Folios/v7/Time-landscape-2019/MS-166
Kate felt like she was about to explode. She was fighting her own body, pushing against the tightness of her skin, desperate to just get this finished, finally, after hours of pain and pulsing tightness and straining focus.
She was exhausted, but she couldn’t stop pushing. She squeezed tight onto the rails of the bed, wishing it was Matt’s hand that gripped hers, trying to convey the endless pressure that was pulling her in all directions. Finally the relentless, unyielding power she was pushing against stopped, and in a slither of release, she gave birth.
She dropped her head back and closed her eyes. “I am never doing that again,” she stated, for the record. “I don’t care if Matt comes back and demands ten more children. It’s not happening.” Everybody ignored her, just like they had for the last nine hours every time she’d screamed for somebody to bring her some more of those drugs, right now I swear to God.
She stared at the pink light filtering through her eyelids, trying not to think about the messy wetness she could feel covering the lower half of her body. No one had told her that childbirth was so disgusting.
She was drifting in a sea of adrenalin, when a small weight was pressed into her arms. She opened her eyes and looked down at the tiny bundle. Her breath caught in her throat. She was exquisite. Kate had hoped she would be able to look at her and see Matt, but for now she was just a round, chubby-cheeked baby. She smiled down wonderingly, touched her tiny fingers and stroked the long length of her eyelashes.
Kate wondered why she’d never done this before. She could have felt this joy so many times, in every life, but somehow it had never happened for them. How had they never managed to make a baby together before, in all those lives? How strange it would have been, if she had given birth in Carlisle, at the very beginning. Their baby would have been grown up when they were reborn in their next lives. She could have met her. She would have been younger than her own daughter. She could have followed her own descendants through history. But they’d missed out on children until now. They’d never managed to conceive before their time ran out.
The baby’s eyes flickered open, blinking against the bright light of the outside world, and everything clicked into place for Kate. The answer unfurled undramatically like it had been there all along, just waiting for her to pay attention. She – this baby – was why it had happened. They kept coming back, endlessly, trying and failing to create this person, this little girl. And now she was here.
Kate settled back on fresh pillows, and felt success tingle on her tongue and in her fingertips. It was done. Kate and Matt had made the baby they had always needed to make, finally, after all this time. Now their baby could go ahead and live her life – do whatever it was that was so important that they kept being brought back to make her.
Finally, they could stop living again and again. She smiled down at her sleeping daughter, knowing that this was it. She didn’t have any more idea of who had manipulated time than she’d had in the eighteenth century, but at least now she knew why. She wouldn’t be back for another life. It was time to let her baby girl take over. Hopefully she and Matt would be around to see some of her story, if everything went according to plan. Hopefully.
The only thing left was to choose a name. She liked the sound of Clove.
Three days later, she gave her baby to Tom and her ecstatic new grandparents. She was leaving their daughter in safe, loving hands. Kate was ready to finish their story.
> Objective achieved
> Mission complete
> Assignment “CLOVE” in operation