CHAPTER TEN
Buffy throws her feet out in front of her as she ascends to even greater heights on her swing. She is currently having a race with the just-out-of-toddler stage little girl on the swing beside her. There was no, "betcha I can swing higher than you" challenge. It just sort of started. There is something about this little girl. She seems more independent than the others on the playground, as though her mother, handsome in an oversize chambray shirt and black leggings and sitting on a nearby bench, came along as a companion rather than a supervisor. The girl's red coat has all but slipped from her arms, the faux-fur trimmed hood flops behind her as she swings, trying to match Buffy's effortless glides towards the heavens. The little girl has an Eskimo look about her. Her eyes are small and hidden like two twin cabochons of onyx on either side of her pert little nose. Her inchworm of a mouth smiles.
Finally she says, "What's your name?"
"I'm Buffy," the swinging Slayer answers. "What's yours?"
"Karen," the little girl replies. "How old are you?"
"How old do you think I am?" Buffy asks teasingly.
"I don't know. Are you older than my brother?"
"How old is your brother?"
"He's twelve."
"Oh, yeah. I'm much, much older than that."
"Are you sixteen?"
"Mmm…A little older than that."
"Twenty?"
"Add one more year and you've got it."
The little girl looks thoughtful. Addition must be new to her. Buffy imagines that the girl is assembling little blocks in her mind. Twenty…add one more block and you get…
"Twenty one!" the girl says enthusiastically.
"That's right!"
"Is that a kid's age?"
It seemed like it…yesterday, but not today. "No, it's not," Buffy says softly.
"Is that a mommy's age?" the girl asks.
"Yeah," Buffy says, "It's a mommy's age."
They continue to swing for a while in silence. There's not much to be said between a twenty-one year old and a, she's guessing, five year old. It's not like they can trade opinions about the Enron scandal. But after a while there is more from the girl. By this time, another train of thought has Amtrak'ed its way through her brain.
"Mommy and I went to the zoo the other day. We saw some alligators and some hyenas!"
"Really?"
"Um hum. And there were some snakes too. I like snakes."
There are some girlish squeals from the top of the jungle gym just a few feet away.
"Karen! Karen! Come on!"
The little girl skids her pink Barbie Velcro shoes against the mulch underneath her swing, abruptly ending their contest. There are no "nice to meet you's" and Buffy understands this. The child has been called away for better things with kids her own age. Buffy is a mommy's age.
A mommy.
Actually, Buffy is grateful that she is allowed to stop swinging, because she is now nauseous from the back and forth movement. She drags her feet along the mulch under her own swing and lays her head against the cold metal chain. Her heart is beating rapidly. She fans her face with her hands, swallowing hard in rapid succession.
Oh God, I'm going to puke…Oh God…
There is a flash of red before her. Her eyes catch the flailing of small hands clutching the air. She jumps from the swing, running in quicksilver speed towards the jungle gym where the little girl has lost her balance and is falling fast towards the hard earth…
Into Buffy's arms.
It has happened so quickly; both the little girl and the savior are blinking at each other with incredulity.
"Oh God! Karen!" a woman shrieks.
Buffy is setting the girl down into the mulch, onto her own two feet, and is putting her hood over her head when Karen's mother meets them. It's cold today. The little girl should have something covering her head.
The mother, still suffering from the late effects of panic, places a hand over her chest.
"Karen, are you ok?" the mother assesses her daughter's condition.
"Yes, Mommy," the girl says. "Buffy caught me."
The mother looks at Buffy gratefully as she embraces her child. "You've got some quick reflexes, Buffy," she says. "You'll make a good mother one day."
"Thank you," Buffy replies. Her eyes are misting as she says, "I really needed to hear that today."
"Yeah, hello," Spike says anxiously into the phone. "My girlfriend, Buffy Summers, had an appointment at 10:30 this morning at your office and it's 1:30 now and she's still not home. I'm a bit worried." At this time, Spike hears a key being inserted into the door lock. "Nevermind. She's here."
He slams the phone into the cradle and stalks over to the door. Buffy pushes her way in. She is wearing the camel coat that he often thinks matches her skin tone. But today, not so much. She is pale. She has been pale for the last couple weeks, but today she is…
Pale as death.
She lets her keys drop into the bowl beside the door. She remains fixed there and will not look at him.
Spike takes a step forward.
She edges away, closer to the door.
"What did you find out?" Spike asks warily.
