CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Buffy sits on the sofa, a makeshift beret of pastel ribbons and bows positioned on her head at a jaunty slant. At her feet is a treasure trove of all things baby---tiny booties, tiny socks, tiny mitts, tiny sleepwear. Just now she is divesting the final present of its Mylar gift-wrap.
"Wow! A Diaper Genie!" she exclaims.
"Oooh!" Anya coos, munching on a handful of Chex mix. "Is it a real genie?"
"No, Anya," Buffy says, "It's a disposal for the baby's diapers so they don't stink up the apartment after they've been pooped and peed in."
Anya looks unimpressed. "Would be better if it were a real genie. Then you wouldn't have to touch those nasty things at all. You could just tell the genie to change them. But anyway. Hey! Great gift-giving idea for those of you still looking for that perfect gift for Xander and me!"
The gathering nods, tucking any comments they may be expressing inwardly into their knowing smiles.
"Well, I think that's all of it," Buffy says. "Time for cake!"
"Not just yet!" Dawn says as she gets to her feet. She clears her throat and pushes her long hair back in two dramatic swipes as though opening the curtains for her performance. "You guys may have been noticing that I've been writing stuff down as Buffy's been unwrapping. Well, not only have I been jotting down who gave what, but also Buffy's reactions to the gifts. And according to baby shower legend, these are some of the very same things she said the night she conceived her little Slayerette. And since I was in the next room, I can tell you most of these are, as Spike would say, 'Spot on!'"
There is a small ripple of laughter as Buffy gives her sister a look that says "I may be side-lined with this pregnancy thing, but I'm still the Slayer!"
"Don't worry, Buffy. I've edited most of them for the family hour," Dawn says with a sly grin.
Buffy shakes her head slowly, smiling behind the hand clamped over her mouth.
"All right, all right. Here goes." Dawn skims what she has written and laughter overtakes her, delaying her delivery for a few minutes. Recovering herself, she begins with, " 'I've never seen one so tiny!'" The room erupts in laughter. Her first attempt a success, she tries another one on the crowd. " 'I didn't know they came in this color!'"
Once again, it's as though the long-lost audience from a Dean Martin Celebrity Roast has found its way into the living room. " 'Aww…this is so nice!'" After the listeners have quieted down after that one, Dawn readies for the big finish. " 'Oh wow! I know just where to put this!"
Once the laughs taper off, Buffy raises an eyebrow to her sister. "You done with the stand up, Carrot Top?"
"Yeah, I think that's all of that," Dawn says, wiping a few tears from the corners of her eyes.
"Good, because I want cake NOW!"
"Oh! I almost forgot!" Anya springs up suddenly. She rifles through her purse, extracting a business size envelope. "This is from Giles. He asked me to give this to you."
Buffy eyes the envelope curiously. "Hmmm…I wonder what it is?"
"Well, open it!" Willow urges, arms flailing at her sides.
Buffy slides her thumbnail under the sealed closure, doubly secured by two equally spaced pieces of scotch tape. She then opens the tri-folded stationery inside. A rectangular piece of paper flutters to her lap. She reads the message first, silently to herself and then aloud. " 'Once again, the man of too many words finds himself speechless. I don't know what to say to you, Buffy, except I wish you an eternity's happiness with the arrival of your child.'" She looks down at the jettisoned piece of paper on her lap. "Oh my God! A check for $1200!?!?"
"So that's where my bonus went," Anya grumps.
The message in the memo area of the check reads, "For a good start." She looks incredulously at the numbers on the check, not even trying to hide the emotion on her face. He really loves me, she says to herself. He really does.
"OK, since we're all in a mushy mood now," Dawn says, "I would like to offer a toast." Dawn waits until everyone has had time to find their punch or refill their paper cups. She raises her own cup high in the air. "To my sister Buffy. At first I thought it was kind of weird. I mean, you and Spike? Having a baby? Who da thought? But you did. And I'm glad you did because you're going to be awesome parents. I know that because since you've been taking care of me, I've had a god after me and all I got was a little bump on my forehead. And your baby is going to be the luckiest kid on earth because most Mommies and Daddies want to give their children the world; you guys can actually save it for him. So cheers!"
