Disclaimer: As always I own nothing but the original characters and the situations all characters will be finding themselves in. Everything else belongs to someone else and that's just the way it's gotta be.

Babies and Secrets

As it turned out not even Blake could get Bane to spill the beans about what the two members of the Sullivan compound had wanted to talk to Talia's muscle about, so by the end of the night the visitors were gone except for Quinn who was determined to hang around a little bit longer to continue to get a sense of her step daddy and the health of her mommy and siblings. So with Quinn tucked up in the guest room for the night and Blake up sulking in the attic Eames and Arthur turned in for the night with the former having to help the latter get ready since Arthur was getting bigger by the day.

"After this is over you're going to spend a fortune buying me designer clothes tailored to fit my not pregnant body to make this up to me." Arthur informed Eames as he slid under the covers, glaring down at the huge bump that made him feel like a total pig. And what was even worse was the fact that he hadn't even gotten into this state pigging out on yummy food, which his babies were also not letting him eat often because they were so picky about what they'd let him eat.

"Only the best for my darling." Eames assured him as he leaned over to give Arthur's forehead a smacking kiss before reaching out to rub a hand over the mound of Arthur's stomach. "Are you going to insist on dressing our children in designer clothes, Luv? Like those celebrities who spend thousands of dollars on a bloody jumper the kid's only going to wear once or twice."

"One, any child of mine is not only going to know how to dress, but dress well despite your genes, and two, only a complete idiot blows that kind of money on a child when it comes to clothes. They grow out of or destroy the perfectly innocent clothes within weeks depending on the age. But I will be strictly monitoring what they wear, so get the idea out of your head now if you think for one minute you're going to have any say in the matter."

Eames considered this, and hoped that his children wouldn't curse him later for not arguing the point. "Can I at least have a say in what sports they play and watch?"

"Provided they want to watch or play when they're old enough."

Bingo. "And that same rule applies to their clothes once they're old enough to have a say?"

Arthur smirked, making it clear that he had seen his little ploy coming from a mile away. "They can have all the say they want when they're buying the clothes and I don't have the authority to bar them from leaving the house if they look like color blind fashion rejects."

"Ah...they yes, let us hope once again that we're not having girls."

Smiling in response Arthur was about to make a comment about that when his stomach was kicked hard, both his hands moving to press against his stomach as he winced hard. "Dammit."

Immediately Eames was up on his knees, his eyes going stormy as he pressed his hands over Arthur's as he asked what was wrong. Did he need something? Should he call his mum? Blake? What was wrong?

"Really hard kick. Fuck."

"Getting stronger by the day, aren't they?" Rubbing his darling's stomach to try and soothe his babies into letting their mum rest, Eames murmured to them that they needed to remember that Arthur would be in charge of their clothes for the next eighteen years at least. They ought to keep that in mind the next time they decided to use their poor mum's insides like a football.

"You plan on teaching them to call me mum, aren't you?"

"You prefer mommy, Darling?"

"I'm used to it. And I am the one carting your babies around for months, so it's not like I can argue I'm the woman in this situation so to speak. Which again, means that you're going to me making this all up to me, particularly the stretch marks, for the rest of our lives together."

Shifting up again while bracing his body weight on the hand he set beside Arthur's shoulder, Eames leaned over to brush their lips together one, twice, and a third time before stating that he had absolute faith that Arthur could make even stretch marks look hot.

"Damn right I can." Reaching out Arthur pulled Eames's head down for a much more serious kiss, one that lasted until another hard kick had him breaking it off so that he could curse that fact.

And then his bladder insisted he had to pee again, completely ruining the mood they'd both been going for.

)

In the morning the babies were still kicking like mad with only short periods of rest, and thanks to the sleepless night he'd gotten as a result of all that kicking Arthur was far easier to convince than normal that he should go in for a checkup in case there was a reason they were in such a frisky frenzy. Quinn wanted to see the babies on the ultrasound so she wanted to come along for that alone, but she was worried too about her little brothers and so they all piled into Eames's car and headed into town after breakfast. Thankfully Eames's mom had managed to clear a space for them, and they were all her hoping that she'd tell them that this was entirely normal for babies to be doing at this point.

Once the ultrasound was up and showing the babies everyone breathed a sigh of relief that they looked pretty normal, or at least as normal as two alien looking creatures with overly large heads could be.

"Ah...interesting."

"What's interesting?" Eames asked distractedly, unable to tear his eyes away from the screen.

"They've grown a lot faster than I expected. The estimates we made based on their growth in relation to the time of conception, they're bigger than we anticipated. And they're starting to run out of room."

Now Arthur looked in her direction, his voice joining the other three as they all asked as one if the babies were in trouble.

