With an X and a Y and an X, X, X

[lit_gal]

Title: With an X and a Y and an X, X, X
Author: Lit Gal
Fandom: Sentinel
Genre: Gen? Preslash? Weird!!
Warnings: Sandburg Zone ahead

Summary: Jim is brought face to face with Blair's vision of parenting, and he can safely say he never saw it coming.

I blame Sentinel Thursday. That and the fact that I'm exhausted and trying to stay away while the kids are reading.

"Jim?"

"Hmmmm." Jim reached for a wrench, groping with fingers on the concrete before a sneaker shoved the tool close enough for him to reach.

"Have you ever thought of having kids?" Jim looked suspiciously toward Blair's sneakers, and suddenly the man crouched down so Jim could see faded jeans and the bottom of that multicolored vest Blair loved.

"Chief, there something you want to tell me?" Jim asked as he started mentally reviewing the list of his partner's recent dates. Despite Blair's reputation, Jim knew that the man didn't actually get around as much as the station gossip would have it. Oh, he had dates plenty, but the number of times he came home smelling of sex and satisfaction... okay, the number was a little higher than Jim's own stats. Still, Jim had assumed Blair had been more careful than to get some girl pregnant. He flinched away from thinking about how this would change their relationship.

"Oh yeah, totally," Blair said with so much significance that Jim immediately ignored his worn brake pads and slid out from under the truck. Blair was squatting there, fingers nervously working the edge of his vest.

"Who is she?" Jim asked.

Blair looked up in confusion. "Who?"

"The girl."

"What girl?"

"What are you talking about?" Jim demanded in frustration as he sat up.

"I'm talking about parenting. What are you talking about?" Blair asked as he continued to stare at Jim as though Jim were the one out in left field. All Jim could do was sigh and brace himself for the Sandburg zone he could almost feel approaching like a storm front across his skin.

"Okay, parenting," Jim said slowly. "We thought Caro was pregnant once, and then it turned out to be a false reading. I can't say I ever thought of it after that."

"Well, no joke considering the kind of women you date. Oh man, you'd be taking the kid to visit mom in prison," Blair said with a wry smile, and Jim glared. Blair just smiled wider. "But seriously, I mean, don't you ever think about having a kid running around, some little girl climbing on your knee or a little boy hanging onto your leg?"

Jim had thought about that quite a lot when he'd thought Caro was pregnant. "Not recently," he shrugged.

"Why not? Are you afraid the sentinel genes might make life difficult, you know, like your senses made your father call you a liar?" Blair shifted and settled on his butt, and Jim guessed they were having this conversation right here in the parking lot, sitting on the concrete in the shade of his truck. Yep, this would be the Sandburg zone.

"I'm afraid I don't know how to raise a child alone," Jim growled. He really did hate it when Sandburg assumed everything came back to the sentinel genes. But rather than take Jim's aggravated tone personally, Blair was just nodding.

"Cool. So, if you had someone?"

"Chief, did you get some girl pregnant?" Jim came right out and asked. Blair started laughing, which was not the reaction Jim expected.

"No way. No fucking way would that happen," he said cheerfully. "I'm just thinking about parenthood."

"But no buns in the oven?" Jim asked. This was worse than he thought.

"Nope. But it'd be cool. And now that I have the consulting job and a nice little settlement from Rainier and Sid, it seems like the right time."

"What about your PhD?"

"Oh please. I hate university politics. Worse, I suck at it. I wanted to find a sentinel, and then after I found you, I wanted to keep being your partner. The PhD was like a total excuse man... total. And now with the consulting job, I'd price myself right out of work with a PhD. The commissioner is totally too cheap to hire a full doctor just to run around and play with the cops."

"Play with..." Jim just stopped and shook his head. The man obviously didn't understand how the rest of the department saw him. "Blair, you're incredibly good at your job. Simon has to beat off other captains and their requests for your help."

Blair gave a huge smile, one that made his whole face look impish and young. "I know. Oh man, it's a trip. I never thought I'd find a place where I really fit, and now I'm inside one of the tightest closed cultures on record. It doesn't get any better."

"So, what does this have to do with parenting?"

"I'm settled. I mean, I never thought that would happen, but I have a home and a job and I think I'd make a great dad."

Jim frowned. Okay, this wasn't sounding like a confession. This was sounding more like Blair was planning on moving out and starting some 2.3 kids, white picket fence life, and that just wasn't the Blair he knew.

"Jim?" Blair asked slowly. "Don't you think I'd be a good dad?"

