Chapter 1: Morning Sickness and a Dragged-Out Diagnosis
The world didn’t wake up so much as lurch. Goku’s eyes flew open to the pale, sickly wobble of the nightlight’s glow on the ceiling. A hot, sour wave climbed his throat, immediate and undeniable. He rolled, stomach clenching like a fist, and scrambled for the edge of the bed. His knees hit the floor a second before he gagged, a dry, painful sound in the quiet room.
Nothing came up but bile, stringy and acrid, burning his sinuses. He shuddered, spitting into the plastic trash can, his whole body trembling with the aftershock. This was wrong. His body didn’t do this. His body was a reliable machine of boundless energy, of hunger that was solved with food, not this hollow, aching void.
“The hell are you doing?”
Sanzo’s voice was a sleep-roughened rasp from the darkness beside him. Goku heard the rustle of sheets, felt the weight of a stare on his back.
“Dunno,” Goku gasped, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. A cold sweat slicked his forehead. “Feel weird.”
“Weird how.” It wasn’t a question. Sanzo’s hand, surprisingly dry and cool, landed on his forehead. Goku leaned into the touch, a small whine escaping him. “You’re not hot.”
“Just… sick. Empty.” Another cramp twisted his gut and he leaned over the bin again, heaving uselessly. The smell of old takeout containers from the can didn’t help. He groaned, slumping against the bedframe, spent. “It’s been days,” he mumbled into his knees. “This waking up thing. And the… the smell of your tea makes me wanna puke now. That’s not fair.”
Silence stretched behind him, thick and charged. Then the bedside lamp clicked on, casting harsh yellow light over the clutter of books and discarded clothes. Goku squinted against it.
He felt Sanzo move, felt the dip in the mattress. A calloused thumb brushed the damp hair from his temple. The gesture was so uncharacteristically tender it made Goku’s throat tighten with something that wasn’t sickness.
“You eat something stupid? Something that went off?”
“I haven’t eaten anything good in a week,” Goku moaned. “The thought of meat makes my stomach flip. I tried a banana yesterday and it was like… betrayal.”
Sanzo withdrew his hand. Goku missed the contact immediately. He heard the rustle of Sanzo finding his pants, the jingle of his keys. “Get up,” Sanzo said, his voice back to its normal, flat impatience.
“Where?”
“Clinic. Now.”
“It’s just a bug,” Goku protested, but he was already being hauled upright, his legs wobbly. Sanzo’s grip on his bicep was iron, uncompromising.
“You don’t get bugs. You once ate two-day-old street meat in the rain and laughed about it. This isn’t a bug.” Sanzo shoved a hoodie at him. “Move. Or I’m carrying you.”
The 24-hour urgent care was a sterile, fluorescent-lit box that smelled of antiseptic and anxiety. Goku slumped in a scratchy chair, watching Sanzo fill out forms with sharp, irritated strokes of the pen. He’d put “partner” in the emergency contact box. Goku focused on that word, a small, warm anchor in his churning discomfort.
The nurse was brisk, taking his vitals. “Any chance of pregnancy?” she asked, not looking up from her clipboard.
Goku blinked. “Huh?”
Sanzo went very still beside him.
“It’s a standard question for abdominal issues and nausea in patients of childbearing age,” she said, her tone implying she asked this a hundred times a night.
“Oh. Uh. No? I mean, I’m male?” Goku said it like a question, his brow furrowed.
The nurse finally looked at him, then at Sanzo’s stony face. “Trans men can and do get pregnant. It’s still a necessary question.”
“Right. Yeah. No, I’m not… that’s not… it’s not possible.” Goku’s cheeks flushed. The concept was so alien it briefly overrode his nausea. Him? Pregnant? It was like asking if he could suddenly photosynthesize.
She made a note. “The doctor will be in shortly.”
When the door hissed shut, the silence in the room was deafening. Goku chanced a glance at Sanzo. His partner was staring at a poster about proper handwashing, his jaw a hard line.
“That’s a weird question,” Goku offered weakly.
Sanzo said nothing.
The doctor, a young guy with tired eyes, went through the same routine. Listened to Goku’s symptoms, pressed on his abdomen, asked about diet, stress. Then he leaned back. “We’ll run some bloodwork, rule out the usual. But given the presentation—the specific aversions, the morning-specific nausea—I’d like to do a beta hCG test. It’s a hormone check.”
“The pregnancy thing again?” Goku asked, a nervous laugh bubbling out. “But I told the nurse, I can’t…”
“It’s extraordinarily rare,” the doctor cut in, his voice kind but firm. “But not biologically impossible for someone assigned female at birth, regardless of current gender identity or hormone therapy. We’ve ruled out the common gastrointestinal causes. This is the next logical step. It’s a simple blood draw.”
