snick_backup | FIC: Seraph (15/?)

Story begins here. All parts may be found here.

As usual, muchas gracias to my lovely betas,

phoenixofborg.

~~~~~

“I’m not taking the Slayer to my sodding doctor’s appointment!” When he’d dropped by at dusk to ask Joyce about it, he’d expected her to simply refuse. This was quite possibly worse.

“Dawn isn’t going without her,” said Joyce, her voice level and even and brooking no argument whatsoever.

“This is personal,” Spike said. “I don’t need her goggling while the doc feels me up.” It was little comfort that Buffy looked only marginally more thrilled about this idea than he was.

“If I’m not comfortable that Dawn will be safe, then she’s not going.”

“Hello, bloody slayer of Slayers here,” he said, before remembering that this wasn’t perhaps his best credential in present company. “I’ll take care of her.”

“Spike,” Joyce said, voice soft with admonishment. “It’s not just her you’re protecting. You’re vulnerable now. If it was a question of saving your daughter or saving Dawn, which would you choose?”

“I--” He glanced at Dawn, who was watching Joyce anxiously. “I’d see they were both all right.” Then he winced, recalling how well he’d managed that the last time. “Besides, it’s neutral ground -- there won’t be anything she’ll need protecting from.”

“Which is the only reason I’d consider letting her go at all, especially since she is still grounded.” Joyce gave Dawn a sharp glance before looking back to Spike. “Now, you take Buffy as a bodyguard, or you go by yourself.”

Dawn folded her arms and glanced between Buffy and himself, her mouth set in a line that promised a tantrum directed at whichever of them turned her down.

Tantrum aside, he wanted her along, for... well, for company. Oh, how the mighty were fallen. He shrugged a sigh. “Slayer?”

Buffy still looked slightly shell-shocked, but she managed to roll her eyes. “Fine. Hey, it could be fun!” Chirpy voice aside, she looked like she very much doubted it. “Maybe I can at least kill something while we’re there.”

The office was never going to schedule him an appointment again.

~*~*~

“The Chosen One, that’s me,” Buffy said, climbing into the DeSoto next to Dawn. “The one girl in all the world called to escort her sister and a pregnant vampire to the doctor’s office. So not in the Slayer handbook.”

Spike turned and stared. “There’s a handbook?”

“So they tell me.” Buffy shrugged. “Giles only mentions it when I’m not being ‘proper’ enough. He could be making it up.”

“Bloody hell, Slayer, do you have any idea what that’d be worth on the black market?”

She looked over at him with the skepticism of someone who not only had never had such an idea occur to her, but who held deep suspicion for anyone to whom it did.

He sighed. “Never mind.”

The office was one he’d passed dozens of times on his prowls, and never given any notice to -- just one more door in a long line of doors leading to accountants and mortgage brokers and other such people that an unchipped vampire had only one use for, and a chipped vampire no use at all. Inside, he and Dawn settled into chairs so stiff and upright they must have been designed to prevent loitering. Buffy turned a full one-eighty, eyeing the potted plants and the blandly idyllic watercolors as if a demon might spring from one of them at any moment. Probably she thought one would. Finally she caught his amused glance on her and sat down, flushing and looking annoyed about it.

“Are you sure this is the right place?” she asked around Dawn in a harsh half-whisper.

“Sl-- Buffy,” he stumbled, remembering how very much he didn’t want to advertise who he was with. “D’ya think all demons like muck and slime?”

“But the receptionist looks human.”

Vampire, he instantly thought, and snapped around to stare at the woman, sniffing. But she didn’t smell of either blood or arrested decay, but of tropical spices and an undercurrent of kerosene. He relaxed and shook his head. “Look at her eyes.”

They were the typical Shiraka color, gold, with vertically slitted pupils, and after Buffy squinted at the woman a moment, she settled back in her seat, looking nettled.

Another human-looking woman -- fortyish, graying, spectacled, and wearing a crisp white lab coat -- opened the door next to the receptionist station. “Spike?”

He pushed himself up and followed, Dawn stuck leechlike at his side, and after a moment Buffy trotted behind them. Probably had to roll her eyes at the universe first, he thought.

Pleasantries: I’m Dr. Mack but you can call me Stacey, so glad your friends could come with you, now tell me what I can do for you. A summary of Spike’s Initiative history commenced, with occasional tongue-clucking from Stacey -- apparently he wasn’t her first patient with Initiative horror stories. Then a few silent minutes spent while Stacey looked over the specs Willow’d printed out for Spike to bring.

Finally, Stacey cleared her throat and said, “You have to understand, I would never recommend an artificial hosting arrangement like this without much more regular care than you’ve had so far.”

“Do you--” He searched the carefully professional face for sign of bad news, but couldn’t read what he saw. “Do you think there could be something wrong with her?”

