system. You're the one with the…with the…with the… Wait a second… No… You couldn't have…you didn't…"
Tim went on for a second, razor-sharp accusations flying off of his tongue as he continued to flex himself tighter and tighter until suddenly he was trailing off and his eyes and his pupils were blowing wide in tandem as he stumbled over his words.
"Timmy?" Jason asked tentatively, but Tim acted like he hadn't even heard him as he continued to study the alpha in front of him, and all of a sudden Jason realized what Tim was thinking and his jaw fell open as he followed Tim's gaze towards Conner. "Timmy, what—"
"No…" Jason heard Tim whisper, but Jason refused to turn around and look back at him as Conner scuffed his toes down into the carpet and refused to look up at Tim and Jason swore again.
"Shit."
"It can't…you would have…no," Tim continued to ramble, his words growing louder and more sure of themselves as they went, but Jason knew that they didn't matter anymore. That nothing any body could say would stop what was only inevitable. "You would have told me. Tell me it's not true. Tell me you would have told me, Kon-El."
"I can't," was the only answer Kon could give, clearly choking on the words and the tears as he did, but it didn't matter. Tim was already halfway across the room with a piece of Kryptonite in one hand and a bō staff in the other.
"You bastard!"
When two omegas' cycles "synch" they trade off months in heat instead of falling into heat around the same week like most animals do. This is a survival instinct so that there are as many able-bodied persons around to protect them while they are vulnerable.
A "cycle" as it's used here, refers to the entire three-month "ordeal" that omegas go through in between each of their heats and not just a female human month or the 4-5 days an omega is in heat.
A note on Kryptonian Cell levels in humans: it is my head canon that Kryptonians had different biological make ups than humans, and therefore a "scientist" can tell how much exposure a person has had to a Kryptonian by measuring levels of different compounds/chemicals in their bodies. For example, a person who merely stands near a Kryptonian probably wouldn't have measurable levels because no body fluids would be exchanged and there wouldn't be enough skin/skin exposure, but somebody who lived with one on a daily basis (like Ma) might show slightly increased levels as sweated chemicals were transferred via things the Kryptonians have touched, and somebody who partook in…relations with one (Tim) would probably show comparatively high levels on a regular basis as their body absorbed and broke down exchanged body fluids. More on how this affects Tim in regards to the pregnancy to come.