AN: I forgot to mention that in the story Xander and Anya have reconciled
somewhat and are back together. I just couldn't leave what was one of the
most dysfunctionally funny relationships of BtVS apart. Also, to any
readers of my other fics, sorry for the hold up with updating those, with
this fic going and me being abound with schoolwork, my inspiration for the
other two long fics I've been working on has been a little zapped, I'll
update them as soon as I can!
Chapter 3: Surprises
"How can you not know?" Xander exploded, arms gesticulating madly. His hair was rumpled as he threaded his hands roughly through it, and his face was a red mask of bewilderment. He was pacing the floor with such feeling that Buffy feared for the state of the carpet. The whole house was in sad need of repair, the last thing she needed was to replace the carpet if Xander wore a hole into it. Giles appeared glazed over on the couch, still too perplexed to make any motion to indicate that the news hadn't caused his heart to stop completely. Buffy was over by Willow on the couch, her arms around her as if she was trying to act as a physical support system for her friend at the moment. Dawn was struck silent and sat at Willow's feet on the floor. Anya was indifferently lounging in a chair filing her nails.
"Why is it so important to you, Xander?" Willow asked agitatedly, hurt slightly by her best friend's rather animated response to the situation.
"Well the knowledge of who did this to you would really help me thin the ranks of scumbags I have to track down and KILL."
Buffy sighed. "Let's not get all vigilante just yet, Xander, maybe a little sensitivity is in order just about now."
Xander was too engulfed in blinding male rage to register the words and continued pacing. "Girls do sensitivity. Guys do fist-to-cuffs, heavy- handed ass kicking."
Anya frowned, ceasing her primping for a bit. "You do that? Or a better question, you do that well?"
"Look Wills, all I'm saying is that you don't let a guy get away with something like this! The least you can do is tell the guy what happened . . ." Then, when he appeared to easing down from his hard masculine stoicism, he added, "Then proceed to chop off his genitalia."
Ignoring the last comment, Buffy turned to Willow. "You know Willow, he's right. Whoever did thi-----the father," she corrected herself uneasily, "kind of has a right to know that you're having his kid . . . if you are that is."
"And I understand that kind of reasoning. But the loophole in that reasoning is that I have no idea who IS the father."
Buffy shook her head, not grasping this concept at all. "I don't understand Willow, did he not tell you his name or something? A one-night stand, what?"
Willow huffed frustratedly. "That's right, you don't understand. I haven't been . . . I-I haven't been with a guy since Oz." She gazed at everyone seriously, eyebrows cocked high for emphasis.
Xander clenched his teeth. "So Oz is back in town? He's the one who did this to you? I knew it!" He pounded one fist into the other. "I always knew that were-boy was up to no good! Oh he disguised it well with that laid- back, laconic-man stoicism aura, but he wasn't fooling me! He could play girls the way he played his Fender-----"
"Xander!" Willow interrupted. "I haven't been with Oz! I haven't been with ANYONE since . . ." she paused, growing quiet and somberly elegiac. " . . . Since Tara . . ." She didn't need to finish, for all suddenly and painfully understood, and they fell fittingly quiet in remembrance.
Anya, with her usual bumbling candor, broke the silence with a loud, "I don't get it."
Xander turned around to face his ex-fiancée. "Get what?"
"Well, from what I've learned in my eleven-hundred year stay on Earth, a willing male is needed in order to carry out procreation correctly. I mean, that's the only way it's done. A man has good and proper intercourse with an ovulating female and---"
"Anya, stop!" Xander demanded, slamming his hands to his ears in revulsion.
"---Unless you were artificially inseminated, but you would have to be pretty desperate to make it with a robot," Anya concluded, wrinkling her nose into a frown.
"Thanks for the sex ed lesson Anya, but I did NOT get artificially inseminated. I'm as surprised about this as you all are. Why would I want a kid now? And the whole "one-night stand with a guy" theory? Not of the real conceivable. Cause I mean, um hey, total lesbian here. I kept asking Dr. Mercer if it was a mistake, because it doesn't seem possible, but she kept saying I was already three months along----"
"Did you say three months?" asked Giles, who, up to this point, had been stricken with silence.
