Chapter Two

Dimitri stared at the small stick for what felt like forever. Realistically, it was probably only minutes, but it may as well have been hours.

"Say something," I said finally.

Finally, he looked up and met my eyes. "Is this for real?"

"Did you just say, 'for real'?"

"Rose-"

"Yes," I choked out. "Sonya… saw my aura and… well, ta-da." My humor was coming through to mask my terror because that was there, too – strong and sickening in my stomach.

Dimitri reached out immediately and pulled me to him, a smile breaking out on his face. "I can't believe it…"

"You and me both."

He kissed my hair, tangling his fingers in it with one hand, his other, pressing me against him tightly as it rested on the small of my back. I buried my face into his chest, arms wrapped around his waist, closing my eyes tightly as more tears spilled out. When he pulled back, our expressions were like night and day. He was smiling – no, beaming, with joy. It was palpable, but I couldn't find it in myself to celebrate. He realized my struggle immediately and frowned, cupping my cheek.

"How can you be happy about this?" My voice was small, and his thumb brushed more tears off my cheek. It was a stupid question – of course he was happy about it. He was 27 – more than ready to start a family and had been tempted by Tasha's offer three years prior to kick-start that process. I remembered being with Tasha and Dimitri in the cabin over Christmas and her mentioning him talking to babies in Russian and how happy the thought had made him look. I remembered my mother telling me what a good opportunity it would have been for him to take her up on her offer and I believed firmly that if I hadn't of been in the picture, he would have. He loved kids and it had been a great offer. Luckily for him, though, I was in the picture and he didn't have to have offspring with the Queen Slayer. Small blessings.

Me? I didn't hate kids, no, but I never pined for them like he had. He had accepted his fate of being forever childless with me the moment we had become official, and he had told me that being with me was worth more than anything else that he could think of, but now, seeing his joy, I knew he had sacrificed a lot back then in being with me. At least until Declan caused us to question everything. It made my heart clench. I knew Declan's conception always piqued his curiosity, but he hadn't pushed the issue of children with me. Marriage was first on his to-do list, I imagined and that was proving difficult enough.

His face turned serious. "Why wouldn't I be happy?"

"I don't know," I admitted lamely. I was far from a teenager knocked up by someone who would abandon me, but I still felt terrified. There were a million thoughts running through my head. "The implications of this alone… Sydney and Adrian have been hiding Declan's parentage and then we go and…" Dimitri was watching me curiously, trying to gauge my rant, and I sighed. "How did this happen? I've taken my pill on-time every day, Dimitri."

"I don't know, Roza," he said gently, pulling me against his chest again. "I don't know how it happened, but… well, we will figure it out."

"That's easy to say when you won't be one the size of a whale!" I cried, pulling away from him to pace the small bathroom. "We can't hide this. I'm already sick. We're high-profile, not like Olive. I can't just… disappear. I can't leave Lissa unguarded, but I can't protect her like… this," I motioned to my body. Suddenly, my mother came to me, my thoughts jumping all over the place, and I gulped back the growing lump in my throat. She had been faced with this – an impossible decision. Abortion, being labelled a blood whore, or…. "I'm not letting the academy raise it."

Dimitri hesitated, but nodded. "Well one thing is decided already, see how easy that was?"

"You're too practical about this," I argued. "Can you lose the Zen life-lessons for one second and just freak out with me!?"

"You do a good enough job for the both of us," he said, a grin on his lips – one that sparked my anger even more. He saw it, and sighed. "And what would that solve?"

"I don't know, but it would make me feel better," I grumbled.

He chuckled and reached out to take my hand. "A baby, for me, is a blessing. Especially considering it shouldn't have been a possibility for us. A baby with you? That's… beyond words. I love you, we're engaged, and both in our careers. It's far from the worst-case scenario. Back at the academy? That would have been worst case," he said, his tone daring to have a teasing edge.

I rolled my eyes, but a shadow of a smile played on my lips at the thought of our activities in the cabin at St. Vlad's. A baby from that? It would have most definitely have been worst-case. This was laughable in comparison.

"They'll try to experiment on it," I said unhappily, revisiting all of Adrian and Sydney's worries for Declan in my head, unable to stay on one topic of life destruction when there were so many to choose from and validate right now.

"Maybe this is… a little tricky, politically, yeah, but do you think Lissa will let anything happen to you? To our baby?"

He was right, but another thought came to me. "People won't think it's yours," I said suddenly, coming up with another impossibility for this situation. "They'll say I…"

"Who cares?"

"Me! People talk about you… us, enough, I don't want them to think that I wasn't faithful to you."

Dimitri just shrugged, "I know the truth, you know the truth, and our friends know, so what anyone else thinks is irrelevant to me."

"Okay, Mr. Composed," I said strongly. "What do you propose we do?"

"We should go back to the others, ensure them you're okay, and then figure this out back in our room later."

"We have the party tonight. I can't just not show up."