"No, but they're going to have to come out sooner than we anticipated. Maybe even as early as next week."

Again everyone else in the room spoke in tandem to express their shock and surprise over that.

"That's what I said. This isn't a normal pregnancy, not by any standards. It was always going to end in surgery to remove the babies from Arthur's artificial womb once they were big enough to survive being separated from him. Leaving them in too long could kill them, and potentially Arthur depending on how badly wrong things went. In this case the sooner they come out the better for all three of them."

"This would make things easier. The sooner we can go home and get away from Talia's bitches the better and safer they'll be." When everyone looked at him Blake simply shrugged his shoulders. "What? No matter what they said to Talia or Bane during their little powwows it's only a matter of time before she shows how incredibly stupid she is and tries something. If we're all in the US when she makes that next move we'll be in our territory, not hers. If she can even find where we are, which is doubtful. Yes I know being around Dr. Eames is preferable, but she can't do any of them much good if they're dead."

"Even once they're born they're still going to need to stay close by for medical reasons. We'll have no way of knowing how they'll adapt to the outside world until I can look them over properly. They can't be trusted to a regular doctor and there's the physical markers to consider. There can't be any cosmetic surgeries until they're older, the data we have on the first hybrids indicated that many of them likely died from the shock of having limbs and other body features removed when their systems were too new to handle it."

"You're both right." Quinn informed them to head off a possible fight. "But my daddy's more right than you, Grandma. There's nothing you can do for them if they're dead. Of course we'd be dead too which would suck cause those stupid dog breathes would have to get past us first which isn't likely. Unless they try to blow us up. But that would be the smart thing to do and the bitch isn't."

While Eames's mother reeled over being called grandma by Quinn the others traded looks, knowing that Blake and Quinn were right about it being safer for all of them if they had an ocean between them and the wolves. Bane and common sense could only protect them from Talia for so long. But Eames's mother was right too, and they knew that as well.

"For right now what we concentrate on is Arthur and the babies." Eames told them all, cutting the others off. "We focus on getting the babies out without any harm being done to them or Arthur. After they're fine we can go from there. Nothing else matters until that's done and we can judge how safe our various options are. For now, we're happy the babies look healthy and Arthur is as well, badly bruised stomach aside."

"Thank you for adding that last part."

"Of course, Darling. Not to mention the fact that it's bloody difficult to get sleep myself with you up and cursing our boys for kicking you black and blue."

"If I wasn't pregnant with your kips I'd shoot you for that and blame it on hormones."

"He loves me madly."

"Sure I do." Rolling his eyes, though the look in them when they focused on Eames was soft, Arthur turned his attention to his still befuddled doctor. "Is there anything I need to do, or can do, to make them stop using me as their punching bag for the next little while?"

"Fraid not. Their other father was the exact same way."

Shoulders hunching at the dark look he was now getting from both Arthur and his own mum, Eames mumbled that he really couldn't be held responsible for what he'd done or his children were doing in the womb. From their continued looks it was obvious they didn't consider that a decent defense.

"You know this isn't fair, you might have been just as bad for all-sorry." Eames winced, having belatedly remembered why it was that they had no way of knowing just how active Arthur and Blake had been in the womb or any other quirks about their genetics.

"Don't worry. We both hope we broke ribs when we were in the womb."

Arthur and Blake fist bumped each other.

"Me too, me too."

They each fist bumped Quinn.

Having regained her composure Eames's mother told Arthur that it would be for the best if he stopped in every couple days until say the end of the following week. If the babies were big enough at that point, and they had no reason to think it would be unwise to act, they'd perform the surgery then.

Arthur nodded in agreed, and waited until after they were done and heading out before he asked Eames why he looked so troubled. It was good news that they'd have their babies sooner than later.

"I don't like the idea of you having dangerous surgery."

Chuckling, though it wasn't really funny, Arthur placed a kiss on Eames's cheek. "I've had loads of them, Eames. And I haven't died once."

)

Arthur could see that Eames was getting progressively tenser and more worried as the day went by, his forger imagining the worst and trying to hide that fact without much success. And since it wasn't so long ago that he'd come to England expecting that he'd have to have an abortion, or even might end up dead because of some strange new medical condition, Arthur knew that sort of irrational fear well. Take that level of fear and triple it, and you might get close to the level of fear one felt when you thought someone you loved was in harm's way. But how he was supposed to make this easier on Eames...he didn't know.

He'd spoke honestly before, about the fact that the idea of surgery didn't scare him. His childhood had been full of them after all. The recent scans taken of his body, he'd studied them religiously and compared them to regular wombs and pregnancies. There were inherit risk to any sort of surgery, people had died on the table during the most routine procedures, but he wasn't most people and Arthur trusted his own strength of will enough to believe that if anything went wrong he'd survive it. Did he fear for his children, yes, of course. But they came from him and Eames, had that strength of will bred into their bones. They would be strong enough too. Their very existence proved their strength.

