Archive of Our Own ^beta

Something was off. It had been off since early this morning. 

He had cramps and felt vaguely nauseous. He knew that it was probably just his cycle starting, which he knew was a possibility with his busy schedule. He had been on testosterone since he graduated high school, which meant that his cycles had become basically non-existent but he was so busy that there was a chance he could have missed a dose or two at some point. He had seen some spotting the day before, and woken up feeling vaguely achy and sick along with the other symptoms. He had taken a couple of pain relievers and eaten something dry this morning for breakfast to try and help alleviate the symptoms. He would still be able to work today just fine.

And he had been, up until now.

He had finished the assignments that Bailey had given him earlier that morning, which meant that he was the intern that Burke chose to bring to the surgery. Christina wasn't too happy about that, but she always sulked when she was given an assignment that she didn't like which meant that she wasn't anywhere close to finishing.

George scrubbed in like always, but it was only when he was right by Burke's side, performing the surgery on the heart, that it became glaringly obvious that something was horrifically wrong. He was still doing as he was told, taking the tools from Burke and passing over the ones that he needed. It felt like he was moving in slow motion, almost swimming through pain and this weird fog that had settled over his mind.

The hand that he wasn't using tightened around his scrubs as a pain began to build in his back. It stayed there for just a moment before it wrapped around his front. He could feel every single individual muscle in his stomach tightening up painfully.

"O'Malley?" Burke's voice cut through the pained haze.

"Yes, sir?" he asked, trying to make it so that his voice wasn't too strained as he spoke.

"Did you hear what I just asked you?" the doctor asked, glancing up from the surgery that he was doing to the other man.

"No sir, sorry," he said, swallowing down the urge to cry from how much pain he was in. His mind was already racing with whatever this could be.

The doctor paused and took a small step back to look at the intern. He glanced up and down the shorter man before he said, "Something's wrong."

"Nothing's wrong, sir."

"Don't lie to me, O'Malley. You're in pain, aren't you?"

The younger of the two was already cursing internally, not that he could say anything right now with how harshly he was grinding his teeth to try and stop himself from screaming. Finally, finally, after an agonizing thirty seconds the pain stopped and he was able to speak. "Maybe. It's nothing that I can't handle."

"No. Absolutely not," Burke shook his head. "I know you interns. You don't listen to your bodies. Go have someone check you out."

"Fine," he grumbled. He stripped off his gloves as he walked away from the operating table. The young man had just grabbed the door handle to leave for the scrub room so he could finish getting rid of his garments when the doctor behind him spoke.

"And O'Malley? That pregnancy better now be ectopic," Burke said, sounding halfway serious and halfway joking.

"Ha. Ha. Ha," George said as he turned to give the attending a look. "I can't get pregnant. I think it's just appendicitis or a kidney stone." He let the door swing shut behind him and then began to strip off the surgical equipment that he had been wearing. He groaned as the pain and pressure returned. His hands grasped at the massive sink in front of him and his knuckles began to turn white with how hard he was holding the rim. 

When everything finally passed, he began to work through what this could be. If it really was his cycle coming back like he had suspected, then he could have some weird form of endometriosis that had gone undiagnosed since his periods had started at fifteen and then became weird and irregular thanks to hormonal birth control. But if it was endo, then he should have noticed something was off sooner. There would have been other signs, and he'd be bleeding very heavily now. He could also have a cyst that was rupturing, which meant that he should go down and get it checked out immediately.

Of course, pregnancy did flit across his mind but he shook the thought out of his head almost immediately. He knew that it was just Burke getting into his head. He hadn't had sex with another man, at least not in a way that could get him pregnant, in at least seven months and he would have noticed if he was pregnant. Plus, the testosterone that he was on was supposed to prevent ovulation which was kind of crucial to making a baby. He couldn't get pregnant, much less have an ectopic pregnancy. Burke was just joking. It wasn't possible. Another pain was beginning to form, but he tried to ignore it in favor of thinking about other things.

There was also the possibility that he wasn't on his cycle like he thought, and that the blood was coming from his urine which could mean kidney failure or urine stones. The pain could be caused by a kidney stone, or appendicitis.

"George," he said to himself to try and snap out of those thoughts. He took a deep breath, held it for a moment to feel the steady beating of his heart in his chest before it let out as slowly as he could through his mouth. "Just go get checked out. You can't be your own patient," he left the scrub room before another pain could hit him and someone could catch him not following orders from an attending- even if those orders were more personal than professional. 