"We have hours until the party," he pointed out, checking his watch. "We can talk, in private, before then."

I looked at him, really wishing I could revel in his composure and joy right now, but still terrified with so many unanswered questions. He sensed it and leaned down, brushing our lips together in a gentle kiss. It calmed my nerves a little, but not nearly enough. "I'm not going to forfeit being a guardian, either," I said suddenly, remembering my words about not giving our baby to the academy. "Or… well…"

"We'll figure it out," he promised, looking into my eyes. "We always do, right?"

"We do," I admitted. "I just… never thought I'd be having a baby at 20." Let alone engaged and potentially getting married soon, if the conversation earlier was any indication of our impending nuptials. Suddenly, they seemed more favourable with a baby on the way. Knocked up at 20 and rushing into a wedding? Only Rose Hathaway could let this happen considering how much I had pushed marriage and parenting away to this point. It was a far cry from our usual life-threatening problems we dealt with daily, but it was terrifying, nonetheless.

"The same age that your mother was when she had you," he pointed out.

"Are you enjoying pointing out, once more, how similar we are, even in our differences?"

He shrugged, "She may be a good resource for you in this, that's all."

"Fuck," I said suddenly, causing Dimitri to look at me, concerned. "We have to tell my mother… and… my…. Shit."

He nodded, his face sobering. Finally! He didn't look like he had just gotten a new puppy to play with. "We can speak with your parents after… well, after we talk about this more. We should speak with Lissa first and have some more… concrete things planned out before presenting this." Telling his family would be a joke in comparison to her parents. Dimitri's mother, grandmother, and sisters would probably be overjoyed – especially Olena. After all, Karolina was only a year old than Dimitri and had two kids already. Yeva probably had already seen this. I was surprised that Dimitri's cell phone wasn't already ringing all the way from Russia. Dimitri's family was nothing but loving. Mine? Love was there, of course, but it was dysfunctional and non-traditional at best.

Lissa was the least of my worries in all of this, surprisingly – minus her safety while I was off with a huge stomach, my feet in stirrups, and pushing a small human out of me. Oh, why did even more terrifying things slip into my thoughts as the seconds ticked by? His words should have been comforting – and they were, to a certain extent, but they didn't negate the difficulty of our future with a baby to be accounted for.

"They're both coming to the party tonight," I murmured, remembering Alberta's words. "I'll see how long they're planning to stay around… My dad is scary, are you sure you want to be there…?"

"Absolutely not," he chuckled. "I'd rather face your mother any day and that thought's scary enough, but I told you, we're in this together. We're a team."

"A team with new names."

"What?"

I shrugged, "We used to be the badass duo now we'll be… well, mom and dad." The thought didn't settle well in my stomach, but my words made him smile and it eased my own terror slightly.

He spoke a few words in Russian, and I assumed it was the translation for mom and dad but wasn't certain. I had lots of time to find out. "We're still badass and our baby… our baby will be extraordinary." His eyes were wistful, and I could picture him imagining a little bundle wrapped in a blanket with dark hair and eyes looking up at him. And then a strigoi slayer at the age of twelve. Oh, God, I was suddenly hit with a new thought-plaguing reality: Our child will forever be in danger of death. Fuck me. Okay, maybe poor word choice considering that's exactly what got me into this position.

"Hopefully it has your level-headedness," I admitted, trying to shed some light on the situation.

Dimitri chuckled, "And your wit and beauty."

"Don't forget my hair," I said teasingly.

"Of course your hair. How could I forget?" His fingers ran through it idly again, playing with the ends. It was down today – just the way he liked it.

I sighed. "So… we're having a baby."

He smiled, "We are having a baby." I felt sick again and closed my eyes, taking a deep breath. "We're in this together, Roza. You and me. I'll support whatever you decide."

"Me and you," I pointed out. "Our decisions."

He chuckled, "You've already made a few."

"Well, yeah, I'm not going to… abort our baby, but I'm not going to give up protecting Lissa, and I'm also not giving it to St. Vlad's so it can hate us like I hated my mom. I figured you'd agree with all three of those decisions."

Dimitri sighed, "I do agree. Like I said, it's going to be… a challenge, but we will figure it out. The best friend of the Queen can quite obviously get some leniency, right? Plus, the fact that we are both dhampirs means we're here together. Unlike Moroi and Dhampirs who… well, traditionally live different lives, we don't, which means we can do this together and there are plenty of resources here, at court, so that our baby won't have to be shipped off and we can both still work. I know there will be speculation, but as for rumors, we're not exactly new to them. Medical questions about the baby, assuming they believe that it's ours will be there but maybe we can see a human doctor? We can go together and make sure that everything is okay, then talk to Lissa about a reduction in your duties. In the meantime, I'll work with Christian and you can take a minor role in Lissa's guard. When you start showing, maybe we will have to leave court until the baby's born, but until we speak with Lissa, it's just speculation. She will protect you, Rose, and the baby, no matter the… implications of this. Maybe us bringing it forth now will allow others, in the future, to be able to do the same and people, like Declan, won't have to hide. With the strigoi vaccine impending, it's likely we won't be the last two dhampirs in this position in the future."

