Jesse turned as he heard someone walk up behind him. In front of him he saw a petite woman with long wavy red hair and soft brown eyes. "Madeline?" he whispered as he stared at her.
"Oh, Blake!" she sighed as she closed the gap between them and threw her arms around his neck. "I've missed you so much!" She put her hands on his face and passionately kissed him.
Jesse closed his eyes and pulled her to him as he kissed her back. When they broke the kiss he put his hand behind her head and stared into her eyes. "How is this possible, Li? You died over twelve years ago in that car wreck. I identified the body. It is not possible for you to be standing here."
"It is a long story, Love. I'm just happy to be back with you. You don't know how much I needed you over the last few years. I have so much that I need to tell you, and I want to hear everything about your life." she hugged him tightly and laid her head on his shoulder. "I can hardly wait to put back on my ring!"
"Li, we really need to talk." he gently pushed her away. "You've got to understand that I really thought you were dead for these last twelve years. I'm supposed to be married the day after tomorrow."
"You can't get married, Blake! We're married! We're married to each other! You promised me, now and forever!" the tears started to run down her cheeks. "I still love you, Blake!"
"Li, our marriage was declared null and void after we all thought that you were dead. What did you expect me to do? Did you want me to spend the rest of my life alone?" he wiped her tears away and gently took her hand. "I'll be honest, I don't know what to do now. I still care about you a great deal, but you've been dead to me for the last twelve years. Lexa and I have taken a lot of time in getting to this point. I'm only able to marry her now because I've just gotten over loosing you, and now I have no clue of what to do. We are all three going to have to sit down and talk through this."
"Blake, I need to know, do you still love me?"
"Of course I do, Li." Jesse led her to the Helix Two. "But no matter how I feel about you there is still the fact that I am engaged to another woman who I love very much. I spent six years with her getting to the point where we could consider getting married." he shook his head slightly "Lets just go to Sanctuary and talk to Lexa about this. And before I forget, I don't go by my middle name at all any more. I'm not sure if Lexa even knows what my middle name is."
"Alright, Jesse." Madeline answered coolly. "But there are a few things that I should tell you about what has happened over the last twelve years."
"We can talk about this when we talk to Lexa. I cannot do anything unless we are all three aware of everything."
"You should know this before we talk to her. I don't want you to hear this for the first time while we are in front of your fiancé."
"Alright." Jesse punched in a few command on the Helix Two so that the autopilot was engaged. "What do you want to tell me?"
"When I left, and I will explain to you about that later, I was pregnant." she felt the tears stream down her face. "It gave me so much hope to know that I had a small part of you to carry me through. every time I stared to miss you too terribly, I looked in the mirror so I could see how my body was changing due to the child that was growing inside of me. Your child."
"Is that why you apparently faked your own death? Were you too worried that Adam was going to find out and try to take the baby from us?"
"I didn't know that I was pregnant until after I left. We conceived on our wedding night." Madeline wiped at her eyes. "We would have had a son to raise together if I had known. He was the most beautiful thing that I've ever seen in my life and for the split second that I saw him nothing else in the world mattered to me. I don't know how many times I've wondered how it could have been to be a mother, and I wish that I had been given the chance?"
"What happed to him?" Jesse took her hand and held it tightly.
"Bla-Jesse, I don't know how I can bring myself to say this. It still hurts me so very much. My superiors did not want me to have a baby. They tried countless times to get me to agree to an abortion or to put the baby up for adoption, but I couldn't do either of those things to our child. I think they decided that the only way to take care of the problem was to kill the baby. A week before I was due they gave me a shot, it was supposed to prevent me and the baby from catching some virus that was going around, but I know the truth. They killed the baby, and when I went into labor I delivered a still born baby. I saw him only for a split second and only because I begged the doctor to let me see him."
"Oh, Li, I'm sorry." he squeezed her hand. "I wish that I could have been there for you. I would have protected our baby."
"I know that you would have." Madeline smiled ever so slightly. "You always fixed my problems for me. Sometimes you fixed them before I even knew that I had them."
