Authors Note:

So sorry for the delay in updating this one, I went straight from a levels to a 9-5 and the novelty has worn off fast. I'd planned to do a lot more writing in my gap year before Uni but here we are, so please enjoy reading and I hope to be adding a few more chapters over the next week.

As always, your reviews mean so much for me to read, if you could take a second to leave me your thoughts I'd be super grateful - you guys are sound.


There is a package outside her quarters, surely not for her to find until the morning, but she has been awake for so many hours without doing anything at all, that sleep continues to elude her. No amount of tea or hot chocolate can take away the energy that she can't get rid of, having spent the entire day holed up in her quarters, no appointments or bridge duty to save her from herself. Picard told her to take the day off, but what he really had meant to say was that he's terrified of her - a woman a bomb.

She is, at any given moment, feeling so much and changing so rapidly that she terrifies him, truly, for the simple fact that she could just keel over and die, or spontaneously begin to bleed on briefing room tables - that is what this is really about.

Her nose stopped bleeding a few minutes after Data returned to duty, and since then, her day has been nothing but wasted.

There is a package outside her quarters, but it is not from her Captain, and it is not from Data, or anybody else she might suspect for that fact, and had she not decided to go for a walk around the ship to try and quiet the life within her, then she might not have found it all.

It takes too long to correctly guess who has left her such a thing, and she is stood dumbly in the corridor in that same cream dress, cleaned now of its patches of red, her hands holding up a large parcel that has been wrapped with considerable care. The paper is a deep shade of blue, and lumpy where the object beneath curves and dips, the whole thing soft and light in her grasp.

She carries it back into her quarters and sets it down on the desk, searching out a tag that is flipped over onto its blank side. The printed message there begins to stare back at her once she has righted it.

On the advice of a colleague: hope this helps - Geordi

Fingers trace his words until they are almost swimming the tears in her eyes, and she has to swallow down the feeling of gratitude, that he has been thinking of her, when he did not have to.

The bindings are easily unloosed, and all of a sudden she is looking down on a lump of patterned fabric, folded slightly to conform to some kind of shape, but upon release it seems to expand in a cascade of filling beads that it is stuffed with.

There is a small slip of paper with instructions printed on it, and yet she still has no idea what this thing actually is, reaching for the slip and reading it carefully.

Expanding body pillow - lay flat and allow approximately 30 seconds for expansion to full size.

She drops the paper to the floor along with the wrappings and a thousand other things that have been discarded there, and tries to bundle the thing into her arms without unfolding it too much.

It is only slightly difficult to navigate this new chaos of her quarters, picking through the data pads and old clothes until she reaches the bedroom, the pillow held aloft in her arms.

All in all, the loosely filled fabric stretches out to 6 foot long when she manages to lay it flat on her bed, where the sheets are strewn about with no clear sense of order, and she stands back to watch as it expands rapidly.

Her hands come to rest atop her stomach as she watches, the irony not lost on her at the rate the pillow grows in comparison to herself - things which at first were unassuming.

And at the height of 30 seconds, she finds herself looking down on a tightly packed, 6 foot long, silver and lilac body pillow.

It is a terribly endearing thing indeed.

To touch it is very soft, and surprisingly malleable when she presses her balled up fist down into it, watching as it slowly expands back to shape. She's heard many good things about these kinds of pillows from some of the patients she's worked with, those husbands who needed something to soothe their pregnant wives before they were driven crazy, or the engineering ensigns with terrible back ache from constantly crawling through conduits.

The bed dips slightly when she sits herself down, pulling her dress up and over her head to discard along with everything else on the floor, too warm anyway to want to be covered by much more than the blankets surrounding her. A hiss escapes her as she lowers herself down beside the pillow, her body groaning the shifting weight, and she pulls it in closer to her, laying on her side with one leg resting atop it.

She pulls the top of it around her head to form a sort of loop, bending its shape until it conforms against the curve of her spine, her belly even now held up by it's surprising support.

For only one moment in time she wonders if maybe Will were still here would he have suggested this? But the thought escapes her much more quickly than it came, and so she nuzzles down into the curve behind her head, pulling her own throw over herself to cover where she is exposed.

And somehow, her back does not ache so badly, her belly is not so heavy on all the muscles that animate her, and, miraculously, the child is still.

Her eyes close like leaden weights, another midnight miracle, and she thinks this is something Geordi deserves much more than a thank you for.