The last thing that Sebastian wanted was to have Logan drag him in to a doctor's appointment, but with his best friend standing over him looking worried, the most he could do to avoid that fate was to make the appointment for when he knew that Logan would be at work. Which still left Sebastian with this dumb appointment to go to.

He grumbled all the way to the doctor's office, wading through the slush in the parking lot and all the way up in the elevator. He was still fuming when the receptionist told him to go into room B, and he stalked into the cubicle with the formidable certainty of someone about to be told that viruses happen and he should go home and drink some fluids.

The doctor, however, paid no attention to Sebastian's obvious annoyance, asking him questions about his stomach with the calm assurance of a robot, turning to face him only when Sebastian's temper was reaching boiling point.

"Have you considered that you might be pregnant?" she said, and all the vitriol that was about to pour out of his mouth vanished in one terrified instant.

"No?" he said nervously, a bead of sweat running down his spine.

"It would be consistent with some of these symptoms," she said calmly. "You're about the right age to have had a heat already...?" The question trailed off into silence.

"Yeah." Sebastian looked down at his hands. "My first."

"It does only take once. And when was that?"

"Mid-January," he admitted, still not looking up into her eyes.

"That fits the timeline fairly well," she said, almost apologetically. "If you'd like to do a quick test, just to rule it out, we can move on from there."

Her tone made it clear that she was only saying that in response to the panic on Sebastian's face, but he clung to that hope anyway, with desperate strength, right up until the moment that she looked up from the results, and said, still calm, "Congratulations."

Sebastian covered his face with his hands.

"Would you like a moment alone?" the doctor said. "I know this is a lot to take in all at once."

His voice dried up in his throat, but he managed to nod, and she slipped out of the room as his world crumbled around his ears. What would his mother say? What would Logan say? What about school? The worries piled up on each other one after the other until his mind was almost too full to allow him to think, let alone feel. Clutching his knees, he managed to stop himself from actually bursting into tears, but that didn't do much to fix literally every other problem he was having right now.

Eventually, after who knew how long, the door to the room opened again and the doctor came back in. "How are you doing?" she said, kindly, but unemotionally.

Sebastian made a noise that didn't really mean anything and stared at his hands some more.

"You don't have to make any decisions now," the doctor said. "Go home, tell your partner, take it all in. This is a big day for you. You don't have to take it all in at once. I'll make a referral to the pre-natal clinic, and they'll get back to you within a few weeks, when you've had more time to adjust."

"Okay." Sebastian felt like his voice was coming from the other end of a long tunnel, but the doctor didn't seem to notice anything strange about it.

"Go home," she said again. "Get some rest. You'll need to build up your strength for the pregnancy."

He nodded, unwilling to trust to his voice again, and got up from the chair on legs that wobbled dangerously underneath him. By the time he'd staggered his way out to his car, the whole thing felt like some kind of fever dream. Maybe he'd imagined the whole pregnancy test angle. The doctor had told him to get some rest. Maybe he just had the flu really bad. The kind of flu that made you hallucinate, just a little bit. That could be a thing. He wasn't a doctor, but it sounded plausible.

Especially when, after a few days of napping and tolerating his mother's attempts to feed him an endless supply of soup, Sebastian's stomach really did seem to improve. No more vomiting, no more queasiness over random smells. He was fine.

It wasn't precisely denial, more a sort of refusal to think about the subject, and it served Sebastian well for more than two weeks of perfect normalcy at school, at home, and among his friends. A perfect plan, right up until the moment he walked through his own front door and into the living room to see his mother frozen on the couch, an unopened letter clutched in her hand.

As she broke away from her stunned stillness to first thrust the letter into his face, and then to begin the angriest, most disappointed diatribe that Sebastian had ever heard in his life, the thing that kept running through his head was "Letters? Doctors' offices still send fucking letters?"

He'd almost managed to forget that his family doctor had said she was going to refer him to the pre-natal clinic, but apparently, she'd been as good as her word. Here was the referral to the pre-natal clinic, the envelope carefully stamped with their name and return address in nice, big, unmistakable letters.

Sebastian sighed. "It's not what you're thinking–" he started to say as her head snapped up to glare at him and his lie subsided into a whisper.

"The letter says it's exactly what I'm thinking," his mom said firmly. "My boy... My baby boy... How did this happen?"

"Don't open my mail," Sebastian said, trying desperately to think of literally anything else he could possibly say to her. Now that he looked closer, the envelope looked sealed, but the flap had been carefully pried up without a rip or a tear. "Were you going to stick this back down and pretend you hadn't opened it? Really?"

"Don't get smart with me," his mom snapped. "You drove me to it! You were going to lie to me about it!"

"I wasn't going to lie," Sebastian protested. "I was just going to tell you in my own time."

"Tell me what?" his mom said. "That you're never going to get married? That I'm never going to be able to hold my head up in this town again? What's your father going to say?"

"You're overreacting," Sebastian said, putting his head in his hands with a groan. "You're so old-fashioned. It's not that big a deal. It happens all the time."

"What happens?" she said, staring at him through tear-swollen eyes. "Say it. You can't even say it, can you?"

"I'm pregnant," Sebastian said, the paper crumpling in his hands as he fought to stay calm. "It's perfectly normal. It happens all the time."

"My own son!" she shrieked, her voice rising. "Pregnant! And you don't even care, do you? You little slut!"

Time seemed to slow down as Sebastian rose to his feet, the letter fluttering to the ground next to him. "I don't have to listen to this," he shouted back, and then he was out the door and down the front path to the sidewalk before time caught up with him, leaving him cold and alone among the snowbanks.