#ALL THIS TO SAY that i think forrest packed five or more boxes of bug repellent ty for coming to my ted(dy) talk

[wreckedhoney]

a while ago on the discord i brought up the "which desk at the station is forrest's desk" question when the answer should probably have been obvious. he's been at the job for approx. one week, so it's the desk with all the unpacked boxes. it just didnt occur to me because thats Frankly A Lot Of Boxes and my first thought was this is where all the storage and junk are piled on, but no. it's all stuff forrest brought (/hc). he's a heavy packer. he spite packed all the stuff he didn't want his old job to keep even if he doesnt need or even like them all that much but now that he's blacklisted then no one in the entirety of chicago can have them

[embloomfields]

A/N: hi! in lieu of a new chapter, which is on hold because of The Great 1DFF Drought, i give you this... possibly canon extra that hasn’t been edited and is a giant piece of fluff but writing it made me feel warm and fuzzy over two excruciatingly busy weeks. anyway.. enjoy! please send me your thoughts :)  

“Maybe I’m just crazy.” Sasha frowned at the negative pregnancy test on the bathroom counter. "I would have put money on it."

I rubbed her back. I swallowed my own disappointment to offer Sasha comfort. "You're not crazy. The signs were there."

A tear trickled down Sasha's cheek and she wiped it away hurriedly. We both started at the white plastic stick as if the results might magically change under the weight of our disappointment. My chest tightened at the thought of more negative results in the future and how disheartening it would be to not get what we were after month after month. I could control so much in my life, buy almost anything I wanted, but fertility was beyond my control while Sasha insisted on trying the natural way.

Sasha sighed heavily and leant into my chest. "The wedding is in a few months anyway. I guess it isn't really the right time."

"No. Don't do that," I snapped. Tension radiated from my entire body and Sasha's instinct was to curl her arms around my middle. "Don't talk negatively. We will keep trying. It will happen for us. The doctor said it could take a while for your body to stabilise after coming off the pill. You only went off it a month ago."

Sasha sniffed and tilted her head so she was looking up at me. "I'm terrified I won't be able to give us what we both want so badly."

"Angel," I crooned. "You have to give your body time. One negative test doesn't mean you're barren. Besides, two can play at that game. What if I'm the problem? What if I'm shooting blanks? I've certainly never been in a situation where I tested my fertility. I was a strict condom man before you waltzed into my life."

Sasha laughed. It was soft and airy, the sweet kind of laugh that warmed the coldest parts of my soul. Hearing Sasha laugh, any of her laughs, was magic. She was never more beautiful that when laughter spilled from her body.

"I waltzed in? I believe you strut into my life with an intoxicating air of authority and confidence." She laughed again and gazed at me fondly. "I couldn't figure out if you liked me or hated me on sight. You left me feeling very rattled."

"You unsettled me," I murmured into her hair. She smelt like the vanilla and raspberry shampoo she had used ever since I met her. It was the smell of home, comfort, and love. “I knew the second I saw you that you were going to have a significant impact on my life. It took two seconds to realise you were important.”

“Please,” she scoffed. I didn't react to the nudge of her elbow against my stomach. “You were running through all the different plays you could make to get in my pants.”

“Mm,” I nuzzled again Sasha’s hair, “that too.”

Sasha kept staring at the pregnancy test. While she wasn't looking at me I relaxed the control I had over my features and let my disappointment show. I had been the one to suggest we start trying, the more excited one as we ventured toward starting a family. Sasha had been hesitant — what if we weren't ready, shouldn't we wait until after the wedding, were we rushing to have everything all at once? — But I knew there would always be a reason not to start trying. What mattered was the abundance of reasons to try.

Now, with failure staring me in the face, I had my own reservations. Could we handle potentially months of being let down by negative results? The months leading up to our wedding and afterward should be spent on cloud nine, not with Sasha crying on the bathroom floor and me barely holding it together because a child seems further and further out of the realm of possibility.

“I guess what I thought were signs of pregnancy was just PMS,” Sasha said. I tightened my hold on her, almost wishing I could squeeze all the sadness from her. “Some symptoms do overlap. Breast tenderness, cramps. They just felt different but maybe it was all in my head.”

“The nausea isn't a sign you're getting your period, though.” When Sasha though she had a bug but it never went away, I turned to Google. I was used to her breasts feeling fuller and heavier in my hands for a week or so every month. I knew when to bring her the wheat pack for her cramps. Two weeks of feeling nauseous, extreme fatigue, and paling at the smell of red meat wasn’t part of the monthly routine, however.

