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Unwritten Bandslash #5: Bob Gets Knocked Up
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riverlight was the only one to cast a tie-breaking vote, so it's time for Bob getting knocked up, with, let me just reiterate, SOME GROSS BIOLOGICAL DETAILS, because that is how I roll.(I mean, look, if you have enough unsuspected internal ladyparts to get accidentally pregnant through anal sex, then, logically....)
I actually told most of this in email to
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missmollyetc so there is ... quite a bit of it. Apologies for tenses jumping all over the place, it was ... many different emails.~10,000 words. Bob/Gerard, Bob/Gerard/Frank, Frank/Jamia. Mpreg. (But no diagrams.)
Anyway, I was commuting with
strangecobwebs and apparently listening to a fair amount of David Bowie in her car when I came up with this, so the story came to be titled Spiders from Mars
So the central premise is that Bob entirely fails to be shocked by it. Like, it's a surprise, and not a good one, but ultimately it's much more on the scale of having your house burn down than having your house disintegrated by robot ninja spiders from Mars, if you know what I mean.
So, for that to be the case, Bob would have to have an inkling that a) this could happen and b) this could happen to him. So Bob's got this older cousin - second or third cousin, really, the kind of relative he encounters in person maaaaybe once a year, and just hears about from time to time, the kind who's not just "Danny" but "Danny, you remember Danny, my cousin June's youngest, you remember June, you met her at the reunion, but Danny was living in Colorado then so he wasn't there..." - and for a while there he was hearing about Danny a lot and it was all mysterious whisperings and sidelong glances and Danny had been in the hospital and nothing Bob heard ever exactly made sense, so he never really tried too hard to understand it, but it was there.
And one of the reasons that maybe Bob never wanted to know too much about what was wrong with Danny was that Bob never wanted to think too much about what was wrong with him. Because--not to put too fine a point on it--there was this time when Bob was about fifteen when, after a few days of vague muscle soreness and this weird crampy stomachache and a general sense of impending fucking doom, Bobby Bryar started shitting blood.
It was horrible and scary and a fucking lot of blood, and he felt awful and the belly cramps really never went the fuck away, not for like three days. And he knew he should tell someone, except he didn't really want to think about what it might mean, and he didn't really want anyone sticking anything up his ass (no, he didn't) and maybe, okay, maybe he was a little bit terrified that he'd done it to himself, or brought it on himself, with the things he'd been thinking lately, and maybe it seemed like horrifying proof that that nagging sense he'd always had - that he was different, that he was not quite right - was not only accurate but fucking dangerous.
The thing is--yeah, his belly hurt, and yeah, he ate like a pig for a couple of days, and once or twice he felt sort of dizzy--but mostly he just felt dizzy when he was looking at all that blood and if he didn't look at it it didn't seem like such a bad thing. His ass didn't seem to be actually hurt--he hadn't put anything up it--and it wasn't, like... he didn't think it was really all that much blood, and in the end he didn't say anything to anyone and after a few days it went away and he felt fine.
And, okay, like six or seven months later it happened again, but that time, well, it had happened before and then it went away, right? And sure enough this time it went away too. And it was almost a year after that until it happened again, and that time he did some searching on the internet, and he thought maybe he had, like, irritable bowel syndrome or something--he always did feel kind of crazy and stressed out right before it happened, when normally he really felt pretty laid back--and, okay, IBS didn't exactly explain about the way the cramps started before the bleeding, or the muscle ache (the way his nipples hurt, to be precise, but Bob didn't really like to think about it in that kind of detail) or the way his pants got kind of tight--but whatever.
It wasn't a big thing, even if the year he started college it happened fucking five times, whatever. It was never that often again--mostly once or twice a year, and it got so he only kind of just registered that it was happening again. He didn't really think about it when it wasn't happening; he pushed it away into the back of his mind. He realized he was kind of gay and did like taking it up the ass, and he told himself that the lingering fear that there was something Really Truly Wrong About Him was just old internalized homophobia and maybe distaste for whatever stupid undiagnosed medical condition he had that made him occasionally shit blood when he got really stressed. (Not that it ever did happen when something really stressful happened, but when something really stressful happened Bob was too preoccupied dealing with it to think about the fact that he wasn't shitting blood.)
And then he's in My Chem, and then he's having sex with Gerard, and then - with Jamia's gracious permission - he and Gerard are sometimes also having sex with Frank - and then there comes a run of days where Bob is feeling kinda ... off. Kinda wound up and crazy, and his chest is kinda sore (nipples. painfully sensitive. not that he's thinking about it.) and he keeps feeling this weird little crampy sensation in his belly that's not quite pain or sickness but just this feeling like something's going on in there. And it's not like he's really thought out the fact that there are warning signs before he starts shitting blood, but on some level he's sort of expecting it.
And he keeps going to the bathroom and keeps leaving the bathroom feeling like something didn't happen; he keeps going to the bathroom and realizing he doesn't actually need to go, he's just... in the bathroom. For some reason. And then one day he's wiping his ass and there's no blood and he realizes he's expecting blood, there should have been blood, there should have been blood days ago, and he thinks It's late.
And then he thinks--
It's not really a train of thought, it's just. Faster than dominoes. He doesn't really remember steps, or putting it together, or anything, he's just suddenly thinking, Oh, hell no with the sinking certainty that it's yes.
Bob proceeds to have this really uncomfortable day in which he keeps snapping mentally back and forth between "completely impossible" and "obviously happening." He doesn't say anything to anyone - he really, really doesn't want to talk about how and why he thinks this is actually happening, because it's gross and freakish and he doesn't even like thinking about it, or knowing it. But it goes right along happening, and for another whole day there's still no blood and his belly still feels weird. He kills time between sound check and showtime making a list of all the sex he and Gerard (and Frank) have had, as far back as he can remember. Dates. Whether he got fucked. How absolutely positive he is that there was a condom.
The thing is, Gerard's kind of a freak about condoms, and it's not exactly like the "he was drunk and forgot" issue is going to come up--but condoms aren't a hundred percent, anybody can screw up, and it's not like Gerard would think he was really risking anything, if anything happened--they're both clean and they're both guys.
Right.
They don't get all that many chances to have sex at all, fewer to actually fuck, and Frankie hasn't been with them much lately, because Jamia's been on the road with them on and off. Bob hasn't felt like getting fucked even when there was a chance for... about a week and a half now, yeah, it was in Virginia that he pushed Gerard off and blew him instead, and Gerard hasn't asked since. And that, Bob realizes, is kind of a symptom.
