Re: Sun, 4/21 - Nat & Tony (afternoon - THE BOMBSHELL)
Nat had made Tony sit on the bed next to her and was currently clutching his hand. When the healer had said he wanted to talk to both of them, there had no longer been any doubt about that strange tone to his voice. There was definitely tone. Unfortunately, he had that whole neutral healer thing going on where she couldn't read between the lines, and that made it all the worse. She hated not knowing, even if it was only for long enough to retrieve Tony from wherever he'd been at that moment.
"What's going on?" she asked, unable to even wait for the wizard to speak. "Is she okay?"
Healer Young held up a hand and nodded. "Your baby is fine. Stable, no signs of undue distress. But that's only partly why I need to talk to you. Mostly, it's about the two of you."
Tony could tell this was freaking Nat out by how tight she was gripping his hand, and he wasn't totally copacetic himself, but he smiled down at her anyway, resting his other hand on her shoulder. He kept his eyes on her rather than the healer, though he was listening intently.
Nat glanced over at Tony, all confusion and worry, and back at the healer. "Is there something wrong? Please, just tell us."
"Nothing wrong. Simply...different." He gave an awkward little laugh. "I'm sorry. This is very new territory for me, so if I'm bungling the delivery, I apologize. It will probably be better if I back up and explain." He pulled over the room's only chair and took a seat. "We've been attempting to isolate the baby's biology from yours, using both your brother and boyfriend for baseline comparisons. What was unexpected was that many of the things in your diagnostics that we had initially attributed to the baby were also showing up with Tony."
Nat nodded, because they knew much of this already, not bothering to correct the label he'd given her ex. She just wanted to know.
"Nothing for concern, exactly, but the unusual levels that also had some commonalities with Njall."
"I don't understand," Nat said. "You mean Tony and Njall? How? Wasn't the point to use Njall to isolate the Selkie parts?" She couldn't help thinking of the discussion she'd had with Tony a couple of days earlier, and then later with Njall. She'd thought she was mostly over it, but that was going to be more difficult if it really did have something to do with the issues she was having.
"It was. But Selkies are not the only beings who register on certain magical diagnostic spells." The healer took a deep breath, obviously preparing himself. "What I'm trying to say is that the problem is not with the baby's human blood, and it's not with her Selkie blood. It's with the combination of the Selkie blood and the other blood. The part that the two of you have that's not Selkie...but also isn't human."