Goku looked at Sanzo, seeking something—a scoff, an eye roll, a dismissal of this insanity. Sanzo just stared back, his grey eyes unreadable. After a beat, he gave a single, tight nod.
The pinch of the needle was a faint, distant pain. They sent them home to wait for the lab results, which would be ready in a few hours. The dawn was breaking, a dirty grey smudge against the skyline, as they walked back to the car. The silence between them was a physical thing, heavy and strange.
At home, Goku crawled back into bed, exhausted. Sanzo didn’t join him. He stood by the window, smoking, watching the light creep into their messy room.
Goku’s phone buzzed on the nightstand hours later, jerking him from a thin, uneasy sleep. An email from the clinic portal. His hands were clumsy as he opened it.
There, in plain, brutal Times New Roman, were the results.
Beta hCG: 850 mIU/mL. Reference Range (Non-Pregnant): <5.
He read it once. Twice. The numbers swam.
“Sanzo?”
His voice was a scrap of sound. Sanzo turned from the window, the cigarette frozen halfway to his lips. He took in Goku’s face, the wide-eyed, pale shock of it. He strode over, plucked the phone from Goku’s numb fingers, and read the screen.
The cigarette dropped to the floor, forgotten. Sanzo’s face didn’t change, but a muscle in his jaw began to tick, a tiny, frantic pulse. He stared at the phone for a long, long time. The clinical words seemed to hang in the air between them, louder than any shout.
Goku watched him, the fear and the weird, dawning excitement tangling in his chest. He placed a tentative hand on his own flat stomach. A feeling, deep and primal, whispered that the doctor wasn’t wrong.
Sanzo finally let out a long, controlled breath. He tossed the phone onto the bed and reached for his keys, his movements precise and sharp.
“Get your shoes on,” he said, his voice dangerously low. “We’re going to the hospital. A real one.”
The drive was silent. Not a comfortable quiet, but a thick, buzzing void where the only sounds were the engine’s hum and the frantic skitter of Goku’s own thoughts. He watched the city blur past, his hand still pressed to his stomach. Something was in there. Something that made him puke and crave strawberries and cry at laundry detergent commercials. The reality of it was a slow, cold leak into his veins, both terrifying and miraculous.
Sanzo drove with a lethal focus, his knuckles white on the steering wheel. He didn’t speak. Not when he parallel parked with sharp, jerky movements. Not when he shoved the car door open. He just waited on the sidewalk, a tall, rigid figure in his long coat, until Goku stumbled out to join him.
The hospital was a different beast from the clinic—a cavernous realm of echoing footsteps, harsh lighting, and a desperate, low-grade panic humming in the air. The smell of industrial cleaner couldn’t mask the underlying scent of sickness and aged plastic. Sanzo handled everything at admissions, his voice clipped and impersonal. He used words like "possible ectopic" and "urgent ultrasound," which made Goku’s heart clatter against his ribs.
They were ushered into a curtained bay in the ER. A different doctor, a woman with a severe bun and kind eyes, asked the same questions but listened more closely to the answers. She nodded, her expression unreadable.
“Given your physiology and the beta hCG level, the priority is locating the pregnancy immediately to ensure it’s viable and intrauterine,” she explained. “We’ll do a transvaginal ultrasound. It’s the only way to get a clear picture this early.”
Goku just nodded, a puppet on strings. Viable. Intrauterine. The words were clinical, alien. He changed into a gown, the papery material crinkling with every slight tremor. When he came out, Sanzo was standing by the curtain, staring at a wall-mounted hand sanitizer dispenser as if it held the secrets of the universe.
A technician wheeled in a large machine. She was brisk, cheerful. “Hop on up, sweetie. Feet in the stirrups, just like a pelvic exam. You know the drill.”
Goku didn’t know the drill. He’d avoided doctors for most of his life. He glanced, wide-eyed, at Sanzo, a silent plea for… what? Reassurance? A joke? An escape?
Sanzo’s gaze met his. For a fraction of a second, the hard mask slipped, and Goku saw pure, undiluted terror in his partner’s eyes. Then it was gone, sealed behind a wall of stoic impatience. “Just do what she says, idiot. Get it over with.”
The gel was cold. The probe was a cold, intrusive pressure. Goku squeezed his eyes shut, focusing on the cracked ceiling tile above him. He felt absurd, exposed, a science experiment. His hand flailed out, searching for anchor, and found Sanzo’s. Fingers, stiff and unyielding at first, then lacing tightly with his own. A bone-crushing grip. Sanzo didn’t look at him; he stared at the dark, swirling screen of the monitor, his face pale under the fluorescent lights.
