FIC: Seraph (24/26)
Nov. 30th, 2009 09:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snick_backupStory begins here. All parts may be found here.
Beautified by my fabulous betas,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
hello_spikey, phoenixofborg, and penny_lane_42. Thank you, ladies!
A/N: Almost done! I expect to post the last two chapters within the next couple of weeks. Hooray! *\o/*
~~~~~
Now it was just a matter of time and gestation.
A long consult was had with Dr. Einjarl, who huffed through his tusks and whiskers all the while. A date was scheduled for the surgery, during which Spike was going to give birth, more or less, and in all the oddities that was possibly even more boggling than the fact that there’d be a baby when it was over. Discussions were had about formula and feeding, and the question was raised -- and, to Spike’s relief, immediately laid to rest -- of whether the Initiative had equipped him for that, too. They had not, so bottles it would be.
Meanwhile, he swore vengeance on the ghost of Isaac Newton for those two inexorable facts of physics: gravity and inertia. It felt as though he were fighting them at every turn.
“I can’t move properly,” he complained to Joyce. “The strength I’ve still got, but speed, balance, reflexes -- they’re all buggered to blazes.” She gave him the smile of sympathetic superiority reserved for those who’ve been through it all before and managed very well, thank you.
He waddled. He, Spike, who’d spent over a century perfecting the swagger, waddled.
Now when Dawn came down to the basement for improvised darts, they switched off, she with her special walnut-bladed knife in her foam target, he with the steel blades on wood. Dawn won as often as not. If his center of gravity would just quit shifting with every ounce gained, Spike’s aim might have stood a chance; as it was, he found himself consistently over- or under-compensating.
They were at it one day, a week and a half before the day. Two hundred and forty-six hours. He lobbed a knife off in the general direction of the target, graceless but with enough force to make a satisfying thump in the wood anyway.
“It’s like watermelon ballet,” Dawn said suddenly.
“What is?” He flicked the other knife.
“You.” She grinned at him, preening with mischief.
In the half-second of deciding whether to grin back or snarl at her, it came to him: The melons shall dance and the turnips shall sing opera.
Dru.
He huffed a disbelieving laugh. Of course she’d known.
Hadn’t seen fit to tell him in any words he might understand, but she’d seen him like this -- what had she made of it, him so heavy and sow-bellied? -- and heard Dawn’s cheek. Dared he wonder what the bit with the turnips was about?
He slumped on the futon bed as it all rolled over him, the awkwardness and the aches and every single indignity, and the gasps of laughter that followed came accompanied with tears. If some of those tears were less for the comedy of it all than for Dru and the buggered ridiculous wondrous future she’d sent him off to, well, it seemed fitting enough.
“Spike?” Dawn sat on the bed next to him, blue eyes huge with earnestness. She picked at his blanket for a minute. “You’re still sexy,” she blurted.
He twisted to stare at her and regard the sudden flush. “What’s that?”
She hunched up, arms folded awkwardly. “That’s what people worry about when they’re pregnant, right? That they’re not sexy anymore? And then their boyfriend -- or girlfriend, I guess -- laughs and gives them a big sappy hug and tells them of course they are.” She stared intently at the floor. “But you don’t have anyone to tell you that. So.” Deep breath. “Still sexy.”
Not that this wasn’t amusing, but he’d obviously missed the train of thought. He thought back… oh. “This about the watermelon thing?”
Her apologetic grimace was answer enough. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.” Then Dawn flung herself in his arms, apparently to give him the aforementioned big sappy hug.
“So,” he said into her hair, “Is this a proposition?”
A snort. “Whatever. You’re like my older brother.”
Since she wasn’t looking at him, she couldn’t see his face. Or his smirk. “You were just saying it, then. Didn’t really mean it.”
She pushed away and looked determined to reassure him without giving him any more ideas. When she saw the smirk, she slapped at his arm. “My pregnant older brother.”
“Ow! Careful, I’m fragile.”
*~*~*
An hour later, he was occupying his time by bleeding on the kitchen linoleum. “I don’t know why it won’t close,” he growled to Buffy, who was wrapping his hand with a gauze bandage after he’d bled through the Band-aid that he shouldn’t have needed.
