A/N: So, as the structure is much looser here (which is to say I don't need to have so much of a basic plan before going in and I don't have everything slated too far ahead of time), if there are any particular little moments you'd like to see happen within the story here, just let me know!

Chapter 3
Years to Remember

Hours later, Lucas was right where he'd told Maya he would be, waiting for her outside her last class of the day. She walked out of the room, chatting away with Franny and Kayla, and as they waved her off – with a wave over to him when they saw him – he spotted the rolled paper in Maya's hand, one of his notes. As she started over to him, he could see the multicolored ribbons dangling from the roll, which held all five papers together.

"You really should have written something like 'Hey, Prego, don't read this in front of people, I'm about to go all romantic on you' on the outside, yeah?" she asked, smiling. There was a tremor of emotion still in her voice, and he nodded apologetically before she stretched up to kiss him.

"So… you cried?" he guessed.

"Five times," she held up a hand, fingers splayed out for emphasis. "Five. They probably think I'm unhinged or…"

"Pregnant?" he suggested.

"Now where would they get a thought like that?" she wondered, and he mirrored her expression. "This was really… It was worth making a weepy fool of myself," she smiled. "Thank you," she pressed the roll close to herself with a tip of the head.

"Every word," he smiled back, tapping a finger to that roll.

They drove back home, just the two of them, the better to get themselves ready for their Date. He disappeared off to the basement to shower and get dressed, leaving her their room and enabling a moment for them to meet up again, in all their anniversary glory.

Maya did not feel particularly glorious as she stood in front of her mirror and looked at herself before she got started. She'd been going around all day, doing her best to just sit through her classes, be the student she needed to be, and not just think about what was going on in her body. That was easier said than done when the memory of her first face-off with morning sickness was still so alive in her. What if it happened again? Fine, she knew it would, for a while, but that didn't make the prospect of a repeater on the first day any better… this day of all days. This was to be the swan song of their normal days for a good long while…

"Alright, green dress…" she pulled it from the closet. "You work your magic, make him pull that face like he just got smacked upside the head. Do that, and you became a… sartorial legend."

She put on the dress, picked out the right shoes to match, then went about doing her hair. It wasn't long, but it wasn't as short as it had been when she'd had it cut. She pulled the sides together, pinned them at the back. She stood at the mirror again, inspecting the results so far. It didn't seem complete, it needed… color…

She looked to her dresser, the tight roll of pages together, the five ribbons poking out the middle, red, yellow, green, blue, purple… Quickly, she bound them together, fixed them to the back of her head until they dangled with the sides she'd pinned back. She could just see them as she turned her head this way and that. It was just what she'd needed, like she carried those years with her with every flick of her hair. Everything after that fell into place, and then she was all ready to go.

Downstairs, after he'd stepped out of the shower, Lucas started through pulling himself together, which didn't really take all that much. Soon, he was all dressed up and ready to go. He finished up fixing his hair and as he stood there, looking at his reflection, his hand settled in his pocket, around his pocket watch, the one she'd bought him, knowing how much he'd always loved holding his grandfather's pocket watch. Over the years, the only times he hadn't carried it with him, clipped to his belt, had been when Maya had the watch in her possession. He would let her borrow it whenever the situation demanded it, when she needed support and he couldn't be with her to provide it.

He looked at himself, and what did he see? He saw… He saw a twenty-one-year-old kid, working hard for a future that came a lot faster than any of them expected. Was he afraid? A little, sure… okay, more than a little… But he looked at himself and that portion of fear felt natural… expected, normal. He'd be more concerned if he wasn't afraid about becoming someone's father, becoming responsible for a human life like that. He didn't think he'd ever stop being afraid another day in his life.

He'd gone up to the living room, turning on the television as he waited, clicking through the channels to keep his mind from scattering. When his phone gave a buzz, he picked it up to find a message from Maya. Ready. Are you? Three words, and a string of what had to be every single green emoji available to her.

"I'm sitting down!" he called up the stairs. "Smelling salts at the ready!"

"I stood up there for like three minutes convincing myself I could still wear heels. I don't want to start overthinking everything all of a sudden, like 'hey, what if you trip on those heels that make you just tall enough and break the kid,' it's only been a day, just tell me I'm being ridiculous, okay?"

