Disclaimer: I don't own IPS or any of the characters.
Warning: Rated M for character death, adult themes, and angst. If those will upset you, don't read.
Author's Note: I knew that when I decided to post this story, some people wouldn't want to read it, but I'm really surprised that so many of you have. Thank you all, my wonderful readers! I'm so pleased to see so many of you giving it a chance.
2.
He'd known she was pregnant before she had. Almost overnight, her lovemaking had become more languid, suddenly lacking that fervent urgency of which she'd been possessed since they had decided to try.
He remembered that first night, after she'd asked her best friend over and, out of the blue, had pushed a coffee mug and a turkey baster across the counter while phrasing her request in the most ineloquent way possible. Yet, the meaning had come through; she wanted a baby, and there was no other man she would want one with. All the same, he wasn't about to have a child with the woman he'd loved for so long by way of a cooking utensil, and when he'd told her as much, she'd been utterly crestfallen. He'd taken her into his arms then, and he'd told her that she could have all of him, unconditionally, if that was something she could find acceptable, and apparently is was. They'd made love in her bed, and though she hadn't gotten pregnant that night, he'd fallen asleep with his hand pressed to her belly, wondering if they'd made a life.
It was another two months before he knew. By then, their lives had merged seamlessly, fluidly into one; as complicated as Mary was, as he himself could be, that had been surprisingly simple. The fact was, their lives had already been more integrated than either of them had realized. It was almost a mere formality, because not very much had really changed. The sex, certainly, was new between them, but the love wasn't, and the time spent together wasn't, and after years of heated situations in the field, it was even the case that each found the physical nature of the other familiar.
She'd looked at him with such wide eyes when he'd told her, whispering sleepily against her neck that he thought she was pregnant with his child. She had replied that there was no way he could possibly know, but he'd insisted that he knew anyway, and he'd kissed her, and the next day she'd taken a test and his suspicions were confirmed.
From there out, it seemed like things just kept getting better. He'd loved her for so long a time, and yet he felt that with every day that passed he only loved her more, until what he'd felt for her before seemed only a pale shadow of what had grown in his heart. He was right there with her while morning sickness came and went, and he was there, too, when she realized her clothes didn't fit any longer, and she had cried and said she felt like a whale. They were together in all things, partners always, from work to birthing classes to the bedroom; at a point it was decided that two houses were superfluous, and she had readily moved in with him, declaring that her own house had too many memories that she didn't really want to think about. When she had to leave the field, Stan had allowed him to spend more time in the office, taking the opportunity to train Charlie in the finer points of handling witnesses, and their boss had even gone so far as to let them both leave the office early on a semi-regular basis, when she found that even desk work exhausted her.
She grew increasingly ravenous for food as the pregnancy progressed, and for sex as well. If Marshall had thought Mary was insatiable in those areas before, he had come to realize that his expectations had to be redefined. When she woke in the night with insatiable cravings that had more than once sent him driving across town in the small hours for the strangest of foods, he was there, or at least, wherever she'd told him to go, and when she craved other things that he could do for her, well, he was there for that, too. The curious thing was that he didn't even consider the latter of his many duties to her to be somehow a reward for all the rest. To him, it was all rewarding, and he would have happily done anything for her.
He, too, couldn't keep his hands off her, and not only in a sexual context. The changes in her fascinated him, from her rounding belly to her enlarged breasts to the soft glow that graced her facial features. She had complained to him that he spent more time with his hands on her bump than she did, which he didn't think was true at all; he'd caught her with her hands resting over their unborn child more often than she would ever admit, an expression of happy curiosity on her face. Then there came a day when he was for seemingly the billionth time putting his hands on her belly and murmuring embarrassing things to their offspring that had her rolling her eyes and on the verge of severe irritation, and the baby had suddenly begun to kick, and they'd both felt it, and that surprising moment had taken Marshall to an entirely new place in his love for her and the child she carried.
For Marshall, for a time, everything was perfect.
And then, all in one night, it wasn't.