“But shouldn’t it...clot, or something?” she asked.
“Yes, Slayer, it should. But it’s not.”
“It’s not even a big cut!” said Dawn. “It’s teeny-tiny.” And it was: just a quarter-inch slice across his palm from edge of the shelf he’d stumbled against, putting the knives away.
Buffy finished taping the cloth and said, “I think you should go to the clinic.”
“It’s nothing,” he said. “Hardly even a paper cut.”
“But it’s a really drippy paper cut!” said Dawn. “And Dr. Stacey said...”
“Fine.” He jerked his hand away from Buffy. “And seeing as your mum’s run off with the car for the next three days, you were thinking to get there how?”
After some wrangling with the slurred male voice on the Harris line, they finally got Xander, who reported that yes, he could play Chauffeur of the Dead for the evening. Again.
Spike had called ahead, and gotten lucky -- Stacey had a spot open, which saved explaining the whole sordid fiasco to someone new. After a few minutes of Xander squirming in his chair and whispering too loudly about nothing, Stacey called Spike in. Buffy and Dawn followed, leaving Xander casting furtive glances over a magazine at the reception area’s other, less human inhabitants.
After hefting himself up on the exam table -- two hundred and forty-three hours -- Spike thrust his bandaged hand at Stacey. “I can’t stop bleeding.”
She cut the now-damp bandage away and examined the cut, still welling crimson. She made him tell over again exactly how he’d gotten the cut. She asked about magic, but Buffy assured the shelving was 100% non-mystical Ace Hardware, on sale. After cleaning the wound, Stacey sealed it shut with medical glue. Then she swiveled and tapped on a laptop for a bit.
Finally she turned back. “I can’t be sure, but I think there’s some...friction between your mystical and natural physiology.”
“‘Friction,’” Spike said. “That’s highly technical, right there.”
“I can’t be any more specific; I’d need to do some fairly invasive tests to find the exact cause. But vampires aren’t whole creatures to begin with. You’re human and demon, natural and supernatural stitched together with some old-fashioned blood magic.”
“Half-breeds,” Spike suggested.
She winced, and he recalled that that term likely struck rather closer to home for her. “If you like. The point is, I think your hosting apparatus is starting to burst those ritualized seams. I’d guess it has something to do with how it’s redirecting the blood you ingest. Maybe the filtered blood lacks some mystical nutrient, or maybe your metabolic system is finally reacting to all this foreign matter you have in you. I’m not really surprised. I think the fatigue and the tremors you talked about are probably symptoms, too.”
“So I’m falling apart,” Spike said carefully, and wondered how the words could sound so steady. Vulnerability to sunshine and toothpicks was one thing, but this disintegration from within? “Today I’m not healing, and tomorrow I’ve got bits dropping off.”
“Possibly,” she said. “But not if we stop things in time. I suspect your biomystical system will repair itself once we extract the hosting apparatus and contents.”
It took longer to process that than it should. “You mean, get her out.”
“I do,” she said. “Ten days early isn’t considered premature. It’s not even terribly unusual. She should be fine.”
A deep breath; a glance to Dawn, who was wide-eyed with blooming delight, and then to Buffy -- and when had he started looking to Buffy for reassurance?
“When?”
“As soon as we can manage it. Give me a few minutes to call around -- I’ll see where Dr. Einjarl is on his circuit. If he’s not available in the next day or two I’ll send you into L.A.”
She left, and the three looked at each other.
“So, you’re going to have her soon?” said Dawn. “Like, tomorrow?”
“I guess so,” he said. This was good news and not bad, and he was having as much trouble getting his breath now as before. He gripped the edges of the exam table and began recalculating the hours.
Stacey strode in a few minutes later. “Dr. Einjarl will be at the Oak Hollow clinic tomorrow, and I’ve scheduled you for a post-sunset surgical appointment. They have a few beds, so you’ll be able to spend the day and they can keep an eye on your healing, in case it doesn’t improve right away after everything is removed. They’ll also handle the birth certificate and all the usual documentation.”
“So she’ll be legal and everything?” Buffy said. “A U.S. citizen?”
“The papers are legal papers,” Stacey said. “I wouldn’t look too closely at the ruling that allows the clinics to issue them. But yes, legal and everything.”
