CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The bed is quaking beneath her. This is the first thing Buffy realizes when she wakes from a deep sleep as the clock by her bed ticks off the five minutes before seven. But this time her boyfriend is not locked into a nightmare. Instead, the nightmare is all around them.
The earth is coming apart.
On the tilt-a-whirl her floor has become in this decidedly rude awakening, Buffy trudges over to the cradle as though making her way through a snowdrift. Securing her child, she yells for Spike to go get Dawn, but as the words leave her mouth, she sees Spike coming through the door with her sister firmly in his arms.
Spike reaches for Buffy and folds her to him. He braces himself against the doorframe, with Dawn and Buffy clinging to him, as the quake tears apart their lives before their eyes.
Objects are flying off shelves, crashing onto the floor, soaring to opposite corners of the room so quickly, with such utter arbitrariness, it's as though some inner earth god is out for a wilding. The mattress they have just vacated holds on bravely for a few brief moments before slipping to the floor like a graceful white sloop surrendering to a storm. The baby's cradle dances in a half-figure eight across the floor, sidling at last up against Buffy's mirrored vanity. Buffy's perfume bottles leap one by one onto the floor, breaking and soaking the floor in a bittersweet rain shower.
Elsewhere in the apartment, more unseen, and from the sounds of things, more violent destruction is taking place. Inside the kitchen dishes are pounding to the floor, no doubt the ones still stacked in the strainer because Buffy was just too tired to put them away last night. Something large and heavy falls with a resounding thud in the living room. Is it the TV? The curio cabinet? The mantle piece Buffy knows was not so much nailed to the wall as it was pasted with Elmer's School Glue? From down the hall, there is a groan and a thunk from Dawn's room. Dawn gasps and holds on tighter to Spike whose glowering visage shows nothing except how much he is raging to wrap his hands around the throat of this invisible force and kill it.
At last, the shaking begins to subside. With one last show of force, the earth's movements select a few of Buffy's heftier college texts from her bookshelf and send them to the floor like poorly arranged dominos. At first it is difficult to tell whether or not the quake is over. The curtains by the window are still swaying. It takes Buffy several minutes to realize that it is the wind coming through the window and Southern California's unique way of waking its residences is all a memory laid out in a mosaic of smashed belongings.
By the clock's ticking, the whole thing has lasted about three minutes.
Buffy is still in Spike's arms and she finds him panting. She has often wondered why he does this when he doesn't have to. Dawn is still clutching him, her face a pale moon, her eyes flickering with fear.
"Is everyone all right?" Spike asks, above the din of the sirens and car alarms coming from outside.
"Yeah," Buffy says in a hoarse whisper as she untangles herself delicately from Spike's embrace.
"The baby?" he asks.
"Sleeping like one," she wonders, passing a hand across his soft velvety forehead. Daniel furrows his brow a few times, yawns and flexes his tiny fingers against his cheek, but he quickly settles back into a deep, expressionless drowse.
Dawn is surveying the damage in her sister's room and suddenly is aware that hers is just down the hall and was just as vulnerable. "Oh, God!" she mutters as she ducks under the archway of Spike's arm and dashes for the ruined sanctuary of bedroom. "Oh, my God! Oh, my God!" she shrieks once she is there.
Buffy is looking with detachment at her surroundings, observing what's there and what was there before and what's just gone. Her piggy bank bleeds tip money from the neck onto the carpeted floor. She sees Mr. Gordo pinned helplessly under the weight of Maggie Walsh's freshman psych book. Her bureau mirror is cracked and when she looks into it, she sees herself as though her image has been transferred onto a frame of ruined film.
When Spike touches her shoulder, she almost cries out.
Wincing from her flinch, Spike stands back in bewilderment.
"Love?" is all he says.
She bends towards her beloved stuffed pig and frees him from his confinement, tossing the book aside as though it were a biohazard. Taking Mr. Gordo in her free hand, she rubs the stuffed toy's worn and pilled face against her own.
