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Carson had fallen asleep in Elke's bed, his arm thrown possessively around her shoulders - and at some point, he'd woken up, aware that she'd gotten up. In his drowsy state, he hadn't thought anything of it, but then he'd woken up again, and she was still gone, and Carson was a little bit confused. Where had she gone? Why hadn't she said anything to him? Why hadn't she come back yet?

He was never going to get back to sleep like this. Carson turned on the lamp on the bedside table and rubbed his eyes, resigning himself to wait for Elke's return. She was probably just downstairs... even if it was an odd time of night for that.

About twenty minutes later, Elke - or someone who looked very much like her, a petite blonde girl in a green chiton, leather-wrapped hands holding a lavender-wrapped bundle very tight - appeared in the center of the bedroom, accompanied by a soft flash of light and a hint of frost. .

The part of Carson that was and had always been Triumphalis knew who she was - "Virgo," he said, confused - she'd abandoned her post, broken her pen, hadn't she? "When did you-"

His eyes narrowed, drawn to the bundle of blankets, which had begun to squirm.

"What," he said, "is that."

"Sorry, what?" asked Carson, scooting towards the end of the bed to get a better look at the baby. She had blue eyes and pale white hair - the rest of her was wrapped in a blanket, and Carson didn't really have enough experience with babies to judge how old she might be besides that she was neither a newborn, nor as old as Elke's actual baby would have been now.

Also, that baby was dead, and this one was very alive and currently cooing at his girlfriend.

"Okay, uh," he said, pinching the bridge of his nose. "I can see that she's a baby. Where did you get a baby at--"

He looked around, realized that clock radios were a thing of the past, and made a wild guess: "Three in the morning?"

"Castor?"

Carson bristled. He'd only met Castor once, but that had been enough. The mere mention of his name left a sour taste in his mouth. He'd known Castor was an a*****e, but infanticide was a new low. A new kind of low. A low that looked at all previous lows and then got out a shovel and started digging.

"That good-for-nothing low life," he said, staring at the baby. She was so little! And yeah, now that Elke mentioned it, he could see the resemblance - which made it worse, knowing that the prince had been ready to murder his own offspring to accomplish...

what, exactly?

Scratch that. He didn't want to know what kind of magic required the blood of a forsaken child to work.

"I hope you told him where to shove it," he said. "Who in their right mind could hurt a face like that?"

"He would have fought back," said Carson, squeezing her fingers. He didn't need to have gone toe-to-toe with Castor to know he was powerful - but then, Carson didn't have a benchmark for how powerful Virgo was by comparison. Could she go toe-to-toe with him? The possibility was simultaneously terrifying and thrilling.

"Do you have, uh," he said, reality interrupting his train of thought. "Things? For a baby? Formula and diapers and, uh, somewhere for her to sleep? I mean. I guess a drawer works in a pinch."

He seemed to recall a story about how either he or Marcus had had a drawer instead of a crib and turned out fine, but that was so long ago it seemed almost apocryphal now. He could almost hear Caroline tell it, the ghost of a memory. A memory of a ghost.

"I'm not gonna sit here and think about all the ways we're not prepared," he said, reaching his free hand down to brush a finger over the baby's hair. She seemed impossibly soft. "I mean. I'm going to. But I'm going to pretend that I'm not."

Carson nodded, following Elke down the hall. He'd never been into this room. The door was always closed, although now that he was standing in it, it seemed like it was aired out often enough that it wasn't musty and hadn't collected much dust. As a nursery, it was half-finished, the walls swatched with different shades of green and pink. A changing table, still flat-packed in its box, leaned up against the far wall.

But at least it had some of the basics.

"It needs a weekend or two," he said appraisingly. "But I could get it put together. How are you planning to explain this to your mother?"

How, he realized with faint shock, was he going to explain this to his?

Carson grabbed the bassinet, grateful for something to do, and carried it back to Elke's bedroom. "Okay," he said, setting it down. "That's definitely a thing. But we probably still need to go to Wal-Mart."

At three in the morning.

God, what his life right now.

"Preferably," he added, "Before she wakes up wet or hungry or both."

The baby was very cute, but she was also something of a ticking time bomb at present, and that made Carson very, very nervous.

Carson nodded gamely. "Yeah," he said, "I can handle that."

A friend who would take you shopping for baby supplies at three in the morning, no questions asked, was a friend indeed.