Buffy bats aimlessly at the top button of her coat before finally unfastening it like a drunk. Spike begins to wonder if the doc loaded her up with some powerful drugs during her office visit. Some kind of opiate, it seems.
"Buffy?" he begs.
His exclamatory plea catches her attention, finally. "Hmmm?" she asks, dragging her heavy-lidded stare to his eye level.
"Your appointment! What did the doc find out?"
He watches her as she sets her purse down on the table by the door. She rummages through the contents, discarding a few yellow credit card receipts, a bottle of holy water and a wooden stake as she searches. At last, she produces a blurry photograph of…something.
Spike takes it into his hands, trying to decipher the rendering in black and white. "What's this?"
Buffy takes a while. It is still so foreign to her to say, "Our baby" that she has to rehearse in her head how it will sound to him. She can't say it cynically, because there's no way on God's green earth that something like this could happen between a vampire and a human. A Slayer, even. Instant protection, she always thought. Cold seed. Dead seed. She has felt his liquid invasion many times, and it is always as though she is treading a chilly sea. Never did she imagine that at least one of his swimmers could reach the wall and make her a Mommy.
"That's it," Buffy says, pointing her index finger at the little, peanut-shaped blob of white hinged onto the wall of what Dr. Hemphill said was her womb. "That's, um, a baby."
Spike takes the photo, sitting in marionette fashion on the back of the sofa. This is a…baby? His? He of the dead body has helped produce…
Life?
He clamps a hand to his jaw as he continues to stare at the picture. How seems to be the only word his brain can manage at this point.
"Before you say anything," Buffy begins, "I should tell you that a few days before Christmas, I touched a fertility god. It was in the Magic Box on the discount table, for Christ's sake, and missing a nipple. I mean, a nipple! Giles said that it probably wouldn't work, because once an idol has been injured, it's never the same. But Giles said that it works by will. A woman wanting a baby touches the idol to her stomach. I didn't know Giles meant that touching it to my stomach would mean…you know."
He looks up at her face, so full of questions, so full of anxiety. She thinks she has done something. He thinks he has as well.
"That same day, I went into Helene's House of Herbs," Spike tells her. "I don't know why. Well, actually I do. We had passed all those baby carriages in the mall. And I saw you wanting one of them, or what was inside of them. And I saw myself not being able to give you one. Helene said she would bless us, that she would ask for Gaia's assistance, make an offering to Gaia in our names. She said that Gaia knows when two of her offspring have enough love in their hearts to bring another life into the world. I didn't know that asking Helene would…"
And there is the black and white photo, held between them, in Spike's quivering hand.
"I guess, in some ways, a small part of us really wanted this," Buffy says in a small voice.
"I…guess," Spike says. He has seen the baby now, obscured in Van Gogh swirls and he thinks, when he looks carefully, he can see an eye staring out at him from the middle of the photo. There is something he needs to do now; he needs to hear it.
He has that ear. That well tuned, vampiric ear. He lowers his face to her abdomen. After pushing up her shirt, he listens.
"Oh God…" he intones against her.
"What?" she gulps.
"The other night. I thought I was hearing another heartbeat. But now…"
"Yes?"
He places his cheek flat against her belly so that his ear is suctioning up all the sounds from within. Then he crumbles. His cold tears glide down her bare stomach, pooling in her navel.
She holds him close to her, trying to soothe his tremors. "Sweetheart, I know you're upset and I was too. I mean, complete shock of it all alone almost sent me into cardiac arrest right there on the examining table. But we're going to get through this. I just need you to be OK with this. I need you..." Buffy is startled now to hear a burst of steady laughter against her belly. "Spike?"
He lifts his completed elated face to hers, tears streaming down his face like the spent wax from a candle glowing from inside of him "You're going to make me a Daddy! You're going to make me a Daddy!"
"You're…happy about this?" she asks.
"What, that the woman I love is carrying my child?" He brings his arms around her backside, hoisting her into the air, sending her legs wheeling in space. "Oh, Pet, you've just about made me the happiest man who ever died!" He plasters her stomach with kisses. Suddenly, just this one bare patch of flesh isn't enough. He wants to feel all of her. He wants to thread the bobbin of her silky body through his fingers and create a tapestry of her for him to wrap himself in for all eternity. Buffy encircles her lover's waist with her legs as they lumber in one combined form to the bedroom. Once on the bed, Spike's hands are everywhere, simultaneously slipping off her shirt, her bra, all things that keep him away from every inch of her skin. His kisses are constant and breath taking. She relishes his lips on hers, but craves the air.
