Thanks for the reviews. Just to be clear, I promise you that Kate's baby is 100 per cent Jaby, so there will be no shock twist there. The secret she's keeping from Jack is exactly what she told Sawyer: that she went to his apartment to sleep with him, with the intention of getting pregnant. (I'll explain her motivation for that in more detail later.) I'm sure some people are asking, "Why doesn't she just tell him?" Because she only just got him back and we all know how he feels about being manipulated.
The other thing you should know about this fic is that I wanted to play with the idea that they're in the seventies, when people were much more conservative about sex and relationships than they are now. (Hence Amy's mistaken assumption that Jack and Kate plan to keep her pregnancy a secret until they get married). It's something I would have liked to have seen on the show. (I always thought we were going to find out that Sawyer and Juliet were pretending to be married to explain why everyone was so accepting of them "playing house".) ;)
Chapter 5.
"So your appointment's at two?" Jack checked, swallowing the remnants of his coffee.
"You know, you don't have to come," Kate told him. Lately it seemed like all he did – aside from work – was worry about her and whether or not she was getting enough food or water or rest. When she made the decision to get pregnant, she hadn't really thought about how much it was going impact on him; she wasn't thinking much of anything beyond making the pain stop, and now he'd had his whole life turned upside down because of her.
Then again, by convincing her to come back, he'd managed to do the same thing to her.
"Are you kidding?" With his free hand, he rubbed the slight rise in her belly through the thin cheesecloth of her shirt. "And miss out on seeing her with you for the first time?"
Juliet had already gone over the process with her. "I don't even know if they'll do an ultrasound—" she warned him, stopping when he shifted his hands to her arms.
"Kate, I want to," he assured her, his voice firm, decisive. The corners of his mouth lifted into a wry smile. "Besides, it'll give me a chance to check him out, make sure he's doing his job properly."
The dubious note in his tone made her smile. Somehow she'd always known that he would be like this: cautious, protective, reluctant to trust them to anyone but himself. She rewarded him with a quick, impulsive kiss, wrinkling her nose when she could still taste the coffee on his breath. "Then I guess we'll see you at two," she agreed.
"You've met Jack?" Kate said when the doctor called her in from the waiting room and they got up hand in hand to go in.
The doctor's eyes darted down to the front of Jack's jumpsuit. "You're one of the workmen?"
She felt his back stiffen as he stood up a little straighter. "That's right," he agreed.
She knew that it wasn't easy for him, being in an infirmary where he wasn't the one in charge.
"Great. There's some waste out back that needs to be driven out to the incinerator—"
"I'm not on duty," he cut in. "I'm here to support Kate." His frown deepened when he noticed the doctor's expression. "Is there something wrong with that?"
"You're the father?" The doctor asked, directing the question more at Kate.
"I'm the fiancé," Jack told him, slipping a possessive arm around her waist to emphasise his point.
"It's just that this is highly unusual," the doctor explained. "It's not standard procedure for husbands – or fiancés," he amended before either one of them could correct him, "to be present in the exam room during these appointments."
"You're telling me none of the other men here have asked to come in with their wives?" Jack repeated, shooting Kate an incredulous look.
"You would be the first," the doctor agreed, looking wary when Jack exploded.
"So what exactly is standard procedure?" he demanded. "I wait out here and Kate tells me exactly what you just told her?"
She could see that his intimidating stance was making the doctor uncomfortable. "Jack." She took hold of his bicep to pull him back into line.
"With all due respect, I'm the patient and I'm asking you if you could just make an exception," she said, hoping to appeal to his more emotional side. She couldn't stand seeing Jack so disappointed, especially when he'd gone to all the trouble of swapping rounds with Roger so that he could be there. "Please? This is really important to us."
The doctor sighed. "I'll let you know when it's time for the ultrasound," he told him, "but until then, you're staying right where you are."
"I'd like you to put this on for me and then we can get started," the doctor said, handing Kate a thin paper gown and leaving her to get changed.
She folded the rest of her clothes and placed them on a chair, wishing that Jack had been allowed to stay with her as she waited for him to return. Despite everything Juliet had told her, she still had no idea what to expect.
A lot of questions, it seemed. "What was the date of your last period?" he asked once he'd gone through the usual preliminaries, enquiring about her morning sickness and energy levels.
She had it marked in a diary that had disappeared along with the rest of her belongings. "I… uh… I don't remember," she told him. What she did know was that it wouldn't be for another thirty years, which was sure to complicate things.
"Are you sure? Because that's going to make your due date difficult the determine."
She forced herself to think back, to when they'd first arrived. "I had some bleeding about a week after I got here," she told him. At the time, she was sure that it meant it hadn't worked. "That was almost three months ago."
"That could have been any number of things – spotting, implantation bleeding… Hopefully the ultrasound will give us a better idea of when you conceived," he said, glancing down at the folder in his hands.
It was a copy of her file, she realised. The same one they had in the office. "I don't seem to have your medical records here," he confessed. "Who was your treating physician back home?"
"It was Dr…" She trailed off as she wondered if he would try to contact her.
"It's too late to have it sent over from the mainland," he said, letting her off the hook. "So maybe you can just give me the highlights for now?"
She nodded, relieved that she didn't have to lie.
"Have you ever been pregnant before?"
"No," she replied, but she had a son once: why didn't he ask about that? It was beginning to feel as though Aaron had never existed.
"Did you have any trouble getting pregnant?"
"No, not really," she confessed. It was much easier than she would have thought, requiring very little effort on her part.
"Not really?" he repeated, glancing up from his clipboard.
"I don't know – this is the first time I've tried," she confessed.
