Chapter Text
Prince Gumball had been speaking for a long time. Fionna had stopped listening to him some time ago, but on and on he went, and he didn’t appear to be stopping any time soon. Her mind had already wandered in and out of all of her usual daydreams, leaving her with nothing to do but to stare blankly at him until he reached some sort of stopping point. Although her friend was super smart with science and junk like that he wasn’t very good at interpreting social cues.
Thankfully, he stopped talking, and Fionna put her hands on either side of her, preparing to lift herself off the exam table.
“So, we’re all good? Same time next year?” she asked, and the pen he was using to jot notes down on the clipboard in his hands paused.
“Well, that’s up to you, I’ll need to see you much sooner if you’re agreeable to my proposal,” he said flatly. “Judging by the date of your last menstrual cycle, I’d say I need to see you back here in seven or eight days.”
“What are you talking about?” she asked, confused.
Gumball had been doing her yearly health exams for basically her whole life, as long as she could remember, really. He monitored her closely due to the various hazards a life in Aaa posed to her, and he liked to occasionally take samples, as she was what he referred to as a ‘critically endangered species’ or whatever.
She didn’t mind, and he only ever asked her for weird stuff she didn’t care about anyway. Some of her spit in a test tube, maybe a few strands of her hair, once or twice he had asked her to pee in a cup, and he liked a blood vial every once in a while for testing. Never before had he asked her to come back so quickly, however.
“Were you listening to anything I just explained to you?” he asked, and she shrugged.
“Most of it was over my head, sorry,” she said sheepishly. He crossed his arms and sighed, running a hand over his pink hair, smoothing it out.
“I’ll try to simplify it as much as possible. Fionna, you are getting old,” he said, and she frowned.
“I’m nothing compared to you,” she pointed out, feeling like this was a very rude thing to say.
“But you’re not immortal, and I am. You’re turning thirty next year. If what you’ve told me before is still true, that you’d like to have a child, we really need to proceed with your impregnation sooner rather than later. This is especially true if you’d like to have more than one,” he said.
Fionna gaped at him, and despite her clear discomfort he continued on.
“Every year you wait, you lose more eggs and a pregnancy will gradually become more complicated for you. Besides that, I’ve done some research on human development. Breastfeeding a baby will give you some innate protection against breast cancer, and with the amount of radiation you’re subjected to on a daily basis you can use all the protection you can get,” he continued. “In the interest of preserving your species, I’m saying we cannot wait another year.”
She swallowed nervously, his words both making complete sense and sounding outlandishly bizarre to her at the same time in her jumbled head. Although she knew she was almost thirty, and far older than her own human parents had been when they had her, she couldn’t help but feel like she was still just a kid herself, for some reason. She knew she did want kids, though, at least one.
Cake had been gone a few years, and she was lonely. She spent time with Cake’s children (and her children’s children) but they were all so independent it wasn’t the same. She liked the idea of having a human baby, and had told Gumball before she was interested in becoming a mother some day… but some day had always seemed so far away. An abstract date in the future where she would be somehow ready. Not before her next birthday. Her eyebrows screwed up as she thought about this.
“Why would you want me to come back in a week?” she finally asked.
“Because, that’s when you should be ovulating,” he explained. “You can’t get pregnant if you’re not ovulating, it’s very important.”
“How would you get the kid in there? You wouldn’t… or would you?” she asked, the words making her so uncomfortable she found she couldn’t complete her question. She knew what sex was, in theory, of course, but she had never done it. After a bad burn from Flame Prince some years ago she swore off dating completely, knowing that Gumball could help her have a child when the time came. She had never put any more thought into it than this, and now she found herself eyeing him warily as she wondered how exactly he planned on doing this.
“The traditional way? Oh no, Fionna, I’m made of gum, it’s quite impossible for me to go to tier fifteen with anyone and produce offspring,” he said, letting out a little laugh. She gave a nervous giggle, feeling more relieved than anything else. Sure, she had a crush on him as a little girl, but the idea of actually doing it with him made her want to throw up. “I do, however, have access to old human scientific archives. I’m confident I can artificially replicate human sperm, it may take us a few tries to produce a healthy fetus, so that’s why I’d like to begin as quickly as possible.”
“A few tries?” she asked, not sure she liked the sound of artificially producing a baby. For some reason this didn’t sit right with her, but she wanted to give her friend the benefit of the doubt.
“Yes, I’ll get started on it right away, I’m sure I’ll have a prototype completed by the start of your ovulation cycle. I’ll use an ultrasound-guided needle to inject it directly into your uterus, exactly at the place where it needs to be. It will take all the chance and guesswork out of it,” he said, nodding at his own words.
“You’ll make sperm in a lab… and inject me with it… with a needle?” she gasped, the idea of this making her hair stand on end. She tightly crossed her legs reflexively, as if this would somehow give her some kind of protection against what he was suggesting. “Won’t that hurt?!”
“A necessary evil,” he admitted.
“But, isn’t there a better way? Something… I don’t know, more natural than artificial sperm and an ultrasound-guided needle?” she asked, fidgeting nervously with a lock of her hair.
