I'm baaaack. Did you miss me? Probably not. But I'd bet you missed my writing! Anyways, this is a bit of a filler chapter, and I can't promise I'll have any earth-shattering updates posted all that soon here, but it won't be another five months until I post again. Y'all can expect another chapter in a week or two. Also, I realize that Beck's parents reactions is a bit anti-climatic, but this story is going to have plenty of drama throughout it and I just didn't feel the need for Beck's parents to have some kind of huge blowout with him.

Beck was sitting at his computer taking in any information he could find about pregnancy and parenthood.

Jade had gone home an hour or so earlier after she got sick.

Beck felt horrible about it. He had been trying to make dinner for the two of them, something he used to do all of the time. It was pasta, something he could cook easily since all he had to do was boil some water and heat up some sauce on the hot plate that he kept in the RV.

Except, when Jade woke up she ran off into the bathroom where Beck could heat her retching.

Jade explained to him that alongside the many changes her body was going through, getting sick at the smell of tomatoes was one of them.

They both knew that the tomato smell would take a while to air out of the RV, so Jade had to go home.

It was just another reminder of how out of his depth Beck was. He didn't know anything about what Jade was going through physically and what they both would be going through emotionally. Beck figured a good place to start would be to find out whatever he could about pregnancy and use that to help Jade.

Beck was in the middle of his research when he heard a car signaling that his father was home, his mother had gotten home hours earlier.

Beck didn't want to waste any time telling his parents, he walked into his house where he found his parents sitting at the kitchen table eating dinner.

"Hey, kid, what's going on? You want something to eat?" Beck's father greeted him.

"No, I had pasta." Beck took a seat across from his parents.

"What's wrong?" Call it mother's intuition, or the fact that her son had never looked so stressed in his life, but Beck's mother could tell that a painful conversation was about to happen.

"I have to talk to you about something. It's about Jade," Beck started.

"Jade? I thought the two of you broke up a while ago?" His father furrowed his eyebrow.

"So that was her car I saw sitting by your RV." Beck's mother spoke more to herself than to him.

"We did. But I think we're kinda back together." Beck stopped, he had figured from their conversations that he and Jade were back together, but they had never actually said it.

"Okay..." His father didn't hide the confusion he felt.

"That isn't what you have to tell us though, is it?" Beck's mother put down the silverware she was holding and sat back in her chair.

If Beck didn't know any better, he'd think she knew what he was about to tell them. It was like she was bracing herself for something terrible.

He took a deep breath. Like a band-aid, just rip it off, he told himself. The longer he sat there the harder it would be.

"She's pregnant," Beck said quickly.

You would think he had slapped his parents across the face with the way they looked at him.

It was stunned silence, nothing but stunned silence.

"Jade? Jade West... is pregnant?" His father leaned forward, covering the bottom half of his face with his hand.

Beck nodded.

"With your baby?" Beck's mother looked like she had aged ten years in ten seconds.

Beck nodded again.

"What are the two of you planning on doing about this?" She asked calmly.

"Jade was going to get an abortion, but she couldn't. I guess it's not set in stone, but I think we're keeping it."

"And how do you plan on supporting a family while going to college?" Beck's mother folded her hands in front of her as she looked to Beck expectantly.

"I'll get a job, maybe put college off for a year." He looked back and forth between his parents.

His mother was focused in on the situation, Beck's father looked completely checked out. The conversation was basically just between him and his mother at that point.

"You think that's a wise decision?" She asked.

"I think... that it's what I have to do."

"How far along is she?"

"Well, I don't actually know," Beck said, slightly more meekly than before.

"Has she seen a doctor?" His mother continued.

Beck remained silent.

"You don't know." His father concluded for him. "Have the two of you talked at all?"

"I just found out today!" Beck yelled slightly, as much as someone as calm as Beck could yell. "I would have made sure I knew all of this first but Jade felt too sick to get into it and I didn't want to wait to tell you guys."

