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Why was it that when Samus Aran and motherhood crossed paths, the Metroids were always involved somehow?

Galactic space’s premier bounty hunter sighed, glancing down at her delectably ripened belly. She felt suddenly, surprisingly full—the sensation unanticipated, distinctly unforeseen, and yet, in its own way, not uncomfortable.

It had all started so innocuously…

After the dustup from the fallout of the B.S.L. station’s destruction (and of course the Federation had blamed her, just because she was responsible for the destruction of Zebes. And Phaaze. And the Bottle Ship. And okay, they were right, but it still seemed rude to jump to conclusions!) Samus had been on the run for a bit until things had gotten settled. Once back, she’d resumed her role as the GF’s favored freelancer, a one-woman black ops team who could handle anything.

A research team had probed into the subterranean caverns of a hitherto uncharted moon on the far rim and discovered what looked like Chozo ruins. What’s more, they claimed, alarmingly, to have found Metroid eggs.

The Metroids were extinct, of course—Samus herself had seen to that, and the lone survivor she had attached herself to had been wiped out in the aftermath of Mother Brain’s last stand. Other than the Federation’s ill-advised cloning efforts, the final legacy of the Metroids was within Samus herself, who carried the genes of the last Metroid encoded in her. (It was a long story, but she was still human. Mostly. Probably? She looked the part at least.)

But if anyone would have had backup plan upon backup plan, it would have been the Chozo—and so Samus had been tapped to venture down below, just in case the Metroids weren’t as gone as expected. She was the natural choice. Not only was she the one individual in all of creation who didn’t get wrecked by the creatures on a regular basis, but her Chozo upbringing would even lend her the ability to help probe and wander through the ruins.

The caverns there were unlike those on Zebes—they were beyond ancient, obviously uninhabited for centuries if not millennia, and with differing architectural styles and eerie statues.

Local wildlife was a potential concern on any new world, but there was nothing too threatening on this new moon, thankfully. Samus encountered little resistance as she pressed deeper into the catacombs.

She saw the glow of the chamber before the chamber itself. The researchers had described a sea of glowing, lime-green eggs, their shells translucent to show off the infant Metroids slumbering within. The clutch, they said, was nestled safely inside a vast chamber of similarly-colored stone. The green light was visible just where they’d said it would be—at first little more than a dot at the end of a long hall, but gradually encompassing more and more as she approached.

Stepping inside, the bounty hunter whistled to herself. Those were Metroid eggs, alright, and the shape of the creatures within could still be seen from her vantage point. She stepped in, cannon at the ready, but the eggs still seemed sedate. Whatever the Chozo had in mind with this chamber, it was clearly still slumbering.

But only partially. There was an ambient thrum of power in the air that she could feel settling on her skin, probing through her armor.

Stepping further in without any response from the creatures, she was satisfied that they were good and lethargic. Lowering her cannon, she opened her suit’s log. “Reached the inner chamber,” she began. “No serious dangers on the way, area largely as the research team described.”

So focused was she on the recording that Samus missed out on the way that the ambient power suddenly began to change. The transient feeling began, imperceptibly yet irreversibly, to zero in on the chamber’s newest visitor. Her orange power suit was no barrier; the power settled in, playing about her body, reacting in invisible ways to the chemistry within her and the new and mysterious changes which her newfound Metroid genetics had gradually introduced to her system.

Still in the midst of her log, Samus paused and cleared her throat. She felt strangely… bloated. Not sick, but oddly full, and her entire body began to feel a bit off—only a little bit, as if she had suddenly stood too fast, inviting wooziness.

Shaking it off, she pressed on.

“The eggs number a little over fifty,” she said, “and are unlike those seen on SR388… of course, it is known the Chozo had varying breeds of Metroids. Tallon’s had a different life cycle entirely and reacted to the introduction of Phazon…”

As she continued, the ambient power of the chamber pressed harder, eventually weaving its way through Samus’s body to nestle inside her womb. Once there, it spurred her body to release a number of chemical signals—ones which her new Metroid chemistry reacted to quite suddenly.

“…the Metroids are in lethargy and it is my recommendation they should remain that way,” Samus was saying. “The urge to weaponize them is as alw—u-ugh, hnnnnnnnnnnnn, h-huh?” There was an immediate change inside of her, one she could no longer ignore. The bloating sensation had intensified, making her suddenly cogent of an indescribably heavy feeling nestling down among her nethers. Also, for the first time, she realized that the woozy feeling had retreated but left behind a bodywide feeling of pins-and-needles and a strange flushed sensation.