It's been a long while since Frank has fucked him (long enough, Bob hopes, because maybe his own life is about to turn exactly as fucked up and freakish as he always secretly suspected it was, and maybe he's kind of dragging Gerard along for the ride, but if he doesn't have to also take Frank - and Jamia - down with him... he'd really rather not), not since right at the start of the tour, seven weeks. He thinks seven weeks is too long, he thinks he'd be noticing something different at this point if it had been seven weeks. He draws a cautious star next to the tiny scribbled notation, eighteen days ago in Georgia of all fucking places. Gerard had fucked him and they'd both kind of fallen asleep and Bob couldn't remember what the hell happened to the condom. The timing was right. It had been a really good fuck. Bob had woken up to Frank crawling in next to them, kisses stealing what breath Bob could get with Gerard draped over his back.
There could have been worse ways to totally screw up all their lives.
---
Next morning, Bob slipped out alone with a mutter about Starbucks. He twisted down a few sidewalks, made sure no one was following him, and then slipped into a drugstore and bought two pregnancy tests, different brands. He paid cash and didn't make eye contact with anyone, stuffing the little boxes into the front pocket of his hoodie before he was even out of the store.
He did go to Starbucks, then, locked himself in a single-stall bathroom and pissed on a couple of sticks. Both in the same go, to make it efficient. He laid down a piece of paper towel and set them on the floor, and then he perched on the toilet and stared at them with his head in his hands, waiting.
Two blue lines.
A plus sign.
Bob told himself to keep breathing, rested his head down on his knees until he was actually doing it. Then he got up and washed his hands and washed the pee off the sticks. The blue lines and the plus sign didn't wash off. He wrapped them all up in the bag from the drugstore and stuffed them back into the pocket of his hoodie, and then he went and bought himself a coffee and half the contents of the bakery case. Apparently he had a fucking right to be a girl about this.
---
The next thing Bob does is hole up in his bunk--shoving the drug store bag down between the wall and the mattress and stashing the alarmingly huge Starbucks bag (full of muffins and pound cake and everything that looked like it had chocolate in it) beside his pillow--and then he gets out his Sidekick.
It takes him a few minutes, paging through old emails, before he finds that one forward that he got three separate times--his great-aunt May had sent it out to probably everyone in her address book, including Bob, and then his mom sent it to him and his brother and a bunch of people, and then one of Bob's random cousins who sometimes emailed Bob amusing encounters with people who knew Bob's name (and they actually were pretty amusing most of the time, which was cool) had forwarded it but with some little ironic note at the top. And that one had gone around to a ton of Bob's variously distant cousins. Including Danny.
So he copies out Danny's email address and opens up a new message - and checks about a hundred times to be sure he's sending this to Danny, to the right Danny, and only to him and not also Richard and thirty-seven of Richard's favorite cousins and childhood friends - and then, scowling in concentration, he writes.
Danny,
Hey, man, I know this is kind of out of the blue, but I think maybe I have the same medical condition you did, like, ten years ago. I know it's been a long time and you probably don't want to talk about it, but if you could recommend a doctor or somewhere to find more info, I'd appreciate it.
And if that really was just a bad appendectomy, uh, please forget all about this and tell Auntie June I said hi.
Bobby
And then Bob waits, and waits, and gives up and gets out of his bunk and shares his delicious loot with everybody else because he ate way too much of it and it's starting to make him feel a little sick (nothing else, just the smell of sugar in a confined space, yeah). Ray is giving him kind of a funny look, but everyone else is just chowing down on the baked goods and telling him he's their breakfast hero, and Gerard crawls into his lap and gives him a crumb-y chocolate-y kiss, and Bob returns it and tries not to think about anything until his phone vibrates in his pocket, trapped between his thigh and Gerard's.
Gerard jumps and then says something about Bob's magic fingers, and Bob says something - he will never be able to remember what - and disentangles himself from Gerard and goes back to his bunk.
He's got a message from Danny.
BB,
If it hurts real bad or there's a lot of blood, do not pass go, do not dick around about not wanting to talk about it, get to a hospital and tell them whatever you have to to get them looking at your guts. Tell them you shoved a woodchuck up your ass, just get them to look. You can do yourself a lot of damage, you can DIE, I am not even kidding, do not fuck around. I cut it pretty close, and I don't wish that on anybody.
And if you're not quite at that point yet, go to this message board [the address is all numbers], sign up, and make a post. Say Ludlow sent you, list your symptoms and leave an email address. Somebody'll get in touch, get you all the info you could possibly want. And probably some you don't.
It definitely wasn't an appendectomy, but I'll tell my mom you said hi anyway. Good luck, kid.
Dan
Bob stares for several minutes--not at DIE, weirdly, but at shoved a woodchuck up your ass, because... there really are only so many things that can be an analogy for. And Danny knows exactly what he was talking about and it wasn't an appendectomy and, oh god, Bob kind of just told somebody, didn't he? It's kind of real now.
He reaches down the side of the mattress, until the drugstore bag crinkles under his fingers, and then he listens to the sounds of the guys fighting over a piece of coffee cake - normal and good and tour and his life - and then he opens up the browser and starts typing in numbers.
---
So it isn't until that night after the show that he gets an answer to his posting on the message board (he read the others with a mixture of recognition and revulsion, and typed his own with his eyes averted). The message doesn't say much except Sounds like you're pregnant, dude. Welcome to the club. It contains instructions on how to join a mailing list, and, jesusfuck, fuck, fuck, there's that word.
So he joins the mailing list, and gets a deluge of .zip files with various labels, all including the word "archive," categorized into sections like horror stories and I survived and Find a doctor right fucking now and sprogs. He doesn't think too hard about that last one, clicks into Find a doctor and, once he figures out what he's looking at - emails, some as recent as yesterday and dating back years and years - he figures out what he's looking for. There are apparently a handful of doctors in the US and Canada who sort of specialize in pregnant dudes, and one of them is based in Chicago. The tour is rolling through there next week, five days from now, and Bob figures that's soon enough, because it's early yet - anyway it doesn't hurt real bad and he's not bleeding. Bob reads on because he can't resist - there is a lot of debate about which doctor is the best or gets the best results, but as far as he can tell, most of them like their own doctor the best and won't hear a bad word about him or a good word about anyone else's, so he figures they're probably all all right. No one's warning anyone off the guy in Chicago, anyway.