She begs for and gets a few minutes of quality oxygen time by asking him, "I was so worried that you would think I had cheated on you. That you would leave me."
"That was your hormones kicking in, sweetheart. I know you'd never stray. What, did you think I would assume that you were boinking the barkeep? Hardly. You should know me better than that, love."
I should, Buffy thinks as she draws him closer. This is her man, her one and only. As Spike immerses himself in the warmth of her skin once again, she sees his dazzled expression, as though he's being allowed to dance in the afternoon rays of the off-limits sun. He loves her so much. Sometimes when her hand roams the muscular planes of his cold body, she has to constantly remind herself that he is dead; he is a cold, dead thing. A creature of darkness, a being who requires daily gulps of blood to exist. But then he looks at her; his eyes shimmer with that inner light that she can almost call his soul. She has realized for some time now that what she is seeing is her own soul reflected in those ice blue eyes. The first night they made love he removed most of the doubt that the thing he had for her was real. Every day they are together, he strips away whatever remaining qualm she might have about his true nature. There are other times when she is touching him that she thinks she is molding the clay of him into something human. Humans replicate themselves in their young. Under the tutelage of her hands, has he become a living being again? She shrinks away from the notion that she has such power. She creates death, nothing more. But somehow, the two of them, in their twin negatives, have joined together to make a child. A child! The plus signs she saw this morning still dance around the room as though some Crayola happy math teacher is sketching freehand wallpaper.
She places her thumbs in the hollows under his high cheekbones and kisses him, whispering against his lips, "You are the one true love of my life."
"And you are mine," he answers.
Hours later, after Buffy has been helped into happiness, Spike is lying with his head on Buffy's stomach.
"I love you," Buffy hears him say.
"I love you too," she says, combing her fingers through his hair.
"I'm talking to the little one here," Spike says, kissing her just above her bellybutton.
Buffy giggles as she feels the assault of Spike's soft kisses against her stomach. "If you keep doing that, I'm going to get chapped abs!"
"We'll get you some Vaseline, then," he answers, continuing to kiss her, "because I'm not going to stop until he's born!"
Finally he's had enough and returns to his side of the bed, nestling his head in his pillow. She has never seen such a smile on his face. He is so full of love that if pricked, he'd bleed valentines.
"This is so amazing," he says through a sigh. "I never thought…I never even dreamed that something like this could happen to me."
"Well, guess what? It's happening."
"I know." He reaches over for the watch dangling around Buffy's neck. "Of course, you'll have to give this up when he's born."
"Aw!" she pouts.
"Well, maybe not right away. When he's older and can actually tell time."
"Then we can tell him about the wonderful night you gave it to me."
"And he can gag and make faces and say, 'So you've always been gooey and romantic.'"
"They say that the romance ends when baby makes three."
"Then we'll have to spend every day after he's born proving them wrong, love."
He pulls her into his arms, kissing her lightly on the forehead. Settling into his embrace, Buffy asks, "So who are we going to tell first?"
"Mmm…I think the first person we should tell is coming down the hall and is about to open the front door right about now."
Buffy hears that a new presence invading their quiet in the form of a jingle of keys being placed on the table inside the door. She hears footsteps on the floor leading to the kitchen.
The bedroom door is open.
Buffy grabs for anything that will cover her, in this case her pink robe that she knows will signal to Dawn like an unfurled tongue, "I've just been having sex."
But by now, Dawn is so accustomed to the sight of her sister's flushed, post-coital cheeks, she is not even embarrassed anymore. She sees Buffy readying herself for public viewing, cinching her robe around her with a slim sliver of her naked breast still exposed and thinks, "Why bother?"
"Hey Dawnie," Buffy says, smoothing back her hair.
"Hey Buffy," Dawn says, heading straight for the kitchen, sustaining a bemused smile of her face.
Buffy scampers behind her sister. "Umm…how was your day?"
"Good," Dawn replies at the open door of the fridge. She selects a Diet Coke and depresses the tab. "And yours?" she asks, taking a sip.
Not as productive as a couple months ago, Buffy is prepared to say. She holds back and substitutes with, "Very good. But Dawn…there's something Spike and I have to tell you."
"OK," Dawn says. "Where's Spike?"
"I'm here," Spike mumbles, fastening the last button of his jeans as he's entering the room.
Dawn looks at them carefully, a haughty curl to her lips. "So what's going on?"
"Um…something has happened. Something we didn't plan on," Buffy begins.
"What? You're pregnant?" Dawn asks, sending her eyes rolling.