“N-new changes,” she said through gritted teeth, valiantly still logging her experience. “No pain—in fact, it actually feels k-kinda good, damn, but a sudden… unghnnnnnnn, oh h-hell…”

She trailed off as her tummy suddenly felt fuller than ever, a blossoming sensation that spread from her stomach through the rest of her body like petals unfurling from a bud. She was suddenly aware of her cheeks burning, feeling flushed, her entire body preparing itself for… something, she had no idea what.

Samus made the decision to partially unveil herself from her suit, as there had been nothing threatening thus far. Her legs stayed locked into the armor, but the upper body peeled back, exposing her skin to the chamber.

And not a moment too soon. Scarcely half a minute after folding her upper suit back, Samus gasped as with a surge of what could only be described as pleasure, she felt a sudden, intense, and decidedly encompassing clench in the spot right behind her belly button.

She felt fuller; glancing down under her form-fitting crop top, she could see that she did in fact look a bit round in the tummy. She just had enough time to wonder if the sensation had really originated from where she thought it had—her womb—before she was met with another, stronger clench that made her rock and—

And with a rewarding spray of bliss that made her pupils shrink, her hands shake and her toes quiver, her body suddenly changed as her stomach massively jutted out in front of her, full and round and heavy and decidedly occupied—and as it ebbed away, Samus glanced down at herself again and was forced to confront the fact that yep, her stomach really did look…

It looked…

Well, there was no other way to describe it. She looked, and felt, pregnant.

What.

The.

Hell.

After filling the long-lost ruin with a rhapsody of marvelously colorful language (Samus was still, after all, a military woman) she shook her head and got to work figuring things out. Thankfully, after her misadventures with Phazon she’d equipped her suit with a number of scanning materials and rudimentary medical equipment, just in case something weird had happened. And in Samus’s opinion, abrupt impregnation in the middle of an ancient ruin on an uncharted world certainly counted as “something weird.”

As her suit helpfully buzzed with alarm and activity—“FOREIGN PRESENCE DETECTED. BIOCHEMICAL CHANGE DETECTED. INCREASE IN MASS DETECTED. SEARCHING FOR CAUSE”—Samus, shaking her head, pulled out a few small patches and affixed them to the side of her belly.

(And having to touch it, having to deal with the fact that her belly was big and taut and full, round, her skin tight as a drum and pale in the light of the cavern, all of that really sort of sunk home that yes, this was happening, and she had no idea how to deal with it. Strangely enough, as she fixed the patches to the side of her inexplicably-gravid belly, Samus found herself thinking that the thing that most threw her about the situation wasn’t the sudden weight she had to carry or her center of gravity being thrown off, it was that her bellybutton had suddenly poked out, a tiny nub made convex as whatever occupied her womb had robbed it of space. She’d never considered herself that attached to her bellybutton, but seeing it like this, a little bump crowning a much bigger bump, really sort of made the whole thing sink home.)

After affixing the patches and pulling out an ultrasound wand, Samus blinked. Her whole body still felt weird. Not in pain, not uncomfortable; whatever had instigated this change had clearly had her comfort in mind. In fact, it felt almost embarrassingly pleasurable, warmth and delight radiating out from her tummy to settle in the rest of her, and she was still cognizant of her cheeks burning. But so different was the rest of her body that she hadn’t realized that some part of her was already undergoing a big change of its own:

Her breasts.

They were suddenly tender, aching sweetly, and Samus slowly pulled up her top to examine them, blushing despite being alone. Her breasts sat free, nestled against her big round tummy. Was it just her, or did they look a touch fuller? They felt different, that was for sure, and her nipples were hardening—though perhaps that was in reaction to the blissful feeling still seeping its way through her.

Shaking her head, she cupped one slightly, hissing through her teeth at the tender touch and the change in weight.

She sat there like that for a few minutes: cupping her own breast with one hand, idly caressing her roundness with the other, feeling warm and strange and weirdly maternal, her cheeks still burning. She almost fell into a haze, resting there in her suit.

