A/N: For a long time - more than three years, in fact - I swore that this story would never see the light of day. It was too stupid, too preposterious, too far removed from anything else I'd ever written, and until recently I wouldn't even admit that I'd planned it. But the truth was as stupid as 99% of mpreg is, I wanted to see if I could pull it off.

This story has gone by many names and had many incarnations, but after I ended up with a timeline ten years long and more complex than anything else I'd ever planned, I knew I had to write it. So this month I'm doing a sort of personal NaNoWriMo with this story. I hope you enjoy it!

Warning: This is mpreg. Expect the worst.

Even after I've stopped screaming, it takes me a long time to let go of the duvet. I gasp for lungfuls of stale, acrid air, one hand resting on the bloody skin of my burst illusions, the other still clenched tight in the folds of the duvet cover, which like everything I touch is wet and clingy with sweat. After the exploding pain of the last hundred thousand hours, the silence is deafening. I took my watch off as soon as I got home and although I assume it's nestled somewhere among my supplies in the footwell, I don't know where: but it's the middle of the night, right when the only light is coming from my cheap torch, illuminating the scene like a clever set-up for a horror movie.

After a longer while, when I've finally managed to detach myself from the duvet, I dare to stretch my legs a little, experimentally. The tired muscles protest loudly at me, but I persevere until the tips of my toes reach the opposite door, the cold plastic stinging against me and the undersides of my thighs just brushing the mess of innards and body fluids below me, hot and putrid. I can't breathe through my nose. I can hardly breathe at all. I want to reach up and open a window, but it's freezing outside, and worse still, I hardly even have enough energy to salvage the bottle of milk I prepared earlier and hold it up to my baby's lips. It gurgles as it feeds, comforting me in a sensation alien to the tired wreckage around me. I let my eyes slide closed for just a second, planning the things I need to do. Firstly, I need a cup of water. This is easier said than done: I already drank the bottle I had with me, and all the others are in the boot. The boot is like my kitchen; I keep all my food and crockery there and sometimes when it's not too cold I sit in amongst the tins of sweetcorn and packets of crisps to eat supper, staring out across the warehouse where plants and rats have made their homes in amongst the abandoned boxes, shelving and machinery. Then I need to let in some air and get rid of the stench of blood, wipe down my new baby and dress it in the baby clothes I bought last week. But I'm still hurting, still exhausted.

When my baby tires of feeding and falls asleep, I rummage around for my penknife to cut the umbillical cord away. I don't know how close to the baby I can cut. Does it hurt? I can't remember. Will my baby be stuck with a deformed belly button if I get this wrong? But I have to detatch it - her, a quick inspection reveals, her - from the mangled lumps that slithered out behind her so I saw away at the cord as close to her as I dare, then pull her away from the remains of her nine-month home. Then I bundle the duvet up and put her down, assessing the damage with my sticky, messy hands, trying not to move anything below my belly button or above my knees. This is almost impossible, and each tiny clench of muscles sends pain shooting through my body. But I have to move, or else I will seize up and die in amongst the linings of my own womb. I pick up the blanket I set down earlier and carry it away from the car; it's too badly stained to even consider trying to salvage it. What would the people working at the laundromat think? But the blood has seeped through into the seat of the car. I will clean it tomorrow.

I get out some baby wipes for their named purpose until her skin is as smooth as, well, a baby's bottom. Then I grapple with a nappy for a long time until it folds around her satisfactorily. The second hand onesie I found a charity shop goes on top, and then she almost looks like a normal baby and not the unholy offspring of me, Marluxia Braefern, a sixteen year old male virgin.

I need some music, to drown out the echoes of my screams still bouncing off the rusting steel walls of the warehouse. I pull on my puffer jacket and wobble out onto the dirt again, fumbling with new batteries for my Walkman. I'm still hurting, so much. The insides of my thighs feel like they've been punched repeatedly for hours on end. I glance down at myself, naked below the jacket, wondering if bruises are beginning to form there, but all I can see is the dark stain of more blood dribbling down my leg. I shiver almost comically, finding a clean-ish pair of pants and a sanitary towel. Thank God I knew how to use these things already, that a mother-figure was there to teach me how to get the pad in the right position so blood didn't slop over the sides, back when I first started bleeding.