Bob calls, and like the archived email tells him to, he tells the receptionist he's been referred by PGDL. She immediately asks him how soon he can come in, with words like any morning this week, how's tomorrow. Bob stutters out that he's not in town, it's not urgent, how about next week, Tuesday? And just like that he's got an appointment for Tuesday, 8AM. She only asks for his first name, nothing about his insurance information even when he offers, tells him they'll work it out when he gets there.
Over the course of the next five days, Bob slowly reads all of the Horror stories file, and then all of the I survived file. He starts entertaining the idea that none of this is true, that it's all some elaborate fetish fantasy, and the more he thinks about it the more plausible that seems (except for the real, immediate concern in Danny's email, that ... that didn't seem like it had anything to do with anyone getting their rocks off). Anyway, if he gets to the doctor's office and anybody's wearing leather or brings out a gag, he figures he'll just run. And never speak to Danny again.
He mentions to Gerard that he's going to see his dentist when they get to Chicago. He says he has a toothache.
He forgets, until he sees the look of dawning horror on Gerard's face, that Gerard will automatically translate this to mean Bob's jaw is broken. And gangrenous. Gerard asks him if he needs ice, or a heating pad, or aspirin, and tells the entire rambling saga of his abscessed tooth from while they were recording Bullets, with lots of comforting asides about how they have dental now, and Brian's assistant Heidi handles all the insurance stuff so it actually gets paid (which Bob knows perfectly well, actually, because he's had more than one excruciating phone call with her over ER visits and checking out AMA). Gerard goes on to interrogate Bob about his dentist - is this a good guy? will he listen when Bob tells him something's wrong, like actually listen? - and Bob has to swear up and down that it's the dentist he's been going to since he was two years old and the guy will take care of him and he's fine, really, it's just a little thing. Gerard asks if Bob wants him to come along, and Bob says, no, it's early (dumb objection, since Gerard is a freaky morning person now that he doesn't have hangovers to contend with, it's Bob who stays up all night and then sleeps til noon) and anyway - ruthlessly, because he already feels like such an asshole at this point - they'll probably have to do the thing where they stick a needle into his gums.
Gerard shudders but gives in, asks if he's being too mommish about it and swears he'll be cool, he just--you know, Bob never goes to doctors or anything, he's sure it's okay? And Bob says he's sure, and Gerard promises again to chill out about it--except for five days he kisses Bob carefully, like his mouth is made of glass, and doesn't ever touch his face on the left side, and won't let Bob go down on him.
Bob feels like the biggest asshole in the world.
But he's also starting to wonder if he couldn't just--just go with this, just let it be a toothache and then maybe, like, an emergency root canal, and he'll be sick for a few days and maybe miss a show or two - maybe the anesthetic didn't agree with him or something - and then it's over, this whole thing just goes away and he doesn't have to think about it ever again, doesn't ever have to tell Gerard (or Frank, or Jamia) what he is or what happened.
Except the night before his appointment, when Bob's in his bunk trying to fall asleep early so getting up at the asscrack of dawn won't be quite so miserable, he opens up the files again, and for the first time he clicks on the one labeled Sprogs. There's a warning at the top of the file: Every email tagged [Sprogs] contains dudes talking about the kids they gave birth to, and lots of them include pictures. Don't look if you don't want to see.
Bob has to shut his eyes for a second. None of the other emails talked about kids at the end of--of pregnancies. Just talked about damage, ICU stays, surviving. Danny doesn't have a kid, Danny had major abdominal surgery, sepsis, a near death experience. Bob hadn't thought about a kid, but before he can question whether he wants to, he's opening his eyes and scrolling down and he can't even look at the words, but there are pictures--impossibly scrawny babies covered in tubes and little hats, wide-eyed healthy babies, tiny fingers wrapped around big hairy-knuckled ones. A little girl with a brand new backpack, waving as she steps onto a schoolbus, oh God.
Bob's seen Gerard and Mikey's baby pictures, and he can see it all of a sudden, see her, with dark blonde curls and hazel eyes and teeth missing from a smaller version of Gerard's dorky smile, and...
Hell.
Gerard wakes him up the next morning with coffee, and Bob lets him put an ice cube in it and drinks it lukewarm and tells himself he isn't going to be sick.
---
He takes a cab from the venue to the appointment, giving the address without too much worry because Gerard has carefully not walked him to the cab, in an elaborate display of not-hovering. He gets there, pays and steps out of the cab and stands staring for a second at the totally normal little doctor's office, his stomach doing a slow, queasy roll, and he thinks What if this is morning sickness and what if it's like this all the time, and then he tells himself to man up and get on with it. He braces for a room full of pregnant ladies and curious stares, and goes inside.
He's a little early, though, and the waiting room is vacant. There's a receptionist, a woman a little older than their average fan, wearing scrubs. She says, "Bob?" and he nods. She presses a button and says, "Doctor Landry, your eight o'clock is here," and about fifteen seconds later--before Bob could even have sat down, without handing him a clipboard or making him wait sitting in an exam room--there's a gray-haired guy in a white coat, consummately doctor-looking, who says, "Hello there, I'm Dr. Landry, come on back."
He takes Bob into an office, not an exam room, waves him into a chair in front of a desk and doesn't say anything about stripping naked and putting on a hospital gown that leaves his ass hanging out, and a little of the anxiety ebbs out of Bob's stomach. "Your name is Bob?"
"Bob Bryar," he repeats, because he's grasped that they're trying not to make him reveal personal information, but really, if he's going to trust them with everything else, he can let them know his last name.
Dr. Landry writes that down--Bob automatically spells it for him when he sees the pen move--and says, "All right, thank you. Do you prefer Bob or Mr. Bryar?"
"Bob, Bob's fine."
Dr. Landry nods again, and says, "And just to be absolutely clear--you said you'd been referred by PGDL, and you understand that I'm an obstetrician, yes?"
Bob swallows hard and nods.
"So you are here because you are a man who believes that he may be pregnant. Is that correct?"
Bob nods again, and then, because it seems like the kind of thing you have to give a proper answer to, he says, with neat precision, "Yes."
Dr. Landry gathers up a couple of forms from Bob's file and slides them across the desk with a pen. "These are some basic consent forms, which I would like you to sign so that we can do a few tests today to make an accurate diagnosis. We won't be doing anything invasive, but signing those forms does not in any way commit you to anything you're uncomfortable with. Do you understand?"
Bob nods, skims the words--he can't make himself read them properly, but they look pretty normal, stuff about privacy and informed consent--and signs.