“Figures,” said Spike. “Go to all this trouble having a baby, and she winds up a Yank.”
~*~*~
When they got home, there were calls to be made. It turned out the witches wanted to come, over Spike’s protests, and of course Buffy and Dawn were, too, which necessitated a discussion of whether another car was needed or if all those tiny females could squeeze in the back seat of Xander’s rattletrap. By the time it was done Spike still wasn’t sure what the conclusion had been. Then a call to Joyce, during which she admonished and scolded -- for his gall at having a baby without her -- and reassured.
Buffy made a meticulous inspection of his hand. The glue Stacey had slathered it with seemed to be holding.
Group project. That was him.
But finally the what-abouts and what-ifs slowed to a trickle. “I’m going to bed,” he said. Dawn’s mouth cracked open. “Alone,” he added, too knackered/edgy/everything to care about softening the words. She frowned, but Buffy gave her a Significant Look and she quieted.
He shut the basement door and stumped down the stairs. By the glow of the nightlight he passed a last glance over the crib, at the tidy stack of sleepers in their shelf, at the diapers Joyce had helped him choose. Then he stripped down to a fresh pair of sweatpants and sat unsteadily on the mattress.
He breathed slowly, deeply, taking in the faux-lemon of Joyce’s all-purpose cleaner and, beneath it, the rich taste of earth on the air, dulled though it was by the newly installed humidifier. The part of him that had never quite escaped the grave was soothed by that fragrance of stone and soil. He was glad his girl would grow up knowing it.
He slid his hands over the broad, impossible swell of his belly. Uncomfortable, yes. Bloody inconvenient. Give him six months, and he’d surely be repulsed by this memory of himself, swollen and misshapen and stripped of the comfortable masculine certainty that such a thing could never, ever happen to him. But for one more night -- twenty-two hours -- this was where his little girl was, and much as he wanted to see her he couldn’t begrudge them both these last few quiet moments before the world turned over.
The door above creaked. Footsteps descended, slow, irregular. Shoes appeared: not Dawn’s sneakers, but a pair of Buffy’s heeled leather slaying boots. Her head ducked around the frame and her gaze found him in the semi-dark. “You’re awake,” she said softly. She trotted down the rest of the stairs and came to stand before him, arms crossed awkwardly. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“No?”
She didn’t appear certain that she’d meant to come at all. “I was about to go patrol. I came to, um, see if you needed anything.”
He gave that a long moment’s thought, and then planted his hands behind him and said, “I don’t suppose I do.”
A pause, while intently regarding a possible scuff on her shoe. Then, facing him, “This is never going to stop being weird, is it?”
“‘This’?” His girl was waking up; he could feel her starting to squirm.
“You, with a baby, in my house.”
For a bare instant he let in the whole view at once: him under the Slayer’s roof raising up a human chit of a thing he’d carried himself. “Doesn’t seem likely, does it? Expect you might quit noticing after a while.”
“I guess.”
“And you’ll be back at university any week now, yeah?” He braced against a half-hearted kick to his spine.
“Well, but I have to come back and visit the Spike-baby, don’t I?” She reached out and gave his stomach a furtive pat.
“Wouldn’t have figured you for the squalling infant type.”
She considered. “I’m not, really. But I feel sort of responsible for this one. Especially if she’s a--”
“No,” he said sharply. “She’s human, and that’s all she is.”
“But if--”
“No.” He stared her down until her gaze dropped. She licked her lips, her weight shifting to turn, and he said, “Do you want to feel her?”
She stared, a Slayer caught in the headlights. “Not really,” she muttered.
“S’not like you haven’t touched us before -- what was that bit about saving her from the dorkiness?”
“That was different,” Buffy said.
He arched an eyebrow.
“I wasn’t thinking about it then.”
He swallowed a laugh at this girl who’d faced down any number of the world’s more revolting demons and yet was spooked by him. By this. “I’ve seen your fingers twitching at your sides when you’re trying not to look at me.”
“They do not twitch!” She hid them behind her. “No twitchiness here.”
“Give us your hand,” he said, offering his. When she still hesitated, he added, “ S’almost your last chance, you know.”