The room was silent except for the hum of the machine. The technician moved the wand, clicking buttons, her cheerful demeanor fading into professional concentration. The grainy, black-and-grey shapes on the screen meant nothing to Goku.
Then she stopped. Clicked again. A slow smile spread across her face.
“Well,” she said, her voice softening. “There it is.”
She turned the screen. In the center of the chaotic static was a small, oblong, greyish blob. And within it, a tiny, furious, flickering light.
Flicker-flicker-flicker-flicker.
A rapid, rhythmic pulse.
“That’s your gestational sac,” the technician said, pointing. “And that little flicker? That’s a very strong, very healthy heartbeat. Measuring right at six weeks and two days.”
The world narrowed to that pulse. That tiny, relentless, blinking light. It was a star being born in the murk of him. It was a drumbeat. It was alive.
A choked sound escaped Goku’s throat, half-sob, half-laugh. He turned his head to look at Sanzo.
Sanzo was still staring at the screen, his expression utterly shattered. All the cynicism, the irritation, the controlled cool—obliterated. His lips were parted, his eyes wide and unblinking, fixed on that rhythmic flash. He looked like a man who had been shown a miracle he never believed in and didn’t know whether to kneel or run.
He swallowed, hard. His thumb moved, a rough, unconscious stroke across Goku’s knuckles.
“So,” Sanzo said, his voice raw and quiet, stripped bare. “That’s that.”
The technician left them alone with the image frozen on the screen. That tiny, blinking light. The silence in the curtained bay was no longer empty; it was charged, thick with the echo of the heartbeat they’d just heard.
Goku finally took a breath that felt like his first. He wiped his cheek with the rough sleeve of the gown, surprised to find it wet. “Sanzo?”
Sanzo dropped his hand. He turned away from the monitor, running a hand over his mouth. His shoulders were rigid. “Get dressed.”
“Did you see–”
“I saw.” The words were clipped. He shoved the curtain aside with more force than necessary, standing with his back to Goku, a tall, unyielding barrier between him and the rest of the ER.
The adrenaline that had carried Goku through the exam began to ebb, leaving him shaky and cold. He fumbled with his clothes, his fingers numb. The soft cotton of his hoodie felt alien against his skin. He kept glancing at the blank screen, as if the afterimage of that flicker was burned into his vision.
When he was dressed, Sanzo turned back. He didn’t look at Goku’s face. His eyes scanned the floor, the walls, anywhere else. “We need to go. Paperwork’s at the desk.”
The walk out of the hospital was a blur of linoleum and murmuring voices. Sanzo moved quickly, his long strides forcing Goku to almost jog to keep up. The night air outside was a slap, cool and smelling of distant rain and city exhaust.
The car door slammed with a finality that made Goku flinch. The engine growled to life. Sanzo gripped the wheel, staring straight ahead at the concrete wall of the parking garage. He didn’t pull out.
The only light was the sickly glow of the dashboard. It etched the tense lines of Sanzo’s profile in sharp relief.
“You’re pissed,” Goku said quietly. It wasn’t a question.
Sanzo’s laugh was a short, hollow sound. “Pissed isn’t the word.”
“What is the word?”
“I don’t have a word!” Sanzo finally looked at him, and the raw, unfiltered conflict in his eyes was terrifying. “This isn’t… this doesn’t happen. Not to people like us. Not to you.”
“But it did happen.” Goku’s own voice gained a sliver of strength. He pressed a hand low on his abdomen, a protective gesture he didn’t even think about. “That was a heartbeat. In me.”
“And what does that mean, Goku?” Sanzo’s tone was dangerously low. “What does that mean? You can barely remember to buy toilet paper. You think a box of cereal is a balanced meal. You get distracted by squirrels. And now you’re… you’re what? Going to be a parent?” He said the word like it was a curse, something filthy and impossible.
The words stung, sharp and precise. Goku felt his earlier wonder curdle into something hot and defensive. “So what? I’ll learn. I can learn.”
“It’s not a fucking video game! You don’t just ‘learn’ and get a trophy at the end! This is a life. A life that’s going to be completely, utterly dependent on you. On us.” He dragged a hand through his hair. “Christ. On me.”
There it was. The core of it, laid bare in the dingy car. It wasn’t just shock, or logistics. It was the sheer weight of it, the anchor of responsibility being dropped onto the shoulders of a man who prized his freedom above all else.
“You don’t want it,” Goku said. The understanding was a cold stone in his gut.
“It doesn’t matter what I want!” Sanzo snapped. “It’s there. It’s real. That’s the fucking problem.” He finally shoved the gearshift into drive, the tires squealing slightly as he pulled out of the spot. “My want hasn’t factored into this equation from the beginning, has it?”
