snick_backup | FIC: Children's Tales

Title: Children's Tales
Words: 2000
Characters: Spike, Dawn, Spike-baby
Rated: PG
Warnings: mpreg

A/N: Sort of an Epilogue

AKA The Fic in Which We Learn Her Name

AKA Shameless Newborn Schmoop

You have been warned.

Beta'd by the always wonderful

penny_lane_42.

~~~~~

The sun hadn’t even risen yet when she woke him, pushing and kicking in quarters ever more cramped. For a moment he just lay there, faltering between the now-familiar choices of irritation or awe. Tonight exhaustion trumped them both; he’d finally admitted to himself that his not-quite-a-pregnancy was wearing him out.

But not his little girl, apparently. With a groan he sat up and began rubbing his stomach in slow circles, hoping to coax her still.

After ten minutes of that he had warm hands and a thoroughly awake abdominal parasite. “Bloody hell,” he muttered, and heaved to his feet. “Better appreciate just what I put up with for you.” That, too, was familiar -- a mumbled refrain that she ought to be able to recite back to him in a few years, if those in-utero learning theories were worth anything.

The door squeaked open and a bare foot slapped against the top step. “Spike?”

Spike snatched a blanket from the bed and held it in front of himself. “Nib--Dawn. What’re you doing up?”

Her pajamaed knees descended into view, and then her hands hanging at her sides, and finally her face, squinty with sleep. “I thought I heard you talking.”

Girl could be a vamp, for the range she had with those ears. “You want to turn around?”

“Huh?”

“M’not exactly presentable for polite company.”

A half-moment’s pause while she took in the blanket, and then she spun, flushing gray in the gloom.

He pulled on a pair of sweatpants. “All right, then.”

She turned back. “So why are you up?”

He ran a hand over his bare stomach. “She’s turned tumbleweed on me. Sometimes taking a stroll puts her to sleep.”

Dawn came over and flattened her hand against him, her eyes pulling wide when his little girl obliged by rolling under her palm. Her face lit in a wide, sleepy grin. She didn’t have an irritation option, it seemed, even after months of this.

After a moment, she added, “Do you want company?”

“You’re supposed to be asleep.”

“But I’m not. So...” She bounced on her toes and eyed him hopefully.

“Come on, then.” He sat on the bed with his back braced against the wall and she sprawled next to him, her chin resting on one arm. Her hand landed on his stomach again and rubbed gently. It occurred to him that pubescent young things probably oughtn’t to be coming down in their pajamas in the middle of the night to give him tummy rubs.

He wasn’t about to complain. Evil, after all.

“Maybe she needs a bedtime story,” Dawn said.

“How’s that?” He squinted one eye open. Whatever Dawn was doing for his little girl, she was putting him to sleep.

“You know, ‘Once upon a time’...” She narrowed her eyes. “You realize I’m, like, years and years too old for fairy tales, right?”

“Understood,” he said solemnly.

“Okay.” She settled her head against her outstretched arm. “So, once upon a time, there was a very small princess. Very small.” She gave his stomach a pat. “And one night she got stolen by some ogres. Especially one really big, ugly ogre with black hair that stuck up in the air, just like a Muppet or something.

“And they were going to eat the very small princess for lunch. So the lords and ladies said, ‘We have to find a hero to save the princess!’ And they put out posters all over the kingdom, offering a reward for anyone who could save her.”

“Hang on here. Isn’t there a vampire about somewhere?”

“A what?” She squinted up at him with a frown. “I told you, they’re ogres.”

“But didn’t this princess have a vampire looking out for her? Her dad, maybe. How’d these ogres get hold of her in the first place?”

“Oh.” She considered this a moment, brow creased with concentration. “Yeah, you’re right. But no one realized she was missing until morning, and the vampire was asleep.”

“So, what, he just pottered around the castle a bit after he found her gone? Had himself a pint of blood, caught the morning soaps?”

“No...”

“He’d go after her, and never mind the bloody sunshine.”

She heaved a sigh richly colored with teenage exasperation. “This isn’t about the vampire! It’s about Aurora the Ogre Killer.”

“That right,” he said carefully. Declaring she was adorable would have done neither of their dignities any good.

“Yeah. And, uh, ‘Aurora’ means ‘dawn’ in Greek or something,” she said, glancing up at Spike.

“Ah. Carry on, then.”

There followed tricks and derring-do and the rescue of two previous sets of would-be gallants, including several troubadours calling themselves Lance and Justin, respectively. Treasure found, princess retrieved, valor of one unlikely Ogre Killer trumpeted kingdom-wide.

“And what about the vamp?” he said, when the ‘happily ever after’ was reached.

“Oh. Yeah.” Now her eyes were drifting shut. “When they all got back to the castle, he wanted to eat the minstrels, and Aurora wouldn’t let him.”

He snorted. “Quite the dashing figure.”

“Well.” Her grin was distorted by another yawn. “Not everyone can be a hero.”

“Cheeky.”

“Did she stop turning over?”

“Did... oh.” He realized it’d been several minutes since the last cartwheel. “Bored her right to sleep, feels like.”

Dawn stuck her tongue out.

~*~*~

Spike awoke to stirring from the small, warm weight cradled against his chest. Keeping tight hold on her – on his daughter, that’s what she was, and he was certain he’d never tire of saying the words over in his head – he struggled upright from his pillow on the sofa, wincing as the slashes in his belly twinged. He’d be comfortable trudging the stairs in a day or two, he hoped, and then he and Cora would retire to their basement abode, but until then it was this: makeshift bed on the same level as the stove.