A sudden sensation jolted her back to reality. There was a small bump in her tummy, a twinge of movement that definitely wasn’t caused by Samus herself, and the hunter gasped at the weirdly foreign sensation. As it stilled, her body sang out in delight, and she blushed harder as she realized that she was feeling a level of maternal pride that whatever she was nurturing inside of her was safe and hearty.

(She’d never considered motherhood for herself, not really, but the last Metroid had relied on her and sacrificed itself for her and sometimes, she wistfully reflected that she might have been happy raising it—and this strange thing inside of her, whatever it was, was stirring up old feelings she had thought she’d left behind…)

Shaking her head, Samus swallowed, and then busied herself again.

Still cognizant of the various bumps of movement within her as her new offspring (and that word was still incredible to think; offspring, offspring, she was going to have a baby) wormed and turned as it nestled inside of her, Samus finished setting up the ultrasound and began the scan.

It was what she’d expected, but the revelation still made her breath catch.

The equipment in her suit was rudimentary, but the shape up there on the grainy screen was impossible to deny: a nebulous body, see-through with a triptych of nuclei that were nearly as expressive as eyes, small nubs that would one day sharpen into fangs.

She was carrying a baby Metroid.

Immediately the feelings of old washed over her. She stared down at her lush roundness, then back at the staticy screen showing the creature inside of her, then back down at her stomach, then the screen again. She said nothing, but her mind was exploding with a parade of emotions—shock, confusion, resoluteness, but more than anything else, a sudden and overpowering sense of affection.

She had… she had another chance.

After completing the ultrasound, she had her suit run diagnostics. The suit’s response was confusing—it showed that Samus, despite her sudden gravidity, was a specimen of good health, yet the chemical levels detected were not anything seen in humans. Her suit helpfully informed her that her biochemistry matched that usually seen in Queen Metroids before their first laying.

And everything clicked into place. Glancing about the Chozo chamber, cognizant of the ambient power (which had ebbed back after instigating her change, but not gone away entirely) Samus realized what she was standing in.

Gray Voice and Old Bird had told her stories of how, at their height, their people had controlled the Metroids. Within Chozo sanctuaries lay special rooms known at Hatcheries. Some of these rooms were rumored to contain backup Metroid eggs, but they also served another purpose. Most Queens, they had told Samus, were self-fertilizing, at least up until the first laying, but biology being biology, accidents happened. If a mature Queen wandered into a Hatchery who had not yet grown pregnant, the Hatchery would take care of it for her.

Glancing down at her belly, caressing it and gasping lightly at another bump from the creature within, Samus thought back to how the last Metroid’s genes were now encoded with hers. The last Metroid had been an infant Queen… but Samus was, of course, mature, and if her biology was far different than what the Hatchery could have planned for, the Chozo were nothing if not adaptable.

Her breasts still tingled, and maternal warmth still ran through her like a slow-moving stream, omnipresent and comforting. Maybe it was just the Metroid genes in her reacting, or maybe it was the fact that this was a second chance after all, but it felt right.

She rested one hand on her tummy and smiled to herself as she felt the creature inside move again, this time almost seeming to press against her touch. Was it aware of her? Did it know?

It bumped again, the movement small enough not to be visible to an observer but definitely felt by Samus herself. She stroked it gently, hoping the gesture would transfer some level of the affection she felt towards the being within. If it didn’t know now, that was fine. She had the rest of her pregnancy to see it through.

Already, not following through on this seemed unthinkable.

---

When she emerged from the warrens several hours later to the research camp, one of the scientists—clad head-to-toe in a protective hazmat suit—dashed over to her. “Miss Aran! Miss Aran! How did—”

The scientist stopped, and Samus didn’t have to see his face to imagine the look of utter befuddlement he wore. It would have seemed absurd: the galaxy’s foremost hunter who, a mere twenty-four hours ago, had been ready to make war if need be, waddling out, suddenly too big for her suit, her shirt barely capable of covering her breasts, her pale round tummy bare to all the world in its enormity, her face flushed—openly and visibly and indisputably pregnant.

“The ruins are definitely of Chozo make,” Samus said as soon as the individual cut off. “The Metroids are in lethargy and will remain as such until provoked by external stimuli. I’m aware that GF really wants to clone these little monsters, but my professional opinion is that they should be left alone, for the sake of everyone. All attempts to control them have failed; even the Chozo succumbed. The genetic data GF already has should suffice if the X become a problem again. The rest of the ruins should be safe to explore, though preliminary safety scans before entering a new chamber would not be a bad idea.”