"Are you moving out?" Jim asked.

"What?! Oh man, you are not tracking this conversation well. I never said I wanted to move out."

"There isn't exactly room for a baby crib in the loft," Jim pointed out. He was starting to feel more than a little cranky. In fact, he was feeling cranky enough that he really didn't want to be having this conversation here. Grabbing up his tools, he started slinging them into his toolbox.

"The apartment next door is coming open. I thought I might buy it."

"That place is half the size of mine. You won't have room for a cat over there, much less a kid," Jim pointed out. The day had started out so nice. He got up and grabbed his toolbox, and headed for the loft.

"Well, yeah, if I moved over there, totally," Blair agreed as he chased after, apparently still in a cheerful mood. "I was planning to knock down the wall at the end of the hall so that we had another bedroom behind the bathroom. We could keep the second bathroom, but the kitchen would have to go. No way do I want to destroy the environment with disposable diapers, and those chemicals right up against skin are so totally not healthy, so I thought we might put in a washer and dryer so I could do cloth diapers."

That brought Jim up short. His finger was only halfway to the elevator button when he turned to study Blair. "You want to say home but bring a baby in?"

"Well, yeah. But this is not something I can decide for us. It's your home I'm talking about invading with baby food and diapers and baby smell, and despite how grandmothers like to coo about the smell of a fresh-washed baby, I've smelled some of them, and that is not a good smell, not even on your own baby."

Okay, Jim definitely needed some thinking time. He reached out and punched the button as he thought this through. He'd always expected that Blair would eventually move on and start a life... that they'd go from roommates to friends who saw each other at the office and spent Friday nights drinking beer and watching a game or playing poker. But this... Blair was changing the rules.

"Oh man, message sent and received. That's totally cool because I understand that having someone else in your space is hard. I still might get the apartment next door though. Real estate is a good investment and Rainier's settlement money is not exactly pulling down big interest dividends in a savings account." The elevator doors opened, and Blair darted in, his head ducked so that hair hid his features.

"I didn't say no," Jim said with a frown as he followed.

"You didn't say yes."

"I'm thinking."

"You're thinking with that wrinkle between your eyes, the one that makes it look like you just stepped in something disgusting and smelly. Really smelly."

"Chief," Jim sighed. Shit, bluffing was easier before Blair knew him so well. "Okay, I'm a little bothered by the idea but it's not the baby. You do realize that a baby comes with a mother, and that comes with potential for custody battles and general ugliness."

"I was thinking about a surrogate mother."

"Which is one area where the law is fuzzy at best. The baby is going to be half hers, and any woman who can just walk away from her child...." Jim stopped. That was coming a little too close to his own wounds. Blair was silent, but his hand reached out and rested against Jim's arm, an island of warmth in the suddenly chilly air.

"Okay, that brings us to the next part of this conversation," Blair said as the elevator doors slid open.

"Next part? You mean this gets weirder?" Jim hesitated so long that the elevator doors started closing and he had to reach out and hit the side of the door to keep from being cut off from following. Blair was at the loft door, bouncing and fidgeting.

"Maybe we should get some beers."

Fuck. Blair only suggested beers when the Sandburg zone crossed the Twilight zone. "Blair?" Jim asked, a warning in his voice. Sandburg finally got the key to work and he darted into the loft, beelining for the refrigerator where he pulled out three beers.

"Are you expecting company?" Jim asked. If he was about to meet Blair's child's potential mother, he didn't want to do it in a greasy wife-beater.

"No... no, two of these are for you," Blair said as he shoved a cold bottle into Jim's hand and headed for the couch with the other two. He set one on the table and took a deep drink of the other. "Okay, I can do this."

"Blair?" Jim asked as he came and sat close. The desperate beating of Blair's heart was starting to seriously worry him.

"Okay, just... just don't freak."

"I'm not going to freak."

"Seriously. Do. Not. Freak," Blair said, articulating each word in a way that made Jim start worrying even more.

"Sandburg, I'm a Ranger. We don't freak."

Blair just snorted. "Fine, but when you freak, I'm reminding you of that. Anyway, have you ever heard of congenital adrenal hyperplasia?"

Oh god, Blair wanted a kid because he was dying. Jim clamped down on that thought and forced himself to take this calmly and rationally. "Are you sick?" There, that came out sounding almost normal.

Blair twitched an eyebrow at him. "No. For me, it's like totally normal. I was born with it."

