The Nichols House was finally a happy place to be. After a baptism of fire with heartache and death, it had waited many long years to see that pain washed away with the arrival of the couple who now filled it with their laughter and their love. Slowly but surely, they were beginning to bring the beautiful building back to life, restoring the century-old monument to one man's faithful love with a love of their own. There was, however, one thing that might slow that work down a little for a little while, and Kit was the one who knew about it. She was running down the stairs from the upper floors at this precise moment, calling out for her husband excitedly. "Rand" Rand, where are you?"

He wasn't too difficult to find as the smell of food cooking would lead her to the kitchen where he was making breakfast, but just to be sure, he called back when he heard her shouting his name. "In here!" From the smell that was coming from the kitchen, it seemed there was coffee and eggs involved. He had yet to dress, loafing around in the old worn bathrobe that had seen better days, while he moved about the kitchen.

His merry tempered little wife burst into the kitchen in her pajamas, socks making her skid a little on the wooden floor, and virtually bounced into his arms, heedless of the fact that he was cooking at all. "It's positive!" she declared brightly, legs wrapped about his waist as she waved a very important little plastic stick around between them. "Third morning in a row, it's positive!"

Taken completely by surprise by his new bride's excitement, he dropped the spatula he'd been using to tend the eggs with a clatter to the floor to catch her as she bounced into his arms, staggering backwards before he lost his balance. "Kit! I'm trying to make..." he started, trailing off as his brain caught up with what she was trying to tell him. "Wait, what? Positive" What's positive?" he asked, craning his neck to see what she was waving back and forth in his face.

He tended to view Kit's occasional outbursts of hyperactivity with a certain amount of indulgence, which was no doubt why she had decided to embrace her excitement this morning and share it with him, after having been so carefully not increasingly excited over the last couple of days. "This!" she laughed, slowing in the waving of her hand to show him that the little stick in her grasp was, in fact, a pregnancy test.

"Three mornings in a row?" he asked, arching both brows as he tried to wrap his head around this. They hadn't been together too long, but long enough apparently to cause the little pink stick to show a positive result. "Does that mean....Are you....Are we..." He trailed off again, almost as if he was afraid to say it.

"We are!" Her bright smile reappeared as she threw her arms around his neck, hugging him tightly. Screw burning the eggs, this was far more important. It wasn't as though she'd been secretive about the whole thing; they may not have discussed this exact moment, but they knew one another well enough to know that it wasn't a bombshell they couldn't survive. "We're going to have a baby, Rand!"

It wasn't like he didn't know that such things happened or could happen, and it wasn't like they were taking any real precautions to prevent it from happening, but he still looked more than a little shocked by her news. It wasn't a bad thing - it was just so unexpected that he was stunned into silence, even as she threw her arms around him and hugged him tightly. "Are you-are you sure?" he stammered, though he thought three days in a row was more than enough proof.

Her arms loosened a little as she drew back to look into his eyes, her delighted excitement fading a little at his stunned, stammering response. "As sure as I can be," she said quietly. "I should make a doctor's appointment to get the blood test, I suppose, but ....well, even if they did the urine test, it would still come out positive." Her brow furrowed uncertainly; she'd been so sure this was good news.

"Shouldn't-shouldn't you be sitting down or something?" he asked, looking her over as she drew back from him. He didn't know the first thing about babies or the process involved in having them, other than for the obvious. "Bloody hell! The eggs!" he exclaimed, snapping out of his silence, and drawing her by both hands over to the table. "You sit and relax, while I finish making breakfast! You're eating for two now!" he said, his insides doing somersaults of nervousness excitement.

Kit jumped as he suddenly exploded into action, lurching with him to be sat down at the table while her husband displayed all the signs of a man in panic. "Um ....sweetheart, there's nine months to go," she pointed out through a slightly bemused smile. "I'm not suddenly going to stop being able to do everything that I have been doing, you know."

"Yes, but....You're in a family way now, Kit, and....you don't want to do anything that might hurt you or the baby," he said, his face turning pale at the thought of that. "Oh, god....we're going to have a baby," he mused aloud, lowering himself into a chair before he passed out.

She eyed him with a certain amount of amusement, one brow raised above her smile. Of all the reactions she had been expecting, it hadn't been this, though perhaps she should have considered it. There was, after all, a part of him that had lived at the beginning of the 20th century, when a woman was expected to stop everything the moment she realized she was expecting and become even more useless than she had been before. Whereas these days ....If Rand was harboring any thought that she was going to quit working just because she was pregnant, he was in for a nasty shock. "Yes, we're going to have a baby," she agreed fondly. "I didn't suddenly lose the use of my arms and legs. I'm just ....a little bit more for a few months, that's all."

"I don't know anything about babies," he murmured aloud, more to himself than to her. They had sort of discussed this possibility in a roundabout way, but he had never thought it would happen so fast. And then something struck him suddenly that he hadn't thought of before and he looked over at her with that look of shock and amazement on his face again. "I'm going to be a father."

"You're going to be a wonderful father," she agreed softly, leaning forward onto her elbows as she watched him come to terms with the unexpected news she had just dropped on him from a great height. A thought occurred to her, and she laughed suddenly. "My mother is going to hit the roof," she snickered wickedly. "Pregnant bridesmaids aren't really on her wish list for her wedding."

"I'm sure she'll forgive you since you're giving her a grandchild." Not "we", but "you?, as if he wasn't as important to the equation as she was, at least, not to her mother. "She'll just have to get over it," he added. His thoughts regarding her mother weren't a very big secret - he was trying to like her, but he found her to be a little too selfish for his liking. He did like her fiance, though, and hoped he would make her a better person. "Are we really having a baby, Kitkat?" he asked, leaning forward to reach for her hand.

