After a few days of cooling off and trying desperately to figure out his life, there was nowhere else for Sebastian to go except back to his parents' house. Maybe there would have been another choice if he'd been able to bring himself to tell his friends about the baby, but for now he hugged the knowledge to his chest, turning it over again and again as he sat through his father's disappointed silences. It wasn't like he needed to lecture Sebastian in person anyway. Sebastian's mom was more than ready to fill Sebastian in on the precise level of his father's disapproval, as expressed to her in Sebastian's absence.

Compared to that particular battle, the thought of the baby growing inside him was warm and soothing. At first he hadn't been able to picture it at all: the idea of a baby relying on him was too bizarre and unrealistic to seem possible. But as the cold war in his house grew to epic proportions and his belly began faintly to swell, Sebastian found himself returning often to the daydream of himself cradling the child in his arms. Would it look like Logan? (He didn't know if he wanted it to look like Logan or not. That part of the daydream too often returned him to the cold grip of reality, so he tried to avoid it as much as possible.)

He could just about imagine looking after his own child. But definitely not in this house. He'd had years to get used to this kind of bullshit after all. He could deal with the combination of lectures and silences. It hardly affected him anymore. But when Sebastian thought about his child having to deal with either of his parents, let alone both together, it made his heart stop and his breath freeze up in his throat.

The two of them were going to have to get out of here.

It would be doable. Sebastian had been planning on it for years after all. His savings were ready. His degree was planned out to within an inch of its life. All he had to do was not fuck things up by leaving too early and blowing through his savings before he even had a kid to look after.

He reminded himself of this as he sat through yet another almost silent dinner. His parents reacted to his brief attempts at bland conversation about his classes that morning as though he was filling them in on the latest orgies he'd attended, and eventually Sebastian stopped trying, moving food from plate to mouth mechanically, his mind a million miles away.

Honestly, even fifty miles would do it. Just far enough away that his parents couldn't drop in at any time and he could get on with trying to raise a kid all by himself. How hard could it be? Even his parents had managed it, more or less. He was alive and well, after all, even if he was destroying all of their dreams and hopes, as they'd informed him repeatedly since the pre-natal clinic had blown the doors open on his secret.

If it was too far away for Logan to come with him, then that was just something that Sebastian was going to have to deal with along with everything else in his life. It wasn't like moving anywhere closer would help. If there even was anywhere closer that anyone in their right mind would want to live in. Sebastian wasn't going to leave one small town only to find himself in another, almost identical, small town. He needed somewhere bigger, and he was going to get there, whatever it took.

Logan had been hanging around in this one-horse town for years: Sebastian had long ago resigned himself to the fact that his best friend was going to stay behind when he finally managed to spread his wings and fly away. Logan had had so many chances to leave: to go to college further away, to leave and get a job somewhere else, all those opportunities and he'd used them to stick around here. If that kind of provocation hadn't moved him, what chance was there that something as small as a baby would be the magic ingredient?

Sebastian had known Logan for years and Logan had never shown the tiniest smidgen of interest in babies. Admittedly, Logan's parents never seemed to drag him along to coo over their friends' kids' newborns – something Sebastian always found awkward – but there were a ton of Alphas who made it clear that they were looking to settle down with a nice Omega and have some kids pretty much as soon as humanly possible. Logan wasn't like that. He was always chill.

It was a good quality in a friend, but now, when Sebastian was looking around in desperation for someone to stand by him in this, frankly, terrifying situation, it seemed more like a liability. He needed someone to help him figure out what to do, not just sit by non-judgementally.

Not that it was Logan's fault. Sebastian had pushed himself on his best friend, and now he needed to take responsibility for that mistake.

At some point responsibility should probably include telling Logan what was going on, but that was the kind of thought that made Sebastian want to go hide his head in the sand and never come out. There were so many other things he had to do before then, starting with keeping himself from failing out of school, and going on to attending what seemed like a never-ending succession of doctor's appointments.

It wasn't procrastinating if you were keeping busy all the time, right?