His brother and Quinn knew his strength, knew what he'd survived, so they weren't half as worried as Eames was. Eames had some idea, but there was just some things, some types of pain and suffering that someone who hadn't experienced it personally couldn't begin to understand. And because he couldn't come up with a plan to help Eames with his fears Arthur sought his brother out after dinner, since Eames was on clean up duty and Quinn had decided that she wanted to hang with Salar for the last couple hours of his shift to get to know him better. Whether he wanted her to or not.

Since they didn't have a lot of time alone and Eames had very good hearing Arthur got straight to the point and then asked his twin for his opinion once it was only them.

Taking a moment to think it over Blake weighed the pros and cons of the most obvious answer and then went with his gut, which trusted Eames enough for him to say it. "Tell him the truth about where we come from. The others don't know much about us, but they do know something of the conditions we lived in and the amount of experimentation done. Yes I know it's a risk, someone could get it out of him, but he's under our protection now anyway...and since you love him he should know anyway. The more time that passes without you telling him the more it's going to piss him off that you didn't tell him sooner."

"I've told him there's things I can't tell him about my past."

Reaching out Blake gave Arthur's shoulder a squeeze. "The wolves are circling, Arthur. They're going to know who they're messing with soon enough. I've wracked my brain thinking of who Patrick and Teddy could have threatened Bane with that he would have taken seriously, and the person that came first to mind was Beta."

"Who Beta actually is...they know better than to discuss that."

"All they'd have to do was warn him that there's someone who hates Talia with every fibre of her being, and could kill her easily. Would kill her, if Talia came after us again. He wouldn't know who they were talking about, he thinks she's dead like the rest of them."

"And hopefully it will stay that way. But if it doesn't...well there goes our identities again. I trust Eames to keep his mouth shut about it, and we don't have to tell him about Beta. That remains with us until we're back home unless she makes an appearance here. He's going to meet her either way."

Yeah, and that could get sticky given who Eames's godfather was. Arthur still hadn't quite worked out how they were going to deal with that situation and he was usually beyond brilliant when it came to strategizing. He blamed the pregnancy hormones one hundred percent for that. Just as he blamed them now, because his brother's suggestion did seem the best course of action given the present circumstances they were in. And he would have to tell Eames sooner or later about his compound, Blake was right about that too.

"You think this is the best option?"

"Even if it's not, it will definitely take his mind off the babies and surgery for at least the next twenty-four hours."

That too was an excellent point.

"All right. I'll tell him."

"I'll go help Salar deal with Quinn then. I figure I owe him that at least given that I've been kicking his nice little ass since I got here."

"He's not your type."

"No, but making Bane think for even a moment that I'd tap that makes me feel all warm and happy inside." Blake grinned in response to his brother's expression. "Hey, I'm not getting laid right now, I have to take the tingles where I can get them."

"Just help Salar, don't make things worse."

"I'd say scout's honor but not only were we never scouts, but not even I would wear those ugly uniforms."

And on that note Blake headed towards the front of the house while Arthur headed for the kitchen. Eames wasn't there, but it was a simple matter to follow his nose to find Eames sitting out on the back porch, deep in thought as the forger stared off into space. But as soon as he opened the door that led outside Eames's head was turning to look at him, his voice gentle as he asked him if he was okay.

"As good as I can be in your hand me downs because I'm so fat." He was also waddling a little, which was so mortifying Arthur was actually grateful that he wasn't in the United States, around people he knew. This was not the sort of mental images he wanted people to have in their heads when they thought of him. That Eames did was bad enough, even though the forger was practically in love with his belly.

Eames got up once he'd made it to the other man's side, and Arthur let him help him down to a sitting position beside him.

"Smells like rain."

"Well this is England, Darling. We're big on rain here."

"Yes, I've noticed. It's a wonder you all don't have webbed feet and gills at this point."

"It's not that bad."

"Eames...the saying it's raining cats and dogs came from this country because during the time period the idiom was coined London's streets were so full of strays that after heavy rainstorms the streets would be full of drowned cats and dogs."

A long pause. "Seriously?"

"Seriously."

"Bloody hell. I could have done without knowing that, especially since we are a cat and a dog, Luv."

Shifting closer Arthur slid his arm through Eames's, leaning against him a little as their heads came to lean against each others as well as they stared out into the wooded yard. "Would it make you feel better if I pointed out that none of us are likely to drown anytime soon? Well other than me since I'm not entirely sure how well I could swim at this point."

"I'd get you to safety, and I'm of course always happy to provide you with mouth to mouth resuscitation if needed."

"That was never in question."