A/N: My idea was to write about each of the pregnancies experienced on Charmed. The first one I'd had in my head for quite some time, based on a line of dialogue from "Just Harried" that struck me as possibly much darker than it sounded. I hit a case of writer's block much sooner than expected: after the first one came so easily, the subsequent ones have been much harder to write. But over the past two days, I broke the next four, so I'm posting what I have as motivation for the rest. I hope you enjoy!

Phoebe

Patty loves being pregnant, more than almost anything else. She loves the way Victor looks at her, loves taking his hand and pressing it against her stomach, listening to him talk to the daughter they are both dying to meet. She loves the way it makes her feel, beautiful and sexy and mature and capable, strong enough to kick her mother out of the Manor and send her back to her own home for a few months or a few years, long enough for Patty to take control over her own family, her own life. And she loves the new powers that have accompanied each of her pregnancies: with Prue, the ability to move objects with her mind; with Piper, being able to not just slow down time, but to speed it up; and now, with the daughter they'll name Phoebe after her favorite aunt, the power of premonition.

Seeing the future in short, brief glimpses is incredibly intoxicating for Patty. Her first premonition was sharp, specific, detailed; since then, they've come and gone, some stronger, some merely outlines of images. Some she recognizes and responds to immediately: the demon who attacks the manor on an afternoon when Prue is home sick from school; the warlock approaching her mother's house which sent Patty running for the phone. Others are less clear, involving people and places so far in the future – a baseball player collapsing in heap, a baby boy surrounded by a protective bubble, a man so darkly handsome he makes her gasp before he morphs into a hellish demon – she won't ever know what they mean.

Victor treats it like a parlor game, which is how he handles magic when things are at their best between them. He can no longer ignore it completely, not with Prue retrieving toys taken away from her and put on top of the refrigerator with her mind, or Piper freezing the neighbor's son during one of his frequent games of cops and robbers.

"Tell me what you see," he says to Patty, his voice low and teasing, as he holds her to chest at night.

"I see you, changing diapers," she teases back.

It isn't always easy; it never is, but somehow, things are more certain when she is pregnant. Victor moved back the moment she told him about the baby, and she'd been able to quit her job at the diner, stay home all day with her girls, and the four of them are a family, as a real of a family as they can be. She wears the short, pretty, flowered dresses she'd bought when she was pregnant the first time, she cooks dinner, she reads bedtime stories to her girls, and at night, she sits in the backyard with her husband and watches the stars.

"This is what is should always be like," she sighs contentedly one night, leaning back on a pillow stolen from the living room as she looked up at the heavens while Victor rubs her feet.

"What, you always fat, me always subservient?"

She smiles up at him. "I mean, like this. Quiet, and peaceful. A houseful of girls, safe and happy."

"No demons bursting through the front door. No mothers nagging us about training our daughters to be uber-witches. No whitelighters orbing in at all hours of the day and night."

"Honey, Sam's not that bad. And he's just protecting me, protecting us."

"My point is, I like it better when we don't need Sam. Or Penny, for that matter. I know it's old fashioned of me, but I want to be the one protecting my family."

"You are," Patty says. "In all the important ways. You are a wonderful father to Prue and Piper, and I have a feeling that you are going to be an even more wonderful father to our next daughter. I can tell already: she's going to be a real daddy's girl."

"Is that what your premonition tells you?"

Patty closes her eyes, and wills her daughter to give her a glimpse of their future, of Patty and Victor and their three daughters, all happy and loving together, but nothing comes.

"That's exactly what I see," she lies.

Two weeks later, Patty is standing in the kitchen cleaning up after breakfast, when a premonition hits her, stronger and clearer and sharper than any other. It comes on with a white heat, giving her a headache so strong and so fast she drops the dishes in her hands and clutches at the kitchen counter for balance. At first, she thinks it is the past: she sees herself on the day of her wedding, her hair pulled back from her face with trembling hands. But as the image grows sharper, she realizes it is not herself, but someone who looks so much like her, in a different white dress, a different set of troubles haunting her brown eyes, a hope mixed with fear, easily the eyes of a witch in love with a mortal.

"Piper," she murmurs to herself, sensing rather than recognizing her second daughter as the beautiful bride. The image widens, and she sees herself, older, between two lovely young women, in identical pink dresses with dark hair shining down their backs, and Prue is so obviously the girl on her left, with her snub nose and blue eyes, and the daughter on her right has to be Phoebe, and she can see Victor waiting downstairs, and her mother, too, flanking the nervous blond-haired young man who will marry her middle child as she embraces her girls.

"Thank you," she whispers, her hands clutching her stomach as her water breaks, as wetness floods her legs, her shoes, jolting her out of this future moment and back into the present.

For the rest of her life, she will carry the image in the back of her mind, and it will cause her to be less careful, more brave, as she rushes into danger and faces demons more powerful than she'd ever taken on before, all by herself. It will give her the confidence to make the wrong decisions, because no warlock can take away her future with her family; no love affair will permanently separate her from Victor.

At the moment of her death, the image will come to her again, and her very last thought will be the horrible realization that the entire point of a premonition is the future is flexible, ever-changing, that it only shows potential, and was not the promise Patty had mistakenly believed it to be.