"Okay, and what does that have to do with all this?" Jim asked, struggling with a sudden urge to grab Blair and hug him the way he had when Blair had been drugged and scared in the basement of the precinct. Shit. Some weird disease was the one thing Jim couldn't protect Blair from.

"Okay, no freaking." Blair took a deep drink from the beer bottle. "Okay, I was born with CAH, and god bless Naomi for not believing some of the bullshit they tried shoveling at her. And god bless her for not knowing how far along she was in the pregnancy because she thought she was at eight months when she was at nine, so I was born out in the middle of nowhere in Montana with no doctor around."

Jim wasn't ready to bless Naomi for that considering the dangers of childbirth, but he kept his mouth shut at Blair drank more beer and Blair's heart pounded painfully fast.

"Okay, man, I have no idea how to say this. Okay, you know how I am so not an exhibitionist? I mean, you've dropped trousers so often the girls at the prison probably compare notes on your anatomy."

Jim glared, and was ready to point out Blair's many romantic failings, but Blair held up a hand. "Yeah, yeah, I'm so trying to get us off track. This is not easy. Okay, if I were to flash you the way you flash me about every other day when you go traipsing from shower to loft--"

"If it bothers you, just say it," Jim growled.

"It doesn't. Man, naked is natural. I have no problem--"

"Yes, Sandburg, you obviously do because as you just pointed out, I have never seen you naked. And that didn't seem strange up until this point. Right now, I'm starting to get suspicious." Jim had no idea what he was suspicious about, but he was suspicious.

"Okay, geez. That's what I get for rooming with a cop. Okay, so *if* I were to flash you, you might notice that I'm a little on the... underachieving side."

"You're small."

"To say the least. Okay, so the doctor says I'm in the range of normal development, but I'm like at the 2nd percentile."

Jim shook his head. "Please, connect some of these dots because I don't see what any of this has to do with parenting."

"I'm intersex."

"You're what?"

"Karen Jameson offered to surrogate, but it wouldn't be her eggs I used, it would be mine."

Jim didn't even answer. Blair tipped back the beer and drank the rest in heavy gulps that made his Adam's apple bob.

"Okay, this is how it goes. CAH sometimes affects a person's gender and messes up hormones leaving them bits and pieces that don't exactly fit into male or female."

"You're a woman?"

"NO!" Blair snapped. "I'm intersex. Focus, Jim. I have a penis, and something that might pass as balls if you don't look too close, but I have ovaries."

"Ovaries? Without being a woman?" Jim blinked, downed his own beer, and then started looking around for Henri's hidden camera. He'd kill the man... right after he killed Blair for starting this little practical joke.

"You are so totally freaking," Blair said sadly. "Did you know that out of a thousand births, one or two need to have surgery to 'normalize' their genitals? And lots of parents aren't even told. They're just told their kid needs some extra skin removed, and snip, snip, there goes a big chunk of sex organ. One in a hundred isn't totally male or female. This is like natural. Man, I bless Naomi for not letting the doctors do that to me."

"Natural?" Jim didn't even have words to describe that illogical bit of logic.

Blair narrowed his eyes and gave Jim a look that made it very clear he was on thin ice. "Yes, natural. My body is exactly the way it's supposed to be."

"So, could you have sex as a woman?" Jim cringed even asking the question, but he just couldn't not ask.

"I am a man. Repeat after me, Ellison, Blair is a man. Even you couldn't find my girl parts without a doctor and some seriously specialized equipment. If I'm going to have sex with a man, I'll have to do it the old-fashioned way up the out-chute."

"But you want to be a child's..." Jim caught himself when Blair gave him a look that would take the paint off the side of a house, "father. Father who donates the egg. Father who donates the egg and then has another woman carry the baby to term." Jim was fairly sure his brain was broken

"A woman, not another woman, *a* woman, and if I have to tell you one more time that I'm a man, you're going to wake up with permanently green hair... at least what little hair you have left," Blair threatened, but he also took Jim's empty beer bottle and shoved a full one into his hand. Jim took a deep drink.

"Okay. You're a man, and you want to... artificially inseminate an egg and you just happen to be the one planning on donating the egg," Jim checked. Blair nodded.

"And a woman will carry it."

"No vagina here, no vagina and no way my body would carry a baby. Besides, as a man, I am completely freaked at the idea of even trying to carry a baby. It's no different from me asking you to carry a baby to term. Wrong parts there."

"But if we did a genetic test?" Jim asked, suddenly confused about what parts Blair just might have.

"XX," Blair shrugged.