“Maybe the change of season is messing with my body.”

“Or maybe you’re run down.” I raised my brows and Sasha rolled her eyes. Between the wedding, work, and social commitments, Sasha never stopped. The scare a few months earlier where she was hospitalised for exhaustion still haunted me. “You need to learn to delegate, baby. Hire a wedding planner. Let your assistant take on menial tasks.”

Sasha scoffed. “Says the man who runs the universe with an iron grip on everything.”

“I delegate,” I huffed before I conceded. “But, we could probably both be better at it.”

 Sasha didn't respond. I watched her carefully as she wriggled from my grip and dramatically threw the pregnancy test in the bin. She turned back toward me and smiled. It didn't brighten her face and knowing she forced a smile, likely for my benefit, made my heart ache.

“Let's get you to bed, Angel.”

Sasha didn't protest, despite the early hour. Rarely were we in bed before 10 but tonight had gone on long enough and I could sense Sasha was fighting off tiredness. She was out almost the moment her head landed on my chest and I lay perfectly still under her, stroking her hair with one hand and flicking through emails on my phone with the other.

She slept peacefully, her chest rising and falling in a calming rhythm that made me own eyes heavy. The hours where Sasha slept, tucked against my side or with her head in my lap while I worked, were some of my favourite. I didn’t worry so much when she was asleep. During the day, when we were apart or together, anxiety sat in my chest like a sack of rocks. It was harder to breathe when Sasha wasn’t around and if my mind was too idle, it wandered to all the ways I could lose her.

“Harry!” The urgency in Sasha’s voice cut through my sleepiness. She shook my torso and repeated my name.

“Mm? I forced my eyes open and gazed at Sasha wearily. I had no idea of the time, or how long it had been since I dozed off.

“We’re out of mint chocolate chip.”

I groaned. “That’s what you’re worked up about? Baby, its ice cream. We’ll buy some more. Go back to sleep.” Sasha slapped my chest. My mind wandered to eating ice cream off Sasha’s naked body. A delicacy I’d enjoyed a few times since we met. A cheeky grin tugged at the corners of my mouth. “If I was about to eat it off you, I might care a bit more.”

“Harry, I want mint chocolate chip ice cream. We’ve only got boysenberry swirl.”

I glanced at the bedside clock, surprised to find it was half 11. I couldn’t have been asleep long and we’d only gone to bed an hour and a half ago. “I don’t care what the flavour is as long is I’m licking it off you.”

“Harrison, stop,” Sasha whined. “I really want mint chocolate chip and we don’t have any. I’m going to Sainsbury’s to get some and I didn’t want you to worry if you woke up and couldn’t find me.”

I sighed. I pushed the blankets off my body and swung my legs over the edge of the bed. I’d told security to enjoy an early night and there wasn’t a hope in hell that Sasha was going out to the supermarket alone at this hour. She might have started boxing with JJ and could defend herself physically, but it wouldn’t help with the mental scars of an attack. She already battled with the damage inflicted by Donald and Andrew Forrester.

“Let’s go then.”

We set off in our pyjamas, only bothering to get coats and slip on shoes. I flicked a message to Sullivan, who would undoubtably be alarmed by the movement in the house — sometimes I wondered if the man ever slept. He was damn good at his job, always across every aspect of mine and Sasha’s security. I paid him handsomely because I knew losing him would be worse that paying above the going rate.

“Pull over,” Sasha demanded. I glanced at her for a second and she shrugged. I pulled up at the kerb and switched the car off. Given the hour of night and the fact that the store was about to close, we were in and out of the supermarket in five minutes. It took longer to drive there than it did to purchase the ice cream and it was going to take us even longer to get home. I watched Sasha, not saying a word, as she picked her handbag up from the footwell and pulled out two dessert spoons out.

“What? It will melt before we can get home.”

I frowned. “We’re ten minutes from home.”

Sasha handed me one and kept the other for herself. The lid was off the tub of ice cream and a scoop was in Sasha’s mouth before I could register that this was really happening. We were pulled over on Brompton Road and my fiancé was shovelling ice cream in her mouth like an excited toddler.

“Slow down! You’ll make yourself sick,” I warned, completely aghast at Sasha’s enthusiasm for dairy at midnight. “What on earth has gotten in to you?”

“Dunno.” My usually eloquent fiancé was lost in a mouthful of mint chocolate chip at midnight. Sasha bat her eyelids at me and I sighed. Never in my life did I think the sight of a woman eating ice cream in my 150 thousand pound car would turn me on. But the tug in my groin was there and the growing need to pull Sasha onto my lap couldn’t be ignored.

