TITLE: Fluttering
AUTHOR: Goddess Isa
EMAIL: goddessisa@aol.com
SUMMARY: A Buffy POV fic.
SPOILER: Um, not sure? :) Nothing recent, as I've stopped watching.
RATING: TV-14. I think?
DISTRIBUTION: http://planetslaythis.homestead.com, Fanfiction.net under Goddess Isa, anyone else, just send me the URL
DISCLAIMER: Joss Whedon owns the characters herein. Plech.
AUTHOR'S NOTES: I'm such an old-school loon lately, I keep watching S2 on tape because S4 on FX? That's just WRONG.


She'd been reticent about coming here.

Unlike Boston, and the Four Corners, and Niagra Falls, and even Graceland, all of which had come out of a completely extempore decision to get in the car and see where she wound up. There was never a destination in mind, never any thought given to packing for the future. She just threw a few things in a bag and high-tailed out of Sunnydale.

That was then.

This is now.

This, she'd wanted to do since she was a little girl. Her mother had a postcard of the Canyon, one of those cheesy ones you buy at an airport when you've gone somewhere really boring like San Antonio for a family reunion, and you wanna pretend you've gone somewhere interesting, so you buy this postcard. Aunt Arlene had done that one summer, writing "For REAL!" under the cheesy "Wish you were here!" printed messily across the postcard in yellow letters.

Buffy used to sleep with that postcard under her pillow. Her friend Megan Langly, had been to the Grand Canyon once. She'd told Buffy it was the prettiest place in all the land. The sun was shining and the wind was blowing and it was just perfect.

And it seemed like the best place to go for her final trip.

She was running out of time now. Time she'd wasted thinking about him.

Angel.

An extant passion for him still burned within her, regardless of what she wanted. She'd tried, tried hard to break away from him. She'd dated and even slept with people. She'd worked and studied and cut her hair to be like everyone else.

She was still his.

She would always be his.

And standing here, in the sunlight, staring out at the amazing view, she wished she'd brought her camera almost as much as she wished she hadn't come.

It was hopeless, really. Buffy had been telling herself there was no hope, no point in dreaming, in wishing. Happiness was not to be hers.

It hadn't been hers for as long as she could remember. The days when she wasn't a Slayer were marred with the sounds of her parents fighting, of Hank throwing things that shattered against her bedroom wall, of her parents fighting over everything from her middle name to the color of her first car that she never even got.

"Seems like a whole other life now," Buffy whispered. She sat down on the rocks and stared out into the distance. "Seems like it wasn't even me."

The Old Buffy carried all that hurt around. The New Buffy, the one who slept with soulless vampires and yelled at her best friends and closed herself off to the one person that mattered, she didn't know what it was like to go through a divorce. She didn't know what it was like to be That Girl.

The girl she did know how to be had a whole new set of problems.

Will I be a good mother?

How will I tell the father?

How will I tell my friends?

Each time she got into the car, she promised herself she'd go to some far-off place and take care of it. And she always wound up at a beautiful, classic vacation spot, staring at the sun setting, or rising, and knowing that she had to keep the baby.

But it wasn't until today, until she stood on the rocks at the most beautiful spot in the whole country, and stared at the sky that was clearer than any photograph could ever be, that she was sure.

She felt the gentle, sweet fluttering of her daughter's kick, and she knew.

She and Angelus were going to be parents. Now all she had to do was tell him.