Kathryn had known all along exactly what time of year her baby was due. She hadn't pointed it out to Chakotay because she knew how he'd react. Once it had occurred to him, she'd downplayed it as much as possible. "Oh, yeah, I know."

"You know? And you didn't mention it?"

"I didn't mention how many moon phases we'd go through while I was pregnant either," she'd replied, hoping she sounded teasing rather than flippant. "These are things we've been charting for coming up on 7 years now. I figured you might know." She was doing her best not to lie, but with the last sentence she was certainly skirting the truth. She had considered that he might know and be trying to protect her from worry just as she was trying to protect him, but she hadn't really believed it.

He hadn't been fooled. "If you really thought I'd known, I'm sure it would have come up in conversation sometime. You were deliberately keeping it from me, weren't you?" He leveled a glare at her and arched an eyebrow, to which she responded with a neutral expression and a slightly arched eyebrow of her own, but no words. Finally, his gaze had softened under hers and he'd let the matter drop.

Unsurprisingly, though, he hadn't let the overprotection drop. His preparations for plasma storm season were over the top. While the children helped her gather all their vegetables into the pantry he'd built on one side of the house, Chakotay was shoring up and reinforcing every possible nook and cranny of their home. While Kavver was gathering necessary research equipment into the main house and locking down everything in his laboratory, Chakotay was surveying the treeline to take down every possibly unstable limb, and Kathryn only barely stopped him from clearing away all trees within a two-kilometer radius. When they all gathered extra water into the bath house that Chakotay had built around Kathryn's tub and connected to the main house with a walkway, Chakotay insisted the usual amount wouldn't cut it and single-handedly collected twice that.

By the time the first storm struck, Kathryn was about to lose her mind. So as they hunkered down in the house, boards nailed over windows and everything either secured or moved to the floor, and played games to pass the first storm, Kathryn was mentally praying to every deity she didn't believe in that she wouldn't go into labor.

She didn't.

The second storm passed similarly, and the third. So did the fourth. And to everyone's surprise, there was a fifth.

After two weeks of storms, Chakotay said, "That's got to be it, right?"

"We've never had five storms in a season," Kathryn replied in something of an affirmative. "This is our 7th storm season by now. Not enough for empirical data, but certainly enough to see patterns."

"They also usually only last a week," Kavver added. "Two years ago we had that fourth storm a week and a half after the first, you remember? But two weeks apart is the longest it's ever been."

"So we think we're out of the woods?" Kathryn reiterated.

"I think so," Kavver said.

"I'd like to wait a bit longer," Chakotay said cautiously. "Before removing all the precautions, I mean."

Kathryn sighed. "'Tay, the baby will come when she comes. Don't worry so much."

"I know," he said, and gave her a quick peck on the cheek. "Can you blame me for worrying? We may have three kids already, but this is the first time I've known about it ahead of time, much less actually been present and waiting for the little one's arrival. We don't have the doctor or anyone else to help us. I just . . . I want to know she'll be safe."

"Hey, it's my first pregnancy too," Kathryn countered.

"Except those babies with Tom Paris," he teased back.

She rolled her eyes. "Those hardly count any more than your baby with Seska-" She clapped a hand over her mouth, eyes wide as they took in the expression on his face, like a slap. "Oh, 'Tay! Oh, I'm so sorry! I didn't mean-"

He put a hand to her arm. "Don't. It's fine, I know you didn't mean that." He managed to give her a weak smile as he said, "I'm going outside to check on the latest damage. I won't go too far, don't worry. I really do think it's still a good idea to give it a few more days before we risk going far."

Kathryn managed a twitch of a smile in return as she said, "We always do, don't we?"

But as soon as he'd walked out the door, she buried her face in her hands. The children were still reading or playing in their bedroom, oblivious to the conversation the adults had been having in the main part of the house. Kathryn tried her best to sink down into a chair, but her advanced pregnancy - now several days beyond her due date, by her calculations - made that rather difficult, and the best she could manage was a weary combination of an uncomfortable lowering and a plop. She dropped one hand to the table, leaning her head forward into the other hand.

Kavver sat across from her and placed a comforting webbed hand over her slender fingers. "May I ask what that was about? Clearly the teasing about one set of babies doesn't compare to this other baby about which I've never heard."

She slowly slid her hand outward, rubbing fingertips across her eyes and landing with them pinching the bridge of her nose. "Seska. She was a former shipmate. They were . . . involved, before our crews merged into one. He actually broke it off with her around the same time we were pulled into the Delta quadrant. We haven't talked a lot about it, I'm not even sure if it was before or after being pulled in by the Caretaker's array. I do know that she tried to win him back shortly before she . . . um, before she left the ship. And he refused."

Kavver patted her hand reassuringly, silently encouraging her to go on, and in the back of her mind Kathryn wondered again if this fabulous listening habit was endemic to his species or just his personality. Only one of the children - Tom - showed similar habits, so if it was a species-wide trait it must be at least partly a learned trait, and not something Kathryn and Chakotay were teaching properly.

"Anyway," she continued, finally drawing her hand down her cheeks and then removing it from her face, "it turned out that Seska wasn't actually the species we thought she was - a species called Bajoran - at all. She was a Cardassian, the species Chakotay and the other Maquis were fighting against. The Cardassians had enslaved the Bajoran peoples, they had forced the Federation's hand on a treaty that was far more beneficial to them than to us -" She stopped and smiled a little. "Of course, as someone sent to uphold that treaty, I wouldn't have possibly admitted that at the time that I was trying to capture Chakotay's ship." Kavver smiled and nodded. Over the years, he had heard all about that adventure that had resulted in their crews combining.

