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It should come as no surprise to him; it was, after all, a cyclic, scientific eventuality. In its most essential terms, a disability, a binary fission of life in its most basic form… all things that are guaranteed, at least to a certain chance of a percent, to come to pass. He’d been stuck in this strange, fragmented memory of realism for almost 20 years… 20 years without the wonders of modern medicine and science, and though he did his part to spread his knowledge and experience, there was only so much he could do, even when his own corporeal existence was concerned.
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And he couldn’t say it was… an unwanted happenstance. Seeing Ash so joyous and free with the children at the orphanage had him feeling some kind of way, a lightness weaving into his soul at the pure, unadulterated happiness of his partner… a lightness that-- again, a scientific eventuality, a fact-- brought with it a shadow, a sliver of sorrow that he couldn’t possibly give Ash everything he’d ever wanted.
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But you can, a nagging, long-silence voice peeped from the back of his brain, digging up through the detritus like a buried seed, for whom growth had finally reached a level of possibility through the arrival of exocentric homeostasis. You can… technically. It was the same voice, Kepler thought, that goaded him in the face of human experimentation, or, when he’d been in school, fudging the numbers for the grade. He could skirt by on a technicality. But would it cheapen the result?
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It is, at first, a nauseating feeling, the subsequent reminder of the long-fought war he’d been fighting with his body… his body that, for most of his life, had seemed a separate thing from Kepler himself, so much so that he often felt like a parasite inside of a host. And that had calmed as he’d grown, as he’d come to recognize what it was that felt so square peg-round hole of it, and over time he’d metamorphosized and accepted and, eventually, come to a shaky peace with the workings of his biology. That’s all it was, after all, was a science. It comforted him to think of it like that: his physical nature was a series of traps and tubes, of vesicles, liquid, and chemicals, all underscored with an electrical current that keep things functional. For him, there was a sharp, steep canyon between the anthropomorphizing of his cells, tissues, organ systems, etc, etc, and the things that made Kepler, Kepler.
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To him, his reproductive tract was about as useful as the dysfunction in his heart: present, annoying, and treated and handled with appropriately dosed medication. But even then, there was a fluidity to his existence-- like smithed metal, heated and shaped and folded over time, something he’d had to break in and wear out for it to be of any comfort-- that soothed the screaming alarm bells in his head.
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So this development is… he splays a hand over his lower abdomen and frowns, struggling with the concept. He’d been so far removed from all of this… This-ness… that until it’d actually happened he’d never even imagined it as a possibility. And wasn’t that ironic?
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Of course, it was coming nigh to the eve of their destruction. His fingers clench in the fabric of his shirt as he sinks his teeth into his lower lip, tired eyes finding themselves in the mirror, forcing himself to come to terms with the presence of the corporeal meatsack in which he’s been doomed to spend the rest of his days.
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However few they might be.
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He’d tried to tell Ash days ago when they’d received the missive from Summer Atreides promising aid in the face of the apocalypse, but the shaky peace he’d maintained for so long had crumbled in the face of his love, and he’d needed to pull back, gather his forces, and regroup. It wasn’t so much fear of how it would be received that drove him to knee-knocking cowardice, but instead, the vocalizing of it would make it real. And the worry, of course, that Ash wouldn’t allow him to fight in the upcoming battle; this alone was a heavy enough weight that it choked his throat and tempted him to keep it a secret.
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But he couldn’t possibly not tell the man he loved. His husband.
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So he changes out of his sleeping clothes and into some standard of his everyday wear and heads out into the courtyard where King Ashley Shepard has been testing the mettle of his King’s Shield against the blades of his soldiers. Chocobo falls in step next to him, a comforting presence always at his side; and for the briefest of moments, in the rare Galarian sunlight, Kepler leans on the fence of the training field and watches with rapt appreciation as his husband turns all of his best fighting men into the dirt without so much as lifting a blade.
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They’d be strong. Kind. Smart...
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As soon as the smile comes, it fades.
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... If we don’t all die, first.

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