The bustle of the hospital was still going strong despite the fact that he felt like he was walking through a thick fog. It felt like the air was dragging on his skin as fear slipped into his veins with every beat of his heart. He felt the beginning of another pain creeping up in his back and was just able to slip into one of the bathrooms before it hit. This pain was different from the rest, as it came with an intense pressure in his pelvis. "Oh fuck, please let this just be an obstruction that will take care of itself," he groaned.

George grasped at his scrubs and was finally able to shove them down before he nearly collapsed onto the toilet. The pain and pressure were almost unbearable as he gave into his body's natural urge to push. His mind was still racing with the possible things that could be happening to him, but soon it was wiped clean and all he could focus on was the pressure. Every time that it let up, and the pain went along with it, he would gasp for breath.

Nausea was beginning to swirl inside of him as he could feel something moving down inside of him. He was in too much pain to feel any fluid or waste moving out of him, which is probably why he should have gone to see a doctor before just locking himself in the bathroom. Terror was running through the veins as he worried, for as long as the pain allowed him, that he was pushing out a party of his body. 

He grit his teeth and let out little screams of pain as something began to burn and ache and hurt more than anything had hurt in his entire life. For the first time since he had begun working in the hospital, he was glad that these single-person bathrooms were so small. He leaned forward and retched directly into the sink as he continued to push. The muscles in his stomach were exhausted from the cramping and pushing, but the vomiting actually seemed to help whatever was happening to him. 

The exhausted man leaned his forehead against the porcelain of the sink in front of him, trying to ignore the swirling queasiness in his stomach from the smell of his own vomit while he continued pushing. Something slipped out of him and he had a moment of reprieve before he realized that he wasn't done yet, and whatever it was, was still inside of him. His mind was so exhausted and panic-idled that he didn't even stop for a moment to think about what he could have anymore. He just wanted it all to stop.

He knew that he had to get out of this position, it was too uncomfortable and the nerves in his legs were beginning to feel like they were on fire. He slipped off of the toilet so that he was on his hands and knees on the tiny bathroom floor. "Don't vomit, don't vomit, don't vomit," he chanted over and over to himself in the thirty seconds between the pains. When he had gotten to the bathroom, they had sped up exponentially and now it felt like they were almost on top of each other.

A scream began to build in his throat, but he clenched his teeth together to stop the sound from coming to a crescendo. He might have been dying, but he didn't want anyone to see him looking like this right now. He'd figure out what was happening and deal with it himself when it wasn't so humiliating.

The burning sensation in his pelvis came back tenfold, and then finally everything stopped. Something slipped completely out of him and slipped down his legs to the ground below him, right into his pants. He let out a sob of relief as almost everything stopped. 

It took him about ten seconds to open his eyes and turn around to see what had just exited his body.

And then another ten for his heart to stop skipping beats and for him to remember to breathe.

He had just had a baby.

The little one was laying on the cold tile floor of the bathroom. They were covered in blood and birth-goop, which he had never had enough experience with to name. There was movement in the limbs and they were curled up around the baby, so it's not like he had just had a stillborn. They were small but not small enough that their skin was red and underdeveloped. 

George whimpered, but then his brain jumped straight into doctor mode. He grabbed his pager and paged the first person that he could think of, which was Izzie. He knew that she was with a patient or possibly in surgery right now, which meant that it might be a while before she got there, but he knew that he had help coming eventually.

He gently placed his hand underneath the baby's head and neck, and the other underneath their bum. He moved them around so that they were laying in his arm before he removed his shirt and placed the tiny infant down there so that the head was pressed against his clavicle. He laid his shirt over them both like a blanket and then tugged his scrub bottoms back on so that when Izzie came in it wasn't as big of a deal. He didn't tie or tighten them, so that the cord, which was still connected to the placenta inside of him, wouldn't be compressed.

"You're-you're supposed to be crying, little one," he mumbled as he adjusted the baby a little bit so that he could see beautiful blue eyes staring up at him. "Eyes are open, I think that's good," he whispered. Then the baby opened their mouth and began to cry. 

