HC Bingo: Wildcard: Interrogation
Nov. 2nd, 2014 04:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
theaspiebanditHal spends the ride back to the apartment in silence. Out of the corner of his eye he can see Dirk’s jaw clench. Hal can tell he’s pissed, it’s been clearly obvious from the moment he wouldn’t let Dirk into the consultation with him.
He’d cited privacy, and the fact it was none of Dirk’s business, and anyway all he’d do was make them restate all the information he didn’t understand thanks to have not been there for the last few meetings.
Dirk had made the same face he’s making now, and had only nodded when Hal had pointedly asked him if he had any idea what was going on. He’d been expecting Dirk to protest at that, point out that the reason he didn’t know what was happening was because Hal was a lying, obtuse fuck. Something. But instead Dirk had just glared and sat in one of the chairs in the waiting room.
Hal isn’t 100% certain that Dirk’s face had actually moved out of that expression.
The silence is becoming stifling. He resists the urge to fidget. It doesn’t work, the bag of medications he’d been handed rustles as he digs his fingers into the paper. Dirk doesn’t even glance at him.
Fifteen minutes later, Dirk pulls onto the highway, away from the apartment.
“Where are we going?” Hal asks
“On a drive.”
“Why?”
“Why are you pregnant?”
Hal doesn’t answer. Dirk doesn’t say anything to advance the conversation. The mile count on their falling apart car goes up another five.
“Why do you think I’m pregnant?” Hal says, knowing it to be futile the moment it comes out of his mouth.
Dirk’s voice is hard and cold. “I’m not an idiot. There are only two reasons for going to somewhere like that, and you can’t take birth control.”
“You remembered that?”
“Cut the evasive crap already.”
Hal doesn’t want to. He sits in sullen silence again. Dirk glares at him out of the corner of his shades. Slowly time passes. Dirk makes no motion of moving off the highway. Hal thinks he knows what the drive is for now.
“I’m pregnant because I had sex.” Hal says finally.
“No fucking shit.”
“You seemed like you had no knowledge about the entire subject, I thought I might as well start at the beginning.”
“You’re being evasive.”
Hal sighs softly, “What exactly, do you want to know Dirk?”
“I want to know what happened.”
“I told you what happened.”
“No, you told me the biological function that ends with a parasite feasting on your guts if you're a fucking idiot. What. Happened?”
“Oh? Are we going to have story time? As you drive us into Mexico so I can’t get out of the car and escape? Is this what’s happening?”
“Hal.”
“Dirk.” He echoes, just to be a brat.
“Who did you have sex with?”
Of course Dirk goes for the one question Hal can’t ever give a satisfactory answer to. His hands screw up around the bottle.
“Hal. Answer the question.”
“Someone.” he blurts out. It’s not a satisfactory answer, judging by the way Dirk snorts in derision.
“Who?”
Silence falls again. Hal’s guts twist, maybe the brat inside him rolled over.
When Dirk speaks again, his voice is still brittle and hard like glass, but there’s an undercurrent of softness that Hal isn’t used to hearing, “Look. I’m aware you aren’t in any sort of relationship and haven’t been for the entirety of your life. So whatever you’re worried about me finding out, I probably already know it.”
“What do you know?”
“That you’re pregnant. That either you’ve been hiding a relationship from me, or you don’t know who the baby daddy is.” Dirk says, calm and measured. “That it’s extremely dangerous for you to be pregnant and that you’re an idiot for not telling me about it the second you knew.”
Hal smiles humorlessly. “If you already knew so much why did you need to stage an interrogation?”
“Because I wouldn’t have known anything if I hadn’t taken you today. How long?”
Hal doesn’t bother playing stupid. “Nine weeks.”
Dirk curses. He glares at Hal, turning his head at a red light to focus furious orange eyes at him. “Nine weeks?”
“That’s what I said.”
“You didn’t tell me?”
Hal doesn’t answer, Dirk doesn’t want one anyway. He stares out the window as the car starts moving again. He has
no idea where they are anymore. At this rate they really will end up in Mexico, or Louisiana. Either way it doesn’t really matter.
“Why?” Dirk says softly, “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Hal can’t think of any explanation. All he can do is shrug.
“Don’t you trust me?” Dirk asks.
“When have we ever trusted each other?” Hal laughs. It’s not funny. Dirk smiles however, the one that’s cracked at the edges, and is probably the only real smile Hal has ever seen him wear.
“We used to.” Dirk says.
“Used to was a long time ago.”
“Before you got yourself pregnant.”
Hal takes another glance at Dirk, and sees the edge of a joke in the smile. “You’re just jealous because you still haven’t gotten any,” He says loftily, defusing the entire situation.
They both fall back to basic patterns, bickering about points that neither of them really give a crap about. Both of them avoid the elephants in the room, both old and new.
There’s no need to dig up old wounds. Not when eventually they’ll have to spiral back to the one currently growing in Hal’s belly.
It happens on an intersection, right after Dirk U-turns back towards Austin.
“You were meant to go to school next year.” he says, tapping the wheel.
“It seems I’ll have to rethink that.” Hal says.
“So you are keeping it.”
Hal doesn’t know how to respond to that. He looks down at the bag of medications again. When he gets home they’ll go on the shelf where he keeps the rest of his medications. A few will end up in the weekly pill box someone bought for him years ago. He doesn’t remember who it was now. Probably Granny. Granny had always been good about things like that.
He has to take more pills than the average new host. An effect of his other health problems, as well as the fact he has the bare minimum of hormones for his body to function without even more defects.
He’s growing breasts. And actual hips. It’s weird.
“Hal?”
The chance of him surviving childbirth is slim. The chances of the kid being born healthy even less so. And then when it is born what’s he meant to do with it? He can’t look after a kid, he can barely look after himself.
Whatever the spawn ends up like, Hal is going to fuck this up somehow. Either by killing it, ruining it’s mind, or both.
“Hal are you going to talk or just continue to stare out the window?”
The logical option is to get an abortion. His arms slowly encircle his stomach. The logical option is to kill the thing now, before it has a chance to learn what a horrible parent it was going to have.
He was meant to go to university, get a job, skyrocket to the leading edge of the tech world. He can’t do that if he has a kid at 21 with no support other than Dirk who knows even less about kids than Hal does.
The logical option is---
