Lovely
Part One
Eye Wall Sidefic
By Ancient Lady

Note - Lyric excerpts are in italics and are from "Isn't She Lovely" by Stevie Wonder.

Isn't she lovely
Isn't she wonderful..

---------------------------------------
Relena was exhausted. She lay on her side in the hospital bed, sweaty blond hair hanging limply over her cheek. She'd been working so hard. Labor was aptly named, he'd decided less than an hour into the process. Even with dark circled eyes and lank, stringy hair, she was still beautiful. And she'd strived so hard to get this far... to be so close to giving birth to their first child.

Heero was having trouble concentrating on the child though. Even as a grainy image on the ultrasound, it was still unreal to him. His overriding concern right now was for Relena. After what she'd been through over the past two years, he wasn't sure how much more strain her body and mind could take. And it was all culminating in this.

Heero glanced at the monitor, it was about time... There, the slow rising of the green line that presaged another contraction. He brushed the hair out of her face and leaned forward ready for what was to come. Relena winced, and groaned softly as she squeezed his hand.

The contractions weren't too bad, yet, but they'd been going on so long, he was worried for her. Dr.Pell, when he examined her last, had put on a cheerful tone of voice, but Heero could see the worry around his eyes. Despite the contractions, she wasn't dilating as fast as she should, and her water still hadn't broke.

Noin stood by the window, watching the scrub suited nurses eating their lunches in the hospital courtyard. The curtains on the picture window were closed for privacy, but Noin had pulled one edge away from the windowframe to peer out. The hours they'd spent here in the hospital were hanging heavy, and it looked like there'd be a long way to go still. Heero caught her eye, and silently asked her to take over for a few minutes. He left the room to go find the doctor and find out exactly what was going to happen, and what their options were.

---------------------------------------
He remembered the first time she'd told him she was pregnant. It was just under a week before their wedding, and they'd both gone immediately into damage control mode. Evidently, one of their stolen weekends had caught up with them, when her birth control failed to work. They weren't surprised when that particular product was recalled with a great deal of embarrassment by its manufacturer a few weeks later.

It hadn't taken them long to decide that since she was only about two weeks along, and would be less than a month pregnant at the wedding, there wasn't much to worry about. The baby's birthday might cause a few knowing smirks in the press, and a tabloid headline or two, but not a great deal of controversy. It wasn't like such things were rare.

She was so happy, so excited. Heero felt something more along the lines of shell shock. The idea would take some getting used to. He was just coming to terms with the reality of the lifelong commitment of marriage. By the eighth week, however, the idea was growing on him. He'd researched the subject of pregnancy and childbearing - thoroughly. And just as thoroughly researched the obstetrician she chose. If someone was going to be examining his wife there, he was going to go through a hell of a background check.

He couldn't believe the change in her. He'd heard pregnant women described as glowing, but discounted it. Relena glowed. She seemed to make her own light. He'd never seen her so happy, and it created a warm feeling of contentment and satisfaction to see her so at peace with herself and the world, and to imagine the tiny life she carried that would be a part of both of them.

That's why the miscarriage hit them so hard. The first miscarriage.

------------------------------------
Dr. Pell was making notations on a stack of charts at the nurse's station when Heero found him. He was a kindly older man, bushy hair rapidly fading from grey to white, and he'd been a rock of support.

"What's going on?" Heero asked.

"Heero, she can't do this much longer, you know."

"I know. What can you do?"

The doctor leaned against the elbow high counter, and rubbed the bridge of his nose with one hand. "I'm going to try breaking her water, to see if that will speed up the process. It often does. And I want to put some internal monitors in. The external are reading fine, and the baby doesn't seem to be in distress, but this is a long labor, and I want to keep a close eye on it."

"If that doesn't work, what then?"

"Then I think it will be time to consider an emergency cesarean section."

Heero nodded, keeping his face neutral while the news traveled down his spine and lodged in the pit of his stomach. Together, they headed back into Relena's room.

------------------------------------
Within a few months of her miscarriage. Relena wanted to try again to get pregnant. They'd decided before they married to wait a few years for children, but the experience of having been pregnant, and the sense of emptiness from the miscarriage, made her want to change their plans.

Heero wasn't sure getting pregnant again so soon would be good for her, emotionally. He went privately to Dr. Pell to ask what he thought. Reassured by the doctor's words, he threw himself wholeheartedly into the rigors of conceiving a baby.

Sex, he found, had a whole different feeling about it when one was trying to conceive. There was a feeling of overriding purpose. Of doing something bigger, more important, than just enjoying the moment. He lay awake often, afterwards, sorting through and examining these new feelings while Relena nestled contentedly against his side. Odd how the same event could have such a different atmosphere, when there was a goal associated with it. It was exhilarating.