"Okay, you did the right thing telling us." His father nodded his head as he did his best to be understanding of Beck's situation. His eyes were staring pointedly at the table instead of Beck while he made every effort to control himself.

"Why aren't you guys more mad about this?" Beck sat back in his seat. His parents were never the angry type, but he figured becoming a teenage father would be the exception to their patience.

Beck's father sighed. "We're furious-"

"But what's done is done. No sense in yelling about it." His mother finished.

They had always been good at that. Being on the same page; finishing each other's sentences.

"You just-" His father stood up abruptly. "You better come up with a plan. We can help but this is your responsibility." He exited the room, leaving Beck and his mother at the table alone.

There was a long stretch of silence between the two. For a while, Beck wondered if he should just get up and go back to the RV. But, while his mother was keeping quiet, he could tell there were some things still left on her mind. The least Beck could do was give her time to organize her thoughts.

"You said she's feeling sick?" His mother asked, her tone turned much softer than it was before.

"Yeah, I tried to make her dinner and the smell just made her vomit. She had to go home." Beck frowned at the memory.

"Poor thing." His mother spoke with a tut, sympathy showed on her face. " I remember being pregnant with you. You may have been an easy kid but you did a number on me during my pregnancy to make up for it."

"I'm not sure if I can still be counted as an 'easy kid' after this. And Jade seems miserable. I just don't know how to help her." Beck admitted.

"She is miserable, trust me. But you can help her." She reached her hand across the table and placed it on Beck's to comfort him.

"How?" He asked.

"Just be there when she needs you. Make sure she knows she can ask you for anything. Have you tried finding some information about pregnancy and everything?"

Beck nodded.

"That's a good first step. It will let her know that you're serious about wanting to stick around. The last thing a pregnant woman-especially a pregnant teenager-wants is to be alone. She needs to know that she's not." Beck's mother appeared to mull over an idea in her head for a moment before she spoke again. "Tomorrow when you go into school I want you to ask her to make a list of the foods that make her sick and the foods she's been craving. We'll have her over for dinner tomorrow night."

"Jade is never going to agree to that."

"Give her a chance. She might just surprise you."

As I said, a bit filler-y, but we're still only just getting into the story. I think it's easy for these kinds of fics to start out strong then lose steam and become boring. I'm not exactly trying to drag out the drama or anything, but one of the best things I've learned about writing in the past year is that not every chapter needs to have huge climatic levels of drama-oftentimes with that sort of thing you'll just end up overwhelming your reader, boring them with redundancy, or put yourself in a position where your story can never truly reach a climax because all the other drama makes it appear dull.

Think about Gossip Girl and it's never-ending procession of secret, long-lost, family members as an example. First reveal that Rufus and Lily had a baby together? Shocking. Finding out Chuck's mom was actually still alive? Mind-blowing. But then you had Milo, and Charlie, and whoever else and by the time we got to finding out Bart was actually alive I was literally just like "yeah, that might as well happen."

Sorry if this is disappointing, but not ever chapter will be packed to the brim with drama, that's just not my style. For the record though, I don't write fluff either. At least not pure fluff. I can promise you that each and every chapter will further the story, I just can't promise that it will be a huge gasp moment. Especially since this isn't going to purely be a teen-pregnancy fic.

Honestly, for whatever reasons, pregnancy fics are some of my favorite fanfiction, but they often make the mistake of sticking purely to the pregnancy a-plot. Which, unless you want to go into some serious Lifetime movie stuff, just doesn't have enough grit to stand on it's own two legs as a story. A b and maybe even a c plot is needed to get the story past the initial "oh my god you're pregnant what oh no" drama. A LOT of the drama in this story will be coming from my b and c plots (such as Jade's self-harm issues, Andre's mental illness, and I'll find something to give Beck a little more of a well-rounded arc throughout the story.)

I understand the pace of my uploading this story may be a bit frustrating for readers, but I don't want to half-*ss this fic and have it suck. If I have to take some extra time to make sure it doesn't fall into the pit of "what now?" despair and do some more groundwork for later on, then that's what I'll do. In the end, it will be worth it.