Miranda Lawson blinked her eyes once, twice as she slowly came awake, the only sound in the darkened quarters she shared with John his soft breathing and the gentle humming of the Normandy's environment system. For a moment she wasn't sure what had awakened her at this hour- she twisted in bed and checked the glowing red digits of the clock, yes, halfway through midwatch and hours before she needed to be awake. Then a familiar pressure in her abdomen asserted itself, and she crawled out of bed, careful not to wake John. As she padded over to the room's head, Miranda smiled wryly to herself. Her fantasies of being a mother had been a little thin on some of the messier details, but on the whole peeing every couple of hours was a small price to pay. She suspected she might be singing another tune in six months' time, but that was a worry for the future.

A mother. Miranda straightened up from the toilet and looked herself over in the mirror, drawing John's old t-shirt tightly over her body and tracing the barely-there bulge in her abdomen. She smiled softly at the sight, but it wasn't quite enough to chase the uncertainty out of her eyes. She'd wanted this so badly. First for selfish reasons, wanting to pass on her so-perfect genes and secretly hoping a baby would fill the space in her heart left by an uncaring father and absent sister. Then for spite, once she learned of her father's little safety measures- a cancer in waiting, kept in check by drugs secretly administered as long as she was in his house, then silently lashing out to make sure she was part of no one's dynasty but his own. Miranda shivered as she remembered finding out, the grief, the bitter anger once she understood what had been done to her, and how badly twisted she'd been by trying to hold it all in.

There'd been none of that, this time. Being with John had made her want something altogether different- not just a child, but his child. A chance to see her best qualities, balanced by the parts of John that kept her sane and whole. But...

…but what did Miranda Lawson know about being a mother?

She'd never had one. Somewhere out there, of course, was the woman whose eggs her father had used to construct a viable zygote that could host the genome he'd had custom-coded on Ilium, but Miranda had nothing in common with her besides a few scraps of cell plasm. There had been female tutors during childhood, of course, but at the first hint that Miranda was growing attached to one of them- or worse, starting to look at her as a role model- her father had sent the offending woman packing. Henry Lawson had been a jealous God, and had not been willing to share his heir's heart with anyone else. No one had kissed her scrapes away or held her after nightmares- they'd just slapped on a bandage and offered her a sleeping pill instead. She'd learned about makeup from a hired professional, sex from videos hacked off the extranet, and how to talk to her sister from a syndicated column. What was she supposed to do now?

There were books, of course, megabytes of them downloaded in marathon extranet sessions after the first pregnancy test came up positive and crammed down with superhuman rapidity ever since. Miranda had worked her way up to the galaxy's standard textbook on obstetrics and prenatal development, gotten a semester's credit towards a master's degree in child psychology, absorbed the last ten years of the most popular parenting magazines, driven Liara to near-insanity with constant requests for information, and given herself a series of truly memorable headaches. And yet the only times she'd really, truly felt she might be all right with this had been afterwards, when John had held her, massaged away the aches, and told her that everything would be all right.

He'd been right about those things before, and always wiser than she. Miranda just hoped it would be the same now.

She snapped off the light and padded back to bed, curling herself up in John's arms. She'd tried not to wake up, but part of being an N7 operative was being a very light sleeper. She felt him start, breathe in, and then breathe out slowly as his senses tasted the situation and found it without danger. As Miranda shut her eyes she felt him nuzzle against her neck and heard his whispered,

"Love you." She smiled and breathed back,

"Need you." More than ever, she didn't say.

It was a moment of untroubled peace for both of them. Looking back, later, Miranda would remember it as the last such for a long, long time.

A/N: I'm back. With a new pen name, because I'm planning to post some older fic I wrote for a different fandom, and frankly having two pen names was kinda dumb to begin with. Just a little intro into what's been going on since the end of Square One, here.

And yes, Miranda was sterile. Might go into it more later, but for now- come on. She headed a project that brought a dead guy back, twice, and you think she couldn't fix that if she really, really wanted to? As the woman herself said, she's Miranda fucking Lawson.