Everything he said made sense, but it still unnerved me. If dhampirs could reproduce together, it strengthened our numbers significantly – especially if the moroi were on board to fight with magic beside us and the vaccine prevented anymore of us from turning strigoi. Realistically, the threat in, say, twenty years, may be minimal and the large gangs of strigoi banding together for attacks will be horrible campfire legends by then. Maybe our baby would never see front-line action. The thought was soothing to me, until I realized what it meant – I already wanted to protect something I knew nothing about. A child: our child. It also occurred to me while my mind was thinking the worst and thinking up new impossible scenarios, he had been trying to fix them, of course. "Okay, so bypass my career, my age, speculation that I'm whoring myself around again, and the baby's genetic make-up, how in the world am I going to care for a baby?"

Dimitri chuckled despite my crass language. "Intuition."

"What?"

"Mother's intuition."

"Not sure all mother's have that, comrade," I said easily. "Yours did, but mine certainly didn't."

Wanting to protect our baby meant nothing in comparison to feeding a child, changing diapers, and providing enough love. My attention now with Dimitri and my Guardian duties was always split – how could it be further divided with a baby?

"You've made amends with her, and now stand in her shoes, in admittedly, a much better situation, and you still think she was a bad mother?"

Another Zen lesson. Ugh.

"No… it's not that I think she was a bad mother," I sighed. "I just wish she had been a better mother – the mother she is now, for the first seventeen years of my life. It wouldn't have killed her to check-in every now and then."

"Do you think that her decision was easy? That maybe, checking in on you hurt her because it reminded her of something that had been difficult for her? Something that was always difficult for her – giving you up?"

"Do you know something I don't, because I think she was just busy trying to build up her reputation. A simple e-mail couldn't have been that upsetting." Though, as I pondered his words, I remembered my mother in my dorm room before Mason died – looking around, intrigued in finding out who her daughter really was despite her unruly reputation. The wall she had always put up around me had been to protect herself, I realized – to avoid regretting her decision and feeling bad when faced with me. To try to convince herself that she had done the right thing.

"You have the opportunity to not repeat history," he said levelly. "And I think you'll be a great mom."

Mom. The word made a chill go up my spine. I was too young for this – too inexperienced with children and what a positive mother/child relationship looked like in my career path. Mother's either left guardianship to look after their children or dropped them off at the academy to raise – Mason's mom had done both. When he was old enough, she had enrolled him in St. Vlad's, but also had taken motherhood in stride and gave up her own destiny at being a guardian. I wouldn't do that, but I wasn't sure what other accommodations that Dimitri spoke of were at court so that I could, so to speak, have my cake and eat it too – if you wanted to compare motherhood and guardian duties to cake.

"Okay," Dimitri said, realizing his words now were now falling on deaf ears. "If you need to rationalize this right now, I can tell the other's you're not feeling well and we can go talk, but Rose? We're not going to figure this out in a day. This… it's a life changing thing. We just must take it day by day. Conversation by conversation. We can talk about this all day; I can give you best case scenarios and amuse your worst-case ones, but you won't get the answers you're looking for in this bathroom. You need to take time, digest this information, and then we need to have some difficult conversations and once we do that, and have more information to go on, then we can focus on figuring all of this out."

I knew he was right, and I sighed, leaning into his frame again as he hugged me tightly. "Let's go back with the others. We can talk to Lissa tomorrow, after the party."

When I pulled back, he leaned down to kiss me and I returned the passion behind his lips easily. I reached up to wrap my arms around his neck and he surprised me when he picked me up, sitting me on the counter behind me so our heights were a little more leveled. His arms wrapped tightly around my waist, my legs parted as he stood in between them, our bodies tight and close. I felt a soft moan build in the back of my throat and as his hands slid up my sides, resting on my ribs, it released, muffled by his lips and the sound sobered him and allowed him to pull back, resting his forehead on mine.

"Я люблю тебя," he whispered.

I knew what this meant – I love you, though he still hadn't taught me to curse in Russian. Little victories. "I love you, too," I replied easily. "And our baby." The words felt foreign, but I knew it was true; anything he and I created together was too pure and too beautiful not to love, even this - even though I was scared.

Dimitri's hands moved down from my rib cage and toward my belly. It looked the exact same. Minus the intense nausea from the past two days, there was no other indication of anything different, but as his fingers fanned out over my flat stomach, it caused my heart to flutter – the look on his face was full of admiration, adoration, and full of love. It was something that, when he had been restored, I feared I would never see again, and I felt more tears well in my eyes – stupid pregnancy hormones.

"See? There's still so much beauty in the world."

He crashed his lips back to mine again.