Strong hands go against her shoulders, shoving her back into reality. Her eyes meet a tempestuous blue stare.
"Darling, are you all right?" Spike asks.
She nods, hearing a cry that would have sent her hurtling over tall buildings in a single bound a year before. Down the hall, she can hear Dawn sobbing. "Go to Dawn," she says.
"Buffy---
"Go to Dawn," she instructs again, sliding a hand down his forearm. "Please."
To her relief, he does and she is left alone. She can hear Dawn saying, "It's all gone! It's all gone!" and Spike's murmurs of assurance that all is not gone. They are all still alive.
And there is one in her arms who always comes alive at night and who always spoils her sleep at least ten, fifteen times a night. In the eight hours that have led up to this great awakening he has slept and is sleeping still. Buffy looks down at her sleeping infant, so completely unaware of what has gone on this morning, so seemingly content a shiver sprints down her spine and she expels a brief, "Oh."
It is the first time Daniel has slept through the night.
Buffy enters the Magic Box, stray hairs catching in her mouth, baby in tow, colorful diaper bag clutched under her arm.
"We got here as soon as we could," Buffy says, wiping her wrist across her perspiring forehead as she approaches the troubled roundtable of Xander, Giles, Willow and Tara.
"And your boyfriend-cum-combustible during daylight hours?" Xander asks.
"He's on his way," Buffy says, turning just in time to see Spike barreling through the door, his blanket smoldering but not quite on fire. He whips the blanket away from his leather-clad form and dashes in as though seeking shelter from a sudden downpour.
"Hello all," Spike says.
The "all" he is addressing nod a general acknowledgement. Before them is a myriad of opened texts, some so old the mildew is perfuming the room in an aged incense.
Buffy sets the baby's carrier down gingerly on the table as Spike sidles up beside her and takes his own seat, straddling the chair rebelliously as he makes sure that Daniel's Nuk is plugged securely into the baby's mouth.
"We had to bring the baby with us," Buffy apologizes. "Dawn just had to go see Travis and after all she's been through this morning…" she trails off.
From behind the counter, Anya is sobbing as she finds another loss. "Oh, God! Not my imported wolf bane from Lithuania!"
Buffy is shamed when she realizes she was too caught up in her own circumstance to realize that all around her, the previously perfectly aligned shelves are now at an angle and most of their contents have been pushed onto the floor. Under her sandled foot, she smashes, quite by accident, a vial of precious mummy extract.
"We just have to buy a new TV. Everything else is OK, just kind of…moved. Except for a lot of mugs, some of Mom's Fiestaware, my perfume, and Dawn's sea shells from her Dad visitations. She's been collecting them in a mayonnaise jar since the divorce," Buffy says, bending to collect what she can of the glass vial.
Willow and Tara clash loving shoulders. "We lost a couple glass orbs and an antique wishing urn. There are only two left in the whole world," Willow laments.
"We just lost a sugar bowl, my autographed picture of Timothy Dalton, and some bad wedding gifts," Xander says.
"I loved that juicer!" Anya cries, still trying to salvage the wolf bane. "It was the best thing we got."
"I myself incurred quite a few losses," Giles says, dropping his voice to a nearly inaudible level. "My recording of Tuscanini conducting a 1942 radio broadcast of La Traviata. My favorite teapot. My mother's Waterford crystal bowl."
"It was a big one. 6.5 on the Richter scale," Xander says.
For a moment, Spike admires Xander. But his high regard doesn't last long. Xander did have access to TV, which Spike doesn't have anymore. No more TV. No more Hogan. Hogan!
"Buffy, we have to go to Best Buy after this," Spike whispers into her ear.
"I know, I know," she says, swatting him off as though he were an annoying beetle. She is focusing on Giles' concerned stare. She only sees him this pensive when times are dire. They have been through the roughest of times. When she looks at him now, she sees every crisis they have ever gone through times ten and she can't help being just a little fearful, especially when she sees him looking at her swaddled baby, who has slept through most of the hurried morning, waking only for a feeding just before they left the apartment.
