Today I have something for it that is definitely a Thing That Happened.

Okay, so this goes somewhere before the epilogue in Changed. Content warning for pregnancy and related stuff! Also, spoilers for pregnancy? If you don’t want to know who is pregnant, stop now and go read Changed: Mated to the Alien Alpha!

The Omega Colony: Extra Scene

“Okay,” Karl said, in his annoyingly calm doctor voice, “I can confirm that you are, indeed, pregnant.”

He stopped there, waiting for my response. Later, I was glad he hadn’t added ‘congratulations’ because right at that moment I don’t think I could have taken it.

Pregnant. Pregnant? Pregnant. No matter how I said it in my head, it sounded alien to me, which was weird because normally: alien things? Totally my jam. In fact, so much my jam that I knew exactly which alien I had to thank for this particular catastrophe.

“How?” I asked.

Karl gave me a look that said very clearly how much sex he knew I’d been having lately. “I imagine it involved your alien boyfriend and genital penetration. Which, if you recall, I cautioned you about weeks ago.”

I swallowed. He was right. After the whole mystery womb incident he’d said there was a non zero chance I could get knocked up by an alien. We hadn’t understood the whole altha/amekha business back then, but now it seemed obvious.

I was amekha. A bearer. And Tal’jen, the hot alien hunk serving it to me on the regular, was altha. And when an altha and an amekha loved each other very much…or, you know, the amekha went into heat and got mounted by the altha in front of the whole village…well. That’s one of the ways you got babies. Apparently.

And I had been nauseous the last few days. That’s why I was here, after all.

God, I’d thought it had just been too much alien fruit.

“How,” I tried again. “I mean, genetically, it shouldn’t be possible. We’re from completely different planets. We shouldn’t be compatible.”

“Well, seeing as no-one has ever tried this before,” Karl said with only a thin veneer of patience, “I have absolutely no clue. I don’t know if you’re going to be able to carry that baby to term. I don’t know if you want to carry that baby to term. I do know you’ve spent most of your life not having to think about it, so I understand if the prospect is…alarming to you.”

Alarming? It was impossible. And yet. Tal’jen had said it could happen. I’d assumed he was being optimistic, but he’d been right, again. And when he’d talked about it, of putting a baby in me, he’d been so tender. Or, you know, horny. Depending.

Let me fill you with my seed, Cameron, and swell your belly with my young.

That should have been gross, right? Well, it hadn’t. It had been hot, and I’d come all over him, and he’d filled me with his seed and…here we were.

“I’m not going to influence you one way or another,” Karl said with that same level calm. “I just want you to know you have options. If you decide you want to terminate—”

Something in my gut went ‘clang’. “No,” I said. I’d said it too fast, so I took a breath and let it go. “No. I mean, maybe, but not right now. I don’t want that.”

“Okay. Well, in that case, I’ve been talking to one of the birthing technicians in Tal’jen’s village, and—”

“Wait, why were you talking to them? You didn’t even know I was pregnant until now.”

He fixed me with a look that made me feel like an idiot. “Because you and Tal’jen have been going at it like bunnies, and this was inevitable. As I was saying,” he went on, ignoring my guiltily indignant splutter. “You have options. We can try a C-section, though I’ve never performed one before. Or you can attempt a natural birth.”

I summoned every scrap of indignation within me and tried to sear it into him with my eyes. “A natural birth.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know how big of an asshole you think I have,” I said, hearing my voice rising into something unhinged.

Karl waved his datapad at me irritably. “They drew me a diagram. Apparently, just before birth, amekha open a separate birthing orifice.” He blinked at me innocently. “It’s said to be much less painful than perineal tearing, which is by the way very common in human births.”

“What, so I’ll split open like an overripe plum?!”

“Something like that.”

That was it. My brain went to static. I shoved myself off the bench, ready to give him a piece of my mind. The world lurched. That nausea I’d been complaining about hit me full force, and before I could think about not throwing up on Karl’s shoes, I had already done it.

Well. That probably served him right.

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