IMPORTANT AUTHOR'S NOTE: this chapter contains emotional discussion of miscarriage, and related mental health struggles. Please read at your own discretion.

This chapter has a lot of backstory. It follows the 'prison, lake Geneva, Rhapsody' plot from the middle of Act 2 of the musical, and I've taken a bit of a wild stab at the timescale (because someone had to). Some references from Thessaly's Meat/Khashoggi scenes have been used, not explicitly (PM me for info if that rings any bells).

More backstory to follow in the next chapter or two, and by that point I figure I'll have earned my reward of some nice fluff up to the end.

There now, that'll give us all something to look forward to.

Andrei leaned against the cool marble pillar, trying to concentrate on the article he was reading, which was in relation to the scheduled updates to the global mainframe, and trying not to concentrate on the muttering coming from the gaggle of girls on the other side of the shop.

Meat, having woken that morning "feeling like a whale, Andrei, an actual whale", and having decided that none of her clothes fit her any more (though in her defence she did rather have a point there) ensured that from that point onwards, any hope that he might have had of quietly reading the morning news in bed with a cup of tea was extinguished, in favour of escorting Meat to a selection of shops (none of which seeming to have anything she wanted to buy).

Meat's immediate reaction upon walking in to the sixth shop of the morning seemed to indicate that there would be more luck here than the previous five, and Andrei began to feel that the end might finally be in sight. The building was pleasantly cool, and he had just been appreciating the quiet atmosphere when the hushed whispers began.

"Do you think that's really her? She doesn't look anything like she does in the photos."

"Of course she doesn't, idiot, that's when she has the makeup on and everything!"

"Yeah, I know, I just thought she'd look prettier, you know? Her skin looks soooo bad."

The girls' voices weren't loud enough to reach where Meat was interestedly looking through a rail of skirts, but his back stiffened anyway. Not a threat in the sense he was used to, but not quite worth ignoring. The girls, edging around the nearby racks, were now close enough for him to glance them over in his peripheral vision.

"I just can't believe she's actually pregnant," murmured the taller of the girls, leaning conspiratorially towards her friends. "Like, who would even do that if they didn't actually want a baby to keep?"

"I dunno," mused the friend, a shorter girl with vibrant red hair, "I do think it's a nice thing to do. But they never said why they can't have their own - and anyway, she looks really trashy being pregnant without even being with a bloke!"

"Well," the taller girl grinned with relish, "I read the other day that she's seeing Commander Khashoggi. Remember? That guy from the police?"

Andrei took a step to the right, moving behind the pillar so that he would no longer be within their line of sight, should they choose to glance in his and Meat's direction.

There was a chorus of, "Noooo," and one of the friends hissed, "You can't be serious!"

Andrei was by now unable to pay further attention to the Prime Minister's thoughts on an official security administration, and was so fully engrossed in their continued muttering, that he didn't notice Meat until she put a hand on his arm.

"Hi," she grinned up at him. "Bohemian stealth training, wasn't it?"

He couldn't help but smile at the sight of her. "Oh, do shut up."

Meat nodded her head towards the girls, who had turned away, towards the changing rooms. "It's people like that I can do without," she said, without too much bite. "Like it's any of their business." She frowned suddenly, her hand gripping his arm as she leaned heavily towards him, head dropping down.

"Are you alright?" He quickly reached for her waist (her fainting sadly wasn't an uncommon development at this point) but she was already straightening up.

"Sorry," she exhaled slowly, "my back cramped up. Think I've been standing up too long," she added ruminatively, looking down at the delicate sandals she'd chosen to wear (which Andrei had already told her provided no suitable support for her feet whatsover - and had ducked the left one, which Meat had lobbed at his head). Now, he only raised an eyebrow.

"I can't bring myself to have any sympathy for you, I'm afraid," he told her earnestly, trying to keep a straight face as she winced and shook each of her feet in turn.

She huffed at him. "Ever heard that you have to suffer to look good?"

He rolled his eyes, and shook his head. "You're absolutely delusional, you know that?"

"Excuse you!" She said in mock outrage, "Pregnancy happens to be a protected characteristic!"

He laughed out loud at that. "You've spent the last hour browsing in Harrods, Meat, I don't think you can claim persecution."

"Hmph," she allowed him to straighten her jacket on her shoulders, and took his arm again.

-

The waiting had been the worst part.

Week after week, months on end, there had been doctors' visits and hospital appointments and all the while Meat had sat there, foot tapping against the chair leg or the floor while Gazz eagerly talked to the practitioners about eggs and gene recessions and Scara had nibbled her nails and worried about costs and injections and timescales and no one had really asked Meat what she thought about any of it.

She knew exactly what she'd been signing up for, obviously. There was no way to have another couple's baby without significant medical intervention (at least, no way that would definitely only involve Scara and Gazz's genes, because Meat did not want to imagine what a baby that was half Gazz and half herself would end up like).

-

After she'd said it, casually thrown her "I'll help" into the ring, Scara had said nothing, sat so still and quiet for so long that Meat wasn't sure she'd heard her. Then, just as Meat had been about to snap her fingers in Scara's face, she had turned around, eyes huge like a baby rabbit.

A deer caught in the headlights of an 18-wheeler.

"Are you sure?"

Meat swallowed. "Yeah, of course I am."

Scara blinked. "I just - I know you had the. The thing. In prison." She looked down at the floor, because that was how it always was. No one could say, "miscarriage" to her face. They couldn't look her in the eye and talk about the baby she hadn't been able to have.

Meat nodded, slowly. "It wasn't a 'me' thing. It was a prison thing."

"Are you sure?"

"Wouldn't offer if I didn't think it would work," Meat answered, shortly. "I reckon you've been through enough without me offering a dodgy donor body."

Scara made a very quiet gasping noise, and Meat turned to see tears streaming down her friend's face.

"Oh -" Meat reached to Scara and pulled her in for a hug, wrapping her arms tight around Scara's slim frame and ruffling her hair. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean it like -"

"How," interrupted Scaramouche, muffled against Meat's hair, "did you not fucking, just lose it. How did you do it?"

Meat leant her head bask against the wall. She didn't know how to answer. Not really. How had she managed it? She remembered the weeks before the Rhapsody, long endless days in the pub in the outskirts of eLondon, curled over a table with a threadbare blanket across her legs, where the only thing she needed to concentrate on was that the glass in her hands was running low.

She used to wonder whether Pop knew, because the sadness she saw in his eyes as he refilled her glass each time got harder to bear every time, until she stopped looking at his kind old face each time she stumbled to the bar, and watched the ripples spreading across the lake instead.

She remembered the lights when the stage went up after Galileo's triumph, lasers shooting the sky and feeling terror shoot through her body every time, because it had taken a few weeks for lasers to mean stage, music, happiness when just before they had meant terror, fear, death.

She hadn't thought about the baby, not really, until she saw him, standing on the edge of the crowd, uncertain and spectral in his grey suit and bleached hair and scarred cheeks, and thought, 'you bastard, you're the reason I'm alone', and she'd launched herself at him with nothing on her mind except that maybe if she hurt him enough he might kill her, too, and then she wouldn't hurt any more.

It had been awful when he just… hadn't done anything. He'd stood there and let her hit him, scratch at him, slap him. And when her energy ran out and she couldn't do anything except lean against him and howl, she'd felt his arms lift around her to hold her steady, and then she hadn't understood at all.

She didn't realise she'd been saying some of this out loud until Scara sat back a little, head cocked to one side, eyes wide.

"Did you talk about," she swallowed, "did you talk about the baby?"

Meat's heart soared. The baby. "Yeah," she said quietly, "yeah, we did."