I feel very calm. The only reason why I feel calm is that my mind cannot comprehend what has just happened. I am only thinking about banal things, like I don't know whether it's before or after midnight, so I don't know when my daughter's birthday is. That makes two of us. The doctors narrowed me down to either the thirteenth or the fourteenth of March, and I'm inclined to think that they picked the latter so I'd never have an unlucky birthday.

I return to my daughter once Elton John is soothing me with his sad lyrics, rock her back and forth in my arms. Everything is happening very slowly, like time stopped being light like air and suddenly became dense and sluggish. I try to hum along to Elton John but my throat is still too raw. Eventually I turn the Walkman off, because Elton John is singing the first song again and I can't be bothered to change the CD, and the silence squeezes my head again until I think I have a migraine. I've taken all my painkillers, though, even the ones you're not supposed to use if you're pregnant, so I lie down and put a towel over my head and try to sleep for a bit. That's when my baby wails suddenly and vomits the milk back up, all over me and all over my jacket and onto the blankets and things in the footwell. I don't move for a second, and then I feel a horrible pang of aggravation, as hard and sour as the agony between my legs.

I say, in a croaky voice: "Why did you do that?" This is the first thing I ever say to my daughter (screaming doesn't count). As though she understood me, she starts crying. I don't know what she wants: more milk? Comfort? Is she too cold or too hot? Does she already need a new nappy?

This is the moment when I start to collapse into a breakdown. I scrabble for a clean cloth, still gagging at the stench of blood and wincing at my aching pelvis, but my fingers can't quite grasp it and suddenly my whole body feels limp, like all the energy in my muscles has just drained through of my outstretched fingertips. The baby tumbles from my arm and hits a cardboard box. I begin to howl, wailing without restraint or reason, the fear of this great and terrible responsibility pouring out of me in every way, in tears and snot and sweat and terrified, inhuman cries. I pull the baby close to me, sobbing and sobbing and sobbing, bent over, still hurting, still hurting so much, still breathing in thick sticky blood, still brown from the messy leftovers of labour, holding in my hands this brand new human soul, for whose safety and wellbeing I am entirely responsible, and who will die or be extracted from my care if I fail. Six months ago I was ditching school to smoke and drink with people I didn't trust enough to call friends, locking myself in my bedroom and ignoring the hustle and bustle of the family around me, stealing stupid little things like chocolate bars and small change from shops or people, pretending like I was hard to protect myself from how cruelly and mercilessly the world treats you if you're different.

I am not strictly male. I have "an intersex condition caused by genetic abnormalities", according to the doctors who sat me down when I was six or seven and just beginning to grapple with the concept of sex and gender. Basically, I have a penis and I also have a vagina. I think that the doctors decided that I should be raised as a boy because it would make my life minutely less shit, and luckily enough they turned out to be right. Sort of.

I look down at myself, still gasping for breath, a bit too butch to be a girl and a bit too effeminate to be a boy. In the torchlight I can see dark blotches on the inside of my legs, but I don't know if it's blood or bruises. I'm not going to be able to walk tomorrow. And I need to get more washing up liquid and wipes to clean up the car. This menial thought calms me down long enough to pull my baby back from the abyss of the footwell, stroking her soft blonde hair, which is still a little damp. She looks at me, right at me, in a brief pause for air, and I think to myself: You are just a few hours old. This morning you were inside of me, kicking my lungs. How can you see right into my soul?

Her eyes aren't blue like mine; they're a kind of sea-water turquoise, big and wet and sad, already. I wonder if my mother's eyes were this colour. Or my father's. I don't think about my father much, because to me paternal figures seemed like the kind of adult that could come and go; but mothers are a different thing entirely. My mother died still wrapped around me, and while I can never know if she honestly loved me in those last few moments before her heart gave out to the cold, pretending that she did gives me something eternal to cling onto. Mothers are forever; at least, they're supposed to be. This is why I am living in a stolen car in an abandoned warehouse, cradling this tiny person in my arms, both of us crying because we are cold and hungry and afraid, and not at a hospital where they might have stopped me bleeding so much and I might not be in pain any more. Because if I went to a doctor they'd see that I was a teen delinquent and they'd take her away from me. So I held tight even when I had cramps so excruciating I wanted to pass out but couldn't, even when all the pregnancy books I borrowed from the library told me to go to the doctor every time something unusal happened, even though I might have died.