There are cheers as well as aw's all around and Buffy rises to her sister's embrace.
Dawn whispers into her sister's ear. "I love you. You know that."
"Yeah, I do. And I love you too." She remains in her sister's arms for a few lingering moments before breaking away, asking, "Now can we have cake?"
"Yes, now we can have cake," Dawn says, rolling her eyes.
With cake in hand, the attendees sit in a horseshoe around Buffy as she shovels in fork after fork of her Oreo ice cream cake. Mostly, they are too astounded by her appetite to say much of anything until Willow casually breaks the silence.
"So four weeks, huh?" Willow asks, spooning the elegant mix of ice cream and cake into her mouth.
"Four weeks," Buffy answers,
"Are you ready?"
Buffy smiles. "Ask me again tomorrow."
"I just can't believe it's this close to happening. It seems like you just announced it yesterday," Tara says.
"I know. It's been an amazing ride. And except for being sick the first six weeks or so, it's been pretty much trouble free. I'm getting some swelling in my ankles now from being on my feet all the time at work, but it's not too bad. I've really enjoyed being pregnant for the most part. Every once in a while, I'll just sit back and think, 'God, I've got a little person with toes and fingers and everything growing inside of me.' And then the baby will start to move. I swear sometimes he's gearing up for the next Olympics the way he summersaults and cartwheels all the time. As much as I can't wait to see him when he's born, I think I'm going to miss having the little kicker inside of me."
"Especially when he's screaming his head off at 3:00 in the morning," Anya says.
"Oh, he wakes me up enough as it is. He really gets moving late at night. The other night it felt like he had a foot or something caught in my rib cage and I had to rub and rub until he finally dislodged it. And Spike wakes up whenever there's any kind of baby activity." She smiles, making a swoosh through the melting ice cream on her plate with her spoon. "He's been really great throughout this whole thing. So sweet and so caring. If he had his way, my due date would be tomorrow. He studies each and everyone of my ultrasound pictures, looking for any feature that might resembles his. As soon as I finish a book on pregnancy, he'll pick it up and start reading. He's so excited sometimes I just want to say, 'Calm down, it's just a baby.' But then I say to myself, 'it's just a baby…our baby.' And then I'm like, 'aaaaaaahhh!' Because this is the last thing I ever expected to happen between us. I mean, to think that five years ago he was threatening my life in the alleyway outside the Bronze. And now, somehow, we've created life together. And I have to say that I've never been more in love with him. Because not only can I feel his love for me on the outside, but I feel it flipping around inside of me. Like right now. He loves the cake and ice cream combo." She strokes her hand over the hump of her belly as her baby commences his practice session for the day.
"So, have you and Spike picked out baby names?" Tara asks, moving her hand over Buffy's stomach to catch some of the intrauterine action.
"Mmm," Buffy says, ingesting another bit of cake. "Elizabeth Joyce if it's a girl. And Daniel William for a boy."
Willow shrinks back at the suggestion of the latter name. "Um…Daniel?"
Buffy's eyes widen. "What's wrong with Daniel? Oh God, it's taken us months to come up with these names. Please don't tell me we have to go back to Hogan Verizon---
"No no!" Willow qualifies. "It's just that…Daniel. Daniel Osborne. Oz?"
"Oh God!" Buffy says, "Oh God! Willow, I completely forgot! I'm so sorry! It's just that Spike and I were in the car and the song Daniel came on the radio. And the two of us kind of knew then that's what we wanted to name our baby if it were a boy. A son should be named after his father but we both agreed that Spike is a good name for a hip movie director but not so much for a baby…and Spike is already my William…Daniel just seemed so right when we heard it."
"That's all right, Buffy," Willow says comfortingly. "I think I'm at the stage where I'm ready for a new Daniel in my life."
Buffy brings the witch's red head into her embrace and presses a kiss on her forehead. "Thank you. And I'm sure Spike would thank you too."