"So when we found out Seska was a spy, and that she was actively working with the Kazon - that species we were trying to prevent from exploiting the Ocampa - when we realized she was working with them, she initiated a sophisticated beam-out procedure and went to the Kazon ship, where she reverted to her Cardassian DNA.

"A while back, not long before we ended up here, she managed to enact another sophisticated procedure that involved stealing Federation technology while making us look like amateurs. Chakotay still felt responsible for having brought her on the ship in the first place - like he somehow should have known she wasn't who she claimed, even though none of us ever knew, not even her closest friends. But he's so hard on himself, and so honorable, and he took it upon himself to go after her. On that score, suffice it to say that he was captured, eventually we got him back, and he and I had a bit of a trust issue to get over because I felt betrayed. But the ultimate betrayal came from Seska, who sent Chakotay a message to say that when he was unconscious at one point, she'd stolen his DNA and impregnated herself with it."

Kavver gasped. Kathryn nodded. "Yeah. We felt the same way. And the thing is, right around the time we got stranded here would have been within maybe a month or two of her due date. We've never really talked about it, but the reality is that we have no way of knowing if the baby was born, if it was a boy or a girl, or really, if she was even pregnant at all, though I can hardly imagine what she would gain by claiming to be pregnant with his child when she wasn't pregnant at all."

Kavver's fin twitched a little, in what Kathryn recognized as the Loburian equivalent of a furrowed brow. "May I ask - why have you never talked about it?"

She shrugged. "He still blames himself, and knowing him, he probably feels some guilt over not being there to raise the child too. Not to be with Seska, of course, but maybe to rescue the baby - well, child now, close to the same age as the triplets - rescue the child from its mother's clutches and teach it love and kindness. But we can never do that, and in all likelihood, we'll never know what happened. It's much different than the babies I had with Tom, you see. We weren't really ourselves at all - we were some super-evolved creature, though to be honest, from the reports it almost sounded like we'd gone the opposite direction to unevolved!" She laughed a little.

Kavver laughed too. "Oh, Kathryn," he sighed, giving her hand another pat. "You and Chakotay went through so much. I know this baby will be good for you both. I don't doubt your love for the children at all, but having a baby that's the result of your combined love, and a baby that's your own species . . . that's good too. And while you may not love the triplets less than your biological offspring, you also can't see the results of your joining in them."

She smiled. "That's where you're wrong, Kavver. Our joined love makes a difference in all their lives, and molds and shapes their personalities just as surely as our DNA combining molds and shapes this little one -" She was at the end of her sentence anyway, but bit it off so abruptly it sounded like she'd intended to continue. But she was frowning instead, a hand on her stomach.

"Kathryn? Are you alright?"

"I . . . I think so. That was just really weird. I've been having those practice contractions I told you about, but that one was just a lot stronger. That's been happening the past few days, it was just . . . different. I don't know how to describe it. Like a wave coming around me from both sides at once. Like it was more all-encompassing instead of localized like I'm used to. Just . . . different."

"Would you like to lie down? Or do you need something to eat?"

She contemplated for a moment. "I think I need a drink - just some water, please. And then I need to pay a little more attention."

"To what?"

"Umm . . . well, according to everything I read in the database, I think we're looking for regular time between contractions, then for that time drawing closer until they're just a couple minutes apart."

He got her water, then sat and watched while she drank a few sips.

"You can't just use your tricorder to see if you're in labor?"

She shook her head. "It'll tell me if my muscles are contracting and if the cervix is ripening and about hormone levels, but those are all things that can happen without real labor. The key is knowing the time between - oh! It's starting, check the time!"

He dutifully did so, then added, "That doesn't seem long from last time.

She nodded. "I noticed that too."

"Perhaps I should call Chakotay back inside?"

"No, not yet. Let's finish timing this one first."

He nodded, then waited as she drank a few more sips of water and they waited. And waited. Kathryn smiled wryly as she realized this was the only time she thought Kavver actually looked impatient. Just as she was about to mention it, she felt another tightening and gave another gasp.

"Oh! How long, how long?"

"Two minutes and twenty-three seconds."

Her face was in a grimace for several seconds as she focused on breathing through the tension. It was certainly not the most pain she'd ever been in, but it wasn't exactly comfortable either. As soon as it eased up, she opened her eyes and looked up at Kavver. "Get Chakotay."

Kavver was starting toward the door while Kathryn ran the tricorder over her stomach, checking those other things she'd mentioned, especially cervix dilation.

"Tell him I'm 3 centimeters -" she began.

At the same moment, the door flew open and Chakotay was shouting, "The leaves are turned up like another storm is -"

They both stopped speaking at the same time, staring at one another wide-eyed. Then Chakotay groaned. "I knew it. I knew it!"

As it turned out though, it didn't matter. Though the house shook around them, the children tried to distract themselves with games, and Kavver tried to find every conceivable way to be of help without ever seeing Kathryn's exposed body, the baby came into the world inside their little home with no regard at all for what was happening outside of it. As she slid into her Daddy's waiting hands, after 4 hours of labor, no one was paying attention to what the storm was doing outside. They had secured the house well, they had resecured things that came undone in previous storms, and they were focused entirely on that little bundle of joy.

As Chakotay handed her to his wife, they all had tears in her eyes, and Kavver called softly to the other room, "Tom, Janelle, Travin! Come see!"

Three sets of webbed feet pattered toward them, and came to an abrupt halt as three sets of wide eyes took in the little bundle in their Mommy's arms before them.

Kathryn smiled at her older three children. "Meet your new baby sister, B'Elanna Gretchen Chakotay-Janeway."