The Impossible Children

Kurt did not know whether he wanted his dad to arrive or not. On the one hand, he was scared and alone, and at the risk of seeming childish, kind of desperately needed his dad to be there. On the other hand, he had no idea how he was going to explain this scary, confusing, and—now that he had had some spare moments to reflect on it—humiliating condition he was apparently in. He did not look forward to trying to explain it or having to discuss it; the very thought made him uncomfortable.

Then came time for the procedure to start (he hated to call it by its name because even Dr. Samuels said it was an adaptation.) Kurt hated how obviously terrified he was; he could not stop trembling for several minutes. Dr. Samuels tried his best to offer what reassurance he could, but ultimately Kurt had to summon his own inner strength and cling tightly to it. He steeled himself for what was to come; he told himself he could and would get through this—whatever the hell it was—because he had to.

He was positioned and covered in such a way that he did not see the needle being inserted into his abdomen, but he felt it go in. It did not hurt exactly, but he felt it puncture and go inside him, strange and alien. His muscles contracted in response to it. He felt odd and uncomfortable, but not as bad as he expected to feel. Then, it was over almost as quickly as it had began. He released a breath he had not realized he was holding.

He was not out of the woods yet, of course. Dr. Samuels spoke with him once again. "Now, you'll need to take it easy for a while, alright? I would actually really like it if you stayed overnight for observation, given the nature of your case, but, of course, you don't have to; that's your choice. We should have more information based on the results in a few hours."

--

Dr. Samuels honestly had no idea what he had been expecting or why the resulting data was shocking him. He tried in earnest to come up with an explanation, first using conventional "wisdom" and scientific rationality and proper methodology, then using that and less accepted schools of thought.

"If it's 'not human', then what is it?" asked a technician, genuinely curious and more than a little confused.

"I don't know," Dr. Samuels replied, "Well, not from the results alone anyway, but do you want to know my theory?"

"Um." The young woman now seemed wary. "Sure."

"Alien," Dr. Samuels answered as matter-of-fact-ly as he could, "I think we're looking at an alien-human hybrid, and somehow, for some reason, they—the parent alien race, I assume—saw fit to implant it, along with a uterus that is also not quite human, I gather, into a young, biologically male human. Now why would they do that? I wonder. It just seems unnecessarily complicated." He stopped when he realized he was rambling mostly to himself.

Still, this technician was one of his kinder associates; she simply put on a small, diplomatic smile and observed, "But that's impossible, right?"

"No, I'm afraid not, or at least, I don't believe so," Dr. Samuels continued, "Besides, this whole mess is 'impossible', isn't it? Just ask poor Kurt Hummel what's 'impossible' right about now, hm?"

"Good point," she said with a sigh, and silence overtook the lab once more.

--

Kurt was contemplating whether or not to try sleeping when his father, Burt, finally arrived. He had lost track of the hours since he had been admitted. He had almost lost track of the time since he last saw Dr. Samuels.

As glad as he was to see his father, he also dearly wished Burt would stop bombarding him with questions and making a worried fuss over him. Still, he let Burt do so for a few minutes, and he answered questions to the best of his ability.

"So, what you're sayin' is that they don't know what's going on at all basically?" Burt asked in conclusion.

"Well..." Kurt wondered how to explain what Dr. Samuels had discovered, what the doctor was currently studying. "We do, but don't know some things." Kurt was not normally one to mince words, but this was difficult for him.

"What's that mean?" Burt pressed him for more details.

"They said a bunch of my results were weird, and then, Dr. Samuels found this, um, this thing inside me." Just putting it into words made him feel all the more freakishly violated. "And he's running tests on a sample he drew from it."

Burt look lost and scared. "What kind of 'thing'?"

"I, um..." Kurt was genuinely at a loss. He did not dare call it, any of it, what it resembled.

Dr. Samuels entered the room at precisely that moment. "Kurt, I—Oh! Hello, Mr. Hummel, I take it? Do you guys need a minute or—?"

Kurt, who had practically greeted the doctor with an "oh thank god", shook his head with clear desperation that for once he made very little effort to hide. "No, no, go ahead, please."

"And you're okay with him in the room while we discuss—?" Dr. Samuels checked

"Yeah," Kurt said. He did not want his dad to know on some level, but on another he knew his dad needed to know and maybe he needed his dad to.

"Okay," Dr. Samuels said, "Well, the results for the, um, adapted amnio have proved, like so much else in your case, to be very interesting."

"I don't want to be interesting," Kurt muttered.

