Sorry, got stuck in soapbox mode there. ;) Anyhoo, characters and plot herein belong to me; unless you run the TCP archive, please ask me for permission to archive if you want this -- who knows, someone might! ;) Feedback is appreciated as always at kielle@subreality.com ...

She heard his voice in the doorway to the kitchen, soft and blurry with sleep. Bless him, he hadn't turned on the overhead light -- he knew how she hated being blinded like that. In the pre-dawn darkness, the glow from the open refrigerator was more than enough to let her see what she was doing.

"Are you awake?"

She smiled -- it seemed a silly question, perhaps, but a valid one knowing her nocturnal wandering habits. "Yep. Go back to bed, I'll be up in a minute. I just wanted to fix a snack."

She could almost hear him frown in the darkness. "Julie, didn't you just have something an hour ago?"

"And the nice dinner with your parents," she agreed amiably. "But you know how it is--" Posed in the beam of light from the open fridge, she meaningfully patted her rounded belly through her nightshirt.

Trevor chuckled. "Riiiight. 'What that baby wants, the baby gets'! So what is it this time?"

"Celery. And, hmmm...peanut butter."

"That sounds frighteningly normal."

"Wait until you hear what I want for breakfast. Go on, you have work in three hours -- I'll come back to bed as soon as I've finished this. Love you."

"You too." With a massive stretching yawn, Trevor conceded the point and wandered back out.

"So why ARE you being so cooperative tonight?" Julie murmured fondly down at her protruding tummy. The night before it had been tinned sardines...and she normally HATED fish. Almost as much as Trevor had hated trying to find it at 3:30 in the morning.

~Greenwet[untranslatablenutritionalrequirement]crunchyum?~ replied the wordless little tickle at the back of her mind, overlaid with conflicting tones of ordering/pleading. The "words" were her own mind's attempt to make sense of the wordless communication of pure concept, some of which was cobbled together from scraps of her own knowledge. In response to this strange contact, Julie merely shrugged and took a healthy bite of the goo-covered veggie, careful to avoid getting the "strings" caught in her teeth.

"Well, at least you're learning to ask nicely," she mock-scolded. The first three months had been silent...of course. Pregnancies usually were, after all! But in the fourth month, the demands had begun...

At first she merely thought that she was having perfectly ordinary cravings, like those of everyone who'd ever been pregnant had insisted upon telling her (along with every other gory detail of their own experiences). But then WORDS had started to rise to the surface of her mind -- okay, perhaps not actual words per se, but definite thoughts and concepts that were not her own.

At first she'd thought that it was hormones, or a wild imagination. Then when she'd realized what was happening...

Oddly, she'd only been scared for an hour or so. By the time Trevor came home for dinner that night, she'd dug right through her fears and come out on the other side with the marvellous realization that she had been blessed with something very, very special. And she'd been enjoying it ever since...except, perhaps, at three in the morning when SOMEbody wanted sardines for some obscure inscrutable fetal reason.

She was licking the last of the peanut butter from her fingers when two things happened. The first was a mild contraction, which didn't bother her in the least -- with the baby due very soon, that was normal.

The second was a comment/emotion she'd never heard from the child before:

~uhoh~

Julie froze in mid-lick. "Oh? What? Bad celery?"

~[negatorysurge]worry~notnownono!~

Something clicked. Uh oh indeed, she thought as she calmly headed for the stairs to tell Trevor to get the overnight bag and warm up the car.

She sobbed once, unable to help herself -- misinterpreting her dismay, Trevor squeezed her hand for the umpteenth time that hour, whispering reassurances into her sweat-matted blonde hair. "It's okay. It's over--" a shrill protesting infantile wail and a cry of "It's a girl!" brought a wide wreathing smile to his face "--it's over, honey, she's fine. You're fine."

Julie struggled to speak, but the shock of separation was still too strong, too raw. She didn't know it would hurt like this, hurt so bad... She fought to hold back her tears as the doctors fussed over blankets and a bassinet. What was taking them so long? Why wouldn't they give her her baby?

Her heart thudded hard against her ribs and the smile faded from Trevor's face as Dr. Johannson walked over sans baby, instead wearing a solemn expression. He was a good man, and a good obstetrician; he'd been solidly there for them for the last few months, always with an encouraging comment or an amusing anecdote. Thus, the flat worried lack of good humor in his bespectacled eyes was chilling.

"What's wrong?" Trevor demanded, his voice breaking. "What--"

"Please, Mr. Heitmiller, please! I'm sorry to frighten you, it's nothing to fear -- just a minor irregularity that we'll need to sort out. I'd like to suggest that you have your daughter tested for the x-factor."

"W-what?"

"The gene that causes mutat--" the doctor started to explain in a kindly, gentle tone, but Trevor impatiently waved him quiet.

"Yes, yes, I know what the x-factor is. Why do you think our baby needs the test? Is she okay? What are you saying here?"

Julie's heart sank in the direction of her kidneys as she studied the doctor's face from her pillow-side vantage point. He seemed grave and concerned, not at all hostile, but still... She'd secretly known for months now that her firstborn was to be a mutant, of course. She wasn't stupid. It didn't bother her in the least -- how could it? She KNEW her baby, loved her heart and soul. But she'd hoped that it would-- that SHE would be able to pass for normal. For her own innocent sake. It was a terrible world for an obviously "abnormal" child to grow up in.

...oh no, no, my poor little one...