Willow nodded worriedly. "Three or four months . . . which is around the time---"
"You completely succumbed to the black majicks," Giles finished. His hand absently went to his head, reaching for his glasses to wipe them with usual nervousness, but upon realizing he was not wearing them, he settled for wiping a glass ashtray sitting on the coffee table.
"Um, yeah . . . that's what I was kind of what I was worried about. When I was all tripped up on the magic, my mind got kind of hazy. I mean, I remember most things I did, like um skinning a guy alive . . . 'cause you know . . . that'll stay with you, but . . . a lot of the time, there are just these blank moments, things I can't remember saying or . . . doing . . ."
Buffy and Xander exchanged looks. This was the first they heard of Willow blacking out when she descended into the horrible and dark abyss of power last spring. Which, considering all the destructive and hurtful things she had done to them, was something that Buffy and Xander looked upon as a good thing. The guilt over what she had done to Warren had eaten her alive the weeks and months following the chaos, with the loss of Tara adding to her pain. And now poor Willow was given yet another burden to handle. Except Buffy would never look upon it as a burden.
"Wait." Anya held one hand up in the air. "So what you're saying is . . . that you think you boned up some guy while on the Majickal Mystery Tour?"
Willow made a plaintive face in response to Anya's terseness. "That's not exactly how I'd put it, but yes. I was thinking about it, and considered that's what probably happened. I could have slept with someone while on the majicks and forgotten about it." She suddenly looked disgusted at herself and bit her lip. Buffy sensed what her best friend was feeling and patted her shoulder softly.
"So are you saying . . . wait. That means ANY guy in Sunnydale could be the father! Or even worse, with Sunnydale being Demontown, USA, anything. . . you could have done something with some beastie and forgotten all about it!" Xander's eyes nearly boggled out of his skull at the idea.
"Xander!" Buffy chastised with a venomous glare.
Willow groaned and again buried her face in her hands. "Oh god, he's right! I could be giving birth to a demon-child! I'm a whore!"
"You are not a whore! You aren't going have a demon-child!" Buffy comforted, watching her best friend's self-esteem fall into shambles right before her eyes. Urgently, Buffy turned to Giles. "We have to find the guy who did this to her!" she hissed in a lower tone. "Her child could have horns for all we know!"
"Birthing such a child would be rather painful," Anya pointed out.
Giles continued to rub the ashtray absentmindedly, not noticing the fact that it was already a high-crystal shine. This was beyond him and the perplexed expression on his face made that clear to the others. "I-I . . ." he stammered, knowing that everyone was expecting him to supply an answer with all his watcher inclinations.
"Well?" Buffy's eyes went wide with impatience as she rocked Willow, who continued moaning over her status as potential mother to a possible hell- creature.
"My child will give new meaning to the term 'dog-faced girl'!" Willow was wailing.
Giles rubbed his head frantically, trying desperately to think of a solution out of this mess. Suddenly a mental light bulb flashed through his head and he stood up with one finger waving in the air. "Eureka!" he exclaimed.
"You actully say Eureaka?" Anya quipped with one eyebrow cocked.
"A-a spell! A spell that helps you locate parts of your biological make-up within a ten-mile radius!"
"Translated, means a paternity test right?" Buffy frowned at her ex- watcher's inability to elucidate without using more than twenty words when only two were needed.
"Y-yes, a paternity test of sorts. It allows you to roughly pinpoint those made of the same genetic make-up of you. Mostly used for adults looking for parents and siblings and such, but I don't see why it can't be done with an unborn child."
"You mean you can determine exactly where the father is?" Dawn asked.
"Well, as I said, only if he is within a ten-mile radius. It's not that complicated a procedure, only requires the use of a few objects. Of course, if you'd rather not----" Giles started uneasily, knowing Willow would be cautious when it came to any encounters with magic. She had come a long way in weaning off her desire to use it, to place a spell on her now might be too much temptation. Willow just shook her head solemnly, grasping her stomach at the same time.