"Well, actually, yes."
Dawn's eyes fly open wide. Her eyes dart to Spike and then to Buffy, back to Spike, and again to Buffy. "But wait a minute. You can't---
"But I am," Buffy finishes.
Dawn focuses on Spike. "But you can't---
"But I did," Spike answers proudly.
She continues to stare at both of them. The moment of excruciatingly uncomfortable silence is followed by a burst of unbridled laughter from Dawn. She shakes her head and takes her leave, heading for the living room. "And they said irony was dead."
Buffy and Spike exchange glances before following Dawn's path. They find her collapsed in the armchair, hugging her stomach in a fit of giggles.
"Dawn, we're serious," Buffy says. "This isn't a joke."
"Oh, I know!" she says, wiping her eyes. "I just think it's kind of funny. I mean, you are always telling me to use a condom, use a condom. And now. Oops! Anyways, I don't know why you guys were all hand-wringy about telling me. I'm the easy one. You still have to tell Giles, right?"
Buffy and Spike both look at each other, a mutual feeling of dread manifesting itself in a single thought: He won't take this well.
That night at the Magic Box, long after the last customer has waltzed across the threshold with whatever Anya was able to persuade them to buy, a tense and silent trio sits at the round table under a single burning lamp.
Buffy and Spike sit on one side of the table, Giles on the other. Contemplatively, Giles is twisting his thumb and index finger in front of his pursed lips. Buffy has seen this look before. One morning, Giles showed up at her apartment unannounced before she had a chance to make up her bed. She remembers his stare as he focused on the two pillows, both creased with the impressions of their occupants' heads.
On his face he wears the look of fatherly disappointment and a learned man's befuddlement.
Finally Giles clears his throat. "I suppose this is the clichéd response when one hears news such as this, but in this case I think it's warranted: How?"
"Let's just say that Spike and I haven't been extremely careful," Buffy replies. "Anyway, we were kind of hoping you could help us with the how part." Or the why, she adds to herself.
Giles observes Buffy continuously curling her slim fingers around Spike's hand, kneading the flesh over and over and he is returning the massage, roughly combing through her digits. Any other pair would be yelping from the pain of such a clutch, but they are fine. It appears that this touch is keeping them anchored to where they are.
"Well, expectant Slayers are not entirely unheard of in the annals of history, particularly in the middle ages when the average life expectancy of women was considerably shorter than today's. Even in more modern times, there are a few instances in which Slayers have become mothers, most recently in 1927, when a young girl only referred to as Josephine in her Watcher's journals gave birth to a baby boy which she turned over to an orphanage in New York. Some of my cohorts did some research on that and it turns out, the boy was adopted by a moneyed couple and went onto great prominence."
"But what about Slayers getting duffed by vampires?" Spike asks impatiently.
"There's not a single case of that." Giles responds.
"Oh, I get it. Because I'm the first Slayer who's ever bedded one, right?" Buffy asks indignantly.
"No, because vampires cannot father offspring."
"Giles!" Buffy says, gesturing wildly at herself and the vampire beside her. "Us! Here! Telling you that, yes, it is possible because it has happened. Haven't you been listening?"
"Are you trying to tell us that I'm not the father of this child?" Spike asks.
The look on Giles' face answers in the affirmative.
"Oh, bloody hell!" Spike yowls, rising from the table and slamming his hand on the back of his chair, sending it crashing against the table. "I should have known you'd be like this. First Spike's not good enough to be with your sweet little Buffy, now he doesn't have the proper jizz to put a sprog in her."
"Spike, stop…" Buffy mutters, suddenly not able to look at anyone.
But he continues his tirade. "I have sat here countless times before, listening to you prattle on about demon this, demon that and 'my sources say that blah blah blah prophecy predicts blah blah blah apocolypse so cancel your bridge parties and canasta tournaments. We've got a fight on our hands!'" Spike shakes his head, slamming his fist into a row of neatly arranged books, making it appear that the bookshelf has lost some of its teeth. "But Spike's a monster, a bloody fiend! One of these days I half expect to walk in here and find you all nattering on about ways you're going to defeat me!"
"Spike, this has nothing to do with anyone's opinion of who you are and everything to do with what you are!" Giles shouts above the din.
Spike swivels about, his shoulders arched as though he's about to fling himself into battle. His fists clench and unclench at his side. His brow is lowered over the fierceness of his deep blue stare.
"Spike, please! Sit down!" Buffy urges.