"The sample we took is, in its composition, very much like actual human amniotic fluid. In fact, all signs point to the, er, entity we discovered being, well, a developing more-or-less human. There are just a few, slight irregularities, but otherwise this very much seems to bear more than a passing similarity to ordinary human pregnancy."

"How?" Kurt found himself asking not for the first or the last time. "What the hell do you mean? None of this is even possible; none of this makes any sense."

"Like I said before, I'm just as baffled by all this as you are. We all are actually. The official answer right now is that we just don't know," Dr. Samuels replied with clear sympathy.

"Oh yeah?" Burt challenged. "Then, what's the unofficial answer?"

"My theory?" Dr. Samuels responded.

"Yeah, sure. Why not?" Burt shot back.

He could not recite his ideas as bluntly as he had to the technician earlier, but he tried for equal clarity. "This is going to sound crazy," he began.

"This whole thing is already crazy," Kurt interjected, "so go on. It's fine."

"Okay. I think what we're dealing with is not of human design or origin. I think that the entity, the ba- the being-" He changed his wording when he noticed Kurt flinch. "is not entirely human, but rather some sort of alien-human hybrid."

"So, aliens did this?" Kurt sounded understandably skeptical.

"What the hell kinda doctor are you?" Burt asked, "You haven't told us one thing that makes any damn sense outside of some crazy science fiction!"

"I know, Mr. Hummel. Believe me; I know how this sounds, and I'm genuinely very sorry there's not any other explanation right now." He paused, seemingly waiting for the mild altercation to escalate before continuing. "I'd say based on all the information that this thing, this entity, has been developing for around 2 months or so. We're in a good position to act here before things proceed any further. I think in this case our actions now are more important, at least right now, than our lack of explanation of exactly what or how." He paused again.

"Okay," Kurt said, "So, what are we going to do?"

"We've, no, you've, got two options. We can abort and remove everything, the structure and the entity, or you can keep it, the entity; we can still remove the uterine structure after everything is said and done if you wish."

"So, you can get rid of it?" Kurt asked.

"Yes, we can," Dr. Samuels replied, eyeing the young man intently, "but this is your decision, and I would warn you that there are several risks associated with each choice."

"Namely?" Burt asked.

"Well, option 1: we abort, and we try to remove everything. This carries the risk of complications, like any other invasive procedure, particularly something as sensitive and, for lack of a better term, unfamiliar as this case."

"Right, but that sounds a hell of a lot safer and better than the alternative," Burt responded.

"Well, I don't want to say much to influence opinion here, since this is Kurt's choice, but, in my professional, strictly medical opinion, yes. That option is safer. If you, Kurt, were to keep the ch- the entity-" He corrected himself again. "You are looking at potentially a lot of complications. If this progresses anything like normal human pregnancy, we don't know exactly what that's going to do to your body. I can tell you it will be very hard on it, at the very least; it will be incredibly dangerous for you. Furthermore, we just don't know that the ba- the entity, sorry- would even survive, or, for that matter, that you would."

"Okay, well, the choice here seems clear, doesn't it?" Burt said.

Kurt was surprised to find it was not; every choice presented to him sounded overwhelming and scary, as this whole situation already was. "I- I think so, but I just- I need a minute, okay?"

"Okay," Dr. Samuels said and left the room.

"I'll be right outside if you need me, kiddo," Burt said as he, too, exited.

"Either way I go there will be 'complications', and that's just doctor-y code for something going really wrong," Kurt thought, "I mean, worst case scenario, it's entirely possible that I could die no matter what I do." He felt paralyzed by that thought.

Abortion was never something Kurt was fully decided about opinion-wise. Then, again it had never been relevant to him personally, and he certainly never expected it to be this personally relevant. He was pro-choice, sure, but he had to admit he had never given it so much thought as he now felt he had to.

He'd never joined the "when life begins" debates, and now he found himself wondering. This thing—this thing that made him shudder uncomfortably at the thought of it being inside him—was it alive? Would "getting rid of it", which he so desperately wanted to do, mean killing it? Would that mean taking an innocent life?

"It might die either way; in fact, it probably will," Kurt concluded, "if it's really alive at all, that is. Hell, if it's capable of suffering, I'm probably going to spare it a lot of that by ending things now."

So, he decided, he could get rid of it and end this whole horrifying situation before it got any worse. He knew all along that was what he really wanted more than anything. After all, he did not want this or ask for this, and the whole situation had left him feeling utterly violated. He could not and dared not to imagine how much worse, how much more horrifying and mortifying and uncomfortable, this would become if he did not end it all now.

So, he had made his decision.