Christmas, 2383
Kathryn looked longingly at the bowls of stuffing, mashed potatoes, fresh bread rolls, and gravy. Her brow furrowed as she made a decision. Licking her lips, she dove at the mashed potatoes with a large spoon, flicking a large dollop onto her plate, smothering it in gravy, and proceeding to blast through it like a modified torpedo through a Borg cube.
This was something that the Janeway family had seen year after year, except for seven more recent ones. Chakotay looked on in amusement.
"You couldn't eat a thing last time," he pointed out, with a smile.
Kathryn froze. She looked at him, eyebrows raised, as if to say, "I thought we weren't going to tell them yet."
"What are you talking about, Chakotay?" Gretchen said, waving her hand in an all-too-familiar fashion, "She loves her potatoes and gravy. Every year, she finishes off whatever we leave behind. In fact... last year, I think she did it in record time."
Kathryn sighed, and resigned herself to the fact that it could no longer be kept a secret without deliberately skirting the issue.
"He didn't mean last Christmas," she said, reaching for the potatoes once more. There was definitely something different in the way the potatoes landed on the plate this time. The outside of the dollop was more defined, and the middle was so thin that the plate was just visible through it. The gravy pooled in the middle, resembling a brown crater-lake. She shot her husband a lopsided grin that said, "If I weren't behaving myself, that plate could have been your face."
"Well, what did you mean?" Gretchen asked her son-in-law.
Kathryn looked over again at her husband, nodding so he would explain it, and went back to her potatoes and gravy-lake.
"Kathryn didn't eat much of anything... last time... she was pregnant."
Gretchen knew that Kathryn didn't like people to make a big production of things. She contained her excitement the best she could. "Oh, Kathryn... that's... great. How many months?"
"Three," she answered. "Looks like I'm in for one hell of a summer."
"How long have you known?" Gretchen asked.
"A while now," Kathryn said.
"We didn't want to say anything too early," Chakotay explained. "Kathryn said it seemed to drag a bit last time, because everyone knew practically from day one. We thought we'd keep quiet for as long as we could this time."
"That's a wise choice," Gretchen agreed. "And you know how I hate to point it out but at your age..."
"There are many risk factors that can end the pregnancy before the first trimester," Kathryn finished for her. "Has the doctor been talking to you?"
Gretchen laughed. "As a matter of fact..."
Kathryn, Chakotay, and Duncan sat by the fire, all wrapped in one large red, white, and green quilt. Duncan was sleeping, with a corner of his mother's pyjama top bunched up in one hand and his face pressed against her body.
"Gramma knows all about your new little sister now," Kathryn whispered to her sleeping son, more for Chakotay's benefit than his, "thanks to your daddy's big mouth."
Kathryn looked over her shoulder at Chakotay, who leaned down to kiss her. No harm done. Three months was normally the time when friends and relatives found out anyway. And there were far more advantages than disadvantages to that mouth...
The least of which being that they didn't consume much in the way of mashed potatoes and gravy at Christmastime.
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