George blinked away a couple tears. He didn't know if they were from relief at the sound of crying, at no longer being in pain, or because he was so overwhelmed. "I don't even know if you're a boy or a girl. Some dad I am," he whispered. He carefully, gently, moved the shirt functioning as a blanket to the side, so that he could see what sex his newborn was. "A little girl, huh? Good thing I used to pretend I was one too, huh? Means I can teach you about hygiene and stuff." The more he talked to the little one, the more she calmed down and stopped crying quite as hard. Though she still cried, as she had just been through something very traumatic.

There was a knock on the door, and the relief that someone else was there caused him to start crying for real. "George?"

"Izzie!" he called back.

"I'm coming in, okay? The nurses saw you go in here and then you paged me so something better be wrong," she said. 

That caused a rather deranged burst of laughter to emit from him, which startled the baby into screaming loudly. The door quickly swung open and Izzie immediately moved in next to him. "Holy shit, what happened in here? Where's the patient?"

"We're the patients. I am, I mean. I'm the patient now," he said, giving her another small, panicked laugh.

"You had a baby?" she asked, her brown eyes widening with shock. "Right. Patient. Not my friend," she swallowed harshly as if to get rid of her emotions that way.

"How far along were you in your pregnancy?" she asked as she reached down to her belt and paged someone that would really know what to do.

"I don't know," his voice cracked. "Izzie, I don't know. I didn't even know I was pregnant. I haven't had periods since I was eighteen. I didn't even know that I could get pregnant."

"Okay, okay, George, just breathe. We're going to get you some help," she whispered. "I'll be right back. Dr. Sheppard is going to meet us halfway."

"Alright, yeah, okay," he whispered, trying to stop crying. He knew that he had every right to cry, as something terrifyingly traumatic had just happened to him, but he didn't want to come out to the entire hospital this way and he didn't want them to see him like this.

Izzie stepped out of the room for just a couple of minutes, before she returned back with a stretcher so that she could get him down to where they needed to be. "Do you think you can stand up?"

"Not without help," he shook his head.

"I can help you, I just can't lift you completely by myself," she explained. She carefully helped him up, just like they had been trained to do for patients that weren't their best friends. She helped him onto the stretcher and then placed a blanket over his ruined clothes and a little bit over the baby. George could tell that a lot of his coworkers had stopped what they were going to stare at him, even if he couldn't see them directly. "I know that it's going to be hard, but just focus on yourself and the baby. She looks responsive and she's got developed lungs based on the crying. I think," Izzie said, trying to stay chipper for him. She moved the arms of the bed up and began to wheel it towards the elevator. 

When the doors opened, Meredith and Alex were standing there, waiting to get out so that they could complete their rounds.

"George?" Meredith asked, her mouth hanging open with shock.

"Is that a baby?" Alex breathed, all of the color pouring out of his face.

Izzie shot him a dark look, "If you're planning on teasing him or belittling him or anything, now is not the time," she hissed as she pushed the bed into the elevator.

Alex growled, "Who here has the most experience with newborns and postpartum parents, Stevens?"

She pursed her lips and then hit the button for the floor that they needed to go down to. Alex took over as a doctor from then on. He moved the blanket that was covering them so that he could look over the baby, "Her skin tone is good, I don't see too much meconium on the skin which might mean that she's premature. How are you feeling, George?"

"Like I just pushed a human I didn't know I was having out of my body," he replied dryly.

"As funny as you're being right now, I need to know if you're feeling faint and about how much blood you think you lost after she was born. If you're hemorrhaging we need to get that fixed up immediately. Have you delivered the placenta yet?" As Alex spoke, both girls glanced at each other. They hadn't ever seen him act like this before, especially around George. Something was off, but they both knew now wasn't a good time to ask.

"I don't know. I kinda lost feeling down there after I discovered that I had had a baby ," he mumbled. "And I put my pants back on."

"Lost feeling might be because of shock. Birth is a big deal even for people that have known they were going to go through it for nine months," Alex nodded. "But I'm here, I'm not leaving unless you want me to."

"You're not allowed to leave. You have to help me figure out what I'm going to do," he whispered, his voice breaking with emotion. He leaned his head back against the bed and shut his eyes as tears began to leak down his face. "Alex, I didn't know I was pregnant. I drank so much coffee. I drank so much. I barely got any sleep. I didn't take prenatal vitamins or eat healthy or anything."