Several months later, Relena burst into his office, waving a little plastic stick in the air. Dr.Pell confirmed the pregnancy, and advised her to limit her activities, just in case. Accordingly, she cut her meetings and travel plans back to the bare minimum, and installed a couch in her office so she could lay down during the day.

The pregnancy lasted ten weeks.

------------------------------------
"Five." Dr. Pell said, his face mirroring Heero's own relief. In the hour since Relena's water had been manually broken, her contractions became more regular, closer together and more painful. And she was progressing, slowly.

"I'll order something for the pain. Just a shot into the IV. I'm sorry, Relena, but it won't be much, just enough to take the edge off. We're moving now, and I don't want to slow that down."

Relena nodded wearily. She looked so tiny there, curled up in the middle of the hospital bed. Heero knew that she was doing well, considering, and better now than a few hours ago. But he couldn't help an internal shiver when he looked at her, hooked up to so many machines.

Internal monitors had replaced the cumbersome belt around her swollen belly, so now two thin cords snaked out from between her legs to the cart parked beside her bed. Glowing green lines and numbers, and a long paper tape pooling on the floor, tracked her contractions and the baby's heartbeat. There was an IV stuck in the back of her hand, stiff with plenty of tape to hold it still, and her slender wrist was starting to swell from the fluids. He closed his fingers around the chilled skin, to see if it was getting worse. If so, he'd have to call the nurse to come change it to the other hand.

He hated to do that to her, leave her with one hand tethered to the IV, and the other stiff and sore, but it couldn't be allowed to get any worse than it was. Her other arm was wrapped in a blood pressure cuff, automatically inflating every fifteen minutes. It was there for the same reason the IV was. Over the last month, her blood pressure had been rising. When her now-weekly urine test came back yesterday showing protein, Dr. Pell had admitted her directly to the hospital to be induced into labor..

One of Heero's nightmares, stalked by sterile, awful terms from his research, came out of Dr. Pell's mouth yesterday when he said "preeclampsia". This baby had to be born - and soon - or Relena's life was at stake.

-------------------------------------
Their first anniversary was a quiet one. Duo and Hilde had time to fly in, since there aren't a lot of deadlines in the salvage business. Taking a week off here and there was never a problem for them. Quatre tried, but he had to settle for a *very* long distance phone call from the belt. Even after three years, he was still sorting things out from that mess. This most recent trip "out there" had thoroughly foiled his plans of attending, and at the last minute, too.

Noin and Zechs returned from Mars, this time permanently. Noin wanted a child, and conditions in the domes for the terraforming crews and scientists weren't safe enough for that. They'd already dealt with two venting incidents. Zechs tried to gloss over their reason for returning, for Relena's sake, but she knew anyway.

Sally and Wufei were able to mix and match schedules with other Preventers to arrange for two free days just before Heero and Relena's anniversary, to wish them well. The party, if you could call it that, took place just before the actual anniversary, so Sally and Wufei could attend.

Dorothy ruthlessly rescheduled appointments and conferences to spare the whole week. She was surprised at the low key celebration. She hadn't been privy to their trouble the past year as the others had, and when she found out, she understood. Une joined them with Mariemaya for the celebration, but that was all the time she could spare from her duties. Mariemaya wanted to stay and enjoy the company of friends she hadn't seen in a long time, but she left with Une. She didn't think the Lady needed to be left alone. With a certain wisdom beyond her years, the young lady seemed to understand that her guardian was still in mourning, and needed her around.

Trowa and Catherine, unfortunately, were also unable to get away. Catherine looked exuberant on the phone, and kept saying how happy she was for them. It was mentioned later that she seemed unusually cheerful despite the fact that she had lost her target when Trowa moved to L3, to do something for the Preventers that he refused to talk about. Duo laughed when he answered that the circus - and Catherine - had recently been on L4 for some months. Everyone was surprised at this, and questioned him closely, but whatever it was that Duo knew, he was keeping his mouth shut about it. That little hint was all they were left with.

Trowa spoke for a while on the phone, but seemed uncomfortable conversing with a screen. Later, a long and heartfelt letter arrived, expressing his good wishes.

Surrounded by friends and support, they had a quiet dinner at home. They faced the celebration with a happy mien, but underneath, they were both fraught with tension. Relena was six weeks into her third pregnancy, and this time they weren't telling anyone but her doctor.

Instead of comfort, the sympathy expressed for the "lost ones" the last year had cut shards out of Heero's soul every time he heard it. They meant well, all of them, and truly felt sorry at his and Relena's loss. It only proved to remind him, though, over and over that in some indefinable way he had failed to protect his wife and unborn children. From what, he was not sure.

