Fanfic / Love Can Surprise You At Any Time In Your Life

Love Can Surprise You at Any Time in Your Life is a Futurama Alternate Universe Fic and Kid Fic co-written by spacehoney and essence_of_annoying.

Following the events of Bender's Big Score and Lars' death, Fry and Leela find themselves tiptoeing around each other, trying to move on from grief. But when Leela learns she's pregnant with Lars' child, they're forced to confront their complicated feelings, and take the risk of whether the child of a doomed paradox duplicate can even survive in their universe.

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Examples:

• Adaptational Angst Upgrade: Leela's feelings in Beast with a Billion Backs are given much more focus than in the source material, which mostly plays her implied jealousy of Colleen and hesitancy towards Yivo for laughs and makes no mention of the previous movie's emotional revelations. In the fic, Leela is explicitly still grieving Lars while grappling with her relationship to Fry, and of course, she goes through much more emotional turmoil upon learning she's pregnant with Lars' child.
• Armor-Piercing Question: At Lars' funeral, Fry, insecure about being the same person as Lars, asks Leela, "If you love anything about me, can you just promise that it’s because of what I do, and not what Lars did?" Leela can't honestly answer this, instead leaving Fry behind to think things through.
• But I Can't Be Pregnant!: One of the reasons Leela initially doubts her pregnancy is because her reproductive system is complicated (she has a normal period and occasionally lays an egg) and isn't quite sure if a normal human could impregnate her.
• But We Used a Condom!: Lars did use a condom on the night he and Leela had sex. The fact she still managed to get pregnant despite that, yet not from her previous boyfriends who were way less safe, makes her wonder if this was only meant to happen with Lars.
• Call-Back:
  • After the first Dream Sequence, the narration alludes to Leela's dream sequences in "The Sting":
    "Outside of pesky comatose venom-induced hallucinations, Leela was smart enough not to let her dreams affect her reality."
  • The reason Kif is able to clock that Leela is pregnant is because he was once pregnant himself. Seeing Kif's tadpoles also helps convince Leela to keep her baby.
  • Cylon and Garfunkel from "Bendin' in the Wind" make an appearance in Chapter 5, playing music on TV in one of Leela's fantasies.
• Entertainingly Wrong:
  • Zoidberg uses a low-quality ultrasound machine on Leela and sees her fetus for the first time. He assumes she's being haunted by a tiny ghost.
  • In Chapter 5, Leela, Amy, and Zapp overhear Bender talking about Leela's pregnancy to the League of Robots without using her name. Knowing the woman in Bender's story is a widow working at a delivery company, Zapp initially assumes that Amy is pregnant by the recently-dead Kif.
• Doppelgänger Gets Same Sentiment: Zig-zagged. The first conflict between Fry and Leela is when Leela draws affectionate parallels between Fry and his older alternate self, but Fry is uncomfortable with this because he doesn't want Leela to project Lars onto him when they don't share all the same memories. However, after Leela discovers Lars got her pregnant and Fry falls in with Colleen and then Yivo, Leela rationalizes that only Lars is the father of her child, not Fry, because Lars loved her as much as he could while Fry seemingly abandoned her.
• Dream Sequence: In Chapter 4, Leela dreams about being married to Lars and happily revealing her pregnancy to him. She takes this as a sign that he's still with her through her baby, and begins having fantasies in the same vein whenever she has free time and needs a coping mechanism.
• Erotic Dream: In Chapter 5, Leela's second dream about Lars involves a Massage of Love that transitions into implied sex. Evidently, both Zapp and Amy could hear her moaning in her sleep, and it's implied Zapp's voice while he was having sex with Amy worked its way into Leela's dream, much to her revulsion.
• Everybody Knew Already: When Fry finally learns Leela is pregnant, he shares the shocking news to the rest of the crew... who had already found out weeks prior, and assumed he knew already. This only further rubs in Fry's agony about the situation.
• Fainting: Leela ends up passing out during the Deathball game. Zoidberg's subsequent examination confirms her illness is due to pregnancy, though she still doesn't believe it.
• Funny Conception Story: Leela became pregnant the night Lars proposed to her; since both were homeless at the time, they made love up against the dumpster in the alley. Which Bender apparently witnessed, with photographic evidence to boot.
• Genre Savvy: Bender deduces Leela is pregnant because he learned about Morning Sickness from a storyline on All My Circuits.
• Good Girls Avoid Abortion: Concerned that Leela bearing the child of a doomed paradox duplicate would leave her and/or her baby doomed as well, Farnsworth strongly hints that she get an abortion. It's implied she considers it (looking up "planet parenthood new new york" online) so she doesn't have to be a single mother, but by the time she tells her parents, she's decided to keep it, likely due to the events of Kif's funeral changing her mind.
• Insane Troll Logic: Zapp believes he is the father of Leela's baby, not Lars, despite not having had sex with Leela in eight years. He claims his sperm only waited to impregnate her until the supposed end of humanity.
• In Spite of a Nail: Several events in canon remain unchanged despite the added complication of Leela's pregnancy, though unchanged details are usually skipped. In Beast with a Billion Backs alone: Kif still dies and comes back to life, Bender's entire arc with the League of Robots is implied to be the same (with the exception of Bender knowing about Leela's pregnancy and blabbing about it to the League), and Zapp and Amy still sleep together (albeit with a slightly different setup and follow-up).
• Late-Arrival Spoiler: The Reveal of Bender's Big Score — Lars being a time paradox duplicate of Fry and sacrificing himself at the end of the movie — is a major plot point in this fic, and frequently referenced.
• Making Love in All the Wrong Places: The only time Lars and Leela made love was in the alley on Xmas Eve after his proposal, next to a dumpster to boot. Justified, as they were homeless at the time and were implied to be Overcome with Desire.
