The First Picture
Lance crossed his eyes and turned the photo around once again.
"I still can't make it out."
Fitz, sitting next to him, sighed loudly – he just didn't get why was it so hard to make sense of –, plucked the picture from Lance, turned it back, the shoved it back into Hunter's hand.
"Try this way," he said impatiently.
Lance's eyes went comically wide, and his lips formed a little O.
"I see…" He lifted his gaze from the picture and, with feigned innocence, he said, "Ward, it looks just like you!", making Fitz snort into his beer.
To his luck, Ward was in a too goofy-good mood to be bothered by him.
"Not it," he corrected, walking over to the guys and taking a seat opposite of them in the armchair, "but she." Then, after a second he added, "or he." He opened his beer, twisting the cap off. "And she – or he – doesn't look like me. He or she doesn't look like anybody yet."
"No, but look," Lance insisted, turning the picture towards Ward. "He or she has a big head, just like you!"
When a cushion flew towards him with deadly accuracy, Lance knew he went a little too far, but he just laughed it off.
"Sorry, mate," he said, still chuckling, and handed the cushion back. Ward, too happy to even act like he was annoyed, instead of taking it, leaned forward, and pulled the photo from Hunter. Then, not that he hadn't had it completely memorized by then, he gazed lovingly at the grainy, black-and-white picture.
"It's just so surreal," he said, unable to wipe the dopey grin off his face. True, much couldn't yet be seen on the photo, apart from the head and the torso and the tiny limb-buds, but in his hand there was the palpable evidence that inside of Skye's yet barely there bump there was a little life, a would-be person forming. A baby with a steady whoosh-whoosh of a heartbeat he had heard today, who was just three inches right now, but just kept growing and growing. He raised his head to look into his friend's eyes. "I'm going to be a dad."
Hunter nodded and, for the lack of better word, smiled proudly at Ward.
"That you are," he said, taking a sip from his beer. "But your kid still looks like an alien."
This time it was Fitz who hit him with a cushion.
A/N: One of my friends and his fiancée are expecting their first baby now, and she had her first ultrasound yesterday, and my friend sent over the picture almost right away, so I have a pic of a three inch baby in my FB inbox, and you expect me not to have (Skyeward) baby feels?