XX. Female. Woman. Blair was a girl. Okay, Blair wasn't a girl, but Blair's DNA was a girl, but he was a man... with eggs. Jim didn't even feel himself lifting the beer bottle, he just tasted the beer going down and wished it was something a whole lot stronger. Jim was man enough to admit that he was freaking.

"The doctors wanted to cut off my penis and try to give me female hormones. Naomi actually had to grab me and run at this one hospital when I was about three. Neanderthals. They really thought that anything different was by definition wrong, but Naomi was great. When she went to file my birth certificate about a month after I was born, this doctor explained that my parts were outside the range of normal, and she just changed my name from Jacob to the more gender neutral Blair Jacob, and said that if I wanted to be a girl later, she'd pay for the operation, but that no butcher was cutting up her little baby."

Jim didn't even have an answer for that, so he just sat on the couch, staring at his now-empty second bottle of beer wishing he had more. This was beyond even the Sandburg zone.

"I would have to take hormones to increase the estrogen and force the eggs in my ovaries to develop, but that shouldn't take more than a couple of months. The therapy would make seven or eight eggs form all at once, and I shouldn't have more than a few side effects: a little lessening of body hair, which is not necessarily a bad thing. The doctor says that I'll go back to normal the minute I stop taking estrogen."

Jim nodded absently.

"I know Karen Jameson from years back. She was one of the few sexual partners who ever commented about my genitals. I mean, I leave most women so sated and happy they aren't really measuring the equipment, but Karen had done work in Africa on ritual circumcision, so I guess for her it was occupational habit to check out the parts."

"Right." Jim just blinked.

"Anyway, we talked, and she told me that if I ever wanted someone to carry a child, she would love to do it. Said she could never see herself as a mother, but it'd be a shame to not pass on my genes." Blair's voice got soft and sentimental, and Jim could tell that Blair had fallen for her hard sometime in the distant past.

"I called her a couple of weeks ago, and she's still totally on board with the plan." Blair stopped and looked at him. "Jim? Come on, man. You're freaking me out."

"Freaking *you* out?" Jim demanded incredulously. His brain couldn't quite fit around all this. It really didn't.

"Man, Karen wants to know whether to go on a health food diet in preparation for the baby, but this isn't just my life. This is our life. I'm not going to bring home a stinky baby unless you're on board with it," Blair said softly, and Jim could hear the need, the desperate and hard need in his voice. He chuckled at the thought of telling Blair that his biological clock was ticking, but he could do without green hair.

"A little boy or girl with those curls of yours running around... especially if I got to teach them to pick their shit up... I could live with that," Jim said with a slow smile. He could more than live with that. He remembered the bright and shiny hope he'd felt when they thought Caro was pregnant, and he remembered the bitter disappointment when she put down her foot and said she wasn't going to intentionally try to get pregnant, that her job was too important to sacrifice. It'd been the end of their marriage. "I think I like that idea," he admitted.

Blair gave him a bright smile... one of his impish smiles that rearranged all his features. "Man, I didn't know I was so scared, but if you're sure?"

"I'm sure, Sandburg. God, you can't do anything the conventional way, can you?"

"Nope." Blair played with his empty bottle. "Um, I actually have one more question."

Jim nodded, not really listening.

"Will you be the sperm father?" Yep. That was it. Blair had broken his brain. Blair obviously knew Jim's answer before he did because while Jim's brain was still in overheating mode, Blair gave a shout worthy of a cheerleader and threw his arms around Jim for a manly second before darting off the couch and toward the phone.

"I'll call the doctor, you don't have to do anything, well, other than get your sperm into a cup, but that's it, man. I am so going to take care of everything else."

Blair's words sounded so much like Jim the time he had brought home a puppy, that for a second, Jim thought he had misheard the entire conversation... that he had imagined it or hallucinated it or something. Only, there was Blair, bubbling over the phone to some doctor's office as he made an appointment. Oh yeah, welcome to the Sandburg zone.



Yep, this is my response to the fact that one of the mods over at Sentinel Thursday said that we could be brave and do mpreg. I hate mpreg. I mean, they're men, let them be men. Only then my brain went into overdrive and asked how I could do a realistic mpreg. However, I'm going to hold out and say this is not really mpreg but just the Sandburg zone.

Comments

[lit-gal.livejournal.com]

I do have fun confusing Jim. He's just so much fun to get completely flustered. And I"m so glad you enjoyed both their voices here.

And the Witness was a JOY to write, so I'm thrilled that you're enjoying reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.