She stared a moment more, and then she abruptly took the one step between them, settled next to him on the bed, and held her hand out, hovering uncertainly just above his stomach. He pressed it flat against himself and heard the sharp intake of her breath -- just from the heat of him, he supposed, since his girl had chosen that moment to fall still.
“You know,” Buffy said, eyeing his stomach critically with just a hint of a smirk at the corner of her mouth, “You felt way different when we were engaged. ”
He stiffened against the reminder of those few mawkish, treacherous hours he’d put determinedly behind him.
“Oh,” she said, and a startled giggle snuck out.
“What?” he snapped.
“I was going to marry you, and you were already pregnant with some other woman’s kid.” A string of giggles burst from her. “I didn’t...” Snort. “I didn’t even ask if there’d been anyone else.”
Relaxing, he started to grin. “Well, you know. Harm.”
“Harmony!” That seemed to make it worse. “Do you think she’d make an honest vampire of you, if you told her?”
“Suppose she might.” Straightening, he said gravely, “Didn’t you know? It happens this way sometimes, with vampires.”
“Oh, God.” She had a joyous sort of beauty when she laughed like this, with abandon. He chuckled with her until the breathless mirth fell silent.
It was then that Buffy apparently noticed where her hand was still lying. She tensed to pull away, and it came: a drowsy shove against her palm. “Oh,” she breathed. “Hey, kid,” she said, stroking his skin with her thumb.
Then came that deep, full movement that felt like a boulder rolling over inside him. Buffy glanced up, wide-eyed. “Does she do that a lot?”
“Less now than she used to. Not much maneuvering room in there anymore.”
She withdrew and planted her hands on the edge of the bed. “And the weirdness just doesn’t stop.”
He paused for one of those now-necessary breaths. “Slayer?” She glanced up, and for one single moment he loosened his white-knuckled grip of certainty. “Slayer, if she is...”
She looked him in the eye, solemn. “We’ll deal.”
“Right.” He sighed, looking down at the mound that was his little girl. No one would bother her as long as he had her inside. But once she was out...
He felt a touch: Buffy’s hand, warm against his arm. “We’ll figure it out. Okay?”
This time he nodded. “Okay.”
next part
Beautified by my fabulous betas,
hello_spikey, phoenixofborg, and penny_lane_42. Thank you, ladies!A/N: Almost done! I expect to post the last two chapters within the next couple of weeks. Hooray! *\o/*
~~~~~
Now it was just a matter of time and gestation.
A long consult was had with Dr. Einjarl, who huffed through his tusks and whiskers all the while. A date was scheduled for the surgery, during which Spike was going to give birth, more or less, and in all the oddities that was possibly even more boggling than the fact that there’d be a baby when it was over. Discussions were had about formula and feeding, and the question was raised -- and, to Spike’s relief, immediately laid to rest -- of whether the Initiative had equipped him for that, too. They had not, so bottles it would be.
Meanwhile, he swore vengeance on the ghost of Isaac Newton for those two inexorable facts of physics: gravity and inertia. It felt as though he were fighting them at every turn.
“I can’t move properly,” he complained to Joyce. “The strength I’ve still got, but speed, balance, reflexes -- they’re all buggered to blazes.” She gave him the smile of sympathetic superiority reserved for those who’ve been through it all before and managed very well, thank you.
He waddled. He, Spike, who’d spent over a century perfecting the swagger, waddled.
Now when Dawn came down to the basement for improvised darts, they switched off, she with her special walnut-bladed knife in her foam target, he with the steel blades on wood. Dawn won as often as not. If his center of gravity would just quit shifting with every ounce gained, Spike’s aim might have stood a chance; as it was, he found himself consistently over- or under-compensating.
They were at it one day, a week and a half before the day. Two hundred and forty-six hours. He lobbed a knife off in the general direction of the target, graceless but with enough force to make a satisfying thump in the wood anyway.
“It’s like watermelon ballet,” Dawn said suddenly.
“What is?” He flicked the other knife.
“You.” She grinned at him, preening with mischief.
In the half-second of deciding whether to grin back or snarl at her, it came to him: The melons shall dance and the turnips shall sing opera.
Dru.
He huffed a disbelieving laugh. Of course she’d known.
