Urien makes an alarming discovery. A little snippet from a modern AU of First Blood.
Horniness rating: 1/10, this is pure mush, giving it one point because I said the word "belly" a few times
Read on AO3 here: Modern Movement - redpepperbot - Original Work [Archive of Our Own]
In the living room, Ruta sits dreaming.
Daydreaming may be a more accurate term, but it always feels deeper than that. She’s supposed to be working on a commission—a big one, for a client and on a timeline she wouldn’t normally work with, but they’ll need the money soon—and an essential part of her creative process is closing her eyes and silencing every thought to come by until they stop feeling like her own. I.e., wait until her brain starts blasting her with a bunch of weird shit.
This project has been a challenge. She needs to send a concept in soon, finish a mockup, and, you know, actually make the mural, but she doesn’t know what the hell she’s going to paint. It’s not that he has a lack of ideas. No, there are plenty of those, lapping at his mind and threatening a wave, it’s that this mural requires some business-friendly mix of his “inclusive” figures the client loves so much and his trademark grab-bag religious imagery stripped down enough so no one can possibly get offended, all watered down to make some banal but hopefully pretty message matching the list of generic keywords he’s been handed.
Which is annoying, but he’s done it before. Except that this time every vision that enters his mind is on one particular theme.
Symbols of birth sneak behind his eyes over and over, ancient fertility idols and medicinal herbs for a healthy delivery, the annunciation, images of a child in a womb, and, of course, of him. Of Urien. Every composition she tries to imagine ends up like a shrine, every line and angle leading back to him, and to the round, heavy belly he carries, and what it holds inside.
And a private college’s new administrative building probably doesn’t want a mural of a pregnant man on the wall.
Ruta opens her eyes. Her sketchbook sits open in her lap, a fresh page waiting empty for a flow of ideas. She flips through a couple pages, hoping for something to grab at, but that is really not helping. All her sketchbooks are filled with snatches of anything, a shadow, a building, studies, sketches of hands moving, but this, her most recent one, has just… just a lot of drawings of Urien. Him, leaning over the counter, a smudge of gray to capture the way the light frames his middle. Him, looking in the hallway mirror, frowning at how his jacket clings too tight. Him, just… standing there, with snatches of journal entries all amounting to “oh god oh god I’m having a baby with my friend and I am having feelings about it” scribbled in the corners of random pages around him. There are about a dozen copies of the sketch she made when she managed to catch him with a hand around his bump, a sight even rarer than finding him in a slouch.
If this is any indication, this is going to be the most-drawn baby in the world. It’s honestly extremely embarrassing. Ruta hopes, for the one millionth time, that no one ever looks through this thing, and as that thought crosses her mind, she hears a yell.
Just a short, sharp yelp, followed by a scrambling. Coming from upstairs. Urien. Her heart beats, and she runs up the stairs.
She hates knocking on doors—it’s stupid, she knows, but it feels like an invasion—but it only takes her a second to make her fist rap against his. A second passes, and her heart beats faster. She knocks again.
“Was that normal yelling?”
Lucy leans out of their doorway, the wheels of their office chair poking out into the hall. Ruta turns, then turns back, wondering if enough seconds have passed to warrant knocking again. Or breaking down the door. Or calling an ambulance.
“HEY!” Lucy yells, making Ruta jump. “URIEN! You good in there?”
Another second goes by. Ruta is on the verge of swinging the door open and bolting in, but a voice comes first, finally, shakily, from behind the door. “Um. Uh… I-I don’t know…”
“Yeeeah that’s concerning enough.” Lucy stands, crossing the hall to swing the door open. Behind it, Ruta sees Urien, leaning against a hanger rack of clothes like he’s fallen into them, hand gripping the post, staring down wide-eyed at his middle.
“What happened?” Lucy asks, moving quickly to take him up by the shoulders. But he doesn’t budge. His face is white.
“It… it moved.”
“What, the… baby?” Lucy raises an eyebrow. That’s old news. She’s been squirming around in there for a while. Long enough that Ruta can feel it sometimes under Urien’s skin. Long enough that Ruta has stopped crying every single time she has felt it under Urien’s skin.
“No, it—I could see it. I saw it moving,” Urien says. “From the outside.”
“Oh!” Ruta gasps, his hands clapping over his mouth. “Really?”
“Sick.” Lucy pokes Urien’s bump, making him jolt. “Aw, come on, I want to see her do it.”
“What? I saw my stomach move. I saw it—why are you both—what the fuck is happening?”
A tense moment passes. Lucy’s eyebrows are slowly moving upwards. “Uh.”
“Wait, hold on, is this… is this just…” Urien looks between them, eyes flashing, alarm taking on an accusatory tinge. “Is this normal? Is this supposed to happen?”
“Did you…” Ruta stares at him. “...not know that?”
“Wh—no! It looked like the fucking chestburtser scene!” He turns to Lucy, who is doing an admirable job of trying not to laugh. “Shut up!”
“I didn’t say anything!”
“Did you really not know about this?” There’s real concern in Ruta’s voice.
Urien, who is turning increasingly red, avoids her gaze. “No—it’s—how would I know about that?”
“This is like common knowledge?” Lucy ignores his murder stare. “What the hell did I get you that What to Expect book for?”
“I read tha—oh god.” He tenses again, and Ruta sees it.
It’s subtle, and the magic of the moment is rather dimmed by the fact that Urien is clinging to the post like he’s watching a live vivisection, but she sees it. Just a faint ripple of the skin, visible under the thin fabric of the undershirt they caught him in. Her baby, moving in him. She can see her baby.
“Ruta,” Urien says through clenched teeth, “stop crying. I am experiencing body horror.”