• Mistaken for Cheating: Why Leela tries to explain why she doesn't want to scan her fetus for the father's DNA, the doctor assumes she's making excuses for infidelity.
  “My late fiancé was a time travel duplicate of my co-worker,” Leela explained. “If you search for his DNA, my co-worker would come up instead.”
  “A time travel duplicate of your coworker, huh?” Dr. Evans raised an eyebrow. “Yeah, that’s what my wife said.”
• Morning Sickness: Leela suffers from nausea early in her pregnancy, but misattributes it to grief and her nights in the sewer. Only when she vomits during Kif and Amy's fonfon rubok does Kif suggest she might be pregnant, mentioning that he apparently had similar symptoms during his pregnancy. Her nausea acts up several times throughout the fic (including during the Deathball game and while running from Yivo with Zapp and Amy), to the point she gets suspicious when Yivo suddenly cures it.
• My Secret Pregnancy: Leela considers telling Fry about her pregnancy early on, but decides against it. Her plans to tell the rest of the crew (besides the three that already learned on accident) are interrupted when Kif dies and she doesn't want to pile more onto Amy. While Farnsworth is among the first to learn, he's dead set on Leela having an abortion, so she pretends to not be pregnant in front of him and Wernstrom in jail. Most of the cast learns on accident except Fry.
• One Drink Will Kill the Baby: Implied in the third chapter. Leela grabs a beer for Bender on a mission and considers getting one for herself, but decides against it. Her reasoning is that it'd be irresponsible to drink while she's flying the ship, but she's also just learned she's pregnant, albeit still in denial about it. Given that she'd easily put the ship in cruise control, it's implied the latter reason is why she's not drinking.
• The Peeping Tom: Bender claims to have seen Lars and Leela have sex in the alley, and taken pictures to boot.
  “I took pictures to put in your wedding album,” Bender explained. “Big waste of time that turned out to be. Though I guess now I can put them in your baby book. So it all worked out in the end.”
• Pregnancy Scare: Pre-canon, Leela was worried she was pregnant while dating Sean. She wasn't, just stressed, and came away thinking she might not be able to get pregnant from a human (thinking she was an alien at the time). It's implied Sean's relief about this was a major red flag for their relationship, but also what made Leela realize she actually wants kids with the right person.
• Replacement Goldfish: Discussed. After Lars is revealed as an alternate timeline version of Fry, Leela begins comparing the two favorably. However, this puts Fry off because he doesn't want Leela to just see him as Lars, driving a wedge between them that seemingly drives Fry to immediately get a new girlfriend.
• Selective Obliviousness: When Zoidberg's portable ultrasound shows Leela's fetus, she doesn't believe it due to Zoidberg's history with cheap medical equipment and false diagnoses. She repeatedly insists that she's just sick from stress and her brief time staying in the sewers with her parents, but it's clear she just really doesn't want to believe she would be carrying her dead fiancé's child.
  With a mutant body, nothing was ever straightforward. She was sure there was some bizarre abnormality inside her body that just happened to look like a developing embryo on Zoidberg’s crappy old portable ultrasound machine.
• Shotgun Wedding: Discussed. Farnsworth initially thinks Fry is the father of Leela's child and plans to organize a wedding to avoid ire from the Better Business Bureau. Leela assures him that she and Fry — the prime Fry at least — hadn't had sex in a long time.
• Shout-Out: One of the paranoid theories Fry has for why Lars would've impregnated Leela is that "he wanted to make a statement about humanity, like in that show with the shapeshifting rock lady who had the hybrid baby."
• Someone to Remember Him By:
  • Lars unknowingly got Leela pregnant a week before his death, mere days before he realized he was doomed at all. Given that he was doomed to die to prevent a paradoxical coexistence with Fry, this is a potential cause of concern, as there's no precedent for a time duplicate reproducing and there's a chance the baby would also be doomed.
  • The fic addresses how Kif's offspring are left without a father after Kif (temporarily) dies. Amy is unsure whether she'd want to raise them without Kif's help, but remarks that she's glad "everyone who passes this pond can look down and see a bit of Kiffy." This situation is what convinces Leela to keep her baby, seeing it as a remnant of her love with Lars before he broke her heart.
• Survivor Guilt: After learning Lars got Leela pregnant, Fry feels even worse about Lars' sacrifice and the fact Lars isn't around to see his and Leela's child. Fry even wonders if it would've been possible for him to die and Lars to survive, despite Lars being the paradox duplicate, and believes that would be for the best.
• Time-Traveler's Baby: Leela is pregnant after Bender's Big Score with Lars' child. This follows the canonical reveal that Lars was a duplicate of Fry from another timeline, who'd gone back in time to 2000 then re-froze in 2012 himself to meet and fall in love with Leela again, only to sacrifice himself because being a paradox duplicate meant he was doomed to die. As such, the professor is concerned that Leela or her baby may be doomed as well, if such a thing can be passed on genetically.
• Wall Bang Her: The one time Lars and Leela had sex (and conceived their baby) was against the wall of an alley, or as Bender puts it, "they mashed against a wall for a minute [and] got a bit of squirt on each other."
• Whale Egg: Played with. As a Call-Back to "Leela and the Genestalk," it's mentioned that Leela sometimes lays a small egg in lieu of normal menstruation, but she sometimes has a normal period as well. According to her parents (who are more visibly mutated than Leela), Leela herself hatched from an egg. However, her baby on the ultrasound appears to be mammalian, as it has an umbilical cord.
• What If?: The fic explores what could have happened if Lars had gotten Leela pregnant in Bender's Big Score.

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