"All right," Dr. Landry says, after checking that he has signed them--with his real, actual signature, even, not just his autograph-table scrawl. "I'd like to start by drawing some blood, Bob. I have a lab on site, mostly to accommodate exactly this type of case, and my tech is in this morning, so we can run some tests immediately. If I send a sample over now, by the time we're done talking we should have some concrete results to look at. Is that all right?"
Bob nods and pushes up the sleeve of his favorite ragged hoodie--the cuffs are all stretched and it goes up past the elbow without trying, though it won't go much further. Dr. Landry washes his hands and swabs Bob's skin with alcohol, reminds Bob to make a fist. Bob closes his teeth on the ring in his lip, tugging rhythmically at it as he watches the needle slide into his arm, watches his blood flow out into the vial. And then it's done, and he's got a cotton ball and a band-aid, and while he's flexing his arm and keeping pressure on the puncture, Dr. Landry seals the vial in a little bag, writes on the label, and takes it to the door to hand off to someone.
When he comes back, he sits down behind his desk, with lots of official-looking certificates above his head on the wall, and says, "So, Bob, what leads you to believe you're pregnant?"
Bob looks down at his hands. "I took a couple of tests, the day before I called for an appointment, and both of them were positive."
"All right, two positive home tests, six days ago. And what led you to take the tests?"
Bob feels himself blush, but he explains, haltingly, about the blood and cramps and the constant nagging sense of something-not-right, of having a boyfriend instead of just random hookups for the first time in a long while, and about his cousin Danny and his emergency abdominal surgery and near death experience ten years ago. Dr. Landry prompts Bob for more information when he needs it, and otherwise just lets Bob talk, and somehow Bob gets through all of it, and then looks up.
Weirdly, Dr. Landry looks sort of impressed. "You're handling this remarkably well," Dr. Landry says. "You're the first patient I've had come in before the symptoms were significantly more obvious than they are. That's really excellent, because outcomes tend to be better the earlier we see a patient."
Bob ducks his head, trying not to smile like a kid who's been praised by his teacher, though that's pretty much how he feels.
"And I think I need to tell you up front, that you're not always going find yourself handling it as well as you are right now. That's inevitable. You're dealing with something that very few men ever have to deal with, and you're doing so at a time when your body is going through some pretty weird hormonal shifts. The way you feel is sometimes going to be every bit as out of control as anything else that goes on inside you, and I need you to try to keep in mind that it's all part of the same process, and if you find yourself freaking out or crying, that is something that you can't always control. As long as you're not endangering yourself or someone else, you really need to try not to worry too much about that type of thing, all right?"
Bob looks up again, and that little knot of want-to-hide-want-to-scream-want-to-hit-somebody, locked up inside his chest... it loosens, just a little. "All right."
The doctor nods. "Now, let me explain to you a little bit of where I'm coming from with this. I treated my first male patient about ten years ago, and I've supervised the pregnancies of thirty-two men, including two current patients. I consult regularly with four colleagues in this specialty, and between us we have treated a total of one hundred four patients, including those currently being treated and dating back to 1986.
"Now statistically speaking, that is a very small sample, and it makes it difficult to talk about trends or probabilities, and even more difficult to talk about the cause or mechanism of your condition. We've seen a variety of, mm, anatomical set-ups in our patients, which suggests that we may actually be looking at some number of different conditions, all of which result in the possibility of male pregnancy.
"Broadly speaking, most men like you are chimeras--that is, individuals whose bodies include parts arising from two different DNA sequences. Clearly, in your case and the cases of men like you, one of those sequences is genetically male and the other is genetically female, with some sexual organs arising from each. Our understanding is that this happens when, very early in a pregnancy, twin embryos merge with each other, or one is absorbed by the other. The fact that this has happened so many times in such similar patterns suggests that there is something at work other than pure chance, but we can't yet even speculate about what that might be."
Dr. Landry falls silent, and Bob plays that over in his mind, trying to get a grip on it. "So I'm, like... part chick."
"Mm," the doctor says. "Let's say you were in an accident or got sick, and you needed an organ transplant, a liver or a kidney, and you got one from a female donor. Would that make you part chick, or would you just be a guy who happened to have an internal organ containing female DNA?"
The answer is obvious, and now Bob feels like he's being lectured by the teacher who praised him a few minutes ago; he feels his shoulders go stiff and doesn't answer directly. "I wouldn't be able to get pregnant. That's--chicks do that, guys don't."
"Most guys don't," his doctor corrected. "Men whose sexual organs are entirely typical for their sex can't. But that only makes you unusual, not other than what you are, Bob. Gender is a matter of identity, not biology. Tell me this: if I told you right now that the fact that you are capable of sustaining a pregnancy means that you are, irrevocably, female, how would you feel? Like I've given you something, or like I've taken something away?"
Bob looks up warily.
Dr. Landry nods. "I can't take that away from you, Bob. You are who you are. You are unusual, you are a chimera, but that's just the physical, that's the what. You are a man, and that's the who, and that hasn't changed and isn't going to change. You've always had the same body you have right now, and getting pregnant doesn't change your gender any more than breaking your leg or suddenly being able to fly. You're a guy, and you're pregnant." After a small pause, with a little smile, he adds, "Deal with that."
---
So the doctor checks things out and agrees that Bob is in fact pregnant and goes over the various ways he's going to have to work at maintaining this pregnancy--if that's what he wants, and he doesn't have to decide right now, there's some time. They go over what's going on with him hormonally - if he's going forward with it, Bob might have to get supplemental hormones because his levels are naturally lower than a woman's and it's necessary to prevent miscarriage - and Dr. Landry remarks that his natural levels of testosterone shouldn't cause any sort of problem except that, ahem, some studies suggest that high levels of testosterone exposure in the womb can make the offspring more likely to be homosexual.
And Bob stares at his doctor and then says, "Oh, yeah, that's a deal breaker. I'm a dude who got knocked up from taking it up the ass from one of his two boyfriends, but God forbid my kid should be a fag."
And his doctor stares back for a few seconds and then says gently, "Or a dyke, Bob. It's much too early to know the sex."
---
Bob comes back from the doctor's office, hides out from Gerard, and manages to track down Jamia alone. Right away she tells him Gerard's freaking out, why on earth isn't he answering his phone, Gerard is thinking he's dead or something, Frank and Ray are having to sit on him to keep him from going totally publicly nuts while trying desperately not to go totally publicly nuts themselves.