"I'm good Giles, don't worry about it. This spell needs to be done. I have to know who and WHAT did this to me."
Giles returned from his apartment thirty minutes later with the supplies. Those thirty minutes had been heavily stressful for poor Willow as she pondered what possibly could be inside her.
"What if it's a Charebra demon?! Those are nothing but slime and tentacles! Or, or, maybe Firah'shiac demon?! Those are just covered in those long spiny, prickly things, oh God, oh GOD!"
"Breathe Willow, breathe," Buffy commanded, handing her a paper bag as Willow began to hyperventilate once more.
Giles set up his supplies, laying a crystal, various herbs and a map before him. "That's for locating the father," he explained. He settled down in front of Willow and pricked one of her fingers with a needle, letting a drop of her blood trickle into a small little sack, soaking into the herbs that were already packed in. Wrapping the small bag to the crystal, he chanted a few words out of an old Celtic text. Immediately the crystal began to glow in response, and Giles veered it towards the map, it leading Giles' hands along the sheet of lines and squiggles of streets.
"Wow," breathed Dawn admiringly as she hunched over to watch. "They should really market and mass produce that thing. What's it called again?"
"A Thesybrian crystal," murmured Giles, trying to concentrate on his task.
"I call it every deadbeat dad's nightmare, that's what I call it," Xander cut snidely.
The crystal was continuing to glow as Giles grasped on it and it passed over the map with speed. Up Blevins Lane, down Main, passing over Browndale, all the way up to Revello, up, up to a certain familiar address.
"What the---" Giles wrinkled his brow and confusion as the crystal glowed and shook with particular fervency. "It's indicating that this house . . . that the child is biologically linked to someone in this house-----" His puzzlement was deepened when the crystal jolted away from the map, yanking Giles and his arms into the air, standing upright and glistening powerfully. "T-the father appears to be getting closer, look how it's throbbing," Giles stammered, while all the rest watched the crystal in suspense.
"Closer?!" Willow yelped. "Lock the doors, bolt the windows, what if it's a seething demon-man coming to collect his progeny?!"
"Giles, are you sure that the father's in the house? There's no guy here except----"
"Xander!" Anya suddenly glared at her boyfriend with frenzied rage. "How could you?!"
Stricken, Xander was up and started in protest. "What, An, it wasn't me!"
Anya had already stalked up to Xander, pelting him with weak slaps all over his head. "H-how could you?!" she repeated lividly. "How could you do this to me, Xander Harris?! You thought you could relive history?! Thought it wasn't enough to break Cordelia's heart, so you decided to break mine the same way?!"
"An, s-stop, it WASN'T me!" Xander yelled helplessly, trying to guard against Anya's clumsy swings.
"I should have KNOWN that whole gay-heterosexual-Will and Grace-best friends-crap was just a front! I could just FEEL the sexual tension between you two! Why don't you just go and marry her, Xander?! Then hey! Maybe you can leave HER at the alter too!" Anya was on the rampage and it wasn't a pretty sight.
"Anya, it's not Xander!" thundered Giles, now ridden with a migraine. "The crystal is clearly directed away from Xander, signifying it is someone else." He maintained his gaze at the crystal, which was rumbling at full speed and glowing brilliantly. " . . . Someone who is coming right . . ." Everyone held their breath and fixed their eyes on the crystal with such concentration that they didn't notice Spike lumber into the living room with a bucket of fried chicken under his arm.
"Buffy, where's the hot sauce?" he asked lazily, gnawing on a cold drumstick. Buffy absently gazed at her boyfriend, then suddenly understanding, widened her eyes and gaped at him with incredulity. The rest similarly followed suit.
" . . . Now," Giles finished softly, the crystal tumbling from his hands as he stared at Spike hazily. He could feel the vague beginnings of a fainting spell grip him, and Buffy, Willow, Xander, Dawn and Anya could relate.
Spike twitched uncomfortably, growing increasingly uneasy as they gawked at him in silence. Off their looks, he finally swallowed the mouthful of chicken he had been chewing and shrugged restlessly. "What?" he chirped innocently.