She made an unhappy noise.

“Hungry, are you?” he murmured. “Or...” he sniffed cautiously. Yeah, likely it was the other thing that’d woken her. Came with the feeding and the living and all, but it didn’t mean he had to like it. “Right, then.”

He lowered her to the blanket covering the coffee table. He’d done this before, first at the clinic, then under Joyce’s careful eye, and finally with no audience but Dawn and, distantly, Buffy, despite her avowed disinterest in nappy-changing. Now he wiped his girl clean and wrapped her new in one of these modern jobbies that had it all over the old cloth-and-pin method, landfills be damned.

Nestling her against himself again, he shuffled to the kitchen, where he laid her on the counter and boxed her in just long enough to wash his hands - another of those modern human habits he finally had to pick up, according to Joyce. Then, Cora cradled in one arm, he flicked a burner on and put a pot of water to heat.

She mewed, and he brushed her downy-soft head with his fingers. “Grub’s coming,” he murmured. “Shhh.”

When the water was heated he shifted the pot and set the bottle of formula in it – pre-mixed, thanks be to Dawn. How’d he have done this alone at the crypt or some other dingy hole, fending for himself and Cora both while he was still full of stitches? It didn’t bear thinking on.

When the bottle was warm but not hot, he took it and daughter back to the living room and settled cautiously into the armchair. He stroked her cheek and she turned her head towards the pressure, her tiny pink mouth pursing around the nipple of the bottle.

“Both of us on a liquid diet,” he said. “Least ‘til I heal up a bit more. ‘Course yours’d be the fresh stuff, circumstances being a bit less buggered than they are. Not that...” Not that she’d have been around at all had circumstances been even slightly less askew.

He considered this while she sucked at the bottle, her blue eyes half-lidded under fair thin brows. A redhead, Willow predicted, likely pale and solid and nimble-fingered. The Initiative had been thorough in their selection of traits, their Slayer soldiers afforded nature’s every advantage. Height, even. Xander was already crowing over the chance she might grow taller than Spike.

She squirmed away from the bottle. He set it down, propped her against his shoulder, and patted at her back. This, too, was no longer terrifying but not yet routine: wondrous delicious novelty. She was warmer under his hand than he’d have thought, even accounting for the heat smoldering so long in his belly, and he’d never considered what she might smell of until now suddenly his nose was full of her all the time, sleepy and living and very faintly like sour milk.

After a few moments he settled her at his chest again. She fussed, a small discontented cry.

“S’all right, love. You’ve got everything you want.” He tucked a loose blanket corner in. “Nothing to be making noise about.” This bit of novelty he could have done without, this niggle of terror every time she cried.

She fussed again.

“Shhh. Wakeful little thing, aren’t you? Were before you were born, too. Kept me up nights. What, you want another story from your Auntie Dawn?” For so she now insisted on being called, shocking him with the relief of knowing that his little girl had more family than just him. “Always settled you down before. Is that what you’re waiting for? Mm?” He recalled a few bedtime stories from his day, bloody and damning and bleak; no wonder the populace turned to that prat Stoker for light entertainment.

“This’ll be an original composition,” he told her, shifting her in his arms as he thought. “Right. Once there was a bloke, attractive, strong as a hero but with more brains than heroes are prone to. Been around a while, too – not alive, properly speaking, but near enough. Liked feeding and fighting and... well, other things beginning with ‘f’ that you’re too young to hear about. Thought himself well set-up, he did.

“Then one day his lady-love left him and these meddling sorcerers cursed him up so he couldn’t kill much or eat much either – ‘least, not the things he liked best. Hadn’t any mates at all except a few wankers he couldn’t stand. And...” He paused, listening to the sleeping house. There was no one listening but her, and from the evenness of her breath even that was in question. “And he was right miserable,” Spike said softly.

“Then the sorcerers did something more.” She whimpered sleepily, and he pulled her blanket snug around her. “They cut out his heart and made it into a girl, and they handed it to him like it was a present.” He paused. It took him a moment to find his breath again.

Finally, he whispered, “So he took her home and he named her Cora. It comes from the Latin for heart. Cora Lucille. Heart and light.” Never mind Dawn’s rot about old-fashioned; he was old-fashioned, come to that. And even he’d had the sense not to name her Fulgencia.

“And so long as she lived, he did, too. Mystical transference, you know. Sympathetic magic.” He brushed his finger against one thin curl. She was asleep for good now, her transparent lashes lying against her cheeks. He marveled at her nose, still so flat and red.

There was more to be told after that, how the funny thing about life versus mere existence was the implication of an ending and how he’d somehow bartered his immortality away to keep her. It was what came of making one’s heart a mortal thing.

Instead he let his eyes fall shut; it’d be this all over again in another two hours.

Besides, the end of the tale was a long time coming yet.

Finis