"I just could never fix my own problems." he let go of her hand and slammed a fist on the arm of his chair. "What am I going to do! I married you twelve years ago, promised that I'd stay with you until death; and now I'm just about to marry Lexa, to make that same promise to her."
"Are you still going to marry her now that I'm back? Now that we can finally have our life together back?"
"I love her, Li. I love her enough to chance making a life long commitment to her. I don't know what to do though because I still love you." he took a deep breath as he tried to think. "You know the only reason I came here was to find out where Adam is or if he is even still alive. I never expected to find out that my wife was still living, that a child I never knew we created was murdered by an organization that I probably know nothing about."
"We are going to get vengeance for our baby's death." Madeline promised. "And then we are going to fix the problems in our marriage and I will give you a child, one that we can raise together. I'm sure that Lexa will understand once you and I explain everything to her."
"Don't make plans yet, Li. I am still not sure how to react to all of this. There is a part of me that wants to tell you that I'll end things with Lexa, and that you and I will renew our vows and started our own family; but there is a part of me that is madly in love with a woman who I've spent six years getting to know, and that part of me wants to settle down and raise a family too, but with Lexa."
"You told me that you fell in love with me from the moment we met and that absolutely nothing could ever change how you felt about me."
"I know." Jesse sighed. "I remember."
Flashback
"I want you to meet Madeline Hart." Adam said as he put his hands on the shoulders of the petite redhead beside him. "She is one of the best information specialists that you will ever meet."
Shalimar stared at the woman for a moment, trying to get a feel for her. Finally she nodded, her decision about the woman made. "It is nice to meet you, Madeline. I hope that we will enjoy working together."
"It is nice to meet you too." Madeline smiled brightly. "I am sure that you and I will become very good friends."
Jesse continued to stare at the woman. He could not help but think that she was the most beautiful and the most perfect woman he had ever met. "It's nice to meet you, Madeline."
"Thank you." she gave him a slightly softer smile. "I understand that we will be working together a lot since you are the computer expert around here."
"We probably will. I hope you have a high tolerance for people. Shal says that I tend to be extremely annoying about my interest in computers and get on everyone's nerves by constantly talking about them."
"Trust me, you and I will work everything out. I am absolutely sure that we can."
End of Flashback
"Do you still believe that you and I can always make everything work out for the best?" Jesse asked as he got up and walked to the back of the plane to get two bottles of water.
"I don't know." Madeline admitted. "If we really could always make everything work out for the best I don't know why I had to fake my own death, or why our baby was murdered before he even had a chance to live. Little Blake would have never caused hem any problems. I would have found someone to help me take care of him. There were plenty of women working only as secretaries that could have easily done the job."
Jesse gave Madeline one of the bottles and walked back to the front of the plane where he sat in the pilots chair so he could land the Helix Two. "Then you know that somehow you might get hurt. I don't know what I'm going to do, but a decision will have to be made. There is just no way around it."
"I'm sure that you will make this work out." she opened the water and took a drink. "You always do."
Jesse nodded and then focused on landing the Helix Two. He set the plane down and cut the engines, all the time trying to figure out how he was going to handle the problem at hand. As he and Madeline stepped into the hangar Lexa came running to him, waving a plastic stick.
"Jess, you are never going to believe this!" she threw her arms around him. "I found out why I've been feeling sick for the last couple of weeks. I had my suspicions, but this just confirmed them and I'll let you run a scan to confirm it for sure. We're going to have a baby!"
"That's great, Lexa." he forced a smile. "That is really wonderful news."
"Hey, what's wrong?" she looked him in the eye. "I thought that you would have been even more excited then me about this. Do you not want to have a baby?"
"I do, Sweetheart, I do." he kissed her gently. "There is someone I think you should meet and then my less then enthusiastic reaction will be explained."
"Alright." Lexa answered, her happiness over the baby washed away.
"Lexa, this is Madeline." Jesse held his hand out to the red-head. "Madeline Hart-Kilmartin. She's the informant that I've been talking to, but she is also my wife."