Another ANs: I know, I know, I ramble a lot. And I know the ending might seem weird with Spike in Africa the whole time Willow went evil and all, hence confusion over him being the father in general, but again, I'll explain later. So please continue reading!
Chapter 3: Surprises
"How can you not know?" Xander exploded, arms gesticulating madly. His hair was rumpled as he threaded his hands roughly through it, and his face was a red mask of bewilderment. He was pacing the floor with such feeling that Buffy feared for the state of the carpet. The whole house was in sad need of repair, the last thing she needed was to replace the carpet if Xander wore a hole into it. Giles appeared glazed over on the couch, still too perplexed to make any motion to indicate that the news hadn't caused his heart to stop completely. Buffy was over by Willow on the couch, her arms around her as if she was trying to act as a physical support system for her friend at the moment. Dawn was struck silent and sat at Willow's feet on the floor. Anya was indifferently lounging in a chair filing her nails.
"Why is it so important to you, Xander?" Willow asked agitatedly, hurt slightly by her best friend's rather animated response to the situation.
"Well the knowledge of who did this to you would really help me thin the ranks of scumbags I have to track down and KILL."
Buffy sighed. "Let's not get all vigilante just yet, Xander, maybe a little sensitivity is in order just about now."
Xander was too engulfed in blinding male rage to register the words and continued pacing. "Girls do sensitivity. Guys do fist-to-cuffs, heavy- handed ass kicking."
Anya frowned, ceasing her primping for a bit. "You do that? Or a better question, you do that well?"
"Look Wills, all I'm saying is that you don't let a guy get away with something like this! The least you can do is tell the guy what happened . . ." Then, when he appeared to easing down from his hard masculine stoicism, he added, "Then proceed to chop off his genitalia."
Ignoring the last comment, Buffy turned to Willow. "You know Willow, he's right. Whoever did thi-----the father," she corrected herself uneasily, "kind of has a right to know that you're having his kid . . . if you are that is."
"And I understand that kind of reasoning. But the loophole in that reasoning is that I have no idea who IS the father."
Buffy shook her head, not grasping this concept at all. "I don't understand Willow, did he not tell you his name or something? A one-night stand, what?"
Willow huffed frustratedly. "That's right, you don't understand. I haven't been . . . I-I haven't been with a guy since Oz." She gazed at everyone seriously, eyebrows cocked high for emphasis.
Xander clenched his teeth. "So Oz is back in town? He's the one who did this to you? I knew it!" He pounded one fist into the other. "I always knew that were-boy was up to no good! Oh he disguised it well with that laid- back, laconic-man stoicism aura, but he wasn't fooling me! He could play girls the way he played his Fender-----"
"Xander!" Willow interrupted. "I haven't been with Oz! I haven't been with ANYONE since . . ." she paused, growing quiet and somberly elegiac. " . . . Since Tara . . ." She didn't need to finish, for all suddenly and painfully understood, and they fell fittingly quiet in remembrance.
Anya, with her usual bumbling candor, broke the silence with a loud, "I don't get it."
Xander turned around to face his ex-fiancée. "Get what?"
"Well, from what I've learned in my eleven-hundred year stay on Earth, a willing male is needed in order to carry out procreation correctly. I mean, that's the only way it's done. A man has good and proper intercourse with an ovulating female and---"
"Anya, stop!" Xander demanded, slamming his hands to his ears in revulsion.
"---Unless you were artificially inseminated, but you would have to be pretty desperate to make it with a robot," Anya concluded, wrinkling her nose into a frown.
"Thanks for the sex ed lesson Anya, but I did NOT get artificially inseminated. I'm as surprised about this as you all are. Why would I want a kid now? And the whole "one-night stand with a guy" theory? Not of the real conceivable. Cause I mean, um hey, total lesbian here. I kept asking Dr. Mercer if it was a mistake, because it doesn't seem possible, but she kept saying I was already three months along----"
"Did you say three months?" asked Giles, who, up to this point, had been stricken with silence.