Trevor was maintaining a death-grip on her hand, half in reassurance and half echoing his wife's unspoken fears. He'd known about the child's...specialness, of course. Julie had told him right away when she'd realized the truth herself, and though it sounded far-fetched at the time she'd been so serious and so convinced that he'd decided to believe her. Frankly, he had to admit that if their unusual "bond" was as she described, he was a little jealous! All had seemed well: they'd been so happy, Julie had been the picture of maternal health...he'd given almost no thought to the possibility that their child would be born a physical mutant as well as a psionic one.

He briefly considered the future awaiting any mutant child born in this country in this day and age and he shuddered, half in hollow fear for his poor innocent daughter and half in burgeoning paternal rage that anyone might want to hurt his little girl...

Striving to keep the rising storm out of his eyes, Trevor listened as Dr. Johannson explained tactfully, "I'm terribly sorry to have to place the burden of this information upon your shoulders so soon, but upon preliminary examination of your child, I've found that she has extra appendages--"

Julie felt like she was going to pass out with terrified suspense. Extra what? Arms? Legs? Wings?!

"--namely, an extra toe on each foot and an extra finger on each hand."

For a moment, the silence was thick enough to slice up and sell at a deli. Then...

Then Julie started laughing, wildly, nearly hysterical with relief. Trevor was relaxing too, rubbing her hand between both of his, his shoulders settling into a visible sag of deflated tension. The doctor stared from one Heitmiller to the other in obvious bewilderment. "Is she--"

"She's fine. We're ALL fine. Can we hold our daughter now, please?"

"I'd recommend that you wait until after we conduct tests," Dr. Johannson replied slowly, bemused but determined to carry through with his job of protecting both parents and child alike. "Until we can ascertain that she is not a danger to you and vice versa..."

Julie was still giggling in helpless fits. "No, really, it's okay. She's not dangerous at all -- she's just a 'boring old-fashioned mutie' like me and her grandmama! I feel so stupid...I should have thought of it, I should have warned you--"

Dr. Johansson had gone pale and was fighting the perfectly human urge to take a step back. He had nothing against mutants -- he treated them all the time. But there was a special procedure and a special ward for mutant births, both for a very good reason: you never knew when a frightened, hurting mutant mother in the throes of labor was going to be able to cause a lot of damage. A LOT. "You certainly should have told me, young lady! It wasn't in your records..."

"Oh, Doc, don't mind her, she's not making sense yet," Trevor said quickly, capturing the thread of the conversation before it could get wildly out of hand. He felt shaky with relief -- and ready to strangle the doctor for the scare he'd inadvertantly put them through. "Neither my wife nor I carry the x-factor -- we had ourselves tested years ago. Our baby is the OTHER kind of mutant...the original kind of mutant. The perfectly harmless kind."

He nudged Julie and she obligingly held up both hands, fingers splayed and thumbs pointed towards herself. A faint oval scar marked the edge of each palm, right below her pinkies. "Polydactly. Extra fingers and toes. It's run in the Rendleman family, MY family, for generations. You see, Doctor, my daughter is NOT a mutant, not in the sense you're thinking anyway. She's perfectly normal...for a Rendleman."

She smiled winsomely, looking momentarily radiant despite her straggling damp hair and flushed cheeks. "Now...PLEASE...may I see my baby...?"

Dr. Johannson was relaxing, an embarrassed air rising about him as he made a meaningful gesture to a nurse and then ducked his head to clean his glasses. "Of course. I'm terribly sorry for the misunderstanding. You do understand that it was merely procedure?" He looked up, his expression pleading for forgiveness as he earnestly lowered his voice. "I'm simply concerned with the welfare of all involved...last week an otherwise perfectly healhy baby boy suffocated to death in a colleague's hands because we didn't realize until it was too late that the child was a water-breather..."

Julie gasped, her eyes filling with tears that were already too close to the surface anyway. Trevor clapped the man gently on the white-coated shoulder. "You're just doing your job, Doctor. Thanks for the concern."

And that was the end of the conversation, because it was then that the nurse arrived with a squirming bundle of blankets and laid it in Julie's arms. A tiny hand flailed a tiny fist, six tiny fingernails perfect against soft ruddy-pink skin. Instinctively Julie poked her own finger between those tiny perfect digits--

_Contact._

~mommymommymommymommy[toobrightunhappy]coldhungry[disgustmixedwithalongingforhome]wherewhatwhohelp!!!~

For a timeless moment the young woman's entire world consisted of one single shining point of light: her baby. It wasn't over, what they'd shared wasn't "lost," she could still "hear" her when they touched--!

Thank God -- I missed you so much...

For that long moment she simply cuddled and murmured and reassured and loved her firstborn while Trevor, ever the responsible one, quietly sorted out the details of the minor surgery the child would require. For another moment Julie resented that, resented the need to "fix" her perfect baby girl, but then she reminded herself that if they were to keep their child's true talents a safe secret within the family, removing the extra digits was for the best. They did not need a lifetime of mistaken impressions like the one with which the good doctor had just frightened them nearly to death...

For another precious small eternity Julie held her tiny, perfect, wonderful, mutant daughter and cherished what had for five long months belonged to her and her alone. Then she beamed up at her husband, who'd finished with the doctor and was now hovering nervously over them both.

"Trevor? I think it's time you 'met' your daughter. And you, you adorable little thing, how about you be a good girl for mommy and say hello to your daddy just like how you said hello to me...?"