"So this pregnancy was intentional?" He sounded surprised.
For the first time, she was glad that he'd made Jack wait outside. "Anything I say is confidential, right?" she checked. "You can't tell anyone… even Jack?"
"That's right," he assured her.
"Then yes," she confessed, just in case it was important. "It was intentional."
It could have been her imagination, but she thought she saw a hint of disapproval in the way he pursed his lips. "I know what you're thinking, but that's not what this was – I wasn't trying to trap him," she insisted when he didn't say anything, scribbling something on his clipboard.
"Of course not," he agreed without any outward sign of emotion. He put it down on the bench behind him. "Why don't we skip ahead to the exam?"
He measured her heart rate and blood pressure before asking her to step up onto an old set of analogue scales. "I'd like to see you gain a little more weight," he said when the needle stopped at 125, recording this on her chart. "Remember, you're eating for two now."
By her own count, she'd already put on at least five pounds since falling pregnant: almost as much as her baby would eventually weigh. According to what she'd heard Juliet tell Sun, that was more than enough for the first trimester.
Most of what she knew about pregnancy came from Claire and Sun, and listening to the other mothers at the park. "What else should I be doing?" she asked.
"Absolutely nothing," he told her. "You should try to limit your physical activity as much as possible. Household chores, however, are fine."
"You're saying I shouldn't exercise at all?" she repeated.
"Not unless you want to risk harming your baby."
"But running… I thought that was safe, as long as I don't get my heart rate up too high?" she insisted. She'd been out with Jack a few times before her morning sickness forced her to stop.
"I wouldn't recommend it – you could disrupt the foetus and bring on a miscarriage. There are also a couple of theories that suggest exercise directs the flow of blood away from the uterus…"
She was torn between horror and confusion as he continued to outline the risks. Surely Jack – the same man who insisted on carrying anything heavier than a laundry basket for her – would have said something if he thought it was likely to endanger their child? "Okaaay," she agreed, vowing to run it by Juliet the next time she saw her. "Is that all I need to avoid? Aside from cigarettes and alcohol? And car fumes?"
"I wouldn't worry too much about those things, Kate – plenty of the women here smoked right through their pregnancies." She was sure he must have noticed how pale she went as he added, "You might want to limit yourself to one or two glasses of wine a night though, just to be safe – I'm not sure if you're familiar with the reports on Foetal Alcohol Syndrome? Other than that, just keep doing exactly what you're doing."
Nothing that he'd said seemed like sound advice. She found herself wondering if he'd even gone to medical school as she asked, "That's it? Isn't there anything I should take? You know, like vitamins?"
"You're pregnant, Kate, not sick," he scoffed.
He pushed the button for the intercom. "Send in the patient's fiancé," he told the receptionist before turning back to Kate. "Let's take a look at that baby now, shall we?"
She lay back as instructed, watching the door while the nurse finished prepping her; she could feel her face break into a grin when Jack entered the room a moment later, crouching at her side.
"Hey," he murmured, picking up her hand, bringing her knuckles to his lips.
"Hey," she echoed.
"How're we doing?" he asked as the doctor spread the gel onto her stomach and placed the wand against it. "Everything check out?"
"I think so," she agreed, giving his fingers an ecstatic squeeze when the sound of a heartbeat filled the room. She wished that they could get a DVD to take home and show off to all of their friends, but they didn't even have a VCR in either of their houses.
"Based on these measurements, I'm guessing gestational age is about twelve weeks, which puts your due date somewhere around late April, early May, 1978," the doctor told them once he'd had the chance to examine it.
She barely registered the weirdness of this. "Twelve weeks? Are you sure?" she insisted. If he was right, then that meant that she'd conceived the night before returning to the island, the night that she gave Aaron up.
Jack was focused on reading the image on the monitor, but he tore his eyes from it with a sharp look then.
"It could be a little more than that, I suppose…" the doctor allowed. "Thirteen weeks…"
The muscles in Jack's jaw clenched and she could see him was doing the math, trying to figure out if there was something that she wasn't telling him.
"I was thinking less – eight or nine weeks?" she explained, squeezing his fingers again to reassure him. It was about then that they'd fallen back into this arrangement where they weren't really living together, but they weren't living apart.
The doctor pointed to the screen. "See here? How everything is becoming distinct? Arms, legs, neck, head…" He circled each appendage on the monitor; she pushed herself up onto her elbows, and together, as one, they leaned forward to get a closer look. "That's more consistent with the end of the first trimester."
The trapped feeling that she'd had since she'd first began to suspect that she might be pregnant returned until she glanced over at Jack, watching him watch their baby, his eyes glistening, his mouth open in awe.
Her entire adult life, all she'd ever wanted was to be a mother, and to have a family of her own; just when she'd thought that dream was lost to her forever, it seemed as though someone had finally seen fit to give her another chance.
"Can you tell what it is yet?" she asked. While she was pretty sure from the way he kept referring to it as 'her' that Jack had his heart set on it being a girl, she would have been just as happy with another boy as long as he was really hers.
"I could probably give you an estimate at your next appointment," the doctor told her, "and then you can get to work on those booties."
On her other side, Jack snickered.
"What?" she insisted with a self-conscious grin.
He shook his head. "Nothing, it's just… When was the last time you knitted anything?"
When she'd asked Amy where she got Ethan's clothes, she remembered her telling her proudly that she sewed them all herself. "Is that a challenge?" she teased him.
I had fun writing this chapter -- they had some pretty crazy ideas about pregnancy and childbirth back in the seventies.
Next chapter: Jack decides it's time to change health care providers... ;)