"What is Spike doing tonight?" Tara asks.
"If I know my boyfriend at all, he's probably chasing down some hopeless thing in a graveyard."
Spike eyes the Hollaran demon approaching him with a mischievous gleam. "So. I see you've brought on the funk," he says, sniffing the demon's tell-tale stench. "I suppose it's down to me to bring on the noise. And I got plenty of that."
"Slayer boy, I have more in store than just myself tonight," the demon growls.
"'Slayer boy?' Well, that's a new one."
From the shadows, another Hollaran demon emerges. Then another one rises to Spike's right. Another one comes at Spike at his left. Now he is surrounded in a pentagon of snarling Hollaran demons.
"You've had time to rally the whole gang," Spike says. His first impulse is to flee. He knew that they would catch hold of his scent sooner or later. He only hoped that Buffy would be with him. "Oh well. Come to Papa!"
There is a knock on the door of the Magic Box. Giles rouses himself from the mildewed text and heads towards the door to greet an inquiring Xander.
"I was just wondering who was on tonight for graveyard duty. I thought it might be me."
Giles scans the erase board where the Scoobies have been scheduling their nightly slayage. "Spike is on tonight."
"Wait a minute. That wasn't there yesterday. I could have sworn that I was on deck for the dusting tonight."
"He must have erased your name and sketched in his own."
"He's been trading with me a lot. I guess he's doing all he can to provide for the littlest Scooby."
"I suppose," Giles answers.
"You want to go see if he needs help? The guy's been patrolling non-stop for months now. I bet he could use a break and looking at you, it seems you could use a breather too."
"Absolutely," Giles says, removing his glasses from his face. "A slaying would do me good."
Buffy picks up another plate of oozing ice cream cake and drops it into the garbage bag. "Well, I think tonight went well," she says cheerily.
"Went well? You cleaned up, Buffy!" Dawn says, collecting empty cups. "You and Spike won't have to even darken the doorstep of the Super Baby Store now. They brought the store to you."
"There's still tons of stuff that we need. Just when I think we have everything, I read another article in another magazine that tells me how ill prepared we are for the baby. I still have to look for that baby wipe warmer."
Dawn laughs. "You ought to be looking for a cold hand warmer for Spike."
"He said he would warm his hands up under the faucet before touching the baby." She smiles. "Always works for me."
There is a knock at the door.
"You expecting Travis?" Buffy asks.
"Not tonight," Dawn says.
There is an odd assemblage of voices behind the door. Buffy can hear her Watcher and Xander. And then, her lover groaning. She throws the door open. She sees Xander and Giles standing there, a slumped and profusely bleeding Spike held between them.
As soon as they are allowed entry, they head straight for the sofa. Once they're there, Xander and Giles deposit the moaning vampire in a heap of black leather and blood.
"What happened?" Buffy asks breathlessly as she bends towards Spike. He seems to be bleeding from every orifice. Then she sees the cavernous slit gushing blood on the side of his neck. "Oh God!"
"Five dull Hollaran demons and an equally dull axe blade is what happened," Xander explains.
"When we got to the cemetery, he was in the midst of nearly being decapitated," Giles said. "Apparently the demons had some fun with him before staging his would be execution."
"Dawn, get some bandages from the medicine chest," Buffy instructs, wincing as she examines just how closely Spike missed being reduced to dust.
He coughs, spewing a string of blood and mucous from his lips. His spasms wrench his broken ribs and he grabs his chest, whimpering miserably.
"I'm pretty certain one of his arms is broken. He couldn't manage to walk, so I think he may have a few fractures in his legs as well," Giles says.
Spike lies there, motionless, his eyes shut, his mouth open in a jagged crevice of misery. His forehead is impressed with the wrinkles of a deep, ongoing pain. Buffy doesn't dare touch him for fear that her hands will only cause him more hurt.
"My God, what did they do to you?" Buffy asks, tears thickening at the back of her throat. And why wasn't I there? She damns herself silently. The bruises are already coming to black and blue fruition on his pale face. Tomorrow she suspects there will be a shiner puffing out around his left eye.