Hadn’t seen fit to tell him in any words he might understand, but she’d seen him like this -- what had she made of it, him so heavy and sow-bellied? -- and heard Dawn’s cheek. Dared he wonder what the bit with the turnips was about?
He slumped on the futon bed as it all rolled over him, the awkwardness and the aches and every single indignity, and the gasps of laughter that followed came accompanied with tears. If some of those tears were less for the comedy of it all than for Dru and the buggered ridiculous wondrous future she’d sent him off to, well, it seemed fitting enough.
“Spike?” Dawn sat on the bed next to him, blue eyes huge with earnestness. She picked at his blanket for a minute. “You’re still sexy,” she blurted.
He twisted to stare at her and regard the sudden flush. “What’s that?”
She hunched up, arms folded awkwardly. “That’s what people worry about when they’re pregnant, right? That they’re not sexy anymore? And then their boyfriend -- or girlfriend, I guess -- laughs and gives them a big sappy hug and tells them of course they are.” She stared intently at the floor. “But you don’t have anyone to tell you that. So.” Deep breath. “Still sexy.”
Not that this wasn’t amusing, but he’d obviously missed the train of thought. He thought back… oh. “This about the watermelon thing?”
Her apologetic grimace was answer enough. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.” Then Dawn flung herself in his arms, apparently to give him the aforementioned big sappy hug.
“So,” he said into her hair, “Is this a proposition?”
A snort. “Whatever. You’re like my older brother.”
Since she wasn’t looking at him, she couldn’t see his face. Or his smirk. “You were just saying it, then. Didn’t really mean it.”
She pushed away and looked determined to reassure him without giving him any more ideas. When she saw the smirk, she slapped at his arm. “My pregnant older brother.”
“Ow! Careful, I’m fragile.”
An hour later, he was occupying his time by bleeding on the kitchen linoleum. “I don’t know why it won’t close,” he growled to Buffy, who was wrapping his hand with a gauze bandage after he’d bled through the Band-aid that he shouldn’t have needed.
“But shouldn’t it...clot, or something?” she asked.
“Yes, Slayer, it should. But it’s not.”
“It’s not even a big cut!” said Dawn. “It’s teeny-tiny.” And it was: just a quarter-inch slice across his palm from edge of the shelf he’d stumbled against, putting the knives away.
Buffy finished taping the cloth and said, “I think you should go to the clinic.”
“It’s nothing,” he said. “Hardly even a paper cut.”
“But it’s a really drippy paper cut!” said Dawn. “And Dr. Stacey said...”
“Fine.” He jerked his hand away from Buffy. “And seeing as your mum’s run off with the car for the next three days, you were thinking to get there how?”
After some wrangling with the slurred male voice on the Harris line, they finally got Xander, who reported that yes, he could play Chauffeur of the Dead for the evening. Again.
Spike had called ahead, and gotten lucky -- Stacey had a spot open, which saved explaining the whole sordid fiasco to someone new. After a few minutes of Xander squirming in his chair and whispering too loudly about nothing, Stacey called Spike in. Buffy and Dawn followed, leaving Xander casting furtive glances over a magazine at the reception area’s other, less human inhabitants.
After hefting himself up on the exam table -- two hundred and forty-three hours -- Spike thrust his bandaged hand at Stacey. “I can’t stop bleeding.”
She cut the now-damp bandage away and examined the cut, still welling crimson. She made him tell over again exactly how he’d gotten the cut. She asked about magic, but Buffy assured the shelving was 100% non-mystical Ace Hardware, on sale. After cleaning the wound, Stacey sealed it shut with medical glue. Then she swiveled and tapped on a laptop for a bit.
Finally she turned back. “I can’t be sure, but I think there’s some...friction between your mystical and natural physiology.”
“‘Friction,’” Spike said. “That’s highly technical, right there.”
“I can’t be any more specific; I’d need to do some fairly invasive tests to find the exact cause. But vampires aren’t whole creatures to begin with. You’re human and demon, natural and supernatural stitched together with some old-fashioned blood magic.”
“Half-breeds,” Spike suggested.