"Of course, we should all be very glad that we all survived," Giles says, injecting a note of cheer into his voice. "As we all know, a few years ago when these quakes occurred, the Hellmouth was opening. And when the Hellmouth opened the time before that, we almost lost someone very dear to us." His eyes jut briefly to his Slayer charge who is watching her baby nursing sweetly at his Nuk while his father strokes his fine-haired scalp.
"I'd like to prevent of repeat of that if at all possible," Buffy says as her baby expels the Nuk from his mouth with a disapproving tongue. The pacifier lands squarely on the front of his sleeper and Buffy plugs it back in, only to have the baby reject it again.
"That's not the one he likes," Spike says. "You left his favorite at home."
"Well, honey, I picked the first one I saw and I don't recall you being in helpful mode as we were packing to leave." Buffy picks up the diaper bag, tearing through the contents until she produces half a dozen black and white drawings of smiley, happy faces on heavy cardstock. She holds one in front of Daniel and he focuses for a while before his features contort, giving a thumbs down to Buffy's attempts at amusing him.
"The best thing we can do is discern what may have precipitated this latest quake," Giles says in a volumized voice, trying to compete with the baby's cries. "Has anyone seen anything unusual on patrol?"
Xander shrugs. "Just the usual bad vamps with bad breath."
"W-Willow and I saw some demons playing poker with kittens for chips," Tara says. "W-we didn't kill the demons, but we did cast a spell that made them return the kittens to the shelter."
"To this day, four of the six kittens have been adopted," Willow says with glee.
"Xander and I saw some Koulder demons going to go see the latest Adam Sander film which was weird, because no one else was in line to see it," Anya says, "But then we watched the E! Channel and it turns out no one except them saw it, judging by the poor opening."
But there is one thing that happened just under a month ago.
Every hair on the back of Buffy's neck bristles as the full weight of Giles' stare settles on her and her baby.
"Oh, my God!" Buffy says. She rushes to collect the baby in her arms. She sees all of her friends rise, passing shy glances her way. They all assume the same thing. Daniel has something to do with the quake.
She has known what they have thought all along. Slayer+Vampire=anomaly. And this baby, it has to be some sort of sign. When her friends woke this morning they were feeling their fears under their feet in the vibrations that made their worlds sand in an hourglass. But she cannot blame them for being afraid. She is afraid too.
Giles lets his eyes fall to the floor. His helplessness tightens Buffy's throat until she gasps for air. "Just say it! You think Daniel has caused all this!"
"Buffy," Spike begins.
"You do think that he's some sort of portent!"
"Buffy, Daniel needs---" Spike tries to continue.
"You think he's some kind of new evil that is opening the Hellmouth!"
"Buffy, Daniel!" Spike yells.
"What? I just fed him!" she says, her eyes spilling over with tears.
"Yes, and now he needs to be changed," Spike says.
As the mewling infant's cries come to a full throttle demonstration against her breast, Buffy takes the baby into her former training room, now a makeshift changing room.
As she splays her baby's legs wide enough to replace the soiled diaper, Buffy sniffs back tears still, seeing her sweet little baby's cloudy blue eyes, just hinting at recognition of who she is and why she's doing these things for him.
An arm comes up under her swelling breasts and then there is a cold kiss against her neck. Buffy ignores him, icily, wiping the baby's hind parts with a cleansing cloth.
"Buffy, please don't shut me out," he begs.
Buffy does not look at him. She reaches into the diaper bag and retrieves a new diaper and fits it under her baby's bottom. While Daniel busies himself by blowing bubbles from his mouth, she is remembering the Master's mouth. He had Kool Aid mouth. He bit her. He almost killed her.
In her mind she is perusing the branches of Spike's family tree. The Master sired Darla. Darla sired Angel. Angel sired Drusilla. Drusilla sired Spike. Spike tried to sire Buffy. She sired him instead. And from that union came Daniel.