“Sorry…”
“That’s actually kind of fucked-up looking, yeah,” Lucy says, looking at the movement. “Like there’s bugs under your skin or something.”
“Sssshut up shut up shut up shut up.”
“Oookay.” Lucy claps him on the shoulder. “You look like you’re gonna pass out. Ruta, go get him some water or some shit. I gotta go because I am literally on a work call right now.”
Ruta nods, wiping her eyes. “Come with, okay?” she says to Urien. “To help the baby resettle?”
“Right. Sure.” He follows her out of the room, a bit slow, still shaking off his shock.
She leads him down the stairs, and fills a glass of water in the kitchen sink. Turning, she sees him standing in the living room, looking down. It’s weird to see him half-dressed like this. They’ve lived together for years, but Ruta’s hardly even seen him in his pajamas, and even those leave him covered. She can’t remember the last time she could see the thin line of scar on the stump of his arm, or the roughed-up skin around it. The urge to draw him strikes again, and—oh fuck.
He’s standing there. Looking down. At where she left her sketchbook.
Careful not to spill the water, she walks over quickly, hoping maybe she managed to close it—nope, fuck, it’s lying open on the couch. Displaying the page filled with him, repeated, his head turned, his hand cradling gently around his rounding bump.
“I got you water,” she says, at what is definitely the normal speed and volume.
He doesn’t look up. “Is that me?”
This must be, Ruta reasons, one of those questions people ask as a conversational point, because if there are any other blond pregnant men with one arm, she is not aware of them. “…um. Yes.”
He doesn’t take his eyes off the page. And then—oh god—before she can stop him, he reaches down and turns the page. To another spread filled with him. Him sitting on the couch, him at the sewing machine, and one close up of just his belly, resting on his lap as he bent over the fabric… Ruta gulps. “Um. That’s.”
He reaches to turn another page, and then quickly retracts his hand. “Oh, sorry, is this private?”
“Um. Yes. Sorry. I didn’t mean to leave it—mmng.” Ruta’s words disintegrate as she realizes what likely tipped him off. There are words scribbled on there, between the drawings.
“I don’t know how to repay him. I can’t look at him without knowing the immensity of what he’s giving me. I can’t look at him without feeling like the light will burn me up.”
Urien closes the book while Ruta attempts to melt herself with her mind.
He coughs. “I don’t, uh. I don’t think I noticed you drawing those ones.”
“I. Um. Sometimes I do them after.”
“I assume the whole book isn’t drawings of me pregnant,” he jokes. Then, seeing Ruta’s expression, he frowns. “Wait. It’s not, right.”
“No, it’s just, my sketchbook, but, it’s, well, you know, you just sort of draw what’s on your mind, and, um, it’s, I mean it’s mostly other—well a lot of it is other stuff at least.”
“Uh. Oh. Okay.” He blinks.
“Just, uh.” Ruta squeezes her eyes closed. She takes the sketchbook and flips to a page and hands it to him. “It’s, uh. Wait, no, I don’t know why I’m showing you this. Oh god.”
He ignores her feeble attempt to snatch the sketchbook away, and stares. It’s a gouache sketch, a full page, a variant of the vision that’s been plagueing her. Urien, pregnant, seated on a throne, angels around him, a halo above his head. He says nothing for a moment.
“This looks like a sketch for a full painting,” he says, finally.
“Um—it, yes, it, that was what I was thinking but, I won’t, um, I wasn’t going to actually make it. I know it’s. I know you feel weird about this. I’m sorry, I don’t know why I showed you this. Sorry. It’s really just, you know, it’s sort of like a diary more than anything—”
“You… can, if you want to.”
She blinks. “I can what?”
“Paint this. You know. If you want.”
“But—” She stops. Her paintings have long featured the people in her life, strewn onto vast canvases of rich allegory and theology, and she knows to be careful with him. She’s always asked before including him, even in a background, and he’s often said no. Only a few simple portraits for small shows, or a role in something lacking narrative. “But you don’t like seeing yourself like this.”
Pregnant, she means. He doesn’t like seeing himself pregnant.
“Yeah, but.” Suddenly, he tears his eyes off the drawing, his expression changing. “Hold on, you haven’t fallen in love with me or anything, right?”
“No.” Ruta shakes her head vehemently. “I promise I am still extremely aromantic.”
“Thank god. We’d have to kick you out of the house.” Urien looks one more time at the page. “You should… you can paint me. If you want to.”
He snaps the sketchbook shut and hands it to Ruta, who exchanges it for the glass. “Are you sure?”
“Ruta, I am still not fully decided I’m okay with getting pregnant,” he says. “Actually, after what just happened upstairs, I’m leaning pretty heavily toward calling the whole thing off.”
Ruta leans toward him, bending to place her head on his shoulder, looking down at his bump. It’ll be so long still until she gets to meet her, to really hold her. She still has so much growing to do.
“Thank you for doing this,” she says, quiet.
“You’re gonna owe me big, you know,” he says. “I get to take off the first nine months of parenting. Only fair.” He glances at Ruta, her hair obscuring her face, but he knows her well enough anyway. His voice turns gentle. “Ruta…how many times do I have to tell you I’m not just doing this—”
“I know,” she says. “I know.”
After a moment, he turns his head back down, placing his hand oh so lightly on his middle. Carefully, like it might react, might swat him away. And Ruta, though he longs to join him, to feel that life inside him at every opportunity, only watches, listening to him softly breathe.
“If she grows up,” Ruta says, after a long moment, “and she’s not aro, do we have to kick her out of the house?”
“Absolutely,” Urien says. “Full disowning. I will have no romance polluting my bloodline.”
Ruta laughs, lifting her head to look at him, and thinks, for the thousandth time, that in a million years she still would not know how to thank him enough.