He had no words. He'd watched her come down the stairs and everything, listened to her as she spoke… mostly listened… and now that she'd reached the bottom, he sort of knew she'd asked him something, or told him something, but his brain just spun in circles like a frozen screen. She tended to have that effect on him, but today he didn't know if it was the dress, or the milestone, or the baby, but suddenly his joke about the smelling salts didn't feel too far from the truth.

"Do… you need me to give you a minute?" she asked, turning slowly on the spot, he suspected, not so much to give him a good long look at her, much more to ensure she wouldn't get dizzy and get sick all over again.

"I'm going to need more than that," he replied. She smiled.

"Take your time, I'm not going anywhere."

"Oh, yes, you are," he finally got up from the couch and moved to her. He took one of her hands in his, pulled her close with the other. "I've said it so many times, but every time it's been true, and tonight… You're so beautiful…"

"We haven't even made it out the door and you've got me going in for cry number six," she breathed. "We're not making a habit of this, yeah?"

"Can't make any promises."

The somewhere Maya was going, and Lucas, too, of course, was the Nook. It would have been Ma Maggie's in a heartbeat if it hadn't been so far away, but this was by no means a consolation location. They were very much overdressed for the place serving breakfast all day long, though neither of them seemed to care. And with the additional table setting Lucas had brought in a few days before, well… in their own corner of the Nook, they really fit in just fine.

"The usual for you guys?" asked Tasha, who waited on them more often than not. By the smile on her face, Maya guessed she'd been the one Lucas had recruited into setting their table up today.

"Uh…" she hesitated, looking to the menu in front of her. "Special occasion, I think I'll take a look through this time," Maya told her, and the woman smiled.

"Same here," Lucas nodded.

"Great, let me know when you're ready to order," Tasha told them, turning to Maya as she walked off and giving her a wink.

"Okay, that's only sort of the truth," Maya told Lucas once they were alone again. "I just… I want tonight to be good, and what if I eat something that doesn't… agree with me," she gestured with a frown.

"Kind of what I figured," he nodded. She sighed, bowing her head. "Hey, it's fine," he tried to sound encouraging. "It's like… your first day at a new job, and you don't know how everything works yet…"

"Except the… equipment… is my own body, and here I thought I'd done a pretty good job of operating it for twenty years, and now…" she trailed off, trying to find a good analogy.

"You got an upgrade?" he suggested.

"Yeah, that," she pointed back at him. "Right," she opened her menu. "It'll be fine, I can find something. Now, you, don't think you have to take any less than what you want for my sake, okay?"

"Understood," he promised.

After several minutes had gone by, he had decided almost at once and she had just scanned through one page and the next, all through the menu, then back again once she'd gotten to the end… again, and again, and again… She must have been wearing her conflict all over her face, as Tasha came back toward them unsummoned.

"What's the matter, hon, not hungry?"

"Starving, I just… Let's say I don't trust my stomach right now, and it's making it hard for me to make a decision." If she didn't know that he'd tell her he would wait, she would have told Lucas to go ahead and order. This was their anniversary, their milestone. They were going to eat at the same time.

"Tell you what," Tasha reached over and closed the menu for her. "I've got you covered, alright? Trust me."

"I… okay… thanks," Maya smiled at her. Lucas told the waitress what he wanted, and she went off back to the kitchen. "She taught me some tricks one day when I was here on my own, you know, waitress to waitress," she grinned.

"Yeah?" Lucas chuckled.

"She's been working here twenty-seven years, since they opened," Maya nodded, then, after a pause, "She knows."

"What?" he asked.

"About the baby," she whispered. "I didn't say anything, she just knows, I'm telling you."

Whether or not that was the case, when Tasha returned with their plates, Maya willed herself to put her concerns at the back of her mind and eat and talk with her boyfriend. She told him all about how Professor Robinson had walked in on her call with Willow and ended up finding out about her being pregnant that way.

"Anyway, she told me to come and see her whenever if I needed to talk… And that's the last of the baby talk for tonight," she sat up, smiling back at him. "Tonight is about you and me, here now, and five years together. There will be… plenty of time for us to talk about the future in the weeks to come."

"Okay, well, before we move on to something else, I should probably tell you… Bishop knows," Lucas slowly admitted. Maya blinked.

"You told him?" she asked, surprised.