"Buffy, look at me!" Spike commands.
Buffy turns to Spike and sees the twisted spiral of the Master's mouth in Spike's pillowy bottom lip. She is forced to remind herself that Daniel is a member of that line.
She has given birth to evil.
Giles ducks his head into the training room, ruefully. "Buffy," he says. "Xander and I are paying a visit to the Hellmouth."
"I'm going with you," she says resolutely.
"You are not," Spike says. "I'm going with them and---
"You're staying with your childe," Buffy says. "And I'm going with them."
He hates the way she says "child". He hates the implied "e" at the end which suggests that he is Daniel's sire. And he is not. Daniel is the life he doesn't have anymore. Daniel is the affirmation that he and Buffy truly love each other. Daniel is…
Another branch on the Master's family tree.
"Buffy, listen to me," Spike says, chasing after her, Daniel sobbing in his arms. "Buffy, stop!"
Buffy's jutting shoulders shrug off his protestations as she continues on with Xander and Giles, heading for the door. Spike passes off Daniel into Tara's scrambling arms as he pursues his glacial Slayer. At the tinkling of the bell, he should stop walking, but he keeps stalking her, still trying to convince her that what he has in his arms is not evil. The sun singes his skin and he is forcibly beckoned back inside as Giles, Xander, and Buffy head up the street and out of sight.
His skin parboiled, Spike limps back inside, howling, as he powers over to Giles' Mr. Tea Pot, not even bothering to make an internal comment about how Giles has sold out to his adopted country. He pours the water onto his blistering skin and sinks into a corner as the liquid soothes the wounds.
Willow crouches beside him, taking his injured hands into hers, recoiling as steam curls from his flesh. "Hold on. I think we have something to at least make you a little less owie." And she skips off behind the counter.
Spike looks up at Tara who is rocking Daniel in her arms. She is the consummate earth mother in her long, flowing skirt and loose-fitting peasant top. She is whispering against the baby's forehead, cooing to him softly, her eyes closing as her full and rounded lips form a gentle lullaby just for his small and sensitive ears.
"Tara, you don't think he's evil, do you?" he asks.
Tara is whipped out the enchantment of her own voice and blinks back at Spike. It is the first time she can remember that he has ever called her by her real name. She regards the now calm infant with the tender caress of her heavily hooded stare and bends to kiss him. "No. He's not evil. But that doesn't mean there isn't something evil out there that wants him. Because, you know, vampire and a Slayer having a baby? It's kind of the stuff that apocalyptic dreams are made of."
Spike eyes her quizzically. "You think that there's something coming after him from the Hellmouth?"
"Well, I'm not s-s-sure," she answers, suddenly bashful in the beam of his probing stare. "I'm n-not really good with portents. Just potions. But it would seem logical that if something evil were setting its sights on Daniel, it might be c-coming through the Hellmouth."
Willow returns with a mortar and pistil, grinding a heady scented herb into a powder. "Living on the Hellmouth, we do lose sight of the fact that we are also living on a fault line."
"Yeah, if it were only so simple as just earthquakes," Spike says.
"A-and even if something is after Daniel, we can stop it. I mean, so we go up against another Big Bad. He'll be just a Little Bad in no time when he squares off with seasoned vets like us." Willow catches Spike's scowl and remembers that she is talking to a former Big Bad in the flesh. "Oops. Sorry, Big Bad." She quickly sprinkles the powder over his pinking skin and gives the invocation, "Vigorite!"
Spike watches as the powder swirls into his reddened hands. Within seconds, the sting is subsiding. Once he can move his fingers again without pain, he beckons for Tara to hand over his son. As the baby finds himself in the familiarity of his father's arms, a trusting glow emanates from his serene little face and Spike feels that recurring tightening around his heart. "Yeah, I'm the Big Bad," he mutters, passing his bottom lip over the baby's mouth. "I'm the Big Bad."
