Disclaimer: Roswell, the characters, and the situations are owned by the WB. No infringement is intended.

Author's Note: This story is part of an evolving storyline that currently includes (in order): "Decisions," "Looking In," "Christmas Envy," "From Another Place," "Husbands and Fathers," "Claudia and Nicole," "Stars", "Going Home", "The Ethics Lesson", "Redefining Terms", "Beginnings", "First Date", "A Quality Heart", "In Every Ending", "Birth", "Rose Petals", "The Littlest Czechoslovakian", "Girls' Night In", "A Guy Thing", and "Joshua and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day". More stories may be forthcoming.

* * * *

The dark-haired woman sets her notebook aside and picks up the leather-bound book from the window ledge beside her. It falls open to an entry she wrote after her grandmother’s death. She reads: "The tough thing about following your heart is what people forget to mention, that sometimes your heart takes you to places you shouldn’t be, places that are as scary as they are exciting and as dangerous as they are alluring. And sometimes your heart takes you to places that can never lead to a happy ending. And that’s not even the difficult part. The difficult part is when you follow your heart, you leave normal. You go into the unknown. And once you do, you can never go back."

She flips the pages of her journal until she finds a blank page, then she begins to write. As she writes, she presses one hand against the tiny bump of her pregnancy. She thinks, although she does not write this, that leaving normal was the best decision she has ever made, and that this is the closest to a happy ending she has ever felt.

* * * *

Her lover watches her from the doorway to the living room. She is not a conventionally beautiful woman, but because he loves her, in his eyes she is luminous.

He has just finished a series of phone calls home, the last to his best friend. He feels weighed down by disapproval. But he does not regret their decision. Nothing he feels about her has anything to do with regret.

Watching her, he is reminded of his best friend’s warnings that there is no way he can ever be normal. It occurs to him that normal is relative, and that getting married and having a baby qualifies as being normal, no matter what his best friend says.

He is the first to admit, though, that normal in this situation is pretty scary.

* * * *

Across the country, a spiky-haired man sits at his kitchen table across from his on-again girlfriend. He is tired and paint-splattered after wrestling with the demons roused by his best friend’s phone call. He picks up the coffee cup she has set before him and says, "I can’t believe they were so stupid. He should know better than this. I don’t understand why he thinks he can play at happy, normal families. We can’t be normal. He should know that."

Because she is used to his moods, she smiles and reassures him: "Everything will be fine, cheesehead." Then she reaches out a hand to tweak his hair affectionately, and laughs when her hand comes away covered in a rainbow of paint.

* * * *

Although she is careful not to show it, his girlfriend is worried. She stares at her paint-covered hand and worries about her own best friend, who has stepped into an unknown that none of their group of friends have ever discussed. She worries that her best friend’s pregnancy is dangerous. She worries about what her best friend’s pregnancy might mean for her own dreams about children and a family.

Uncomfortable with her worries, she gets up from the kitchen table. "I think I should probably go back to my own apartment," she tells him quietly.

He nods, and she guesses that he is still preoccupied with his dark thoughts about the mistake he is so sure his best friend is making. After a minute, he says, "I’m going to go see them. Someone needs to talk some sense into them."

She sighs as she puts on her jacket to leave. "Why can’t you just be normal for once and be happy for your best friend?" she asks him, even though a part of her knows she is being unfair. She is having trouble being happy and normal about her best friend’s news herself.

Later, when she is back at her own apartment which is much tidier than his, she comes to a decision. She decides to be a better best friend than she has been so far. The first thing she does after making this decision is call her best friend back to apologize for hanging up on her earlier. On the phone, she tells her best friend that she is happy for her, and that she can’t wait to see her.

* * * *

The flaky alien-gift-shop woman grimaces when she calls her daughter’s apartment at 3:00 in the morning and finds the phone line engaged. She wonders who her daughter could be calling at this hour, but really she is afraid that her daughter has just taken the phone off the hook.

After waiting ten minutes, she calls again. She cannot sleep until she is sure that her daughter is home and alone. The line is still busy.

Prompted by her own experience as an unwed, too-young mother, she has been calling regularly every night for the past week -- ever since she heard the news -- to check up on her daughter. She does not want the same thing happening to her daughter that has happened to her daughter’s best friend, who she has always thought of (before this happened) as a nice, serious, well-adjusted girl -- a normal girl -- the kind of girl who would never get herself knocked-up.