"No, well, I…" he sighed. "We went to his apartment over lunch to study, and I figured maybe I could borrow some of Willow's pregnancy books while I was there. I wrote her to make sure it'd be okay and everything, she said to go ahead, so I did. And then…"

"And then Bishop caught you," she guessed, smiling.

"Yeah," he confirmed. "Should have seen him, hugged me so hard I think he almost cracked a couple ribs."

"Oh, no," she laughed.

"Yeah, but, anyway, after that neither of us was really up to studying, so we went and…" He paused now, thinking of something. "Be right back," he told her before slipping out of their booth.

"Wh… Lucas, where are you going?" she asked, but he just held up a finger and headed out of the restaurant. She watched him through the window. He went back to his car, opened the trunk and pulled out a bag before jogging back to the restaurant and to their booth.

"I'm probably taking away any chance we have of not ending up talking baby stuff until after we leave here, but…"

"Who are we kidding?" she guessed.

"Yeah, that," he pointed at her, as she'd done with him before.

"So, what's in the bag?" she asked with an intrigued smile.

"What do you think?" he presented it to her. The bag came from a bookstore, she saw, and not from Coleman's. "Don't tell anyone I went to the competition," he joked.

"To the grave," she swore before reaching the bag and pulling out a small stack of books. The one on top she recognized easily enough, as both her mother and Willow had it. There were a couple other pregnancy books, one of them geared toward the fathers, and there was a pregnancy journal, too.

"I saw it, thought it might come in handy," he explained.

"Thanks," she smirked. "That's good, I…" She started to laugh when she saw the last book, which had nothing to do with the baby at all, not directly at least. It was a beginner's guide to knitting. "Yes!" she whispered.

"Also picked up needles and yarn and other stuff. After the bookstore, we found a store for all that, the bag's still in the car. You'll have all you need to get started on that new medium of yours."

"Oh, I'm going to be all over this," she leafed through the knitting book for half a minute. She closed it after that, nodding to herself before slipping the books back in the bag and setting the bundle at her side. "Later," she told him.

"Maya, it's okay," he insisted. "It's the biggest thing to ever happen to us, it's normal for us to keep wanting to talk about it. Anything beyond that, I mean… If it's important then we'll get to it sooner or later, so for now, let's just talk about whatever we want to talk. School, work, home, or the sprout."

"Sounds fair," she nodded.

"How did your day go?" he asked. "After Willow, and Professor Robinson, all that?"

"It was good," she replied. "A bit shaky, trying to stay focused and not rolling through all the little thoughts and questions that keep popping into my head today…"

"Like what?" he asked.

"Like… I have a little brother who'll be just a year and a half older than his niece or nephew. That'll be so weird… And they could have more kids, my parents, I mean they might…"

"Oh… yeah…" he replied. He hadn't even thought about it like that.

"And then imagine, a few months from now, doing shows with the band when both Willow and I will be out there with our bellies… Two out of five members who are going to be out of 'performance shape' for a while… And who knows what will happen after the babies?"

"No way of knowing," Lucas pointed out, the best he could say.

"And with school, I think I should be okay to do this next semester, and then, far as I was able to count, I should be due somewhere in June…"

"June," he repeated, smiling.

"Your mom is so going to call that kid Junebug, isn't she?" Maya asked, smiling back.

"There's… a fair chance, yeah," he nodded.

"And what happens in the fall?" she pressed on, before chasing the concern from her face as she saw Tasha coming back their way.

"How are we doing here?" the waitress asked. "How's the stomach doing?" she turned to Maya as she picked up their empty plates.

"Well, go the hunger taken care of, so far so good. Thanks, Tasha, really."

"Don't mention it," the woman smiled at her and patted her hand before moving along.

After they'd left the restaurant, they walked back to the car as he carried the bag of books in one hand and had the other draped around her shoulders.

"I was going to take you to the movies, but I think we'll both be better off making our own theater back home. No shoes, no socks, get comfortable…" he told her, and she smiled.

"Yes, please." He looked at her for a moment.

"You're going to start checking out those books, aren't you?"

"What color yarn did you get?" she countered, making him smile. He reached to the back of her head, the colorful ribbons twined in her hair.

"Few different ones," was all he'd say.

"Oh, fine, a mystery…"

TO BE CONTINUED

See you next week! - mooners