I continued to watch Sasha eat and tried not to be offended when my spoon got slapped away as I tried to get a scoop. I shifted in my seat, readjusting myself when the thoughts of pulling Sasha onto my lap and sinking into her became too much. Sasha shrugged off the looks I gave her and happily finished off the tub of ice cream.

“If you still want to eat the boysenberry swirl off me, I’m up for it.”

“Mm?” I hummed absentmindedly. My mind was turning and my eyes dropped from Sasha’s face to her stomach. Her hands flew to her middle and she shrank back into her seat. “Okay, you’re making me feel self conscious. The ice cream hasn’t stacked pounds on just yet.”

“Sorry,” I replied. I reached for my phone in the centre console and type the question running through my mind into Google. “9 out of 15 women experience false negative results before they reach week 8 of pregnancy.”

“What?”

“9 out of —“

“I heard you,” Sasha interrupted. “I’m just…”

“You don’t wake up in the middle of the night with cravings that make you leave the house. It’s just another sign on top of all the others. It can’t be a coincidence, Angel.” We only took one test. The result could easily have been wrong. Sasha drank a litre of water an hour before, it was late at night, it was likely early days — they were all things that could cause a false-negative result. “You should do another one. Maybe a few.”

“I’ve got a stack in the bottom vanity drawer. I suppose it can’t hurt.”

“Seat belt, Miss Ginsberg.”

Sasha grinned and the car roared to life before I took off from the kerb. There were no comments on my driving, though there normally would be — ‘you’re not a race car driver, Harrison’ was a favourite. The same excitement that bubbled in my stomach was the same excitement from earlier in the night. The possibility of starting our family, entering the next phase of our lives, overwhelmed me with joy.

The wait for Sasha to pee on a stick, for which I was locked out of the bathroom because I made her too nervous to go, seemed to last a lifetime. I paced the length of our master suite. I tried to think of other things in the hope that a distracted mind would make the time pass quickly. Despite how long it felt, it was less than ten minutes before Sasha came out with the plastic stick in one hand and her phone in the other.

“Thirty seconds to go,” she announced. My heart was thudding in my chest, faster than I ever thought possible, and I didn’t realise my hand was shaking until Sasha took my hand in hers and gave it a reassuring squeeze.

The timer on Sasha’s phone went off. I exhaled long and slow. “Alright, let’s see.”

Sasha lifted the test so we could see the results display window. I watched her face fall as she registered the outcome. The tearful waver in her voice broke my heart when she said the dreaded word,“Negative.”

I forced myself to tear my eyes from Sasha’s face. I grabbed her wrist and lifted the test closer to my face, studying it carefully. “No. Look. There is a second line. It’s faint, but it’s there.”

“I left two more on the bathroom sink, check them if you want but I can’t… I can’t.” Sasha brushed the tears from her cheeks and sniffed. I pulled her into my body for a hug. “I love you and I want this so badly… I can’t be let down again tonight. I’m sorry.”

“I’ll see you in bed in a second, Angel,” I murmured. I kissed the top of Sasha’s head and walked her over to the bed before tucking her in.

I quietly made my way to the en suite where I spotted the two tests Sasha was talking about, testing on the long vanity. They were different shapes, which suggested different brands, and I was glad they had result indicators printed on them. One needed a plus and a line and the other needed a line in both windows. Even though the plus and the second line were faint, they were there.

I fished the instructions out of the rubbish bin and scanned the page for the answer I was looking for. I couldn’t stop the high pitched noise from escaping me when I found it. False-positives were incredibly rare and faint lines indicated you were pregnant but a blood test would confirm that result.

With the energy of a small child, I raced back into the bedroom and jumped on the bed. Sasha’s half hearted protest when I pulled her toward me and lifted her pyjama top didn’t deter me. I placed my hand on her lower belly and let the cheesiest, biggest grin form on my face.

“They all had the faint line. The instructions said it means you’re pregnant but we should confirm with a blood test.”

Sasha burst into tears. Loud sobs and dramatic tears. “Really?”

“Really.”

Sasha placed her hand over mine. “A little us.”

“I love you. I love you. I love you.” I peppered each proclamation with a kiss to Sasha’ s stomach. “I’ll call the doctor in the morning. Sleep now, Angel.”

I settled on my back and Sasha cuddled in to my side, resting her head on my chest. Her arm draped around my middle and her legs entwined with mine. It was exactly where I liked us to be.

“Harry?”

“Yeah?”

“I love you too.”