Chapter Text
‘How on earth had he ended up here?’ Booker thought. One moment, he had been listening as Joe screamed at him with Nicky, a stone-cold glare on his face, by his side. The next, they were all naked on the bed, touching and groping each other. To be honest, he doesn’t remember much other than the two Alphas lips on his skin and them taking their turns with him for hours to come. It was amazing, but he knew that it was only for now. He knew that when they would deliver their verdict the next day that this would be the last time he would grace their bed, and that any chance of them loving him as he loved them had perished the second he decided to go behind their backs.
They weren’t supposed to get hurt, Copley was only supposed to get their DNA samples in Sudan. And when that had failed, he’d agreed to turn himself in, and him alone. He was tired. He was so, so tired of life and being alone. He missed his children and ached to have them back in his arms just as strongly today as he had over two hundred years ago when they had died. He was desperate for it to end, but he had failed, and he knew that things would only get worse from here.
When he woke up the next morning, the sheets were cold and he was alone.
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“One hundred years from today, they’ll meet you here.” Came Andy’s sorrowful voice as she stood next to him. He could feel his heart plummet to the ground and tried to ignore the dizziness that was slowly creeping up on him. “Till then, you’re alone.”
He didn’t know how long he stood on that beach, looking out at the water after his family left, ‘were they even his family anymore?’. He left long after the sun had gone down and when the cold became too much for his thin leather jacket to keep out.
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This was the third day in a row that he’d thrown up, seemingly out of nowhere. He knew it wasn’t because of alcohol, considering the mere smell of it had made him want to vomit pretty much since the day he last saw his family, almost two months ago. He had lost the taste for a lot of things, he couldn’t even look at baklava without wanting to throw up, and the mere thought of alcohol had him heaving into the toilet again.
He had been feeling a bit under the weather the past couple of weeks, for example, he was constantly tired. This in itself was nothing new, Booker had been tired for over two hundred years, dreams of Quynh drowning over and over again tormenting him each time he fell asleep. But this was different, it wasn’t just emotional fatigue, this was physical. He could sleep through the night and nap throughout the day and still be tired. And he was constantly nauseous and felt a bit bloated, he’d thought it was because of the all-consuming guilt that he’d been carrying around since the betrayal. But he knew, deep inside, that it wasn’t guilt that was causing these things, he just didn’t want to believe it.
After another week of constant nausea and tiredness, he decided that enough was enough and that he couldn’t ignore it any longer. He went to the nearest drugstore and bought a bunch of different pregnancy tests before going back to his run-down apartment and locking himself in the bathroom, even if he was alone.
The five minutes it took for the multiple tests to process the results were probably the longest five minutes he had ever had to endure. He was nervously pacing in the little bathroom while biting his lips and a million thoughts running through his head.
‘What if it was positive?’
‘What would he do then?’
‘Would it be Joe’s or Nicky’s?’
‘Would he raise it on his own, or would the others help?’
‘Should he even tell them?’
‘What if it was negative?’
‘What if-’
His thoughts were interrupted by the alarm on his phone going off. He froze mid-step with his breath catching in his throat. He turned his head towards the closed toilet lid where all the tests laid. He forced his legs to move and picked up one of them with a shaking hand.