The accusation hung in the air. Goku shrunk into the passenger seat, watching the streetlights streak by. He felt hollowed out again, but not from sickness. This was a different kind of emptiness, one where hope had briefly flared and was now guttering out.
They drove in silence for ten blocks. The tension in the car was a physical thing, pressing in from all sides.
“I’m scared too, you know,” Goku whispered, almost to the window.
Sanzo didn’t respond. His knuckles were white on the wheel.
“But when I saw that light… Sanzo, it was the craziest, most real thing I’ve ever seen. It’s mine. Ours.” He dared a glance sideways. “Doesn’t that… mean anything?”
Sanzo’s jaw worked. He stared down the road as if it were an enemy. “It means everything is about to change. Forever. And we didn’t get a say in it.”
“We could… not keep it.” The words tasted like ash. Goku immediately felt a violent, instinctual recoil inside himself, a nausea worse than any morning sickness. The flashing light pulsed behind his eyes.
Sanzo swerved the car slightly, his control slipping for a millisecond. He took a sharp turn, pulling into the dim, deserted lot of a 24-hour supermarket. He killed the engine. The sudden quiet was deafening.
He leaned his forehead against the steering wheel, breathing heavily. For a long minute, he just stayed there, a collapsed statue.
“Don’t,” he said, his voice muffled. “Don’t even say that just to test me. Or to be fair. That’s not a decision you make in a car because you’re scared.”
“Then what do we do?” Goku’s question was a plea.
Sanzo finally lifted his head. He looked exhausted, the circles under his eyes like bruises in the low light. He looked at Goku, really looked at him, for the first time since the ultrasound. He saw the fear, the bewildered hope, the tremble in his lower lip.
“I don’t know,” he admitted, the fight draining out of him, leaving something worse behind—a lost, uncertain honesty. “We go home. You need to sleep. We both do. And tomorrow… tomorrow we start figuring out what the hell this is.”
It wasn’t acceptance. It wasn’t a happy ending. It was a ceasefire, brittle and temporary.
Goku nodded, a jerky motion. It was all he had.
Sanzo started the car again. The drive home was quieter, the anger spent, replaced by a deep, fathomless fatigue.
Their apartment felt different when they stumbled inside. The clutter wasn’t just mess anymore; it was a testament to a life that was already gone. The takeout containers by the sink, the video game controllers on the floor, the futon they’d forgotten to fold—all relics.
Goku beelined for the kitchen. He wasn’t nauseous anymore; he was starving, a deep, gnawing void. He stood in the glow of the open fridge, bathed in cold light.
“There’s nothing good,” he murmured.
“There’s eggs,” Sanzo said from the doorway. He was leaning against the frame, watching him. His arms were crossed, but the gesture seemed less defensive now, more just… holding himself together.
“Eggs are gross right now.”
“Pickles?”
“Too sour.”
“The strawberry jam?”
Goku’s head snapped up. “Yes.”
A beat of silence. A faint, almost imperceptible smirk touched Sanzo’s lips. It was gone in a flash. “You’re going to eat jam out of the jar?”
“Maybe with a spoon.”
“You’re an animal.” Sanzo walked into the kitchen, nudging Goku aside gently. He got the jam jar, unscrewed the lid, and handed him a clean spoon. Then he filled a glass with water and set it on the counter.
It was a simple series of actions. Mundane. But in the surreal landscape of the night, it felt like a peace offering. A tiny, tangible thread back to them.
Goku dug the spoon in, the sweet, fruity burst hitting his tongue like a salvation. He ate three huge spoonfuls before he came up for air, the simple pleasure of it bringing him close to tears again.
Sanzo watched him, his expression unreadable. “Better?”
“Yeah.”
“Good.” Sanzo turned to leave, then paused. “Get some sleep, Goku.”
“You too.”
Sanzo didn’t answer. He just walked down the hall to the bedroom, leaving the door ajar.
Goku finished the jam, washed the spoon, and placed the glass in the sink. He walked slowly to the bedroom doorway. Sanzo was already lying on his back on the bed, one arm thrown over his eyes, still fully clothed.
Goku crept in. He didn’t get under the covers. He just lay down on top of them, on his side, facing Sanzo, curling in on himself. He was so tired his bones ached. But his mind whirled with that blinking light, with Sanzo’s anger, with the terrifying, vast unknown of tomorrow.
Just as the edges of sleep began to pull at him, he felt a shift on the mattress. Sanzo’s hand found his in the dark. Not holding, just pressing, palm to palm, a point of contact. A silent acknowledgment that they were, for now, still anchored to the same shore.
It was enough. For tonight, it was enough.
Down the hall, in the silent kitchen, the ultrasound photo lay on the counter where Sanzo had quietly placed it, facedown. A secret in the dark. A future waiting for the morning light.