Disclaimer: I don't own Dark Angel so don't sue me. Thanks. :-)

A/N: Thanks for the reviews, wizziewoo123, BlueEyedPisces, and Jeanetteg! They are greatly appreciated, and thank you everyone who has been following along and reading. :)

Ex Multus Familia: Part 2

Chapter 21

Sidda looked down at her hands, unwilling to look up at Alec. He was sitting on the edge of the exam table, one hand on her leg and while the other rubbed at his face. At least when Sibil had been in here, they could talk to her. The only sound in the room right now was the quiet beeping of the fetal heart monitor that was strapped across Sidda's stomach, monitoring Bean's heartbeat, which was perfectly normal. Sibil had wanted to hook Sidda up to a monitor as well, but Sidda had convinced her it was unnecessary.

"Are you okay?" she asked, glancing over at Alec. He had been wounded in the skirmish over the gate, but they had all been superficial wounds, much like hers had been, except in greater number.

He grimaced a little. "Yeah, but Sibil could have been a little nicer patching me up." He snorted and looked over at Sidda. "At least you were still unconscious while she was working with you."

"Because being unconscious is so much fun," Sidda said, rolling her eyes. Alec turned to look out the window and the uncomfortable silence descended again. "I'm sorry," she finally said. She put her hands behind her head and stared up at the bright fluorescent lights of the exam room. "I really am, Alec, I was just…losing it back at Headquarters."

"I know," Alec said. He looked down at her, his grip on her leg tightening. "But I started losing it when you showed up at the gate."

"Sorry," Sidda offered again, her cheeks growing red. She had meant to stay completely out of the way, only taking a shot if they needed her to, but when those people had stormed to the gate, she had been unable to stop herself. She could just imagine Alec… She closed her eyes, willing those images away. "But I'm just so freakin' tired of not being able to do anything…"

"No one expects you to do anything right now, Sidda, you're pregnant," Alec said, echoing the quite valid excuse everyone used.

"So they tell me," she huffed. Lifting her right hand, she walked her index and middle fingers across her growing stomach. "Alec, I don't want to be a bother, but I'm going crazy here." She leaned her head back against the pillow. "I mean, I'm so used to go, go, go, it's hard to just sit back and watch." How could explain this to him when he wasn't going through it?

Alec sighed and rubbed his hand over her leg. "I know it's hard on you, but I can't stand the idea of you on the front lines right now, understand?"

"Yeah, I know, but that doesn't mean you have to get me regulated to pencil-pushing," she said, frowning up at him.

He frowned right back. "I'm not going to ask them to stick you on a mission, either."

"That's not what I'm asking for, Alec," she replied, narrowing her eyes at him, "You're right, I'm pregnant, but that doesn't make me incapable of doing something useful."

"Pencil-pushing is useful," he replied stubbornly, "Someone has to fill out paperwork."

"But it doesn't have to be me!" Sidda declared, pushing herself up onto her elbows so she could glare at him properly. Glaring while lying down was never as effective. "And it's not like I'm asking to go on patrols either."

"But you would, wouldn't you?" he snapped right back. He stood up from the bed and shoved his fingers through his hair. "Just to make a point, right? Just because you think you can." He turned back toward her, his arms crossed over his chest and locked there. "Sidda, just because I don't faint when I'm worried about you doesn't mean I'm not worried."

"Oh, I can't, you, OOO!" Sidda exclaimed, at a loss for a comeback right then she was so irritated. She instead sat up and grabbed the pillow from the head of the exam table and chucked it at him; useless since he caught it easily. "You're so infuriating! It's not like I want to faint, you jerk, I really can't help it!"

Alec made a face. "I know, because you do it at the worst moments." A second later, his face fell, as if he regretted that that had just came out of his mouth. "Damn it…"

Sidda jerked her head to the side as tears sprang to her eyes. Ow, that one hit home. "Sorry I'm such a pain," she said, keeping her voice even through her gritted teeth, "Next time, I'll try harder not to faint, since I can obviously control it."

"Sidda, I'm sorry, I didn't…" Alec covered his face with one hand and took a deep breath before he looked at her again. "Every time you faint is the worst moment for me."

"Nice recovery," she spat. She laid back down and rolled over onto her side, putting her back to him. Her shoulder ached as she put weight on it, but she ignored it. She heard his footsteps on the tile as he walked over and put his hand on her back.

"Sorry," he said, "I just get…this whole situation has me on edge, and then you go and pull a stunt like you did today." He trailed his fingers along her spine then put his hand flat against her back. "I don't you really get how much I don't want anything to happen to you or Bean."

"I don't want anything to happen to Bean either," Sidda mumbled, "But I don't want to be driven into insanity by boredom either." The corner of her mouth twitched into a wry smile. "I don't think he'd like having a psychotic mother."