She decides to call one more time before giving up for the night.

* * * *

In another apartment not far away, a tall blonde woman stands in shell shock, staring at the phone. Her brother has gone too far this time, she thinks. She tells herself that this can’t be happening, just when things are finally getting back to normal after the last time her brother screwed up their lives when they were still in high school ... just when she is finally building a normal life with her very-normal boyfriend.

This can’t be happening, she repeats to herself as if it is a phrase like abracadabra that will turn everything magically back to normal.

All of a sudden, she wonders if their parents know yet. She grabs her car keys and heads out the door, thinking that she should check on them. They are still coming to terms with other recent revelations, and she is afraid this might be too much for them.

* * * *

The older couple knows that their son and daughter are different, that their children are not and have never been quite normal. The woman has known this since her son saved her from a kitchen fire when he was sixteen years old. The man has had a harder time accepting the truth about their children; he only learned about it last summer.

But the truth about their children’s origins has not changed how the couple feels about them. They love their children unequivocally.

Within this certainty, they are sitting together on the sofa in their living room, talking quietly, trying to come to terms with their son’s news. They are concerned that he is in over his head. They think that he should be worrying about finishing medical school, not getting married and having children.

They are too afraid to think about what else his news might mean.

* * * *

The owner of the Crashdown Café in Roswell, New Mexico, stares at the telephone receiver he has just replaced in its cradle. He shakes his head slowly. He feels stunned. He suspects something that he cannot quite articulate. He suspects, although he is certain that he can never say this out loud, that there is something about his future son-in-law and unborn grandchild that is not quite normal.

He is seized by a fear that he cannot articulate either. He tells his wife later that he is frightened that this pregnancy will be hard on their daughter, not to mention that it will wreak havoc on her school work.

He does not tell his wife what he is really afraid of -- that their daughter is in over her head, possibly in danger, and that he suspects the person with whom she has decided to spend her life is not quite normal.

* * * *

The dark-haired man, the future son-in-law of the restaurant proprietor, pushes away from the doorway and walks into the living room. He sits on the window ledge beside the woman he has loved his whole life. He knows, because he knows her (not because she will ever tell him this), that she is scared. He is too.

To get her mind off her fear, he quotes gently, "‘if we love each(shyly) / other,what clouds do or Silently / Flowers resembles beauty / less than our breathing.’"

She smiles, startled out of her thoughts; she did not hear him come in or feel him sit down. "I love that poem," she says softly.

He smiles back and says, "Me too," then puts his arms around her, pulling her close.

She laughs and leans into his embrace. "It’s funny that we both love e.e.cummings ... I mean, considering that you’re as much of a science geek as I am. Maria, the English Literature Queen, would be so proud of us." She pulls a little out of his arms and looks up at him very seriously. "You can be so surprising sometimes. That’s one of the things I love about you--"

Suddenly she stops speaking and places his hand against her stomach. He sits quietly beside her, his mind inundated with images of her and their unborn child.

She watches him for a minute, her eyes soft, then surprises him with her next question. "Do you think our daughter will be like us?"

He pulls her closer. "I hope she is just like you," he says and absolutely means it.

She shoves him playfully. "Well, I hope she is just like you. With your eyes definitely. And your ears."

"Not the ears," he groans. "They have always been the bane of my existence."

And she laughs again as she stretches up to kiss the ear closest to her. She whispers between kisses that she loves his ears, but not as much as she loves all of him.

And he kisses her nose as he settles her back into his arms. He tells her that he loves everything about her too. Their loving each (shyly) other, he tells her, is why he exists, is the only normal he has ever wanted. Being together every day, listening to her breathing beside him in their bed every night, is exactly what is so great about making up their own normal, he says.

And as they kiss, they both hope that their child never knows anything but this normal.

Author’s Note:

This story includes the final stanza of e.e.cummings’ poem, "if i love You." (Note that cummings did not usually title his poems; usually their first lines are used for titles.) The poem is copyrighted to e.e.cummings. No infringement intended.

The following is the full text of the poem:

if i love You
(thickness means
worlds inhabited by roamingly
stern bright faeries

if you love
me)distance is mind carefully
luminous with innumerable gnomes
Of complete dream

if we love each(shyly)
other,what clouds do or Silently
Flowers resembles beauty
less than our breathing

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