Willow nodded worriedly. "Three or four months . . . which is around the time---"
"You completely succumbed to the black majicks," Giles finished. His hand absently went to his head, reaching for his glasses to wipe them with usual nervousness, but upon realizing he was not wearing them, he settled for wiping a glass ashtray sitting on the coffee table.
"Um, yeah . . . that's what I was kind of what I was worried about. When I was all tripped up on the magic, my mind got kind of hazy. I mean, I remember most things I did, like um skinning a guy alive . . . 'cause you know . . . that'll stay with you, but . . . a lot of the time, there are just these blank moments, things I can't remember saying or . . . doing . . ."
Buffy and Xander exchanged looks. This was the first they heard of Willow blacking out when she descended into the horrible and dark abyss of power last spring. Which, considering all the destructive and hurtful things she had done to them, was something that Buffy and Xander looked upon as a good thing. The guilt over what she had done to Warren had eaten her alive the weeks and months following the chaos, with the loss of Tara adding to her pain. And now poor Willow was given yet another burden to handle. Except Buffy would never look upon it as a burden.
"Wait." Anya held one hand up in the air. "So what you're saying is . . . that you think you boned up some guy while on the Majickal Mystery Tour?"
Willow made a plaintive face in response to Anya's terseness. "That's not exactly how I'd put it, but yes. I was thinking about it, and considered that's what probably happened. I could have slept with someone while on the majicks and forgotten about it." She suddenly looked disgusted at herself and bit her lip. Buffy sensed what her best friend was feeling and patted her shoulder softly.
"So are you saying . . . wait. That means ANY guy in Sunnydale could be the father! Or even worse, with Sunnydale being Demontown, USA, anything. . . you could have done something with some beastie and forgotten all about it!" Xander's eyes nearly boggled out of his skull at the idea.
"Xander!" Buffy chastised with a venomous glare.
Willow groaned and again buried her face in her hands. "Oh god, he's right! I could be giving birth to a demon-child! I'm a whore!"
"You are not a whore! You aren't going have a demon-child!" Buffy comforted, watching her best friend's self-esteem fall into shambles right before her eyes. Urgently, Buffy turned to Giles. "We have to find the guy who did this to her!" she hissed in a lower tone. "Her child could have horns for all we know!"
"Birthing such a child would be rather painful," Anya pointed out.
Giles continued to rub the ashtray absentmindedly, not noticing the fact that it was already a high-crystal shine. This was beyond him and the perplexed expression on his face made that clear to the others. "I-I . . ." he stammered, knowing that everyone was expecting him to supply an answer with all his watcher inclinations.
"Well?" Buffy's eyes went wide with impatience as she rocked Willow, who continued moaning over her status as potential mother to a possible hell- creature.
"My child will give new meaning to the term 'dog-faced girl'!" Willow was wailing.
Giles rubbed his head frantically, trying desperately to think of a solution out of this mess. Suddenly a mental light bulb flashed through his head and he stood up with one finger waving in the air. "Eureka!" he exclaimed.
"You actully say Eureaka?" Anya quipped with one eyebrow cocked.
"A-a spell! A spell that helps you locate parts of your biological make-up within a ten-mile radius!"
"Translated, means a paternity test right?" Buffy frowned at her ex- watcher's inability to elucidate without using more than twenty words when only two were needed.
"Y-yes, a paternity test of sorts. It allows you to roughly pinpoint those made of the same genetic make-up of you. Mostly used for adults looking for parents and siblings and such, but I don't see why it can't be done with an unborn child."
"You mean you can determine exactly where the father is?" Dawn asked.
"Well, as I said, only if he is within a ten-mile radius. It's not that complicated a procedure, only requires the use of a few objects. Of course, if you'd rather not----" Giles started uneasily, knowing Willow would be cautious when it came to any encounters with magic. She had come a long way in weaning off her desire to use it, to place a spell on her now might be too much temptation. Willow just shook her head solemnly, grasping her stomach at the same time.
"I'm good Giles, don't worry about it. This spell needs to be done. I have to know who and WHAT did this to me."
Giles returned from his apartment thirty minutes later with the supplies. Those thirty minutes had been heavily stressful for poor Willow as she pondered what possibly could be inside her.