“I’ll need to have a closer look at you both before I can say.”

He licked his lips. “I didn’t even know about her for months, and then I didn’t know I was keeping her, and anyway it’s not like the bastards handed over an instruction manual.” But he should have bloody known she’d be needing...things, before now. Supplements, or whatever the lab coats would have given her if he hadn’t run off.

Stacey gave him a warm, soothing, entirely uninformative smile. “Let’s have a look at you, and then hopefully I’ll know something useful,” she said. “Here we go.” She slid his much-oversized t-shirt up his chest.

“Oh my God,” Buffy said. He turned to see her gaze stuck on his belly, rounded and swollen like rising dough. “You really are pregnant.”

“Did you think he was faking?” said Dawn, scowling at her.

“No! No. I just...” She trailed off helplessly.

“S’all right,” Spike said. “Takes a bit of getting used to.” He watched Buffy’s gaze flick from his stomach to his eyes and back, and he found that, all expectations to the contrary, he simply didn’t care. He was beyond obvious now and verging on bloody conspicuous, he still had two and half months to go -- to grow, suggested a cheeky voice in his head -- and yet his increasingly bizarre profile ranked down somewhere near chipped nail polish on his list of concerns.

Stacey glanced between him and Buffy and, apparently deciding that the moment was done, began looking him over and hmm-hmming in various nerve-rattling tones. Then she laid a stethoscope bulb flat on his stomach and listened for a moment. She shook her head with a hint of a smile. “Much easier to hear the heartbeat when there’s nothing competing,” she said, handing him the stethoscope.

Cautiously he put the knobs in his ears. That was what the flutter sounded like, then -- not wing beats at all, but a steady swish-swish at the same brisk tempo. He gave the instrument to Dawn, who immediately squealed. “Buffy, you have to hear this!”

“Really not,” Buffy said, her arms folded across her chest and her eyes still wide. She flashed Spike an apologetic glance that he read as, ‘Sorry, not done being weirded out yet.’

Now Stacey was spreading colorless jelly over Spike’s stomach. This was what he’d been waiting for, what he’d been staring at Dawn’s book in anticipation of for weeks now. Dawn must have guessed; she rested a hand on his arm and watched while Stacey arranged the machine. A bit of muttering, a bit of tickling with the wand, and on the black screen appeared that ghostly pale portrait he only dimly remembered from last time.

There she was.

Eye. Ear. Nose. A tangled splotch of white that might have been a hand. A whole person nestled warm and snug in his belly.

His little girl.

Someone was pushing at his shoulder. “Spike!”

He shook out of his daze to glare at Buffy. “What’s your bloody problem?”

Her lips were pursed less in annoyance than amusement. It was almost a soft expression, not one he ever expected her to direct at him. “You weren’t listening,” she said.

“Oh. Well,” he fumbled. “Busy.”

“As I was saying,” Stacey said, “You definitely have a girl.” She gestured vaguely at a few indecipherable squiggles on the screen. “And I don’t see any apparent deformities.”

“Was that a possibility?” Buffy, asking the question sticking in Spike’s throat.

Stacey must have heard the edge in Buffy’s voice; she glanced between Buffy and Spike and said, “This is an experimental procedure. Prototypical, even. Nothing is guaranteed.”

“But she’s all right,” Spike pressed.

“As I said, no apparent deformities.” He had to be content with that while Stacey hummed a bit more, and then laid the instrument down and turned off the machine. She scribbled awhile on a chart, and the humming switched to mumbling so garbled even his vampire hearing couldn’t sort it out. Finally, she nodded towards Buffy and asked Spike, “Do you want them here while I talk to you?”

He shrugged. “Might as well. Not like I have any secrets,” he added sourly, glancing at Buffy.

“All right, then.” The woman pulled up a chair and sat. “Spike, she isn’t dangerously undersized for a 28-week-old, but she’s smaller than I’d like. This... hosting arrangement--” She gestured dismissively at him. “--is ingenious in theory, but in practice it depends on your eating well and regularly. Have you?”

“It’s been a bit of a challenge,” he said, “what with the being chipped--”

“Excuses are very comforting things to have, but they do your parasite no good at all. What kind of blood? Human?”

“Um.” He cast Buffy a wary glance, and she looked coolly back, eyebrow lifted.

“If you can’t be honest in front of your friends, then they should leave,” Stacey said.

“Pigs’ blood, mostly,” Spike muttered. “There’s been some human. Not live!” he added to Buffy. “From the hospital or from Willy’s, and Willy’s supplier doesn’t kill -- waste of resources.”

Buffy’s sour look suggested she found this last only marginally reassuring.

“In that case,” Stacey said, “I think you should switch as much to human as you can -- this ‘filter’ you have installed should be able to use the nutrients more effectively.”

