Author's Note: I don't own Marvel or any of its characters.

xxxx

Two days before the winter solstice, Bruce told the doctor, "We have to talk in your office about why Dag is so big."

The doctor led him to her office and shut the door. "Talk."

"You promise you won't freak. And you can't be telling the medical community about this. You will compromise my growing family's safety and I'm sure you want to put Mrs. Banner's safety and the safety of our unborn child first."

"I won't do anything to put Sif and your unborn child at risk," said the doctor. "Just tell me."

"I have a medical condition and my DNA was changed due to this condition." That was forward and straight to the point.

"Banner," said the doctor. "I've heard the name before."

"It's a common enough name," said Bruce. "Let me talk before I lose my nerve. I was bigger when my wife and I conceived. Everyone in New York knows of the Avengers. Fuck, there is no gentle way to say this. The Hulk got my wife pregnant."

"Maybe, you should consider abortion."

"No, Sif and I want this child," explained Bruce. "If she's green like her daddy, so what? My good friend Hank McCoy is blue. I shouldn't have said anything. I just thought you should know that we didn't mess up the dates."

"You're the Hulk?"

"Not at the moment." Bruce tried not to give her a look like - if you keep irritating me, I will be. But the dirty look slipped. He had taken enough blood and tissue samples to know his genetic material was altered by the super-soldier serum and the gamma radiation and his external appearance might have mattered a lot or only a little. It wasn't like you could get a blood sample from an invulnerable creature. "It isn't like my cells are normal when I look like this."

"But she had sex with the Hulk?"

"Sif is a warrior goddess and is tougher than she looks." When Bruce got Sif pregnant, his body was struck somewhere between Hulk and Banner, but the Misgardian doctor looked confused enough already and she didn't need to know all that to understand why Dagmar was bigger than normal size for her gestational age. "When we met, Sif put her little hand into my big green one. She told me Misgardians didn't look like me and I told her I was a mutant."

"My first and only responsibly is to your wife and unborn child," said the doctor.

"Thank you," said Bruce.

"Sif told me you could pull trees up by their roots," said the doctor. "When I saw you, I nearly laughed."

"I can do a lot more than rip trees from the ground," said Bruce. "I saw the damage I did to Stark Tower by using it to slow my descent to keep Ironman from becoming broken pile of bones. The Hulk isn't mindless. He/I used physics to save my friend's life."

"Thank you for talking to me," said the doctor.

xxxx

Logan and some of the older children joined Sif and Bruce to welcome the longest night. They went out in a field to see the Venus and the Moon rise. In spite of the Professor's warnings, Logan and Bruce shared a six-pack. Piotr tried to grab a beer.

Logan put a hand over a beer can with Logan's claws hiding under the surface that was warning enough. "Bub, you have to wait till your twenty-first birthday."

"I'm nineteen," said Piotr.

"Then you have only two more years," said Logan.

Bobby and Rogue had an arm around each other as they watched the evening twilight. After giving Logan another dirty look, Piotr sat beside Kitty and put an arm around her. Douglass put an arm around Jubilee. Bruce had his beer in his lap with an arm around Sif. When Sif put a hand on his knee, he didn't remove it because kids were watching. Without a word, they watched day turn into night.

When the sky was full of stars, Logan said, "We should head back."

Theresa got off his lap. After Logan returned all the empty cans to the cardboard box to be properly disposed of, he nodded to Bruce. And they started the walk back to the school.

Rogue said, "We should do this, again, sometime."

Bobby took her gloved hand and held it with his naked hand. "Without the adults."

Bruce said, "Logan, we didn't hear that."

Logan smiled. "I heard nothing."

xxxx

As Bruce was parking his bike at the doctor's office, he felt something stab his leg. A tranquilizer dart. The doctor talked, Frank talked or someone in the doctor's office overheard and felt the need to do the right thing. Blame would come later. As he felt himself lose consciousness, he thought about Tony coming to rescue him.

xxxx

Author's Note: It's a short chapter, but I end on a cliff-hanger.