Dawn bangs on the front door of Travis' house, noting that the hedges are still handsomely arranged, that the furniture on the front porch is still in place.
"Dawn, what are you doing here?" Travis asks. "You should be home---
She invites herself in with a brush of her hand against his shoulder. Warily, she inches into the front hall. At first she sees the chandelier, hanging in perfect symmetry. A quick pass of her eyes to the right and she observes that the so-called Mud Room is just as mudless as ever. To the left, all the furniture in the living room is in yardstick alignment, the carefully and tastefully chosen knick-knacks all in one piece. Even the oil painting of Salome holding the head of John the Baptist is still holding ghastly court over the heavy marble mantelpiece.
She hoped that it wouldn't look this way. On her walk over, she saw cars skidded in zigzags all over the road, water exploding from underground pipes and glass poured from shattered windows sprinkled over the sidewalks. As she neared Travis's neighborhood, the visible damage began to diminish and her heart began to lose hope. It's not that she wanted Travis to have gone through what she did in the early hours. No, she just wanted to see something out of place in Samantha Singleton's Palace of Perfection. But the house looks as HGTV-ready as usual.
"We, uh, we were lucky," Travis stammers in a psuedo-apologetic voice. "We were far enough away from the epicenter, I guess. We heard that Springfield Heights got hit real bad. I was worried you were hurt, but then the news reporter said there were no casualties. The church where we go. It was almost demolished. That's where my Mom and Dad are now. Seeing if they can salvage anything."
Who cares about your fucking church! Dawn's mind screams. Dawn can imagine his family gathered around their 60-inch flat screen TV, whispering prayers that they were fortunate enough to be passed over, but not giving the smallest offering to those who had lost everything. Dawn can almost hear Mrs. Singleton sneering, "So they lost everything? How much could people like that have?"
Bitter tears collect in her eyes as she remembers how this morning, Buffy poured her cereal into a chipped ceramic bowl and realized it was the only bowl left that wasn't broken. "Here, Dawn. You eat it. I'll have a banana. They bruise, but they don't break."
Dawn surveys a row of optimistic Hummel figurines with their angelic, open mouths and wonders to herself, "Why couldn't one---just one of those have been destroyed?"
"Oh, Dawn," Travis is saying in a sympathetic tone. "I can't imagine what you must have gone through this morning. Was there much damage? Can anything be saved?"
She can't beat down her surging emotion any longer and a sob builds to a painful crescendo in her chest. "It was just a jar!" she screams.
Travis stands back. "Huh?"
She sucks back a wave of tears and tries to speak as steadily as she can. "It was a jar I had been s-saving. With seashells. Every time I went to visit Dad, I brought back s-sea shells and I put them in this jar that my Mom helped me decorate with puffy paint. The jar was sitting on my desk. A-and it fell off during the qu-quake and the jar was crushed to bits. I couldn't believe it. I-it was just gone! All those memories…"
"Well, isn't that where you keep your laptop too? Is it gone?"
Dawn narrows her eyes to slits. "I don't give a shit about my laptop, Travis! But that's just like you. Juuuuust like you to value something that cost a lot over something that meant a lot. What do you fucking care, anyway? You have this big house. Your two-car garage. Your mother and father. You actually have a real family, Travis. I don't really have a mother and father anymore. All I have are broken shells on my bedroom floor!"
A warm hand comes to land on her shoulder and she is reminded that at her first discovery of the smashed mementos, she wanted her sister so badly. But instead, there was Spike.
"And Buffy doesn't even care," she says. "She had to stay with the baby. Even after she saw he was all right, she wasn't letting him go. Not even long enough to see if I was OK."