Finally after a lot more fumbling and crying, I successfully prepare a second bottle of milk for my new baby, which she drinks quite happily before falling asleep. I change my pad because I am still bleeding, and even dare to prod at myself a little to inspect the damage: but the pain that suddenly shoots through me is so fierce that I cry out and from then on only touch myself very gingerly to clear the blood away. It is thick and lumpy, like I'm having a period, so I assume I have not ripped anything to pieces and try not to panic. Then I lay a plastic bag over the stain on the car seat and make myself a new bed, wrapping myself up in blankets as I lay them down. After a few minutes, baby dribbling on my chest, I am almost warm. I fall asleep not because I am comfortable or because the pain has subsided, but because I am too exhausted to keep my eyes open for another second.

When I wake up shafts of light are slicing through the cool, damp mist inside the warehouse in a way that is almost beautiful. I stretch out, my joints clicking as I do so. The baby is awake, gurgling again in a way that makes me think she might suddenly begin to cry. So I pour the rest of the milk into the bottle and let her suck at it for a bit, but she's not interested.

Then I notice the smell and enjoy my first experience of changing a nappy. Feeling like I have to at least try to exercise a little, I wrap the dirty nappy up very tightly then carry it out to the other end of the warehouse. It is slow going; every step is agonising. I have definitely bruised, big ugly blotches all around my crotch, and after walking two lengths of the warehouse I am bleeding again, actual shiny red blood. I think I have torn something. I remember reading in a book at the library that there are four kinds of vaginal tears and one of them goes right down to your anus and needs sixty different stitches. I really hope that I don't have that kind of tear.

I return to the car and have a breakfast comprised of stale bread, crumby butter and buttery honey, then curl up on the back seat cuddling my baby. I think back to my fabricated visions of my own birth and everything that was missing from it, and decide that while the sky is clear and the light strong I should take a photograph of her.

I have this old disposable camera that a friend of mine and I bought together a long time ago. What we were going to do was take a photo of ourselves every three months until we used up the whole roll of film, at which point we'd get them all printed out. Her name was Larxene, and she was like me and also very different to me: we were both outsiders, loners with foster parents who were the first to smoke, the first to get pissed off our faces, the ones who bunked off school all the time, and didn't pay attention in class even when we bothered to turn up. But I was reserved and moody and introverted; she toyed with people like they were her personal playthings, fucking boys before I even met her and nicking things from shops without a care in the world. She was the one who convinced me to dye my hair pink. She even got a tattoo, from God knows where and blowing God knows how many people to get it.

I had to move away when we were fifteen, actually just a few months before my baby started making my stomach bulge, and I never saw her again. I hardly ever missed anybody, but Larxene was one of the few exceptions. She chose me even though people teased her for being friends with a shemale: to her, I was cool. But I kept the camera, even when I stole my foster parents' spare car to run away from home, with sixteen photos still left, because I had nothing else to tie me to her and my past that I bemoaned constantly but that was actually rather wonderful compared to my warehouse now.

I dress my baby up in the cleanest baby clothes I have and lay her down on the duvet, folding it over so there aren't any stains visible. Then I position the camera very carefully, and click! My baby is memorised in that little roll of film. I roll the camera over onto the next photo and put it away again, movements coming to me a little more easily now. But I still tire quickly, bundling back up into my blankets, this time making a nest for myself on the driver's seat. The driver's seat is like my sitting room: I keep the CDs for my Walkman there along with the pregnancy books I took out from the library to get through having my baby. I leaf through them again as she drinks more milk and throws some, but not all, of it back up again. I wonder if she's sick. I should take her to the hospital. I can wear my boy's clothes and pretend that the mother dumped her baby on me and did a runner. As I read up on placentas - "Some mothers will want to look at the placenta. After all, it's been feeding your baby for nine months!" the book says patronisingly, like I had a choice - I concoct a suitable alabi for the apparent absence of my daughter's mother. But it's a good five minutes' walk to the nearest bus stop, then two buses to the hospital: I'm not sure if my sore body can cope with that yet. So I stay by the car all day, tidying up, resting, feeding, cleaning. Mostly resting.