"Especially when his dad is already a happy-go-lucky psychopath," Alec said. When Sidda glanced at him over her shoulder, he smirked at her. "That's how Logan described me once."

"I don't think it really fits," she said, turning back toward him. "But seriously, you're going to have to let me do more than read bad newspaper articles and sign off on useless stuff."

Alec's face hardened for a moment. "Because doing more than that goes so well?"

"Come on, I'm just asking for a little more slack," she said. She folded her arms over her chest, right over the baby ball. "I'm too used to being busy to be stuffed into a corner somewhere and told to knit baby booties."

"More like used to being in life or death situations," Alec grumbled. He stroked her arm, the back of his fingers brushing against her skin. "Besides, poor kid if it has to wear baby booties that you knitted." He grinned at her, trying to make her smile.

She pointedly looked away from him. "Poor kid, if he has to deal with his father's bad taste in humor."

"You love my humor," Alec insisted. He leaned forward and stole a kiss from her, forcing her reluctant lips to give into him. Just as Sidda started melting, Bean decided it was time to practice martial arts on her side, right underneath the fetal heart monitor.

"Oh…" She pulled away from Alec, wincing a little.

He raised an eyebrow. "What? Now you hate both my sense of humor and my kisses?"

"No, no, it's Bean," Sidda mumbled. As his eyes started to widen with panic, Sidda reached out and grabbed his hand, pulling him back even as he started to go for the door. "Not like that, Alec. He's just kicking the daylights out of the monitor."

"Oh," Alec said, giving a halting laugh of relief, "I thought…"

"I know what you thought, worry-wart," she said, shaking her head at him and grinning. The grin was wiped away as Bean continued his sparring match. "Geez, I think he's taken a serious dislike towards that thing."

It was Alec's turn to grin. "Just like his mom," he said. He reached down and turned the monitor off before unstrapping it and putting it with the rest of the machine. "Maybe he'll calm down." He ran his hand through Sidda's hair and kissed her forehead gently.

"Hopefully so." Sidda slid Alec's hand over to the place where Bean was still kicking. "Here, let him kick you instead."

A slow grin lit his face and then dimmed for a moment. "Does it hurt?"

"Not as bad as getting shot," she said, smirking up at him.

He snorted. "Funny, Sidda."

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Robin reached over and grabbed a pencil off of the tray near her hand. With quick strokes, she tried to catch Joshua's face, but he kept moving, never staying in one place for long. Smiling, Robin brushed her long bangs back from her face and leaned over her sketch again.

"Josh, stay still? For a minute?" she asked, grinning over at the transhuman. She was trying to sketch portraits of the T.C. residents and had found that starting with the ones in the Cultural Center was best. Most of them stayed still or in similar positions for longs periods of time, so they were easier than trying to catch someone at HQ or the gym.

"Sorry, sorry, Robin," Joshua said. He smiled at her apologetically as he turned away from his painting. "I'm trying."

"I know, and I wouldn't want to interrupt your creative flow."

They were in Joshua's main studio, the big one with lots of space for people to work in. Joshua currently wasn't teaching a class, but there were still people in here. Dalton was in one corner, fighting with an easel and Jaz at the same time. The snarky X6 girl was sitting behind the lanky blond teenager, making suggestions about his painting, and it looked like he didn't really appreciate all of those suggestions. Every now and then, Robin would hear him snap at her and then her snap right back. There were a few other people in the room, but they were mostly keeping to themselves and their paintings.

It had been two months after the humans had attacked the front gates, and most of the city had been quiet since then. No Familiar attacks and no hate group attacks and no one had died. As far as Everett could tell, Telic was biding its time, waiting for the best possible moment to strike, and everyone seemed to think it'd be a few months from now, giving everyone time to prepare. Some people had even headed out to the farm, mostly to start planting crops or whatever they were planning.

Robin sat back in her chair, resting her weight on her legs. She was personally greatly enjoying the momentary peace that Terminal City was experiencing. Peace meant that Seth got to stay home with her and Taylor and none of her friends were in immediate danger. Of course, so much peace had its consequences.

There had been some talk for the past week or so about starting up missions for the government again, and Seth's name had been thrown out a lot. Of course, Robin always threw glares at whoever suggested him. It was unlikely that anyone would get sent with the Familiar-threat still at large, but that didn't mean she had to listen to people talk about how Seth would be a great mission leader.

She hated the idea of him going off again to some dangerous place, and if he went, she was going to. Taylor would just need someone to watch her, and if it was anytime soon, Sidda and Alec could do it since Sidda wouldn't be going anywhere soon.

The eight-month pregnant woman was in Joshua's smaller studio, looking for something to do amid all of his paints and projects. The smaller studio was mainly for Joshua, so anything that he thought was interesting got hauled back there for him to play with later. Sidda had disappeared in there thirty minutes ago, so that meant she had either found something to do or she had fallen asleep on the couch. Either options were viable.