She winced, and he recalled that that term likely struck rather closer to home for her. “If you like. The point is, I think your hosting apparatus is starting to burst those ritualized seams. I’d guess it has something to do with how it’s redirecting the blood you ingest. Maybe the filtered blood lacks some mystical nutrient, or maybe your metabolic system is finally reacting to all this foreign matter you have in you. I’m not really surprised. I think the fatigue and the tremors you talked about are probably symptoms, too.”
“So I’m falling apart,” Spike said carefully, and wondered how the words could sound so steady. Vulnerability to sunshine and toothpicks was one thing, but this disintegration from within? “Today I’m not healing, and tomorrow I’ve got bits dropping off.”
“Possibly,” she said. “But not if we stop things in time. I suspect your biomystical system will repair itself once we extract the hosting apparatus and contents.”
It took longer to process that than it should. “You mean, get her out.”
“I do,” she said. “Ten days early isn’t considered premature. It’s not even terribly unusual. She should be fine.”
A deep breath; a glance to Dawn, who was wide-eyed with blooming delight, and then to Buffy -- and when had he started looking to Buffy for reassurance?
“When?”
“As soon as we can manage it. Give me a few minutes to call around -- I’ll see where Dr. Einjarl is on his circuit. If he’s not available in the next day or two I’ll send you into L.A.”
She left, and the three looked at each other.
“So, you’re going to have her soon?” said Dawn. “Like, tomorrow?”
“I guess so,” he said. This was good news and not bad, and he was having as much trouble getting his breath now as before. He gripped the edges of the exam table and began recalculating the hours.
Stacey strode in a few minutes later. “Dr. Einjarl will be at the Oak Hollow clinic tomorrow, and I’ve scheduled you for a post-sunset surgical appointment. They have a few beds, so you’ll be able to spend the day and they can keep an eye on your healing, in case it doesn’t improve right away after everything is removed. They’ll also handle the birth certificate and all the usual documentation.”
“So she’ll be legal and everything?” Buffy said. “A U.S. citizen?”
“The papers are legal papers,” Stacey said. “I wouldn’t look too closely at the ruling that allows the clinics to issue them. But yes, legal and everything.”
“Figures,” said Spike. “Go to all this trouble having a baby, and she winds up a Yank.”
When they got home, there were calls to be made. It turned out the witches wanted to come, over Spike’s protests, and of course Buffy and Dawn were, too, which necessitated a discussion of whether another car was needed or if all those tiny females could squeeze in the back seat of Xander’s rattletrap. By the time it was done Spike still wasn’t sure what the conclusion had been. Then a call to Joyce, during which she admonished and scolded -- for his gall at having a baby without her -- and reassured.
Buffy made a meticulous inspection of his hand. The glue Stacey had slathered it with seemed to be holding.
Group project. That was him.
But finally the what-abouts and what-ifs slowed to a trickle. “I’m going to bed,” he said. Dawn’s mouth cracked open. “Alone,” he added, too knackered/edgy/everything to care about softening the words. She frowned, but Buffy gave her a Significant Look and she quieted.
He shut the basement door and stumped down the stairs. By the glow of the nightlight he passed a last glance over the crib, at the tidy stack of sleepers in their shelf, at the diapers Joyce had helped him choose. Then he stripped down to a fresh pair of sweatpants and sat unsteadily on the mattress.
He breathed slowly, deeply, taking in the faux-lemon of Joyce’s all-purpose cleaner and, beneath it, the rich taste of earth on the air, dulled though it was by the newly installed humidifier. The part of him that had never quite escaped the grave was soothed by that fragrance of stone and soil. He was glad his girl would grow up knowing it.
He slid his hands over the broad, impossible swell of his belly. Uncomfortable, yes. Bloody inconvenient. Give him six months, and he’d surely be repulsed by this memory of himself, swollen and misshapen and stripped of the comfortable masculine certainty that such a thing could never, ever happen to him. But for one more night -- twenty-two hours -- this was where his little girl was, and much as he wanted to see her he couldn’t begrudge them both these last few quiet moments before the world turned over.
The door above creaked. Footsteps descended, slow, irregular. Shoes appeared: not Dawn’s sneakers, but a pair of Buffy’s heeled leather slaying boots. Her head ducked around the frame and her gaze found him in the semi-dark. “You’re awake,” she said softly. She trotted down the rest of the stairs and came to stand before him, arms crossed awkwardly. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“No?”