The baby. Travis' mind spins back to the morning when he heard his parents' footfalls on the carpet outside his room as they hurried off to the church. He ducked out into the hallway, thinking the house was on fire and they had neglected to tell him. Then he heard the hysterical pitch in his mother's voice as she shouted over her shoulder to his father, "Oh, God, Steven. Do you think he's really coming now? Have we waited too long to perform the sacrifice?"A part of him cheers when he hears the slight semblance of resentment in Dawn's words. "So, uh, Buffy acted like she cared more about the baby then she did about you?"
"Well, I don't know," Dawn says, forcing herself to remember Buffy's cereal surrender at 8:00 am. "I just really needed her then. That's all. I know she has someone else to mother now. Someone who really is her child. But it still isn't easy, you know? After all this time, being her number one concern. And now I'm here at number two. They say it's lonely at the top. It's even lonelier the step below."
"I know," he exhales. "I know."
"What?" she blasts. "How could you know? You're an only child!"
"Listen, I know, Dawn, because…" He realizes how loud he is yelling when the crystals in the chandelier above begin to tinkle and sway. He gathers up his anger in a sigh and says, "I know because my Mom and Dad had a baby when I was twelve. He didn't live very long. He was fine when he was born and he was healthy and all, but one night he went to sleep and he didn't wake up in the morning. The doctors really didn't have any explanation except it was just one of those things." Travis' mouth twists to one side and his eyes roam the walls, the floor, the doorframes…anyplace where he can't see Dawn's shocked expression.
"Oh, God, Travis…" All at once in makes sense to her. All the times she tried to talk about the baby and he would hastily, sometimes angrily change the subject. The rejections of the baby pictures, the complete refusal to come and see Daniel…She stands there in complete shame, wishing back all those entreaties uttered before the first bell in the morning, "Travis, you really should see Daniel." She reaches to touch his arm, which he withdraws and tucks under his other arm. "Travis, I'm so sorry. I didn't know."
"Well, yeah. You didn't know. But you do now."
"Why didn't you tell me before?"
"Because. I didn't want to put any thoughts in your head that the same thing might happen to Daniel." That something can come, in the night, and steal the baby you love and leave nothing behind but an empty cradle.
"Oh, Travis…I just don't know what to say. I feel so horrible now."
"Don't. It was a long time ago. He's all but forgotten now, buried back in Los Angeles. My parents never even talk about him."
Dawn can tell by the anguished look on his face that something in him still wants to talk about him. She tries again to touch him, this time successfully maneuvering her hand around his wrist until their fingers are wrapped together. "What was his name?" she asks.
"Michael," he says, finding it strange just saying his name again.
"I'll bet he was adorable," Dawn says.
"He was," he swallows. "I'd show you pictures, but I don't know where they are."
She doesn't have to see pictures. She is seeing the infant in the memories reflected on Travis' haunted face now, how precious he was in his pastel sleepers, his little hands curling and uncurling as he slept peacefully. She thinks about how she stares at Daniel sometimes and he is so still she wonders if he's OK. And then he will flinch or his eyelids will flutter and she knows he is safe. To think that something could just come and take him away without explanation…
"Oh, Travis," she says, drawing him gently into her arms. There is resistance at first, but then his arms come up around her back, pushing gently against her, his after school jock activities becoming more and more apparent in his firm and muscular hold on her. She kisses the side of his face, directing her lips cautiously to his. When their mouths join at last, there is vulnerability there like the taste of liquor.
He holds her, feeling her tremble against him and wondering how she could be requiting some need in him when he does embrace her, hoping against hope that what he is feeling is not love, because it can't be. He has to ultimately disappoint her. He will become that thing in the night. But he adores her. He has known this since the day he saw her, Slayer sister or not. Even as he uttered the tarnished line, "You're different from the other girls," he meant it. There was a perpetual sadness about her, an inner wound so like the one festering in his own body. He would see her laugh at their friends' jokes, but always, there was a shadow of some secret pain lurking around the edges of her smile. She was just like him.
"I love you, Travis," she says in a shudder against his cheek.
He curls a finger and loops a lock of her hair around it, smiling down at her as she waits breathlessly for a reply. "And I love you, Dawn."