I honestly hadn't thought she'd come.

She'd visited a few times, each more uncomfortable than the last. If truth be told, I'd been preparing myself to hear that she'd thought things over and decided the whole thing had been a colossal mistake, and that she was going to take my son as far away as possible from the psycho who'd fathered him, and keep him there for his own safety.

The whole brutal simplicity of our relationship aboard Enterprise was gone. I could relate to her as a beautiful woman, and God knows she still was one, but her identity had changed. She was a mother, the mother of my son. Most new fathers have had nine months to get used to the idea; I'd had scraps of a few weeks, the bits and pieces when I'd been a) conscious and b) sane. For days after I'd regained consciousness I'd believed she was dead. Then I found out she wasn't, and in my relatively lucid hours I spent an inordinate amount of time devising ghastly, lingering ends for whoever had snatched her away from me in the most emphatic way possible. Then I'd finally discovered the baby she was expecting (still hanging on, however improbably given the circumstances) was mine.

Frankly, that thought had never even occurred to me. I was simply not – as far as I knew – destined for fatherhood. With a relationship history like mine, the prospect of any woman ever even contemplating uniting my disastrous DNA with hers had seemed on the 'absolutely ludicrous' end of the improbability scale.

But Hoshi had made that choice. I didn't suppose for a moment she'd set out deliberately to get pregnant, but I was under no illusions: she could have got rid of it if she'd wanted to. With me MIA and presumed dead, it would have made her life a heck of a lot simpler. Given the way the captain's temper had been shredding, I couldn't imagine he'd been pleased by the development either; though he must have accepted it eventually, I was willing to bet he'd have been a heck of a lot happier if she'd had a termination.

But she hadn't.

That in itself had engendered all sorts of questions I hadn't yet had the opportunity (or the courage) to ask. But try as I might to tell myself that it didn't necessarily have anything to do with what she felt about me personally, hope kept creeping in. If she didn't feel anything for me, she damn well wouldn't have wanted a child to remember me by, would she?

Would she?

Yes, all that was going to have to be part of The Conversation too – The Conversation about what had happened and where the heck we were going from here. Whenever and wherever we finally got around to having it. And given my less-than-stellar abilities on the conversational front at the best of times, I wasn't looking forward to that.

The whole thing had left me as edgy as – to borrow one of Trip's colourful similes – 'a steer in a steakhouse'. It wasn't just a case of what I felt for her; it takes two to tango. Did she feel anything for me, and if so, what? She'd seen me at one of the lowest points in my existence, a raving lunatic hiding under a bed in Sickbay; a long bloody fall from the Tactical Officer of Starfleet's flagship whom she'd taken to her bed. Had she regretted it then? Did she regret it now?

Was what we had between us enough to found a stable relationship on – the sort of relationship that would provide a nurturing family environment for a child? None of this had mattered back in the Expanse; from the start of the voyage I for one sedulously avoided any thought at all of the future, and making plans of this magnitude would have seemed like the worst possible form of tempting fate, even if the thought had occurred to me that Hoshi was interested in anything more than a fling.

But fate had made the decision for her. She'd found herself pregnant by a man everyone believed was dead, and she'd decided to have the baby anyway.

I'd thought about parenthood sometimes when I was with Jessa. I thought she'd have made a bloody wonderful mother, and it saddened me sometimes that being faithful to me meant she'd probably never conceive. I didn't have any way of knowing if there was any chance that our DNA would be compatible; I thought on the whole the chances were pretty remote. I don't think she took any precautions – she never mentioned it. Probably she thought nothing would happen anyway. Most of the women in the village had multiple partners, which gave them a better chance of conceiving, but then the men didn't see that as anything to make an issue of. I, on the other hand, however I might have wished for her sake that she use her new-found sexual confidence to hand out invitations to men who'd suddenly noticed she was actually a very attractive young woman (yes, I had noticed the looks), would probably have taken violent exception to anyone who'd accepted.

It hadn't happened, anyway. At least as far as I knew. Though towards the end I wondered vaguely once or twice whether her menstrual courses were often this far adrift, I put it down to stress making her late – and it wasn't really the sort of thing you waste time asking about when you're facing a battle for not only your life but a whole way of existence for thousands of people who'll face effective extinction if you lose. If she'd had anything to tell me, she'd have said, wouldn't she? So I was hardly going to ask, not when she must obviously have wondered so often whether she was doomed to be like that poor young lass Tyanna who seemed fated never to be a mother. It would just have been rubbing her face in it.

But it had happened with Hoshi. And now I stood opposite her, with the baby in her arms just waking up and making these enchanting little grumpy noises. The baby, whom I'd chosen – at her invitation – to call Charles, for pretty obvious reasons. Her baby. My baby. Our baby.

I still couldn't get my head around it.

She was looking absurdly nervous. Bloody hell, if she was nervous, what did she think I was?