While I rest, I think about my baby. She needs a name. The responsibility of naming a child is a terrible burden to bear. I should know: I have the most ridiculous, annoying, impossible name ever to have disgraced this country. Actually, the logic behind my name is quite clever: I was born in Braefern Forest, the only place where a rare breed of pink daffodil - narcissus marluxia - grows in the wild, and "Marluxia" is a name neither too masculine for a girl nor too feminine for a boy (although the latter could be disputed). However, Marluxia Braefernis also impossible to spell, impossible to pronounce, impossible to contract and impossible to remember. I do not want my daughter to bear the same cross. But I also don't want her to have a common, boring name like Kairi or Tifa. And so eventually after a lot of careful consideration I start to call her Larxene, after my old friend whose photographs still lie undeveloped in that old camera. Larxene Braefern. It's bitter, and suits a baby who cries constantly and pukes almost as much.

I spend a few more days in the warehouse, but I begin to run out of things so I decide that I need to just man up and go out. So I tie Larxene to my chest with a spare shirt and pull my jacket on over her, partly to keep her warm but also so that nobody notices that I had to wrap her up in a shirt, and with my money and my shopping list and a plastic bag full of whatever baby things I might need for the day I wobble out of the warehouse and, with some difficulty, through the gap in the chain link fence that's supposed to keep me out. From then on, it's an excruciating walk to the bus stop. I'm sure that I'm bleeding again, and my legs ache horribly. But I keep reminding myself that I need more food, and I need more painkillers, and I need more water, and I need more baby milk, and I need to take Larxene to the hospital. She throws up about half of what I feed her, and I'm beginning to think that she might be ill. I let this notion spur me on until I can finally rest on the bus stop seat, which hurts and hurts and hurts until my bus arrives and I pay my twenty five munny for a ticket and climb on, at which point the bus seat hurts and hurts instead. I get off at the high street and wobble on down to the shops, not sure if I can cope with another half an hour on a bus with my crotch in so much pain.

I go to the nearest supermarket and just as I'm picking up a shopping basket Larxene starts to wail. So I put it down again, feeling for the first time the red flush of embarrassment that comes with a publically sobbing child, and rush outside to the nearest bench to feed her. She drinks sloppily, staining my freshly-wiped jacket again, and after five minutes of bottom-patting vomits again. All this time, people walking by are giving me dirty looks. I ought to be immune to them by now. I have been living here pretending to be a girl so nobody questioned my heavily pregnant frame for four months: but I still shrink back when a group of boys whisper words like "slut" and "whore" as they pass by me, giving my greasy hair and tatty clothes distainful looks as they pass. I try not to let it get to me, because in actual fact my total abstinence from intimate encounters ought to have been guaranteed protection from parenthood, but that doesn't mean that I succeed.

Once Larxene's calmed down enough to be stuffed inside my jacket again I make a second attempt at shopping, this time getting right around the aisles until the noise of some yelling teenagers disturbs her and she lets out a siren-wail, ensuring my hasty retreat until they pay for their fizzy drinks and packs of sweets and bustle out of the shop. Then I lay my rather more mundane groceries on the conveyor belt, trying to calculate the total cost in my head but soon giving up and letting the till do the work. There's a lot more baby milk; I have to buy the pre-sterilised stuff because I don't have a microwave, which is much more expensive. I wondered with my chest becoming indecisive as to whether I needed breasts or pectorals as the pregnancy progressed whether I was going to end up breastfeeding, but all that came out was a bit of something I really didn't think a baby would want to drink, and that was that. So formula milk it was.

Next it's time to get the bus to the hospital. I have taken some painkillers, so I feel a little better during this ride, but then when I get to the reception I realise that I am still wearing a skirt and my hair is still tied up in a girly pony tail. What I wanted to do was tell the doctor that I was Larxene's father, but obviously this is no longer going to work. But as soon as I step into the building with its clean walls and sterile air I start to panic, remembering the invasive appointments of years passed, my terrible fear that they will take my baby away from me, and I am very nearly almost crying by the time I reach the desk and tell the secretary that I have a baby and I think she's sick and I need an emergency appointment. She directs me to Accident & Emergency, which is on the other side of the building. I wobble off, unsteadily, the pain more prominent now that I am afraid. I know that I am moving slowly, limping even, but they can't do anything to me unless I let them, can they? I am here to check on the health of my baby, and that is all. The doctors will not lay a finger on me.