"What if it's a Charebra demon?! Those are nothing but slime and tentacles! Or, or, maybe Firah'shiac demon?! Those are just covered in those long spiny, prickly things, oh God, oh GOD!"
"Breathe Willow, breathe," Buffy commanded, handing her a paper bag as Willow began to hyperventilate once more.
Giles set up his supplies, laying a crystal, various herbs and a map before him. "That's for locating the father," he explained. He settled down in front of Willow and pricked one of her fingers with a needle, letting a drop of her blood trickle into a small little sack, soaking into the herbs that were already packed in. Wrapping the small bag to the crystal, he chanted a few words out of an old Celtic text. Immediately the crystal began to glow in response, and Giles veered it towards the map, it leading Giles' hands along the sheet of lines and squiggles of streets.
"Wow," breathed Dawn admiringly as she hunched over to watch. "They should really market and mass produce that thing. What's it called again?"
"A Thesybrian crystal," murmured Giles, trying to concentrate on his task.
"I call it every deadbeat dad's nightmare, that's what I call it," Xander cut snidely.
The crystal was continuing to glow as Giles grasped on it and it passed over the map with speed. Up Blevins Lane, down Main, passing over Browndale, all the way up to Revello, up, up to a certain familiar address.
"What the---" Giles wrinkled his brow and confusion as the crystal glowed and shook with particular fervency. "It's indicating that this house . . . that the child is biologically linked to someone in this house-----" His puzzlement was deepened when the crystal jolted away from the map, yanking Giles and his arms into the air, standing upright and glistening powerfully. "T-the father appears to be getting closer, look how it's throbbing," Giles stammered, while all the rest watched the crystal in suspense.
"Closer?!" Willow yelped. "Lock the doors, bolt the windows, what if it's a seething demon-man coming to collect his progeny?!"
"Giles, are you sure that the father's in the house? There's no guy here except----"
"Xander!" Anya suddenly glared at her boyfriend with frenzied rage. "How could you?!"
Stricken, Xander was up and started in protest. "What, An, it wasn't me!"
Anya had already stalked up to Xander, pelting him with weak slaps all over his head. "H-how could you?!" she repeated lividly. "How could you do this to me, Xander Harris?! You thought you could relive history?! Thought it wasn't enough to break Cordelia's heart, so you decided to break mine the same way?!"
"An, s-stop, it WASN'T me!" Xander yelled helplessly, trying to guard against Anya's clumsy swings.
"I should have KNOWN that whole gay-heterosexual-Will and Grace-best friends-crap was just a front! I could just FEEL the sexual tension between you two! Why don't you just go and marry her, Xander?! Then hey! Maybe you can leave HER at the alter too!" Anya was on the rampage and it wasn't a pretty sight.
"Anya, it's not Xander!" thundered Giles, now ridden with a migraine. "The crystal is clearly directed away from Xander, signifying it is someone else." He maintained his gaze at the crystal, which was rumbling at full speed and glowing brilliantly. " . . . Someone who is coming right . . ." Everyone held their breath and fixed their eyes on the crystal with such concentration that they didn't notice Spike lumber into the living room with a bucket of fried chicken under his arm.
"Buffy, where's the hot sauce?" he asked lazily, gnawing on a cold drumstick. Buffy absently gazed at her boyfriend, then suddenly understanding, widened her eyes and gaped at him with incredulity. The rest similarly followed suit.
" . . . Now," Giles finished softly, the crystal tumbling from his hands as he stared at Spike hazily. He could feel the vague beginnings of a fainting spell grip him, and Buffy, Willow, Xander, Dawn and Anya could relate.
Spike twitched uncomfortably, growing increasingly uneasy as they gawked at him in silence. Off their looks, he finally swallowed the mouthful of chicken he had been chewing and shrugged restlessly. "What?" he chirped innocently.
Another ANs: I know, I know, I ramble a lot. And I know the ending might seem weird with Spike in Africa the whole time Willow went evil and all, hence confusion over him being the father in general, but again, I'll explain later. So please continue reading!