The other man leaned over and brushed some of his sweaty hair out of his face. "Doesn't matter. She's fine now, you're both okay," he soothed. The elevator finally dinged, releasing them onto the floor that they needed to be on. Dr. Shepard was waiting for them there, though her eyes widened when she saw who exactly the patient was. 

"Certainly not what I was expecting today, but the baby sounds healthy. Meredith, page pediatrics," she said as she grabbed the end of the gurney and began to bring George to one of the rooms that was free. Alex walked alongside the bed, wiping away tears from the other man and murmuring soothing words to him. 

Dr. Shepard tied off the cord and wrapped the baby up in one of the blankets that they had already prepared in the delivery room, handing her over to Alex. She then moved on to hook her patient up to all of the machines that she needed to monitor him. She then helped him get dressed in a gown and cleaned up a little bit so there was no longer so much baby goop all over his chest. The intern hadn't delivered the afterbirth yet, so she began to work on that next.

"Alright, Dr. Karev is going to check out your baby and make sure that she's doing well, okay?" Dr. Shepperd informed him as she took her place between his legs.

"Yeah, okay," George nodded as he swallowed.

"Now, you haven't delivered the afterbirth yet. I need you to give me a good push, just like you did when you were delivering her. Then I can give you an examination and fix you up," she gave him a calming smile.

George nodded and listened to her. He reached up and grabbed the edges of the bed to brace himself as he gave another firm push. He let out a cry of pain as the muscles he had overused that day reminded him how much they hurt. Izzie was by his side in a second and holding his hand. She reached over the side of the bed and began to move his hair off of his forehead. 

"There we are," Dr. Shepperd said as she removed the afterbirth from between his legs and placed it into the cart next to her so that she could get rid of it after she was finished with her patient. 

"Izzie, I'm so tired," George whispered as he turned to look up at his best friend.

"I know you are, I know, but you can do this. Can I ask you a couple questions? It'll help keep you awake long enough to have her back and for Dr. Shepperd to finish up with you," Izzie rambled a little.

"Yeah, you can ask me some questions. I need to not think about her looking at me down there right now," he nodded.

"Okay," she smiled. "Is there another father that we should call?"

His eyes flickered over to the corner of the room where Alex was standing next to the pediatric doctor checking out his newborn baby. "No, he's um, he's got her."

"Oh. Oh! Really?" Izzie's eyes lit up as she finally put the puzzle pieces together.

"Yes, really. Shut up," he huffed at her.

"I will, I will," she put the hand he wasn't squeezing up in defense of herself. She asked him a couple more questions while Dr. Shepperd checked for tears or hemorrhaging. George was given the all clear almost ten minutes later.

A doctor that he didn't recognize walked over with a crying bundle in his arms a little while later. "Congratulations, Dr. O'Malley. You've delivered a six pound three ounce baby girl. She's healthy as far as we can see. Her heart and lung sounds are good. We took some blood to run some tests, but her femur size makes us think that she was thirty six weeks by the time she was born."

"She-she's really healthy?" George asked as he uncomfortably shifted up on the bed. Izzie had sent Meredith home to get some things to make George more comfortable during his stay at the hospital, and slipped into the room around Alex, who was standing nervously in the doorway.

"She is," he nodded. "I think that you should probably feed her again. They gave her some formula when we were running tests on her in the nursery, but newborns need to eat often. The best thing for her to get is colostrum, but if you don't feel comfortable with that then I can have one of the nurses come up here with some formula."

"No," he shook his head. "I deprived her of enough nutrients when I was carrying her, she deserves the best now that she's out." 

"Speaking of which, we will need an answer on how you want to proceed," he said as he sat down on the edge of the bed after carefully handing over the newborn.

"I-I need a little time to think about it, please. And I have to talk to my roommates to see if they're willing to have a baby in the apartment," George said. This was almost too much for him to deal with. Despite being responsible for lives every single day, the idea of being solely responsible for the care and upbringing of a tiny human was almost too much for him.

The doctor gave him a kind smile as he stood up. "Alright, give me your answer when you get to it. If you have any questions or concerns you can always page me."

He nodded stupidly and then leaned back against the pillows on his bed. He reached up and undid one of the buttons on his hospital gown, allowing it to fall away from his arm and shoulder so that his breast was exposed. For once, he was glad that he hadn't had the time or money for top surgery because he was able to bring his baby up to his nipple and let her latch on. 