“I suppose a more natural option is available to you,” he said, looking slightly put out. “But it will not be a hundred percent effective, as my method would be. It could take multiple attempts.”
“I’m fine with that, you said I still have time, right?” she asked, and he begrudgingly nodded.
“You do,” he said. “But your options are severely limited. Humans have been gone for so long that there aren’t many beings left with compatible genetics. You’d have to be careful going this route, though. Some of them could be dangerous to procreate with in a traditional way.”
“Oh my glob,” Fionna said, her face burning at the thought. “Who are my options?”
“I’ve already prepared your most compatible choices,” he said, flipping a few pages on his clipboard. “I had a feeling you’d be hesitant to my preferred method of impregnation. Let’s see. I’d say your best option would be Slime Prince. His slippery DNA could fill in whatever gaps were needed to complete a genome, and he’s not much of a threat. You wouldn’t be injured in the process-”
“No way,” she said flatly, cutting him off. “Who else?”
“Hot Dog Prince is another safe option, and his cylindrical shape will-”
“NO!” Fionna yelled at him, not letting him finish his sentence. Appearing annoyed, he flipped to the next page.
“Muscle Prince-”
“He would crush me!” she exclaimed, her face burning at the thought.
“As I said, Fionna, you have very limited options. Those who are genetically compatible with you are not physically, or vice versa.”
“Who else?” she asked, and he made to shut his clipboard.
“Nobody, that was the end of the list,” he said. She snatched his clipboard out of his hands.
“There’s another page left,” she pointed out. Behind the page with a picture and quick facts about Muscle Prince was another sheet of paper on the clipboard.
“Yes, technically you have another option, but he’s far too dangerous. I don’t know what I was thinking even including him, I got too carried away by science when I composed the list,” he said. Fionna turned the page, a picture of Marshall Lee sticking out his forked tongue and making a rude hand gesture at the camera staring back at her.
“The Vampire King?” she asked, looking from the picture of Marshall Lee on the clipboard to the pink prince before her, an eyebrow raised. “He isn’t even alive technically, right?”
“He’s undead, he died for a brief period of time and came back. He’s probably the most genetically compatible on the list, being half-human himself, but due to his vampirism I don’t think he’d be a safe option for you to breed with-”
“Don’t call it that,” she said quickly, the implications of the word making her feel more than a little nauseous.
“To copulate with, then,” he said. She didn’t know exactly what that word meant either, but she felt like it was safe to assume it was another fancy term for tier fifteen. “His behavior is abysmal at the best of times, not to mention the risk his fangs pose you-”
“Okay, that’s enough of this,” Fionna huffed, throwing the clipboard back into his hands and hopping off the table. She began to undress from the hospital gown adorned with happy dancing lollipops in a flurry.
“Is it safe to assume you’ll be here next week for your first injection? As I said, it may take a few times to get the artificial formula right,” he said.
“Are these seriously my only options for having a baby of my own?” she asked hotly, angry tears forming in the corners of her eyes. “Propositioning the freaking Vampire King and having him laugh me out of his cave or let you stick a huge needle up my… place?” Gumball shrugged his pink shoulders, unfazed by her emotional display.
“You could also choose Slime, Hot Dog, or Muscle Prince,” he began, but then he stopped talking, sputtering when Fionna’s length of hair whipped him in the face as she quickly spun around, showing him her back.
“As if!” she huffed, storming out of the examination room in the Candy Hospital.
“I’ll be expecting you next week, then?” he called to her back.
“We’ll see!” she said, slamming the door behind her.
Fionna walked back to the treehouse in a very sour mood. She truly wanted a child, but she didn’t like the options he had given her. All of his choices were immediate write offs to her except Marshall. She had always harbored a crush on him, and he used to tease her endlessly about it when she was a teen. He knew what he looked like, how he made her feel.
They had drifted apart in recent years as old friends often do but even through the lens of time her face still burned when she thought of the ways he used to try to trick her into confessing her feelings for him. She had never relented, choosing instead the safety of keeping her feelings locked deep inside her heart. She sometimes wondered, late at night when she was feeling especially lonely and vulnerable, what would have happened if she had swallowed her pride and told him to his face she liked him.
He… probably would have laughed at her. Like he would do when she asked him to help her have a child. How did one even go about that conversation? She had read an anatomy book long ago, she knew the mechanics (sort of). She had even read one of Cake’s old sappy romance novels. While the genre was not for her, she’d be lying if she said she didn’t feel anything during the bedroom scene. She just had never thought she’d be able to have that kind of relationship with anyone in a world full of radioactive monsters, so she had always kept any romantic desire she felt squashed down.
She threw herself on her bed when she got home, groaning with a mix of frustration and exhaustion. She didn’t know what was worse, the humiliation of propositioning her old friend or the pain of letting Gumball stick a needle in her however many times it would take for him to get the formula right. She balled up her pillow and buried her face in it and let out a scream, angry beyond words at the injustice of the situation.