"We were able to dispatch two of the demons. The other three got away," Giles says.
There is a sound from Spike's lips. Buffy bends closer so that she can hear what he's saying. "Don't."
"Don't what?" she asks.
He purses his lips and grimaces as though the very action of talking is taxing everything he has. "Don't even think about going after them."
Buffy settles her bottom on her heels, wondering if her revenge plotting was loud enough to be heard.
"He's right, Buffy," Giles says. "It's entirely too dangerous for you to be trying to best Hollaran demons in your condition."
"Giles and I are going to smoke them out tomorrow night," Xander says. "Don't worry. We'll get them."
Buffy feels as though her limbs are bound to her chest and she's being slowly drowned. Dawn kneels beside her with an assortment of gauze and tape and she selects whatever she thinks will patch up Spike's wounds. The Slayer begins with the gaping cut just inches shy of the vampire's jugular where years before his sire drank and birthed the beast in him. All the time the baby is squirming inside of her as though angling for a peek at what has been done to his father.
Giles and Xander excuse themselves, allowing the two girls to tend to the wounded. At length, Spike is able to rouse himself enough from his injuries to calm Buffy and Dawn's fears.
"I'm still here," he says, almost smiling.
For a moment, Buffy and Dawn stitch together a thread of thought between them, along which their twin thoughts vibrate. "What would we do without him?"
Dawn is now stroking his left hand. He responds by taking her fingers in his. He reaches for Buffy's hand as well and squeezes it, though the effort causes a fresh wave of pain to splash across his face.
"It would take more than some unnecessary roughness by five Hollaran demons to take me away from my girls," Spike says. "Hey. Was there any cake left over?"
A few nights later, Spike and Dawn are asleep on the sofa. The vampire's head rests against the back of the sofa while Dawn's has found a place against his less injured arm. The TV is on and the volume is up at an enormously high level for 2:30 in the morning. As a commercial for Girls Gone Wild begins, Spike awakes with a snort.
He feels the weight of Dawn's body against his side and realizes right away that he is not in bed and, presumably, neither is Buffy.
"Hey! Little Bit!" he whispers sharply, tugging at her arm. "Wake up, love."
"Mmmm," comes the reply as she rolls her face against his arm. She then springs up. "What time is it?" she asks, stretching.
"Very late," Spike answers.
Dawn thinks a minute. Something is wrong. "Buffy's not home yet?" she asks.
"I don't think so," he says. "Else she would have gotten us up to go to bed."
"Maybe she had to close."
"No, she said before she left that she would be home at midnight. She would have called us if she had to stay over."
"That's true."
The two sit there for a few minutes with worry building in their sleepy faces. At length Spike gets up and hobbles over on his still mending legs to the coat rack by the door.
But before he can put on his duster, Buffy enters the apartment.
"What on earth kept you?" he asks, relief invading his concerned features.
"Sorry," she says tiredly, rubbing her sore back muscles. "We got really busy at midnight and I was asked to stay and help out. I didn't have a chance to call." She walks through the apartment, continuing her self-massage. There is a pronounced squish against the floorboards with every step she takes.
The noise, combined with the distinct odor of Hollaran brains, clues Spike in automatically as to what really kept her so busy after midnight.
In the bedroom, Spike keeps his suspicions to himself as he watches Buffy sit gingerly on the bed. She is so exhausted it's as though she doesn't know what to do first; take off her clothes or just peel the covers back and climb in. But she does have to get her shoes off, a task which gets harder and harder each day. When she lifts one shoe, Spike sees that the bottom is covered in a glaze of orange goo.
"So, after midnight, everybody converged on the Bronze to let it all hang out," he asks.
"That's what happened," Buffy says, wrenching her slipper from her swollen foot. Her feet look more and more like Fred Flintstone's every day. She thinks the closer she gets to her due date, the more able she will be able to power a car with them.
"I suppose you'll be getting some overtime for that," he asks.