Robin turned her attention back to her sketch. Joshua was almost finished, at least in this sketchy, quick form. If she could ever get him to stay still for longer than, who knows, two minutes, she would be able to draw a better picture. As if was, she was going to be lucky if she could get him not to look so blobby and malformed.

"Robin having a good time?" Joshua asked, glancing over his shoulder.

Robin grinned. "Yeah. I just want to get these done so they can go out in the hall." She was planning to put the sketches up in the halls of Cultural Center, near the offices or rooms where these people usually were. For the people who weren't usually at the Cultural Center, she would give the sketches to their mates or whatever.

"The halls are nicer now, good murals," Joshua said, nodding his head.

Robin looked around the room. It was covered in a mural of the Seattle skyline, as it would have looked before the Pulse. Joshua had looked at books for weeks before even starting this project, and it had really paid off. She grinned at him. "I think this room is the best though," she said, "It's really awesome, Joshua."

Joshua grinned proudly. "Try very hard to make studio look good. Think it's good now."

"It's great, everyone loves it," Robin said. She added a couple more strokes to her sketch as Joshua turned back to his painting.

"Supposed to be for everyone," he said, "No use if they don't like it." He flung paint at the canvas, and then stuck his fingers into another can of paint. He drug his fingernails across the painting, scratching through multiple layers of paint.

Robin flipped her sketchbook over, giving up on catching Joshua right now. Maybe she would tell him she would fix him a steak dinner if he would just sit still long enough for her to get a proper sketch.

She started going through the sketches she had already done, watching them get better as she flipped from beginning to end. Thanks to spending so much time in the Cultural Center and giving lessons now, her own skills had improved drastically. A lot of them at the front were of Seth or Taylor, since they were the two people she could get to stay still the longest and she saw them the most. Quite a few were of Taylor sleeping and then Seth in profile. Her husband had such a nice profile, very handsome, something she could look at for hours…

Grinning, she flipped the page. Ah, Alec, asleep on the couch. And then one of Sidda, curled up in a chair reading. And Mona standing near the window; she might as well have been a statue, since that's when she was keeping a look-out for Everett. More transgenics appeared in her sketchbook, most of them focused on artwork of some type, and then there were some sketches of inanimate objects from her house.

Closing the sketchbook, Robin rested her arms on the table and looked over at her cell phone. Seth was in a meeting with Max and some of the others; they had gotten information from the team over in Washington D.C., so they had been going over that all day. Robin had volunteered to help, but she hadn't put up a fuss when Seth said she didn't have to. Decoding all those notes would have been a pain, and she wasn't in the mood to sit at a desk and go over information like that.

"You done with your sketch?" Joshua asked, glancing at her.

Robin shrugged. "For now. I'll finish it later." When Joshua's shoulder dropped, Robin smirked. "Unless you want me to do it now?"

"Whatever Robin likes," Joshua said, but his expression was pleading.

"Sure, Joshua, but try not to flail around too much," she said, opening her sketchbook again.

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"So, let me get this straight," Max said, frowning at the papers in front of her, "There are Familiars in Washington, but they're not doing anything right now?"

Beside her, Logan shrugged. "That's what the reports say."

"But why?" she asked, leaning back in her chair, "You'd think they'd at least be trying to get bills passed against us or something."

Across from her at the table, Seth leaned forward and looked at one of the notepads lying in front of him. All of the information they had received from their spies in Washington had come in this coded, yellow notepad form through special mail carriers. "Either that or working for us to make them look sympathetic towards us." He looked over at Max. "That'd be a good cover-up for hating us."

"Don't see why we don't just take care of 'em before they take care of us," Mole said. The transhuman was sitting at the end of the conference table, scowling down at one of the notepads.

"Is that always your answer?" Max asked, rolling her eyes at him, "Kill them before they kill us?"

The big transhuman just looked at her and talked around the chewed-up cigar in his mouth. "Yeah."

Making a face, Max glanced over at Logan. "I just wish I knew what they were up to."

Alec, who was sitting back with his feet on the table, tossed the notepad he was holding back toward Seth. "Maybe it's all just a cover-up for something bigger," he said, letting out a low, amused whistle, "Might as well throw in a conspiracy theory."

"Alec, be serious," Max said, looking like she would really like to throw one of the notebooks at his head.

"Familiar takeover without transgenic intervention would play into their hands," Seth said, nodding his head slowly, "And by not attacking us for so long, it's likely that they're waiting."

"Calm before the storm?" Logan asked, glancing over at Seth.

"It's possible," Seth replied, "By just sitting back and doing nothing, they're not arousing our suspicion."

"But the Familiars who attacked us before—" Max started but Alec cut her off.