Bob winces, starts searching his pockets for his phone. He finds his smokes first, puts a cigarette in his mouth and leaves it unlit, and then comes up with the phone, and he texts Gerard. I'm back, I'm ok just can't really talk, mouth feels all weird and so do I. Chill, see you at soundcheck. He stares at the little screen for way too long before he can force himself to type love you like he would without a thought, if it had just been a dentist's appointment, if it was just that he was feeling cranky after getting a filling put in and didn't want to leak bad mood all over Gerard before a show.
It's true, anyway, he loves Gerard like crazy, he even knows Gerard loves him. So far.
He closes his teeth on the cigarette, thinks about lighting it, reminds himself he shouldn't, reminds himself the doc said It's going to be a hard time to quit, cut back if that's the best you can do. Looks sideways at Jamia, who's still standing there and wants an explanation. And maybe she deserves one, and maybe she'll be the easiest person he's got to talk to about this. And, hell, she's a chick. Maybe--somehow--maybe she'll know what he's supposed to do next. Chicks must think about this sometimes, How to tell your boyfriend that you're unexpectedly pregnant, and her boyfriend is one of Bob's boyfriends, so. Maybe he can get some tips.
"Could we, um." Bob says, stuffing his phone back into his pocket, feeling around for a lighter. "Talk?"
Jamia looks both suspicious and genuinely worried about him--two parts loyalty to Frank and Gerard, one part loyalty to him--but she nods without hesitation, and they walk around the venue for a while, finally settle down side by side in the cheap seats to watch the crew running around on the stage.
"It wasn't a dentist appointment," Bob says. He's got his lighter out and he stares at it as he moves it from hand to hand. "It was a doctor. A specialist."
Jamia's hand settles cautiously on his arm. "Bob, are you..."
"Not dying," Bob says, and then shrugs. "Not unless something goes really wrong. But it turns out I'm kind of a freak."
Jamia's hand tightens. "Hey! No--"
Bob shakes his head, still doesn't look at her. "No, like, technically speaking. A chimera. Sort of one thing and sort of another. And, uh."
He looks over at her cautiously, and she looks confused, but she's holding on to his arm, she's listening. He looks down at the lighter again, rolls the cigarette between his lips, hunches his shoulders. "I have--I'm sort of--pregnant."
Jamia's hand doesn't leave his arm, and then she says, very quietly, "Sort of pregnant?"
Bob shakes his head. "Sort of something else. Definitely. Pregnant." Maybe if he keeps saying it it'll get easier, won't taste bitter like fear and choke him coming out of his throat. Pregnant. He sucks on the unlit cigarette, feels the little feeling in his belly that's got to be half-imagined, because the something inside him is still just a dot, just a ball of cells without even a detectable heartbeat. But it's there and it's his (his and Gerard's) and it needs oxygen and not nicotine and a thousand other chemicals, no matter how badly Bob needs a smoke. He thinks apologetic thoughts at it, and squeezes the lighter.
"But you're," Jamia says, sounding stunned. Bob dunks his head further. "I mean, you're--Frank tells me--um. You're totally a guy, what the fuck."
Bob smiles a little, involuntarily, at that--it's horribly nice to have someone say it, to affirm it. Before he can formulate an answer, Jamia goes on.
"I mean, not that you wouldn't be a guy if you were trans, it'd just--but that's what you said, right, chimera, so, obviously if you're pregnant--wow. Wow. How does that, um..."
"Gerard fucked me," Bob said, "and I guess the condom broke or something. And in about another eight months..."
"Huh," she says, and her nose wrinkles--he can see her thinking out the logistics, she's smart. And then, cautiously, "Gerard? You're sure?"
Bob nods. "Gerard. The doctor wants to do blood tests, later, if... later, to make sure of other stuff, and he'll check that too, to be positive, but... it's Gerard."
Jamia nods, and then says, "Hey, wait, if you--oh, man, have you been having periods?"
It's the first time anybody's said it like that--the doctor talked about cycles and menstruation and Bob just sort of managed to elide all the actual nouns when he relayed that symptom--and he finds himself blushing fiercely, even though it's incredibly stupid. "Uh, yeah. Not real regularly. Hormones are sort of whacked. And I didn't know what it was until now, so."
"Oh, I'm sure that made the bleeding and cramping way more fun, right," Jamia says, and Bob feels... weirdly validated. He kind of loves Jamia right now, and then she says, way too enthusiastically, "Oh, hey, wait--you've been hit in the balls before, right?"
Bob's knees twitch inward a little at the very thought. "Uh. Yeah?"
"So which would you say, like, overall, lifetime cumulative, is worse? Because you don't get hit in the balls nearly as often, do you?"
"Uh, no, like... four times, five? And it's--it hurts more, but it's not messy and it's over faster. I don't know, they both suck."
"Oh, huh," Jamia thinks about this. "That's pretty much what Frank and I agreed on, but we figured no one would ever really experience both, to be able to say."
"Glad I could help," Bob mutters, and he's back to feeling kind of like a freak lab rat, and blushing a little. But at least Jamia's still talking to him, and not telling him he's crazy or disgusting, so.
"Wow, and you've had to do both, that's just not fair. You are totally exempted from all the horrible curses I said against all men everywhere when I got my period on Warped."
"Oh, thanks," Bob mutters, but what he's thinking about is that Jamia was really cranky and spending most of her time either in Frank's bunk or at the port-a-cans in the VIP area right around the same time he was feeling crappy and spending all his time either in his bunk or the port-a-cans in the VIP area.
Jamia's frowning at him like she's maybe remembering that too, and then her gaze goes down to his belly - like she's just now realized what's going on in there or something - and then, suddenly, she blushes.
"Oh my God," she says. "Oh my God, this is my fault."
Bob blinks. "It's what?" Jamia wasn't even there.
"It's--look, was there ever one time when you had more periods? Closer together, more like a chick would?"
Bob's frowning, trying to see what this has to do with anything. "College, my freshman year."
"Let me guess," Jamia says, "you lived in a co-ed dorm."
Bob nods slowly.
"When girls are around each other they sync up, it's pheromones or something, the hormones--it's because I've been on tour, Bob, that's why you had a cycle and--"
She looks down at his belly, and then back up, smiling a little sheepishly. "This totally makes me the godmother, right?"
"Sure," Bob says, in a small, strangled voice.
And then Jamia hugs him suddenly, fiercely, and says, "It's going to be okay, Bob, seriously. It will. It's going to be fucking weird, but okay."
And then they get down to strategizing.