She laughed softly, nuzzling to him in the quiet all around them. "I'll have to child-proof the workshop," she agreed, her first thought to protect their child against the many ways it could come to harm. "I'm sorry I dropped it on you so abruptly. I was - I am - so excited. I know I said I wanted to wait, but now it's happened ....it couldn't feel more perfect."

"It's rather like a Christmas present, but so much better," he said, his smile warming and widening. His arms went around her again to hold her close, safe in his arms. "Would you mind very much if I took the day off" I don't think I'll be able to focus on work, and I'd like to spend the day with you." Fortunately, he worked for a partnership who was very accommodating and understanding of his sometimes unorthodox schedule.

Her eyes lit up with warm delight at his quiet offer, her smile as bright as he could have wished for. "Why would I mind?" she asked him with a soft laugh, nipping the end of his nose for asking such a question in the first place. "Just as long as you're not abandoning someone who needs you." Her fingertip tapped his nose now, impish mischief to match the censuring twinkle in her eyes. "I know I won't be able to work today. Without you, I'll probably just lie in bed feeling my own stomach and giggling like an idiot."

"All day?" he asked, with a chuckle. That was a long time to lie in bed and giggle. "Well, since I've decided to take the day off, what would you like to do today?" he asked, catching hold of her hand as she tapped his nose, looking amused.

"Well, you could always lie in bed and giggle with me," she suggested playfully, wriggling her fingers in his grasp. "But first, you need to call in, and I need to make an appointment. After that ....I'm making breakfast, no arguments." Stern wasn't exactly an expression that came easily to her merry face, but she did try. She had a feeling he was going to try and insist on treating her like brittle glass for a while.

Probably for the next nine months, maybe more, but time would tell. There was a part of him that was very old-fashioned and believed in not only the sanctity of life, but that a woman - especially one with child - was to be cherished and protected, and he intended to do just that. "I wish my mother was here to see this," he admitted reluctantly. "And Katherine. She would have loved a great grandchild." He had a feeling the two women were somewhere in the great beyond having a good chuckle over all of this, but there was no way of knowing for sure.

Her smile softened, touched just a little with sadness for the losses they had both suffered in the past years. "I know," she murmured, curling her arms about him in a warm embrace. "But they know, too. I mean, if we know anything, it's that there is life after death, right' And if there really is, then I can virtually guarantee that Nana has your mother sitting right next to her while they watch all this, eating her homemade toffee and cackling triumphantly about matchmaking across generations."

"I had her toffee once....on All Hallow's Eve, years ago," he mused quietly at a memory that did and didn't belong to him. "That was one thing about Halloween....Your grandmother always made sure I was never alone that one night a year. It was the one night a year when we could really be friends. She never let me down, not even once. Every year, she would plan something new, something different. We would almost always end the night at the piano. No one ever knew. She never told anyone, but it was why she never went anywhere that night....because she always spent it with me." He paused a moment, tears coming to his eyes again for the part of him that had known and adored her grandmother. "And then, there was you," he added with a smile. Whichever Randal she loved more, it was the Captain who had loved her first and the Captain whose memories were attached to this house and to her grandmother.

Kit's smile deepened as he offered up this memory of her grandmother. She would never fully relieve herself of the guilt she carried for not being more present in Katherine's last years, knowing there was more she could have done to assuage the old woman's loneliness. And yet, if she had been more present, would the Captain have fallen in love with her" Would he have trusted her enough that everything that had happened since then would still have happened" She didn't know, and did not care to ask why or how, even now. "And now you're even more stuck with me, you poor man," she teased her husband affectionately, brushing the tip of her nose to his.

"It's confusing sometimes," he started, frowning a little, even as she teased him. "It feels like the memories are mine, but they're not. It's like there are two of me living in the same body." He had mostly made peace with it, but it was still a little confusing at times.

She drew her fingertips against his cheek tenderly, wishing there were some way she could help in these moments when the ghost and the man seemed to be asserting their separate lives within him. "I can't imagine what it's like for you, darling," she murmured softly, stroking her thumb over the furrow in his brow. "All I know is how much I love you. I thought I had lost you once, and you saw what it did to me. I don't ever want to feel that again."

"No," he said, the frown softening. "I'm not going anywhere, Kit. I'll never leave you through any choice of my own. I love you. In some ways, I have always loved you." He brushed a soft kiss against her lips, needing her to know he meant what he said. "I've wondered sometimes if I wasn't born in this body for this very purpose."

She blinked in confusion, not understanding those last words, even as his kiss lingered on her lips. "What purpose?" she asked curiously. "To be everything I could ever have wished for" Because I am fairly certain Isabelle loaded the dice for both of us, somehow."

"You don't really think it was just a coincidence that I ended up here, do you? That I look just like him?" he asked. They had discussed it a little, but he didn't really like to talk about it much. It was almost as if there were two souls in one body, though it was more like a piece of his soul had been left behind before finally being reconnected again.

She bit her lip, reluctantly shaking her head. "I never really questioned it," she admitted quietly. "I would never have let myself believe I loved you, if ....if you hadn't still looked like you. I know that doesn't make any sense, but it's true. I was perfectly determined to die of a broken heart before ever letting myself heal over."

"But when I first showed up on your doorstep, you didn't know me and I didn't know you. I only looked like someone you had loved, and now, here we are. Perhaps there is no explaining these things, but I know one thing for certain - I know the curse was broken. I know things, I remember things that I never experienced, because he's a part of me now. Maybe he always was. If that's the case, then when you fell in love with him, you fell in love with me, too." He chuckled, shaking his head as it all started to get a little too complicated, even for him. "I'm sorry. I know it doesn't really matter, but sometimes it gets confusing, even for me."