"I beseech access to the knowing ones." He was as disoriented as the last two times he had been here. He blinked against the brightness of the light until the beings in front of him came into focus.

He tossed the ornate silver picture frame to the female. "Interesting," she said while examining the gift. "But the past can never be captured." The frame vanished.

"Why are you wasting our time, warrior?" The male made it clear that he had no patience for Angel.

"The slayer is pregnant."

"The petty problems of mortals are not our concern." Angel could see the slight tension in the male oracle, the way his sister had widened her eyes a tiny bit. They hadn't known that Buffy was pregnant. Did that mean the pregnancy had nothing to do with the erased day?

"Is the child mine?"

"The child is no one's possession."

"That's not what I meant," he glared at the male oracle. "Am I the father?"

"Would you have given that appellation to your own parent?" The woman seemed to be truly curious about that.

"Fine. I get that you're not going to give me a straight answer. At least tell me if the baby is going to be all right."

"Do you mean will this child only know happiness? That is not possible for anyone, lower being."

What did he mean? Angel rubbed his hand through his hair, trying not to become agitated. "I mean, does the child have a destiny?" Even as he asked, he wondered what answer he was hoping for.

"Every one has a destiny. We are not fortune tellers." Angel took a step toward the male, anger beginning to win out over patience.

"Its existence is of no consequence to us." Angel stopped, more confused than ever. It seemed more and more likely this baby had nothing to with him. Which was a hell of a coincidence. Plus he didn't completely trust these beings to give him a truthful answer.

"The child needs to be raised with love. Everything else will come from that." She was looking at him with sympathy in her eyes.

"But does that mean---" He found himself on his ass, outside of the abandoned post office before he had time to complete his sentence. "Well, that was a whole lot of help."

MWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWM

"Wes?" Angel frowned as Wes took no notice, engrossed in some antiquated text. "Wes?" A little louder this time, but it made no difference. He bent down, hissed "Wes" in the man's ear and watched, satisfied as Wesley jumped out of his seat.

"Angel!" The man's hands danced around, trying desperately to look self-assured. "I've been researching that list of demons you gave me. None of them can affect the human body in any way."

Angel nodded. He hadn't thought so, but had wanted to double-check the possibility. "I have a question for you. Theoretical. It's just something happened and got me wondering and." Angel looked up, a bit embarrassed that he was so obviously stalling. "Do you think it's possible that if time somehow folded in on itself, that one thing wouldn't have changed?"

Wes leaned forward, eyes bright. "You mean erasing time? As if an hour or a day or a week hadn't occurred?"

"Exactly."

"That would be an extraordinary power, " he murmured. He frowned, taping the table while he thought out loud. "If time is turned back for everyone, how could anyone tell? And wouldn't the future play out exactly the same?"

"Maybe someone would know? And that way things wouldn't be the same?"

Wesley nodded in agreement, "Of course. The demon would keep his memories thereby preventing his demise by avoiding the initial fight. Clever."

"Yeah, very clever." Angel tried to keep his impatience at bay. "Do you think it would be possible that one thing from the future wouldn't change?"

"You mean if you were wearing that shirt in the original future and when the future was erased, you would still somehow be wearing it."

"Aside from all my shirts being pretty much the same, yeah, that."

"The power required to change time like this is almost unimaginable. I don't know of any demon capable of something like that. And to also be able to manipulate who and what was affected is, I think, beyond the power of any demon present on earth." Wes looked at Angel, curiosity evident in his eyes. "What brought this on, exactly?"

"I got wind of something. Just talk, I guess."

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"You were just in Sunnydale," Cordelia hissed. "On a scale of 1 to 10, this is having a giant zit on the day of an audition bad."

Angel calmly reached around her and put a few extra stakes into his overnight bag. "I don't have a choice. I have to go for a couple of days."

She stilled and looked closely at him. "There's something wrong with Buffy?" a small bit of concern leaking into her voice.

"Yes. No. She's pregnant," he blurted.

"You're running down to Sunnydale because little miss perfect got herself knocked up?" Cordelia was completely flabbergasted. "Let the dad to be deal with it."

"She doesn't know who the father is." Off of Cordelia's look, he glared and said, "That's not what I meant. She wasn't with anyone, so she thinks it was some kind of hellmouth thing at work."

"So now Buffy is secretly the virgin Mary slayer in disguise?" She gave an undignified snort.

"Cut her a break, Cordy. She's 18 weeks and she's not positive the baby is normal and she's scared. I'll be back as soon as I can."

Cordelia had suddenly walked over to the other side of Angel's room and was rummaging through the items on his dresser.

"What are you doing? You're touching my stuff."

She simply waved an arm at him. "Found it." She looked down at the desk calendar for a moment and than gave Angel an odd look. "She got pregnant Thanksgiving week."

"I already know this."

Cordelia rolled her eyes and looked heavenward. "Just when I think the Buffy/Angel show can't get more 'As The World Turns'." She sighed, a martyr's pain evident when she looked at Angel's uncomprehending face. "Soap opera? General Hospitals' Luke and Laura? Anything ring a bell here, oh challenged one?"

"I don't have a clue what you're getting at."

"Big surprise," she grumbled. "Standard soap opera plot – the hero rolls in the hay once with the heroine and she gets preggers."

Angel's eyes widened. "I don't see how that's possible. She didn't even know I was in Sunnydale. And there was no hay rolling"

"Not then. The next day during the Buffy and Angel sexathon."

"There was no sexa…she was here for five minutes, I have a curse and the whole thing's impossible."

Cordelia had crossed her arms in front of her chest and was standing directly in front of Angel. "Doyle told me everything."

"Thank you, Doyle," he muttered. "Then you know the day was erased, ergo not mine."

.He hoped that a simple appeal to logic would cause Cordy to drop the subject. Even as he thought that, he silently acknowledged that a rampaging rhino cutting a swath through his apartment was a more likely scenario. Cordelia was the most stubborn person the earth had ever seen.

"That's a lot more likely than it being some sort of hellmouth miracle."

His body slumped forward. "Maybe. I just don't see how. And if it is, what does that mean? Nothing's changed, we can't be together."

"At least the baby won't have tentacles. Fangs maybe."

"Thanks for the pep talk."

"What are friends for?'