As she finished, she noticed that the whole time, the doctor had been staring at her chest. It was still covered by her crop top, but it was bigger than usual, and an hour or so before emerging from the cavern, she’d groaned as damp spots had started to bead through. (She wasn’t all Queen Metroid; mammals gave their young milk, and her breasts had no idea what she was pregnant with—they merely knew that she was, and they had to play catchup.)

Folding her arms in front of her chest, Samus glared at the scientist. “Do you have any questions, doctor?”

The scientist visibly started. “Uh, no mom—I, I mean! Ma’am! Uh!” He slapped an awkward salute. “C-carry on, Miss Aran! Ma’am! Sir! Ma’am!”

Muttering under her breath, Samus awkwardly made her way to her ship.

Once inside she let the business face fall, leaning back with a relieved sigh. Another mission complete—and with a little bonus, to boot! She normally celebrated missions by going back to Earth and drinking herself silly—but she shook her head. Not this time. She had to be responsible.

She gently rested one hand on her stomach as the other began punching preliminary commands in her ship’s computer. It was far more robust than her suit, and she’d likely be able to ride out the majority of her newfound state within its comforting confines.

Another bump made her gasp, and she smiled down at her tummy. “You’re so excited!” she chided her baby teasingly. “Wait a little bit! Mommy has to get ready.”

As she launched into space, she smiled to herself. She had so much to do.

---

A month or so out from her adventure in the ruins and Samus looked just about ready to pop.

She woke with a start and a groan, feeling almost pinned under her own massiveness. A lesser woman might have used her condition to laze about all day, but a lifetime of warrior training and action left Samus feeling antsy if she wasn’t doing something.

The first thing on her to-do list was to get properly motivated. She craved coffee—but alas, that was a no-go for expectant mothers. (She had no idea if caffeine even registered for Metroids, but she wasn’t going to take a chance with her child!) So the ship spat out hot chocolate for her instead.

Guzzling it down as freeze-dried marshmallows would somehow trick her body into thinking it had some caffeine, Samus got a start on her day. Ever since the moon, she’d been running small-time freight jobs. The pay was tiddlywinks compared to her usual rates, but at least it gave her something to do and left a convenient excuse not to go back to the GF’s inner worlds, where awkward questions would surely be waiting. She ordered her ship’s onboard computer to employ some of its processing power to taking her to the nearest outpost, where she was due to pick up a shipment of plasma torches.

The rest of its processing power was devoted to medical attention. The ship’s scanners bathed her tummy in turquoise beams, the scan immediately conjuring up a smooth 3D image of the baby slumbering inside of her.

The little alien had been growing impressively the last few weeks, and often swam about when it woke. It was incredibly active, and enjoyed playing games with her, teasing one side of her stomach, then the other, settling down happily when she stroked her belly. Sometimes she almost fancied she could hear—or perhaps feel—it chirping.

Chugging down as much hot chocolate as she could ever hope for, figuring she might as well replace a caffeine rush with a sugar high, Samus set about tapping on screens and keyboards, instigating the second phase of the medical tests. Her biochemistry was immediately scanned (and flagged for being part Metroid; she waved it away, thinking she really had to convince the ship to chill out about that one of these days), her hydration levels acknowledged as acceptable, her sleep schedule was noted as healthy, yadda yadda, all signs green.

As the ship charted off for her next destination, Samus opened up some files she’d had to call in some favors to get: ancient Chozo records.

Metroids were barely understood, and as their creators, the Chozo were the best source. Except they were all gone now, and even the small group Samus had grown up with had been the last wilting petal of a great civilization rather than the full flower. There was so much nobody knew, so the secrets of the past were the best bet if she was going to give her baby the best life she could. Digging in for some more reading, she—

Bump.

Gasping and glancing down, she could see her immense belly quiver. On the 3D screen, the sleeping Metroid was waking up. It drifted, shook a bit, and then nudged playfully against the confines of its mother’s womb, the action visible as a bump on the outside not unlike a normal baby’s kick.

Giggling to herself, Samus rubbed her tummy. “Well, good morning!” she said between sips of hot chocolate. “Up early, aren’t we?”

The Metroid chirped and ‘kicked’ again affectionately and Samus smiled even wider. She couldn’t ever remember being this happy.

This would be a new start—for the Metroids, for her, for the galaxy.

She couldn’t wait.