Just in case, in the months after her second miscarriage, he'd obtained the name of a geneticist from Dr. Pell. He'd never before put much importance on the fact that he was an orphan, and didn't know anything about the man and woman who had been his parents, once. With the sick feeling that it was something in his unknown medical history that was causing Relena's miscarriages, he had himself tested for genetic abnormalities. The tests, to his relief, came back negative. After the tests were back, he told her what he'd had done. He wasn't sure how he would have managed to tell her if they had found something. Fortunately, he didn't have to find out.

He couldn't express these vague feelings of inadequacy to Relena. He could barely comprehend them himself, and not fully at that. He couldn't articulate them and she was sure to try to argue at him, as his own conscious mind already had, that there was nothing he could do. Despite the logic of his internal arguments, deep down, he felt insufficient.

Relena agreed to keep the pregnancy quiet, although he hadn't explained why. She gave him a close look that caused him to wonder if she somehow had read his mind and understood every misgiving hovering behind his heart. She was inclined that way anyway, she said. The disappointment was bad enough for them, but she didn't want to have to face everyone and tell them that she'd lost another baby. So that week, they leaned on each other, and celebrated their first year together. It had been the best year of Heero's life, despite the pain. Relena was in it. He woke up to her face each morning, and held her through each night. There would be tragedies and triumphs in any life, but in this one there was someone there to share the pain and joy with.

The day after Hilde and Duo, the last of the guests, left. Relena started spotting. A vaginal ultrasound several weeks later confirmed that she had lost her third pregnancy.

Heero tried to talk her out of another one. He wasn't sure she could take any more. He wasn't sure he could take any more, either. But Relena was a determined woman. After a few weeks of walking around like a ghost and crying into her pillow at night, she went back to the doctor. She was ready, she told him, to try the experimental drug he'd told them about earlier, that would increase her chances of carrying the next baby to term.

It worked. Fifteen months after her first pregnancy, she conceived the child she was to carry to term.

-------------------------------------
The contractions were coming fast and hard, now. Her last exam showed her dilated to seven, and she was entering the stage of labor called transition. The longest part of labor was over, and it was now a matter of a few hours, but she was starting the hardest part. The contractions to dilate the cervix all the way to ten centimeters were as hard as the ones to push the baby out, but without the relief of being able to push. It could last up to two hours, or more.

She was still curled on her side. Because of the danger of her blood pressure spiking from the preeclampsia, she was required to lay down, and she was uncomfortable flat on her back. She was sweating, and kept sending him back to the thermostat in the room until it was beginning to feel like a meat locker. Her IV was given another push of pain medication, but Heero recognized the dose as a small one. As before, just enough to take the edge off.

Heero climbed up on the bed beside her, and lay close to her back. He stretched one arm under her head to support it, and wrapped his other around her rib cage, just under her breasts, trapping her free arm beneath it and holding her hand. With his cheek against the side of her head he whispered in her ear. "Breathe. In. Out. "

"I can't do this," she whimpered. "It's too hard. I can't. I can't keep going."

"You can. Breathe. You've come this far. It won't be long now. Breathe. Accept the pain, don't fight it. It'll hurt less if you don't tense."

"You go through this agony relaxed, asshole!"

"Breathe, Relena, you can do it."

"I don't want to," she wailed.

"Don't scream, it's fighting the pain and will make it worse. Remember, low pitched sounds. You can do this. Breathe."

"Shithead!" she said. But when the next contraction came, she groaned as she'd been taught to.

"Breathe Relena, in and out."

"You breathe and leave me out of it!

"Come on, it won't be long now."

"The hell you say! It's been too long already."

"I know, and you're doing good. Breathe."

"Shut up, bastard!"

"Actually," he said, "you don't know that for sure. If I knew who my parents were, we could ask them."

Relena paused for a second, and laughed weakly until the next contraction hit.

He'd given up on the pattern breathing hours ago. She was too tired to concentrate. He was afraid she was almost too tired to remember to breathe on her own without him reminding her. So he held her, desperately wishing he could give her his own strength, take the pain on himself, somehow put himself in her place. But in this, nature had destined him to be spectator and support. All he could do was what he was doing now. "Breathe. In. Out. You can do it, Relena. We're having a baby. Breathe."

"I have to push..." she whispered.

"You can't push, now. It can hurt you to push before you're fully dilated. Resist the urge, you can do it. Breathe."

"Heero! Dammit! I have to push. My body's doing it whether I want it to or not!"

Heero let go of her hand long enough to reach behind him and push the nurse call button. Five minutes later, Dr. Pell beamed at her. "You're dilated to ten, Mama, it's time to push this kid out."

"Thank God!"