---
When he finally can't avoid Gerard anymore, Bob tells him he's fine, just feeling a little out of it. And he needs to talk to Gerard later. In the hotel. He's fine for the show, really, totally fine. And he kisses Gerard after he says it, gently and tentatively and way too much like a kiss goodbye.
Because Bob is more sure every minute that he's going to keep this baby, but it's going to mean time off, it could bring down crazy shit on the band--he doesn't know how Gerard will take it, and he knows there's no way Gerard could possibly have imagined this as a consequence of sleeping with Bob, so it's not really Gerard's responsibility. Bob's the freak, Bob should have found out, taken some kind of precaution, told Gerard. He didn't, he has to deal with it. And even if Gerard's okay in the long run, in the short run--people don't react to big surprises like this really well, Bob knows it.
(But in the back of his head he's thinking: he's Gerard Way, he wants to save everyone. He'll want to save me, too, right?)
Meanwhile they have a show to play; Bob and Gerard each pull it together and Jamia bites her tongue and no one else knows a thing. Afterward, though, Bob takes a detour before heading to the hotel room, to tell Ray and Mikey that he's going to have to tell Gerard and Frank something they won't like, and he just wants them to be prepared for that.
Ray asks, point blank, "Are you leaving the band?"
Bob says, "I'm going to have to take time off, at least, but that's... an effect of the thing. That's not the thing. And I can't tell you the thing before I tell them."
Mikey asks, "Are you all right?"
Bob says, "So far."
Mikey asks, "Are they all right?"
All Bob can do is nod.
So Bob goes to his and Gerard's hotel room, where Gerard is continuing to kind of freak out, and Gerard kisses him before he can say anything, and it's definitely a frantic don't-leave-me kiss, because Gerard is horribly scared that Bob is really sick, that something horrible is going to happen, is already happening. Bob just pushes him away gently after a while and sits down by himself. "I told Jamia to send Frankie, I have to talk to you both."
Gerard paces. Bob sits quietly and says nothing. Frank shows up looking wide-eyed and freaked out from whatever Jamia said when she sent him up.
Bob takes a breath, looks up at the two of them standing together, and says, "I'm just--this isn't going to make any sense, but I'm just going to say it straight out. I'm pregnant."
They both start laughing, wild and hysterical--release of tension, as much as thinking it's a joke. Bob puts his face in his hands and shakes a little and waits for them to stop--Frank stops sooner, but Gerard starts asking questions, talking too loud and still half laughing. Bob answers them as factually and calmly as he can, except he wants to punch someone, he wants to quit the fucking band, he wants to--
Gerard says, "So you're a chick now?" and before Bob can stand up and deck him, Frank tackles him flat onto a bed and physically forces him to shut up, which startles Bob at least as much as it does Gerard.
Frank says, "Gee, shut up and look. Jamia told me Bob was going to say something crazy. And she told me not to say anything stupid, and she told me if i couldn't think of anything to say that wasn't stupid, I should try giving him a hug. So shut the fuck up for a minute."
Gerard goes still, staring at Frank, staring at Bob, and then he fights--well, flails--out from under Frank and bolts over to Bob and clings to him, muttering, "Sorry, I'm an asshole, sorry, really? Seriously? Holy shit, dude, are you scared? Are you--"
And Frank joins in, and they are a little fiercely-hugging knot of HOLY SHIT WHAT JUST HAPPENED.
---
Bob does eventually get to the "you're not responsible if you don't want to be" speech, although Gerard doesn't really let him finish more than a sentence (nor does Frank, nor Jamia). But it sticks in Gerard's head, along with the quiet calm way Bob handled it, the way he went and got checked without telling Gerard anything at all.
Later, when Bob's feeling sick and Gerard's making a doomed attempt to coddle him and Bob is insisting he's fine, Gerard snaps, "Could you let me be nice to you for thirty seconds before you remind me how much you don't need me?"
It comes out a little more plaintive than he meant it to, and Bob is taken aback, and they have a Moment.
---
Somewhere during the process of Bob and Gerard and Frank explaining this to Ray, and Mikey, and Brian, somebody makes an extremely unfortunate Alien joke.
From then on, Bob stubbornly refers to the baby as ET, because if he's going to have to think about the little thing inside him as an alien, it's going to be a friendly one.
He gets so many gifts of Reese's Pieces they start to make him sick, but he never tells anyone, just starts hiding the candy instead of eating it.
---
And then there's the second-trimester libido surge.
---
And then there's Bob explaining to Gerard and Frank, after the second trimester libido surge gives way to being kidney-punched from the inside like ALL THE GODDAMN TIME that no, really, it's okay, he's just NOT IN THE MOOD, and they should go have sex with each other so he can cuddle/make out with Jamia. It's a girl thing.
Gerard and Frank get SERIOUSLY totally freaked out, like, wait! Bob's cranky/in pain, shouldn't they be offering sex to cheer him up? And Bob is all IF EITHER ONE OF YOU TOUCH ME I WILL RIP YOUR ARM OFF AND BEAT YOU WITH IT, OH GOD. He finally has to resort to desperate analogizing - "Look, if the baby was already born and I had to hold him all the time, like, all the time, then, yes, sometimes I would want to hang out with you or cuddle or even make out if he was, like, sleeping, but I really probably would not want to have sex and I DEFINITELY WOULD NOT WANT TO HAVE SEX WHEN HE WAS SCREAMING and I would want you two to just GO AWAY and entertain each other sometimes. POSSIBLY A LOT OF THE TIME."
...it seems clearer to them after that incident.
Also I think possibly there is a waterbed. Possibly heated or with other ridiculously comfy-making features, and no one is allowed to have sex in the waterbed without Bob. Which becomes kind of a logistical impossibility after a while because Bob stops leaving the bed after a certain point.
He will never admit to anyone how fond is his memory of lying across the bed on his side with his head on Ray's thigh, Frank and Gerard having GONE AWAY and Jamia having taken off to shop or nap or something. They watched like an entire season of Gilmore Girls with a bare minimum of getting head-butted in any sensitive internal organs, and Bob doesn't think they said more than maybe ten words to each other, and six of them were repetitions of "Next disc?"
---
The C-section is scheduled for 36 weeks - that last four weeks of a normal gestation is just buffer, really, and between the amount of distress the father is typically in by then and the dreadful dangers of going into labor unassisted, they prefer not to try to go any farther.