“Aren’t you human?” Buffy blurted, and Spike closed his eyes. Here it came. “How can you tell him he should be eating people?”

Stacey turned that cool professional gaze on her. “First, I am three-quarters human, one-quarter Bracken demon, not that that is in any way your concern. Second, my lineage doesn’t excuse me from providing the best possible care to my patients. And third, it isn’t necessary that Spike ‘eat people,’ only that he consume their blood.”

“Think what the-- what Buffy’s saying is that supply’s going to be a bit of an issue.”

She looked at him thoughtfully. “I’m not saying your parasite couldn’t survive without it, and I’m not positive a change of diet will make a significant difference--”

“She’s not a parasite,” said Dawn suddenly, looking mulish. “She’s a baby.”

Stacey pushed her glasses further up her nose and said, “I’m sorry. Of course she is. You’ll have to excuse me -- parasitic health is my specialty, after all.”

Dawn folded her arms and mumbled something unintelligible.

Turning back to Spike, Stacey said, “But for the child’s sake I’d much rather see you eating human than not -- professional opinion.”

“Well. We’ll sort out something then.”

“Spike,” Buffy said warningly.

“I’m not starving her, Slayer!”

Dawn sucked in a breath at that, just about the time Spike realized what he’d said. He snuck a furtive glance at the doctor, who shook her head in what might have been amusement. “I already knew she was the Slayer. How many Buffys do you think there are in Sunnydale?”

Spike and Buffy glanced at each other. He shrugged and said to Stacey, “Anything else I should know?”

“Otherwise, she appears to be perfectly healthy. Either these experimenters were absurdly good at what they were doing, or you’re extremely fortunate. Take your pick.” She paused while Spike took a few sharp, relieved breaths. “About the birth,” she said. “There’s a local surgeon that visits the clinic on a circuit; we can make an appointment with him if you like, at an appropriate date. Or you can go into L.A.”

“Here,” he said automatically -- no reason to venture from home if he could help it. And then the words hit him: the birth. The kind with mess and calm doctors and anxious lookers-on -- and scalpels in his case, rather than contractions, for which he was suddenly and profoundly grateful. And afterwards...

Well, after all that he’d have her, and it came to him that until this very moment he’d never quite believed it. Giles’ posturing, Buffy’s promises, Joyce’s comforting smiles, the ever more athletic internal gymnastics: just speeches and temporary oddities in an existence full of such. All his worries just fever dreams until now, under the clinical brilliance of fluorescents.

“Here,” he repeated, and took in a breath that felt like it might have been his first. He could feel a grin like a canyon cracking his face. “I want her to be born here.”

~*~*~

Afterwards, Buffy strode straight inside, muttering something about changing for patrol, and Spike said he’d catch a quick chat with ‘the mum of the house.’ Dawn settled onto the front step to wait. In a few minutes he was back, whistling, his saunter slowing to a stop as he came up behind her. She kept on staring at the gnome in the Flores’ flowerbed.

Finally came the click of his lighter. “Expecting someone?” he said.

“No,” she said shortly. Just because she wanted to talk to him didn’t mean she wanted to talk to him. Which didn’t make sense, quite, even to her, but there was a vampire moving into her house any day now, and the fact that it was Spike only made things muddier.

Without further comment, he sat at the other end of the step. He leaned back against the post, one hand resting comfortably on his stomach. His other elbow was propped up on his knee, the cigarette hanging from between his fingers. Dawn had had misgivings about the sweatpants, and the huge t-shirt really didn’t do much for him, but he was, she decided, still the coolest pregnant guy alive. Or not alive, depending.

Then she coughed on a cloud of smoke that blew into her face. “Yuck, Spike. Don’t you think you should quit?”

He stared at her like she’d told him to paint his nose purple. “What for?”

“For the baby.”

“What about her? Near as I can gather from Red, it can’t hurt her any. Damn ‘filter.’”

“You know, secondhand smoke? People can get cancer from secondhand smoke.”

He scowled intently at his cigarette. “Your mum’s already laid down the law about smoking in the house.”

“But the smell sort of sticks to you.”

“That be enough to hurt her?”

“Probably.” She couldn’t remember if Mr. Ramirez had actually said that in health class, but a smell that bad couldn’t be good for you.

“‘Probably.’ Fragile bloody humans.” He gave the cigarette one more glance and stuck it deliberately back in his mouth. “Got a lot of smoking to do in the next twelve weeks, then.”

“Yuck,” she said again.

She sat listening to the crickets and wondering when he’d ask her why she’d been waiting for him -- she knew he knew she had, whatever she’d said. But he just looked off down the street, breath catching every so often.

“So you’re moving in with us,” she said finally.

“That all right with you?” he asked, in that soft, careful voice like he thought she was fragile.