The sounds of displeasure from little Charles increased in volume.

"Reminds me of you when the targeting scanners go offline," she said with a slightly nervous giggle.

And with that, suddenly I recognised her again. It had been our fourth night together before she'd actually had the confidence to make a joke about weapons, and she'd giggled exactly like that.

I actually found myself grinning at the memory, and watched relief creep into her eyes; her whole body relaxed. "I – I'm supposed to be holding him," I pointed out. I'd held him before, of course, but it wasn't something I could imagine myself getting tired of in a hurry.

"You'll regret it if you do." Her mouth quirked wryly.

I realised after a startled moment that my reprobate offspring had celebrated waking up by exercising his bowels, but manly pride insisted I bluff it out. "I can change him, can't I?" I said defiantly.

One of her eyebrows lifted in a way unpleasantly reminiscent of T'Pol's. "Have you ever changed a baby's nappy?"

"No – but shouldn't I learn?"

No reply to that, but I thought she looked approving as she handed Charles over to me; me doing my damnedest to handle him as though I'd spent half my life holding babies, when I could count on the fingers of my thumb the number of times I'd been unable to extricate myself from doing any such thing with any other baby but this one.

Obviously he had to be put on a flat surface. I laid him cautiously and carefully on the sofa, and took a preliminary survey of what he was dressed in. I'd felt less nervous confronted by the prospect of disarming that bloody Romulan mine attached to Enterprise's hull.

I eased him clumsily out of his coat and dungarees. Underneath these he was wearing a jumper – he didn't like having that eased over his head, for all the care I took to keep it away from his face as I did so – and then he was down to a vest, which buttoned over his nappy. It was now all too clear even to me that the latter needed changing fairly urgently.

Obviously nappy changing was a duty I expected to share, but I'd sort of hoped to ease in at the shallow end first. I mean, just a wet one. As I apprehensively peeled back the tapes, the full aroma of what was within escaped.

Bloody hell. It was only surprising it hadn't set the fire alarm off.

Hoshi had produced the necessary paraphernalia from the bag she'd brought. I knew as well as if she'd shouted it aloud that she was just waiting for me to chicken out and hand the job over to her.

Reeds don't quit.

He hadn't got anything I hadn't, so it was just a case of making sure it was all clean and dry, wasn't it?

I used the nappy as best I could to get the worst of the disaster area cleared, then resolutely reached for the wipes. I suspected that if this had been anyone else's baby my guts would have been fighting for the exit by now, but although there didn't seem to be enough saliva in my mouth to account for how much I was swallowing, I pressed on with the job in hand. This was my son, my son, and I was going to make him comfortable and get him dressed again, and maybe after that I'd spend half an hour hanging out of the window to recharge my oxygen tanks, but for now it was just 'get on with it'.

Pride, they say, goes before a fall. I was just fumbling the poppers shut on his dungarees again and congratulating myself on a job well done when I realised I'd put his jumper on back to front.

"Don't worry about it," said Hoshi, smiling. "He'll probably need changing anyway after he's had a feed. He dribbles a bit sometimes."

Feed... I glanced wildly at the bag. There didn't seem to be any bottles in it.

I glanced even more wildly at the door to the kitchen. Hayes was taking his own sweet bloody time with that coffee, but now I'd have been grateful to be told he'd gone to Brazil to fetch some.

Hoshi looked around at the sofa. "Sit down in the corner and get comfortable."

"Yes, Ensign," I muttered. I was a bit bewildered by this turn of events, as she surely wasn't suggesting I had the wherewithal to feed a baby. Perhaps she was still going to produce a bottle from somewhere after all...

However, she didn't. She organised me to her satisfaction, placed a few strategic cushions and then, carrying Charles, she nestled down lying half-across me. Then, with the minimum of fuss, she unfastened her blouse and got on with the feeding.

I could only be glad that nobody was on hand to ask stupid questions about how I was feeling. The whole thing was so ... so...

I put my arm around her, at first as tentatively as though she were made of glass. Finding that it was not resented – in fact, it actually seemed to be welcomed – I tightened my grip a bit. She settled into the curve of my arm, resting her head against my chest, and watched as with just the knuckle of my free hand I stroked the baby's busily working cheek. It was the softest thing I had ever felt.

The rest of the universe had ceased to exist. There were just the three of us, in our own perfect, private little world.

Something changed in me, in that moment. A wound, a wound I'd lived with for so long that the misery of it was simply part of my psyche, no longer gaped. Stealing around me and through me like the warmth of a blazing log fire after a forced march through a killing cold was a sense of belonging – truly belonging; of having come home, without ever having realised till now that I had none.

I was holding a woman who'd cared enough about me to carry my child, even when I'd been declared dead and she faced the grim prospect of rearing him alone. I was watching her feed him, watching him thrive and grow strong.

Utter and

Absolute

Magic.