Corralled by the sound of Buffy's pleading voice, he grabs the back of his chair and puts it to rights again before taking his seat, his body forming agitated angles as he crosses one leg over the knee of the other and folds his arms.
As the heat of the emergency settles, Giles speaks again: "Spike, you have proven yourself time and time again to be quite useful to our cause and I don't intend to imply anything untoward about your character, as it is now. It is obvious that you have come a long way since you first arrived on the scene and," he lowers his eyes before uttering softly, "that you care for Buffy a great deal."
Spike feels a slight twinge at the back of his throat at this admission. He allows his body to relax as he reaches for Buffy's hand, tightening his fingers around her returning grip.
"But even so," Giles continues, "You are, for all purposes, a dead man. And it is not physically possible for you to create a child, even with someone you love."
All of a sudden, their sweet afternoon curled in each other's arms is fogged by a settling, uncomfortable truth. What was romantic and full of possibilities now seems implausible and utterly hopeless. Prayers to Gaia and wishes on nippleless fertility goddesses on Christmas Clearance, all stuff of urban legends like sharing toothbrushes or using public toilets.
"So you're saying that this could all be something mystical. Something from the cosmos," Buffy ventures out of the mist of her own thoughts. She can't bear to look at Spike all the way. She caught one glimpse of the hurt piercing his eyes and couldn't look any further.
"It could be," Giles responds.
Buffy is still not willing to accept this. "But a couple months ago when we came to you about the dream Spike and I had. You said that there were no apocalypses on the horizon, for once, and that we were just being overly anxious about our future together."
"And that was true. Then." He answers sullenly.
"But you think now that this baby could be a sign of… something. Don't you?"
"Possibly," he returns slowly.
Thickening shadows of trepidation are enveloping her, sweeping whatever smile she has worn that day, or any smiles to come, into the dustbin that it always her reality. She should always know not to think too positively or dream too large. She is the Slayer, after all. She is as indigenous to sacrifice as forests are to the Northwest.
"So," she says, sucking back encroaching tears, "Another apocalypse. Oh, well. It's not like we haven't seen one of those before. So we find out who or what it is causing it and defeat it. Same old same old." Buffy instinctively runs a hand over her stomach. There's no swelling there yet. Her little one is still inconspicuous, a Spartan dweller inside of her, taking up only the barest of space.
Spike aims a flat gaze at the Watcher who is not only at a loss for words, but seemingly lost as well, and says, "You think that just because you've spent a lifetime mucking about your dusty books and staring down the forces of evil through your tortoise shell specs, that makes you a knowledgeable man. Well, here's this, Rupert. I put my evil, demonized ear to this lovely lady's belly today and I heard a heartbeat. Sometimes it was so fast it was as hard to catch as the wind, but I heard it. Over and over. And I knew as I listened. I knew with all my being, dead or not, that this child is mine. You don't have to go digging out Gray's Anatomy and size me up against a picture of a cadaver and say A=B. And you can sit there and go on about what I can and cannot do, but I know--- I know!" His hand now joins Buffy's over her stomach. When he speaks again, his voice is tightened with feeling. "This child is a sign of something. It's a sign to everyone who doesn't believe we love each other that we really and truly do."
Giles looks at the pair before him and he does want to be wrong. So help him God, he wants to be wrong. And he wants to take back everything he has said by putting a smiley face sticker on it all and telling them that everything will be great. Buffy once begged him to lie to her, he remembers, after she had to go through the unenviable task of staking an old friend. Buffy knows what harsh truth is. She has seen it clawing out of its grave.
This is a different Buffy now. An adult. An expectant mother. A Buffy who has looked long and hard into the darkness that is her work and has still emerged…a girl. A sweet girl, unspoiled by what she has experienced. He thinks sometimes that he has betrayed his birthright by getting too close to her, in turn making her not the fierce warrior he has read about. But then she'll go and stake a vamp as though swatting a fly, behead a Le'acht demon as though cutting through butter, shelve her youth in favor of saving the world…
He watches Spike rub his knuckles over Buffy's trembling forearm. He hears him murmuring encouragements into her ear, sifting her golden hair through his hands and placing kisses on her forehead. "It'll be all right, sweetheart," he says. "It'll be all right."
"It will be all right," Giles concurs out of the obligation of his heart, now completely unstrung. "I'll do a bit more research. This could be something…else. I don't know what, but…" Buffy looks at him with new hope shining through the standing water in her eyes and he is more determined than ever. "I shall look more deeply into this."