Disclaimer: No infringement intended. Not affiliated in any way with anyone. Net worth is still a negative number. Nothing to sue here people, move along.
A/N: In case you hadn't noticed I have a thread over on DA Reflections where I do answer any questions I get in reviews, especially if I don't have any other way of communicating withthe reviewer (Hi Bob!).
Working Title: Apprentice of Evil v2.0
Part Six: Denial
Max knew that something was wrong. There was an incessant churning in her stomach and a dull ache at the back of her skull. It felt like she was always on edge. When she was with Logan, and Logan seemed happy, the feelings subsided but never completely. She wished she knew more about what her freak show body was really capable of. She wished there were someone she could ask about intuition without sounding like a nut. The end result was that she spent the vast majority of her time hovering over Logan, much to the misconception of her friends.
It was the sleeping that she noticed first. A couple of days after they returned from Haven she fell asleep on Logan's sofa waiting for him to finish doing something on the computer. She woke briefly when he was covering her with a blanket, an amused smile on his handsome face.
"You know, you're always welcome to use the guest room," he said as he laid the blanket over her.
"I know," Max replied and drifted back off to sleep. Logan brushed her hair back out of her face and tucked the blanket in under her chin. Max woke two hours later very disoriented. That should have been her first big clue, but she blamed it on the wine and dismissed it. Although she did stop drinking anything alcoholic after that, so perhaps part of her did know.
She started sleeping an hour or two every night after that. Fortunately Logan didn't know her physiology well enough to know how unusual that was for her.
She almost met Original Cindy's on again, off again girlfriend, Diamond. Original Cindy mentioned that she was staying at their crib one morning at work, but Logan was all wrapped up in something about stolen nuclear warheads so she had been spending all her time watching over him. Original Cindy invited her to see Diamond sing a Guru's, but Max declined. She had to knock over a safe for a friend, even though she made up a different excuse for Original Cindy. The gang at Jam Pony assumed that she was blowing them off to hang with her rich boyfriend again, and most of them were happy for her.
The Pierpont Lemkin safe job went off without a hitch. Max grabbed the disks, and about $65,000 in cash that Logan didn't want to know about.
The next day at work a tearful Original Cindy informed her that Diamond had been grabbed by bounty hunters on the way home from Guru's. Apparently Diamond had lied to her about being out on patrol. Max could only offer a sympathetic shoulder to cry on.
"At least you and roller boy seem to be workin' out," Original Cindy said.
"Yeah," was all Max could think to say as she tried to smile.
It was the morning her pants were tight that she seriously started thinking. She tried denial for a few hours, but it didn't last. Toward the end of her shift she picked up a home pregnancy test. She tested positive in the bathroom of a coffee shop and threw the whole kit in their trash. The test was designed for humans, would it even work on an X5? Max was in an even darker mood afterwards than before she arrived at work, and that was saying quite a bit.
Original Cindy knew that she didn't sleep, so she'd gotten in the habit of actually sleeping either at Logan's after he had gone to bed, or in the café on top of the space needle. She still only slept an hour or two a night, but she was sleeping every night now. Something was going on, that much was undeniable.
She'd always loved the top of the space needle. She had to jump a 14 ft fence to get to it, and then another 12 ft leap to the top because they had cut out a portion of the stairs. That wasn't a problem for her and did significantly keep the company down, which was a good thing right now.
It was on the top of her space needle that she always did her deep thinking. She hadn't been in heat; she should not have been able to conceive, right? What did she know about her biology anyway? She'd just assumed that since she went in to heat like a bitch she would only be able to conceive if she were in heat, like a bitch. Apparently she wasn't that much of a bitch. She'd never had normal periods, like the one well-meaning lady had tried to convince her she was going to. Manticore probably thought the blood loss would be unnecessary. Then again, who knew how much of her was by design and how much was just someone's screw up?
Really she already knew before she broke into the women's clinic to run the test, but she did it anyway. She didn't have any experience working an ultrasound machine, but there wasn't much she couldn't figure out. A few minutes of trial and error and she had images up on the screen. If she had known more about conducting ultrasounds she would have been more thorough, but as it was she froze when she saw the first fetus. That was definitely a head. She couldn't deny it any longer. She had Logan's child, and absolutely no idea what she was going to do about it.
TBC