Bob's already in some amount of chronic pain from around 20 weeks; that's when he notices more than just a vague achiness, actual hurt, but it's worse sometimes and better others, and intensifies gradually. He's still behaving pretty normally when they have the tour wrap party, (secretly also Happy Viability to ET!, since it marks 24 weeks) and he looks like he's got a pretty impressive gut, but that's it.
Things get steadily worse, but he's Bob, and apart from getting kind of crabby and profoundly uninterested in sex he really just doesn't let on that it's bothering him. Sometime after 30 weeks, though, Bob pretty much stops getting out of bed other than to visit the bathroom and go to his doctor's appointments. The doctor offers to do house calls, but Bob gets stupidly stubborn about it, even though he gets paranoid about being out in public looking how he does - because it doesn't look anything like a beer gut by then, it looks like he's pregnant. He still insists on getting up, getting dressed, and going to the office for the weekly checkup.
Week 34, the doctor tells them ET probably weighs about five pounds now, and lots of babies born at that size and this stage of development are really perfectly healthy. (He's been sort of just giving them more and more positive statements every week since viability, telling them how much better the baby's chances are now than they were the week before, even when it was just the jump from 50% survival to 55.)
Bob is, of course, grimly determined to get to 36 weeks. 36 weeks is the deal, the best for ET, and he can do it, it's fine.
Except by the time they go to the week 34 appointment it's already been a few days since he slept more than about ninety minutes at a stretch, and usually it's less, before he has to pee or gets kicked in the stomach from the inside, or just has to stare at the ceiling (or Gerard's sleeping face) and breathe carefully through a wave of pain as his insides rearrange themselves.
At thirty-four weeks and two days, he gets up in the middle of the night to pee for the third time since Gerard came to bed. Halfway back to bed he gets a stab of ligament pain so bad he's doubled over, unable to get enough breath to scream and that's the only thing keeping him silent. He can't even remember the last time he wanted to scream from pain, but oh god, this is bad, this is so very bad. And he's staring at the floor and all he can think is I can't do this anymore, I can't, I can't.
Before the pain's even passed off, ET is moving around, and for the moment it's just the weird stretch-push sensation, but it's going to be a kidney punch in a second and Bob knows for a fact that he is going to start sobbing when it happens, knows he cannot do this anymore. He manages to stagger the last few steps to the bed, sinks down carefully onto the edge beside Gerard, and shakes him gently.
Gerard mumbles something half-awake, presses into Bob's touch and reaches for him automatically; Bob grabs Gerard's hand before it makes contact with his belly, and feels guilty even as he does it because ET isn't being a bitch just yet and Gerard could feel him moving if Bob could bear to be touched, and Gee loves that, but--
"Gerard, it hurts too much, I can't--"
Gerard's hand twists and tightens in his, and Gerard is blinking, shaking his head. "Bob? What?"
Bob's throat closes on the words, and he almost can't say it again, but he can't let go of Gerard's hand and he can't lie down again to wait for it to get even worse and he can't, he just can't-- "It hurts. Too much. Gee, I can't, I need to--"
"Right," Gerard says. "Hospital."
Bob winds up being made to hang on for another thirty-six hours in the hospital, but knowing the end is in sight seems to help. They kick Gerard out for a while to get Bob prepped for surgery, and he sits with Frank, staring blankly at a blank hospital wall. "I made him say it twice, Frankie."
"You what?"
Gerard looks down, clears his throat. "He--they're delivering the baby now because Bob's in too much pain. He had to tell me that. That it hurt too much to keep going, to take him to the hospital. But I was sleeping and I didn't get it the first time and I made him say it twice, and he's gonna feel bad enough about the baby being early and he hates saying anything bothers him and I made him say it twice."
Frank stares at him for a second and then shakes his head. "You just go ahead and feel guilty about that. Because I guarantee you in an hour you'll have forgotten all about it."
Gerard tries a cautious smile, and Frank shoves at his shoulder. "Dude, you're having a baby."
"Yeah," Gerard says. "Yeah, we are."
They let Gerard sit and hold Bob's hand for the epidural, which puts Gerard on the side of the drape away from the huge terrifying needle going into Bob's spine, which is probably best for everyone. As it is, it's hard to say who's clutching whose hand harder.
After a few minutes they settle Bob onto his back, and Bob frowns and then squeezes Gerard's hand and then smiles, years and miles dropping off his face as he exhales a long happy sigh. "Oh my God, it doesn't hurt. This is the best thing ever."
Gerard has to smile back, even as he tries really hard not to think about how long it's been since he's seen Bob smile like it didn't hurt.
---
Bob states unilaterally, early on, that he is naming the baby, period, end of discussion. They find out it's a boy at the twenty-week ultrasound (and the doctor assures them then that there's no ambiguity there, no sign of other-than-sex-typical sex organs, though he'll be happy to recheck at any time in the future, so they can be absolutely sure) and Gerard maybe asks, then, whether Bob knows what he's going to name the baby, and Bob just kind of says, "Yep," and that's it.
As they get closer, past viability, past the twenty-eight and thirty week milestones, Gerard starts asking occasionally, whining or teasing or just wanting to knoooooow, and Bob serenely (or annoyedly) refuses to even give hints. And sometimes throws things.
And then it's thirty-four weeks two days, and Bob can't do this anymore, and they go to the hospital in the middle of the night; their doctor meets them there and they're hustled into a private room in Maternity, and he gives Bob a checkup and explains their options and how long things are going to take, and then goes off to do something doctorly/administrative, leaving Bob curled in a hospital bed and Gerard sitting beside him. Bob is pale from the pain, looking much worse under the fluorescent lights than he did at home. Gerard is feeling intensely helpless--he did his bit, he got Bob here, and things are not Instantly All Better, and now he's at a loss, so he's just sitting with Bob, singing to him almost under his breath (because he has to weigh how comforting/distracting Bob will find him singing with how mortified Bob will be if he attracts attention). When he's paused for breath and is just quietly kissing the back of Bob's hand (the hand that hasn't got an IV stuck in it, of course, he's sort of ignoring that one) Bob says, "We haven't talked about what happens if I don't make it."
Gerard freezes, literally feels cold inside, and then he says, "That's not going to happen, Bob, we're at the hospital, your doctor's here." Not that that's helping right now, not that it's fixed anything yet, but for sure they won't let him die. For sure.
Bob shakes his head. "It's dangerous, they've said it's dangerous. It's major surgery, Gerard, it's two major surgeries at the same time. Shit happens. I just--I know you'll be all right, I just want to tell you I was going to name him--"
"Don't you dare," Gerard snaps. "Don't you dare tell me his name until he's here. Don't you fucking dare."
