"you thrill me, you delight me. you please me, you excite me. you're all that i've been pleading for."

isla's taken to singing to bellamy more and more as she nurses him. they spend countless hours together everyday and she's always humming or singing incorrect lyrics to him as if he understand what they mean. he just looks up at her with his big bright eyes and makes a face. she likes to believe he likes it, so she continues on.

"i love you, i adore you. i lay my life before you..."

nate's in the doorway of the nursery and she smiles at him through tear filled eyes. this is a life she never thought she'd have after the disastrous end to her last marriage. she looks from nathan to bellamy and places a kiss on his head, resting there as she does. moments like this, when she can step back and appreciate what it is she has, she thinks it'll be gone the second she blinks. isla tests this theory, taking a deep breath and closing her eyes.

much to her surprise, the baby is still cradled in her arms when she opens them, but nate was gone. if he knows what's good for him, he's probably getting her a glass of water.

a year ago when she found out she was pregnant, she never would have guessed she would be handling having a baby this way. it was dinah who found out first, and she was less excited than isla could have hoped for. she understood, or at least tried to, all of her hang-ups about having the baby, but it's what they wanted. all four of them, or so she thought. it ended up taking dinah months to come around, which made typical hormonal mood swings ten times worse for nate and slade. isla was worried this would cause complications in the future, and she knew post-partum depression was a real threat to her and the baby. she wanted to avoid this, but her other other half was making it anything but easy.

dinah chose to take a backseat for much of the pregnancy. she learned early on if she didn't have anything nice to say, she needed to just shut the fuck up and relax, so she had. for six out of nine of the months. she had to be the one that was scared, because isla was jubilent out of her gourd in a way that made the super alter-ego nauseous. wasn't she worried about what would happen if dinah and slade got corrupted or possessed again? did she not consider the very real possibilities of making this child an orphan before he ever got to know his parents? dinah had wanted to be supportive, but how could she when contingency plans didn't exist and god parents could hardly be discussed without getting into an argument?

she'd sequestered herself away from all of this, only surfacing when forced, as if she were a moody teenager expected to be polite when anyone visited. she was the mature one. she was the tactical one. she...really didn't have a god damned leg to stand on in any of these arguments. she and slade wanted a baby before isla and nate did, so dinah needed to relax and come to terms with the fact that it was happening, and it was too late for her to try to be anything other than supportive to her host body.

when the day bellamy arrived finally came, something happened within her. there was a light that didn't exist previously now flickering inside her. the second she held bellamy to her bare chest , she sobbed, knowing she would never love anything the way she loved her son. even dinah understood this new and unconditional love. any worry she felt when she was pregnant seemed to have melt away suddenly. from that day on, they became a single person unit again, which made mothering a newborn just a little easier.

isla co-slept with bellamy, using it as an opportunity to get to bond with her son, as if they didn't already spend hours bonding with one another during the day. she took him to work when he was old enough and she was ready to go back, and she took him with her to see her mom and aunt. even after they were snapped to san francisco, isla took the baby everywhere on the day's nate needed a break.

he was the other half of it that was making it so easy to do this all of a sudden. despite her very real fears early on, now that she saw nate with their son, she knew they did the right thing. this baby was making them better people overall, and while they were irrevocably in love with one another before, it was tenfold now. if she ever had any doubts that he wasn't ready for a baby, or might not show interest, she was immediately put in her place.

based on assumption alone, she guessed that nathan loved that child almost as much as she did. he often commented on what a cool little kid he was, and usually spent days with him when she couldn't take him into work due to varying degrees of things.