She didn’t appear certain that she’d meant to come at all. “I was about to go patrol. I came to, um, see if you needed anything.”
He gave that a long moment’s thought, and then planted his hands behind him and said, “I don’t suppose I do.”
A pause, while intently regarding a possible scuff on her shoe. Then, facing him, “This is never going to stop being weird, is it?”
“‘This’?” His girl was waking up; he could feel her starting to squirm.
“You, with a baby, in my house.”
For a bare instant he let in the whole view at once: him under the Slayer’s roof raising up a human chit of a thing he’d carried himself. “Doesn’t seem likely, does it? Expect you might quit noticing after a while.”
“I guess.”
“And you’ll be back at university any week now, yeah?” He braced against a half-hearted kick to his spine.
“Well, but I have to come back and visit the Spike-baby, don’t I?” She reached out and gave his stomach a furtive pat.
“Wouldn’t have figured you for the squalling infant type.”
She considered. “I’m not, really. But I feel sort of responsible for this one. Especially if she’s a--”
“No,” he said sharply. “She’s human, and that’s all she is.”
“But if--”
“No.” He stared her down until her gaze dropped. She licked her lips, her weight shifting to turn, and he said, “Do you want to feel her?”
She stared, a Slayer caught in the headlights. “Not really,” she muttered.
“S’not like you haven’t touched us before -- what was that bit about saving her from the dorkiness?”
“That was different,” Buffy said.
He arched an eyebrow.
“I wasn’t thinking about it then.”
He swallowed a laugh at this girl who’d faced down any number of the world’s more revolting demons and yet was spooked by him. By this. “I’ve seen your fingers twitching at your sides when you’re trying not to look at me.”
“They do not twitch!” She hid them behind her. “No twitchiness here.”
“Give us your hand,” he said, offering his. When she still hesitated, he added, “ S’almost your last chance, you know.”
She stared a moment more, and then she abruptly took the one step between them, settled next to him on the bed, and held her hand out, hovering uncertainly just above his stomach. He pressed it flat against himself and heard the sharp intake of her breath -- just from the heat of him, he supposed, since his girl had chosen that moment to fall still.
“You know,” Buffy said, eyeing his stomach critically with just a hint of a smirk at the corner of her mouth, “You felt way different when we were engaged. ”
He stiffened against the reminder of those few mawkish, treacherous hours he’d put determinedly behind him.
“Oh,” she said, and a startled giggle snuck out.
“What?” he snapped.
“I was going to marry you, and you were already pregnant with some other woman’s kid.” A string of giggles burst from her. “I didn’t...” Snort. “I didn’t even ask if there’d been anyone else.”
Relaxing, he started to grin. “Well, you know. Harm.”
“Harmony!” That seemed to make it worse. “Do you think she’d make an honest vampire of you, if you told her?”
“Suppose she might.” Straightening, he said gravely, “Didn’t you know? It happens this way sometimes, with vampires.”
“Oh, God.” She had a joyous sort of beauty when she laughed like this, with abandon. He chuckled with her until the breathless mirth fell silent.
It was then that Buffy apparently noticed where her hand was still lying. She tensed to pull away, and it came: a drowsy shove against her palm. “Oh,” she breathed. “Hey, kid,” she said, stroking his skin with her thumb.
Then came that deep, full movement that felt like a boulder rolling over inside him. Buffy glanced up, wide-eyed. “Does she do that a lot?”
“Less now than she used to. Not much maneuvering room in there anymore.”
She withdrew and planted her hands on the edge of the bed. “And the weirdness just doesn’t stop.”
He paused for one of those now-necessary breaths. “Slayer?” She glanced up, and for one single moment he loosened his white-knuckled grip of certainty. “Slayer, if she is...”
She looked him in the eye, solemn. “We’ll deal.”
“Right.” He sighed, looking down at the mound that was his little girl. No one would bother her as long as he had her inside. But once she was out...
He felt a touch: Buffy’s hand, warm against his arm. “We’ll figure it out. Okay?”
This time he nodded. “Okay.”
next part