"A little. But like they say, every little bit helps," she says, freeing her other foot from the shoe, feeling as though she's just uncorked a bottle of wine.
"Uh huh. I see," he says. "So you met up with the Hollaran demons…where? In the alleyway? In the cemetery? In that smart little open air café that always gets wrecked whenever there's some Big Bad stomping about the city?" He watches as her shoulders freeze in the crosshairs of his inquiry
She makes a slow turn in his direction. There is a small measure of guilt on her face, but there is also a look of deep satisfaction. "Spike, I had to do it."
He lets out an exasperated sigh. "Buffy, after I told you---
"Hey, it's too late to argue with me about it, OK? It's been done."
"That was very foolhardy of you. You know that."
She shrugs. "Both mother and child are fine and about to be resting comfortably."
The two commence their nightly ritual wordlessly. Buffy foregoes taking off her make-up in favor of hitting the sheets. She barely manages to put on her pajamas, employing her boyfriend to help her shimmy into the bottoms.
Once they are in bed and the light is snapped off, leaving them blanketed in darkness and in each other's arms, Buffy is reminded once again why her after work errand to the graveyard was so important when Spike inhales a jagged breath as her arms encircle his chest.
"You should know by now that I don't let anyone mess with my family," she tells him soothingly.
"Oh, I think you've driven that point home quite often, love," he answers, kissing her lightly above her left eyebrow. "Once with a wooden spoon to my chest."
"I couldn't live with myself, knowing and seeing how much they hurt you and not doing a damn thing about it."
"You're forgiven this time. Since it was all done for me," he says with a smile. "Hey. Did you get them all?"
"Yep."
"Really? All three?"
She nods. "What can I say?" she yawns. "They didn't stand a chance against two fierce kickers in one."
A warm breeze flows through the open window, rustling the sheets of the unattended legal pads lying on the meeting room table. An empty Styrofoam cup skates across the slick surface until it is caught by a quick hand and crushed. It is late summer, early fall, and there is much on the minds of the parishioners of Saint Catherine's Chapel. The din poring from the now pitcher's mound size hole in the floor causes them to raise their voices when they speak. They all pass around silently a look that says, "Is anyone else bothered by that?"
Mr. Chapman raps the eraser of his pencil against the cover of his calendar. "Anybody else? New business?" he asks in a roar.
"I have something," Phyllis Wright says. "The Morning Star Circle---
"You'll have to speak up, Phyllis," Mr. Chapman instructs.
Phyllis gives a peeved look before she continues. "The Morning Star Circle is participating in a 6 Mile Walk for breast cancer on October 15. They will need sponsors, of course. If everyone gives---
Stanley Walliston holds up a hand. "Wait, wait a minute, Phyllis. Did you say a walk for Chester Arthur?"
"BREAST CANCER," Phyllis clarifies loudly.
"I didn't think that sounded right," Stanley Walliston says.
"Anyway, they would like a five dollar donation from everyone in the church. Their goal is to raise $750."
"I'll ask Reverend Estey to make an announcement next Sunday," Mr. Chapman says. "Anyone else? New business?"
At that moment, Stanley Walliston's chair begins to teeter to and fro. There is a crackling sound, as though a hundred head of cattle are being herded slowly across the ground of a leaf-laden forest. The patch of wood on which Stanley's wobbling chair is sitting breaks free. Mr. Chapman reaches for Stanley Walliston's hand, holding him fast to the surely bounds of earth while the chair plunges to the fiery depths below.
All the parishioners are standing stunned now, their hands over their racing hearts, their faces dead white.
Mr. Chapman turns to Samantha Singleton as though holding on to one last hope as he lifts Stanley Walliston onto safe ground...for now.
"You have told Travis about the importance of this baby, haven't you?" he asks.
"He was raised on it," Samantha Singleton says, viewing the crags of the rocky cliffs that tunnel to Hell.
Still holding Mr. Chapman's hand, Stanley Walliston says, "I move that we find another meeting place."
"Second," the others agree without hesitation.