Bob gets a stubborn look on his face and opens his mouth, and Gerard shuts him up with a kiss, which is how the doctor and nurse find them. Bob gets all mortified about it, and Gerard feels bad, but it successfully distracts him from what he's saying.
(What no one will ever tell Gerard is that the next day, while Gerard was sleeping fitfully in the chair beside Bob's bed, Bob succeeded in having that conversation with Jamia.
"The baby's name is Elliot, Elliot Lee Bryar, and you--just promise me you and Frank will take care of him, both of them, if--"
And Jamia whispered "Of course we will, Bob, stop worrying. Of course, just relax," and then she kissed him, which is how Frank found them. He cheerfully retaliated by crawling into Gerard's lap and snuggling with him, and Bob wasn't actually mortified at all.)
---
Frank and Jamia were at the hospital when Elliot was born, of course - everyone had been visiting, as the time got closer, Mikey with and without Alicia, Ray with and without Krista, Gee's parents, Bob's parents, Bob's cousin Danny. Frank and Jamia had been there more than anyone (they could do Skeleton Crew stuff just as well in Chicago as Jersey, for the most part) but they happened to have gone back to Jersey for a little while when the day came; in fact the house was empty. Frank and Jamia flew back in the thirty-six hours Bob spent in the hospital before surgery--it was one of the reasons Bob agreed to hang on a while longer, to give them time to get there.
The C-section was a little complicated by also being an all-ladyparts-ectomy (one-stop-shopping to get this All Over With), and there was potential for a lot of bleeding and complications and stuff. Gerard and Bob had talked before, without ever coming to any conclusions, about what Gerard would do when faced with a sick baby being wheeled off to the NICU and Bob still on the table. You only get one other person in the OR and they had to fight a little for that, as complicated as Bob's procedure is going to be.
And then there they are, both later and earlier than they expected to be, and Bob makes a face as the doctor says "You may feel a little--" and Gerard does not look over the drape because he doesn't even want to know. "You okay?"
Bob nods, frowning a little, but says, "Doesn't hurt, just... feels wei--" and there is a definite noise from the other side of the drape, squelchy and biological, and Bob catches a breath and then says, "Really weird."
Bob makes a few more faces, but it doesn't take nearly as long as it seems like it should before the doctor is saying, "Okay, here we go, dads," and Gerard finally looks, just in time to see a tiny pink baby open his mouth, trying to figure out air. Gerard just stares--feels himself breathing deeply himself, like he can show his son how--and then the baby sneezes, gasps, and starts to cry.
The doctor laughs, says something about his lungs sounding good, and then somebody's holding out a pair of shiny steel scissors to Gerard, and he does it, he cuts the cord, and it is incredibly gross, and then the baby is handed off to a nurse who carries him around the drape and sets him on Bob's chest, and Bob brings both hands up to cup carefully around him, muttering, "Hey, hey, dude, it's okay, we're right here, you're okay."
Gerard abruptly remembers camera and takes pictures until Bob says, "Gerard, seriously stop taking pictures and let me introduce you to your son," and then he drops the thing like it burned him.
"Gerard," Bob says, "this is Elliot Lee Bryar. Elliot, this is your other dad."
"Elliot," Gerard whispers, totally entranced. "Hi there, man, it's good to meet you."
Elliot just waves a fist--he's so tiny--and then the nurse has to take him away again, but they let Gerard be the one to gather him up off Bob's chest--he doesn't weigh anything--and hand him over, and then it's part two of The Surgery, the part where they have to cut out internal organs with blood supplies sufficient to, say, sustain a whole other person in there, and Gerard just settles down on his stool and puts his hand on Bob's chest where Elliot just was.
"You should go--" Bob mutters, squinting at the drape, and the doctors are muttering to each other and Gerard catches the word clamp and then focuses again on Bob.
Gerard just says, "He's fine, that's why he's got godparents. I'm staying right here." And Bob squeezes tight on Gerard's hand, and Gerard holds on right back.
And as soon as surgery's over he's up in the NICU - where Elliot's only been admitted for observation, because Gerard can see at a glance he's bigger and healthier than any other baby in the room, lying in a regular crib with Frank's finger clutched in one tiny fist. A nurse comes over and helps Gerard pick up the baby--his son, Elliot, Elliot Lee Bryar--and he sits in the rocking chair and talks to him about how Bob is resting right now, tired out, but he'll be here soon, they'll all be together again soon.
---
So the thing is, careful as they've been to keep things quiet - they know it's just a matter of time. All they really needed was for Bob to be out of the hospital and upright and able to pretend he hadn't just given birth, before people found out. As it is, they managed to keep Pete Wentz from making more than a few veiled blog allusions to friends with a new addition and otherwise kept things almost totally quiet until Elliot was three weeks old and a kid with a cameraphone spotted Bob in the 7-11 with the baby in a sling. The photos are shitty, grainy, and you can't really tell *what* is on Bob's chest (it's the protectively curled arm and cradling hand that give him away, really) but the rumors start up, and everybody is suddenly reasoning back to what possessed Bob and Gerard to come out and move in together right before this lengthy break.
So Gerard and Bob have a long talk and Gerard convinces Bob that giving people a look at Elliot under controlled conditions will be better and safer than being those kind of weirdo people who try to completely hide their kid's existence and wind up being crazy paparazzi bait. Chicago's not that remote, and there are plenty of scene kids with camera phones who could come after them if they got it into their heads, nevermind the pros. But they aren't taking their three-week-old to New York or LA to do this, so they wind up setting up a fucking satellite appearance on SURS (which they casually pass off as "we're on our web cam here from Chicago") and Gerard does this whole little patter about "well, we've heard there are all these rumors about me and Bob having a baby or maybe a mutant kitten or something, so we just wanted to come on and set the record straight," and Steven says, yeah, of course, go ahead, and then Gerard says, "Bob, you wanna do the honors?" and Bob says, "Sure," and reaches out of the frame and settles back next to Gerard with a tiiiny baby in his hands, held face toward the camera. The camera zooms in (quite smoothly, Frank has been practicing) (it was Jamia, incidentally, standing just out of the frame rocking Elliot so he'd be good and sleepy when his cue came) on Elliot's sleeping face, and Bob says, "Steven and everybody at Fuse, we'd like you to meet our son, Elliot."
This entry is crossposted at http://dsudis.livejournal.com/531867.html.
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