“I guess so.” A long moment of him not looking at her. “I didn’t think Buffy’d want a vampire living in the house.”

A soft snort. “Didn’t really think so either.”

“But you’re still an evil vampire, right?”

Now he turned to regard her with that attentive seriousness that made her feel like an adult -- which scared her, a little, in a gray, distant sort of way that was nothing like being afraid of fangs. “We’re all evil, pet.”

“So you still want to, like, eat people.”

“S’not even the same question -- ‘do I like to eat people.’ S’like saying, ‘do you like ice cream.’”

“That’s not the same,” she said flatly.

“Sure it is. What’s your favorite flavor?”

“Jalapeño,” she said, despite herself.

A tiny bit of a grin started at one corner of his mouth and spread to his entire face. “I knew I liked you.”

She basked in that glow for just a moment. “So...”

“S’like this. You like most all kinds of ice cream--”

“Not vanilla bean.” Off his raised eyebrow, “It has little black specks in it.”

“Uh huh. So, you like most kinds, but jalapeño’s your favorite because -- well, just because it is, right? And somebody says, eating jalapeño ice cream’s evil.”

“Ice cream is not people!”

“And you, bein’ a good little human, say ‘All right, I won’t eat the jalapeño ice cream, ‘cause it’d be the wrong thing,’ and, bein’ a good little human, you care about that. Sometimes.” His lip quirked.

“But it doesn’t change you wanting it, does it? Still think about tasting it, feeling the pepper flavor burnin’ down your throat. Probably even resent not getting’ to eat it, because it’s a bit arbitrary, innit, just that one bein’ off limits? And it’s not like you picked it for your favorite, just was, sure as you’re you. Not your fault at all. Whether you’re evil or not evil, eating it or not eating it, you still want to.”

He sat back and sucked on his cigarette, looking off down the street again but at a near enough angle that she could tell he was watching her out of the corner of his eye.

“So, that’s like blood for you,” Dawn said finally.

“Human blood, if you multiply about a hundred times over. And pigs’ blood’s the sodding vanilla bean.”

“And you still want to eat people.” She’d thought -- well, that was stupid. She’d thought he was sort of...good, now. And that still meant not wanting to eat people, it seemed to her.

“S’not even a choice, love. Vampire. Couldn’t help it even if I got slapped with one of Angel’s nancy gypsy curses -- Dru preserve me.”

“But Angel didn’t--”

He turned abruptly to her. “Every minute you were within smelling distance, your blood was singin’ to him. He could have drunk you dry and loved every drop of it, and the only difference between him and any other vamp in existence is he’d have brooded about it in the morning.”

“So my blood sings to you, too.” Like what, she wondered. Like the Hallelujah chorus? Like the lead for one of those weird old rock bands he liked?

His face fell slack and expressionless. “Yeah.”

“But you wouldn’t actually eat me. Even if you could.”

“Said I wouldn’t,” he said, almost sulky.

She pressed at her neck, up just below her ear, where her pulse throbbed slow and steady against her fingers. She didn’t usually think about her blood any more than she thought about her stomach, except when it gurgled, or about her brain not quite sloshing around in her skull.

But he did -- he’d noticed her gesture and was staring at her fingers like she might burst a vein if he kept watching. And then he caught her eye on him and turned abruptly away, a muscle twitching just below his jaw.

So there was wanting and there was wanting, she thought, and it did make sense.

She reached along the step to squeeze his hand: cool, and softer than she’d have thought for a big, bad guy like Spike, at least before she’d known him. “Thanks.”

He glanced skeptically down and back at her as she withdrew her hand. “What was that for, then?” he asked softly.

For not wanting, she thought. But what she said was, “Nobody else ever tells me stuff.”

“You’re feeling warm fuzzies because the vamp says you smell like dinner?”

She shrugged.

He slouched back and shook his head, chuckling. “You’re all insane. The whole Summers clan.”

There was something in the statement, not the actual words but the easy way he said them, that drew her eyes to his face. His smirk was faint, the usual cockier-than-thou thing that she’d tried in the mirror once or twice but never quite got the hang of. The scarred eyebrow was angled just a little bit higher than its usual tilt.

But then she widened her focus and realized it was his whole body talking -- the fall of his fingers, the angle he made with the porch post.

She’d never seen him so relaxed before, so loose.

“Do I suit?” he asked, amusement in his eyes.

“Was it a good day?”

He blinked. “Well enough, I s’pose. Why?”

“You look... happy.”

“Yeah?” A lazy grin drifted across his mouth. “Might as well. Went to see the doc this evening, ‘cause you know, there’s this sodding unnatural growth in my stomach, s’had me a bit worried.” He folded his hands behind his head. “Turns out, I’m having a baby.”

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