Izzie sat down on the bed at his feet, looking at the newborn. She glanced over at Alex, who was now standing to one side of the door, when he cleared his throat. "Iz, can you give us a minute to talk? Alone?" he asked.

"Oh, um, yeah," she nodded as she got up and left the room. She stood outside of the door, not wanting to be too far away from her best friend and the new arrival just in case.

Alex carefully crossed the space between them until he was next to the bed. "Hey, George," his voice was small and scared as he lowered himself down into the chair next to the other man. "How're you feeling?"

"Like shit," he whispered. "But a little bit better than I did this morning. I'm having small contractions to put my uterus back to where it's supposed to be. Not that I knew it wasn't until a human came out of it."

"So you really had no idea?"

He shook his head. "When I was in the OR today with Burke, I guess I was having some contractions and he noticed that I was in pain. He made a joke about me having an ectopic pregnancy like Christina did, and that kind of stuck in my mind when I was trying to figure out what was wrong with me. Before then I hadn't even thought about it. I caught the same flu as Christina did at the same time. And I guess I was more tired than usual, but we're interns. We get tired all the time."

Alex was quiet for a little while, leaving the steady beeping of George's heart monitor and the little suckling sounds from the baby as the only sounds in the room. He dragged a hand over the lower half of his face before he said, "Is she… is she mine?"

"Of course she's yours," George snorted. "What other man could I get to have sex with me enough to apparently get me pregnant?"

"We had sex like six months ago."

"The last time we had sex was six months ago. Apparently we had sex enough to get me pregnant thirty six weeks ago," George informed him, tired and a little loopy but mostly okay now.

"What do you want to do?" Alex asked.

"I think I want to keep her," the other intern murmured after a moment. "I feel responsible for her now. I know it won't be easy, and it may even get me kicked out of the program but she is literally a part of me. And she might be my only opportunity to ever have a kid."

"Oh thank God," Alex whispered as he leaned back in his chair. "I was worried that I was going to have to take care of her all by myself."

George's head snapped up and his tired eyes widened. "You want to be a part of her life?"

"I'm not a deadbeat. I swore when I was fourteen that if I ever had kids that I was going to be a million times the father that my dad was. Unless you don't want me around, I plan on keeping that promise," Alex said, dead serious.

"I can't really do this by myself, and it's kind of your fault that this happened anyways," he joked with a little laugh. 

The other intern grinned as he stood up. He moved to the head of the bed and leaned over so that he could see the baby as she nursed. It was a bit of an invasion of privacy, but they were raising the newborn together now, so neither of them really cared. "It kind of helps that I get to raise her with you."

"What's that supposed to mean?" he whispered, already kind of putting it together but wanting to hear the other say it.

"Well, you're sweet, caring, and dead sexy. Plus you give pretty good head," Alex joked as he turned to meet George's eyes. The other gave a scoff and rolled his eyes, but was still smiling. Alex leaned down a little ways and pressed their lips together in a soft kiss. "We can talk more about this after you have a nap and recover a little more, okay? I'm not going anywhere, so don't worry about changing diapers or responding to her every call. She's got me to spoil the shit out of her."

"Thanks, Alex," George smiled.

Outside, Izzie had slid down to the ground so that her arms were wrapped around her knees. She was trying to respect her best friend's privacy, so that he could talk to the other father of his baby all he needed to but it was taking a lot of self control to not just barge in. She laid her head down on her knees and stared absentmindedly down the hallway while she began to think of baby names to suggest to George.

She nearly jumped out of her skin when she heard someone clear their voice behind her. She quickly scrambled to her feet to turn around and face Bailey and Burke, two people she definitely did not want to have to deal with right now. 

"Stevens? What are you doing down here?" Bailey asked as she folded her arms in front of her. 

"I, uh, George paged me," she pointed to the room vaguely.

"Not good enough. Give me the full story now," Bailey demanded.

"Yes, I would also like to know the full story," Burke said as he copied the resident's stance.

"Well, um, I don't know what happened to him really but he paged me and when I got to the nurse's station they said he had gone in the bathroom and hadn't come out yet so I went there and… George had a baby. Like he literally had a baby ," Izzie explained, her eyes wide and astounded.

Burke moved a hand over his mouth as his eyes widened as well. He let out a small bark of laughter. "So much for not being able to get pregnant. I'm glad that it at least wasn't ectopic."