I wait for half an hour in A&E until a very tidy lady with latex gloves on her hands arrives and introduces herself as Doctor Kennedy, and asks me to follow her into an empty office where she logs into her computer and we go through the usual motions of confusion that accompany my name: "It's with an X, an X. X-I-A. And it's A-E, not A-Y. Fern as in the plant. Yes." Then she begins to ask me questions about how I'm feeling and I say; "I'm here because I think the baby is sick."

She tucks a strand of hair behind her ears and says; "Yes, I know, but it's just important to know how the mother feels too."

"I'm not her mother," I say, and before her professional poker face returns I'm sure I can see her expression of increduity at my bare-faced lie.

"How are you related to the baby?" She asks instead. I scramble for a new explanation. I want to be her father. I want my name to be written on her birth certificate where it says "father", but I am dressed like a girl, and I don't think I could bullshit my way out of this one. So I say;

"I'm her aunt. She's my sister's baby. But she didn't want her. So I'm keeping her instead."

"How old is the baby?"

"Four days," I say. Then I happen to glance at the calendar on the wall. "Five. She was born on the twelfth."

Then Doctor Kennedy asks how Larxene has been feeding and I tell her about the vomiting. To my relief, and also my disappointment, I am told that this is normal for very young babies as they adjust to feeding. Then Doctor Kennedy asks if Larxene has been to the hospital before, and I tell her no, it was a home birth. Doctor Kennedy says she has to perform some routine check ups on the baby, like counting her fingers and toes and weighing her to make sure she's healthy. I nod in agreement, but I still find it hard to let go of Larxene when Doctor Kennedy walks over to lever her out of my arms. Nobody else has held her, nobody else has cuddled her or cooed over her (in fact, nobody has cooed over her at all yet), and I am afraid that if I relinquish my grip on her for just one second then she will never come back to me. Doctor Kennedy must see the pain in my eyes because she says "It's okay, your baby is in safe hands." What gets me is that she says your baby, because she knows that my "sister" is a complete fabrication. I start to cry.

Doctor Kennedy hands me a box of tissues and sits down with my baby cradled in her arms. She says "We get a lot of young girls here. It's nothing to be ashamed of. You're very brave." But then she adds "I think it would be best for you to have a check up as well, especially if there wasn't a midwife present during labour," and I shrink away and try to grab Larxene back simultaneously, without saying anything at all because a lump of terror has formed in my throat. I want to get out, before I lose Larxene forever and she turns out like me. But Doctor Kennedy senses my fear, because she reaches over and gently strokes my shoulder. "I'll be very quick, then you can have your baby back." Then she steps away, and starts making observations, talking as she goes, to calm me down. First she counts her fingers and toes. Then she takes off Larxene's clothes and says "Everything looks normal," and then "Your baby is a girl,"

"I know," I say, "I called her Larxene."

"That's a nice name," says Doctor Kennedy as she gently lays Larxene down on the scales. One thing I notice is that Larxene does not protest at all while these proceedings are going on: I notice this because Larxene protests against everything that I do, almost unconditionally. But Doctor Kennedy has a way with babies, which is probably why she is a paediatric specialist. "She has a normal weight for her age. There are some slight deformations in her skull shape, but they should even out in a few weeks."

Yes, I think to myself, because she was squeezed through hips really not built for childbirth. Then Doctor Kennedy runs through a few more other things, and finally Larxene is back in my arms where she belongs, safe and sound. Mine. Mine mine mine.

Then Doctor Kennedy helps me to register Larxene's birth, which means I get a certificate that proclaims me her mother and her father "unknown", which makes me feel a little sick inside. I know exactly who her father is. But a lump forms in my throat again as I think about this, and I am so afraid of losing Larxene that I hardly even hear what Doctor Kennedy tells me as she fills in the certificate. Then she helps me to apply for child benefits, and finally tells me that I really should book an appointment with a gynaecologist to check that everything is okay with me. She even gives me a card to give to the receptionist, so I nod and pretend to agree with her to throw off the trail. But on the way out I throw the card in the bin and walk straight past the receptionist. I am too afraid of what's in my pants to get the help I know I so badly need.