Her head hung over the toilet's bowl while she clutched desperately at the rim. She heaved again convulsively, but she was only able to bring up ropy strands of green bile from her abused stomach. At last, when no more spasms seemed imminent, she collapsed in a limp heap in the space beside the toilet. With one hand she reached weakly for the toilet paper to wipe the worst of the mess from her chin and hair. Her muscles trembled with fatigue and her whole body ached from the exertion as though she had been badly beaten.
Slowly she managed to get to her feet, gripping the sink for support, and surveyed the wreck of her appearance in the mirror. Her eyes were both darkly bloodshot, the tiny capillaries having burst at the force of her uncontrollable vomiting. Her hair hung lank, matted with sour, reeking fluid. She'd barely made it into the bathroom - an improvement on last time - but hadn't had the time for niceties like tying her hair back out of the way. For the moment, at least, her body responded again to her demands, rather than the other way around, but overriding all other sensations was a fluttering nausea, delicately poised in her belly to tumble out of control at the slightest wrong move. Or perhaps it was just the overwhelming fear that tormented her so.
Moving with deliberate care, she twisted the faucets and wet a washcloth in the cool water. Even the cloth's roughness as she wiped her face nearly overwhelmed her limited grip on her body's reactions. She paused frequently to take deep, stabilizing breaths, and to rinse out the washcloth.
She'd been feeling ill every morning for most of the last two weeks. At first she simply blamed the sickness on spoiled food. When it had continued, she ascribed it to the stresses of working, slaying and even the upcoming wedding. But she finally had to admit she couldn't fool herself any longer: her period, normally the only reliable rhythm in her life in spite of everything, was now a full five days late.
"This isn't happening," she said to herself for perhaps the hundredth time. Despite her mind's denial, her hands reached of their own accord and opened the medicine cabinet. The little pink, flower-decorated box she retrieved looked entirely too innocent to be associated with this upheaval in her life. Trembling fingers broke the seal and retrieved the slim plastic wand inside. Most of the space in the box was taken up with a much-folded, densely printed set of instructions, which she ignored. "After all, this isn't exactly rocket science," she said, with black humour.
Every one of the sixty seconds the home pregnancy test took to develop seemed longer than the one before it. She was ready to smash in the face of her watch for the insolent way it ticked away the seconds, ever more slowly, taunting her.
But then, when the minute hand had crawled around the dial at last, she couldn't look. There would be no way to step back into relatively comfortable ignorance. Summoning the last of the courage that had seen her through so many world-ending threats, she looked down and forced herself to move her thumb from where it covered the indicator window. The little blue plus sign glared up at her mockingly. Positive.
The wand fell from suddenly numb fingers and shattered into sharp plastic splinters on the tile floor. "No," she whimpered, as the reality of the situation hit her. "There was only Spike . . . and that's not possible. It can't be . . ."
She doubled over again as the cramps suddenly returned with greater intensity than before, tearing her apart from the inside. She clutched blindly for support and grabbed the shower curtain, which tore loose from the curtain rod with a series of rapid-fire pops. She bruised her hip sharply on the edge of the tub as she collapsed, and tumbled to the floor twisted in yards of shiny plastic. "Please-"
"-no!" Buffy woke suddenly to find herself on the floor of her bedroom. Her hip ached where she had hit the floor in her fall from the bed, and she was nearly immobilized by the sweat-soaked sheets wrapped tightly around her. She was thankful for consciousness, though - however abrupt - and the familiar dull throb of her usual menstrual cramps had never before been so welcome.