"That was White and his whackos, right?" he said, "So maybe White's not following the plan anymore."

"I wouldn't put it past him," Logan said. The human sat back in his chair and ran a pencil along the edge of a plank page. "He's loyal to the cause, but it's the overall cause, I think, not whatever his superiors tell him."

"So, Pinhead's running wild while the rest of the little shits are trying to find some other way to off us?" Mole asked, "Huh. This gets better and better. People can't even run a proper cult anymore."

"That, or White's playing the distraction bit," Logan said. He stood up and paced along the table, his arms folded with one hand resting on his chin. He turned back towards the others and then pointed at the notebooks. "White's job may be to confuse us, throw us off the actual trail."

"But what the hell is the actual trail?" Alec asked. He pulled his feet off the table and set them on the ground. "For all we know, they could be coming up with an anti-transgenic virus to go along with the death-to-humanity thing."

"Or just a big attack," Seth said, "They might know more about us than we think we do."

"See, this is why we should just go in and shoot 'em…" Mole said, shoving an index finger in Max's direction.

Max ignored him. She sat back and glanced out the window, her fingers playing along the arms of the chair she was sitting in. It made sense, somehow, that the Familiars weren't doing anything so as to not attract attention from anyone. That way, if something did happen to the transgenics, the humans wouldn't start looking anywhere. Not that they would care, but there were a few transgenic-sympathetic ones, and those might start uncovering secrets about the Familiars. No, it was better to wait, to not do anything until that one moment where they could be certain that no one would trace it back to them.

"Or we could all be shooting in the dark," Logan said, breaking the silence as they all thought to themselves.

All four transgenics stared at him in varying states of confusion until he realized that the saying meant nothing to them. All of them could see in the dark and could shoot someone just as well whether it was light or dark. Living with transgenics never was easy…

"What I mean," Logan said, giving a heavy sigh, "Is that maybe we're getting nowhere and all we're doing is making suggestions that may or may not be true." He looked over at Max. "I think we need more information before jump to conclusions."

Max nodded. "Yeah, I think you're right. We'll just get them to dig deeper, maybe they'll find something."

"I wouldn't mind knowing what they were up to," Seth said, thumbing through one of the notebooks, "I don't like how they haven't made a move yet."

"I would say that you could go do some recon, but I think Robin would flay me," Max said, smiling at the other X5, "But if we don't hear anything soon, I may reconsider that."

After a little while longer, the meeting ended and Mole left, saying that he had to go do a weapons inventory or something, leaving the X5s and Logan in the conference room. Max sighed and sat down on the table. "Sometimes I just wish we had Familiar-seeking missiles that we could launch from here…"

"I think Dix is working on that," Alec joked. He grinned and pushed back from the table. "But, you know, if we had that, who would we fight?"

"Besides the rest of the world, you mean?" she groaned. Shaking her head, she looked over at Logan, taking some strength from him. "I'd be nice to have at least one problem gone."

Seth smiled at her, trying to be encouraging. "We're going to handle it, Max. Just not with missiles."

"Syl would prefer the missile approach too," Max said, but she didn't seem as depressed. She tossed a glance at Logan. "Do you need me to go pick up anything for dinner tonight?"

"What she means," Alec said, standing up and grabbing his jacket, "Is do you need her to steal anything?" He grinned when Max gave him one of his death glares.

"Out, Alec," she said, jerking her thumb towards the door.

Alec held up his hands, feigning innocence. "I was going already." He looked over at Seth, who was also getting up from the table. "You heading over to the Cultural Center too?"

"Yeah, that's where Robin is," Seth said, "She's doing a sketching project."

"Really?" Alec said. He raised an appreciative eyebrow. "Maybe we could get her to sketch Ordinaries and then sell the sketches…"

"Or we can just enjoy them like she wants us to," Seth said, smirking at his best friend.

Alec grinned right back. "She'll enjoy what we can get with the money."

Seth rolled his eyes and looked back at Max and Logan. "We'll see—"

Seth was cut off by what sounded like a huge roll of thunder, and the HQ shaking beneath their feet. Seth grabbed the table while Max jumped off the table, her eyes wide. As the shaking passed, they all stared at each other for a moment.

"Was that an earthquake?" Logan asked, thoroughly confused now.

Alec and Seth shared at look. They both knew that wasn't an earthquake. At the same moment, Max's cell phone went off, its shrill cry loud in the quiet room. She snatched it up from the table, hoping the news wasn't too bad. "Hello? What?" The color drained from her face, leaving a strange paleness under her tan skin. Her hand darted out and grabbed the edge of the desk, as if she needed to steady herself. "No, that can't be right, there's no way…I'll be right there." She hung up the phone and turned toward the others, her eyes round and panicked.

"What?" Logan asked, stepping towards her. He touched her arm. "Max?"

"They bombed the Cultural Center."