CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Buffy makes a strangulated cry as she crosses the distance between her and her baby, collecting him from the arms of his abductor as though bringing to light something precious from antiquity. Mere seconds tick by before hatred overtakes her hazel-eyed stare. Before she can pass the infant into someone else's arms, a fist she hoped would be hers flies in Travis' face.
"You fucking bastard!" Spike screams as he lands another punch against Travis' cheek. The teenager lies crumbled on the carpeted floor, breathing blood from his nose. Spike lifts him effortlessly and swipes his face across the row of infuriatingly cheerful Hummel figurines, sending them all to the floor.
As he is held, squirming, from a loop of his cargo pants, Travis begs, "Please don't kill me."
"'Please don't kill me'? Do you know how often I've heard that? And do you know how often that plea has worked on me?" Spike rams the boy's head into the glass of the bookshelf in front of him. "If you answered never, you win!"
"Spike, stop!" Dawn orders in a head-clutching howl.
He looks at Dawn, his actions ceased by the passion of her words. He is almost ready to say he is sorry, but then…
"This is my fight!" Dawn says through clenched teeth.
What happens next could be the rapture of her betrayal, or the long dormant power of her Keyness coming into play. Or it could be the fact that a woman wronged is rising above the girl everyone thought she was and is showing herself in a roar of rage. She strikes one blow against his cheek that sends him flying across the room, crashing into a pink and white striped wingback chair
"You used me!" she screams as she plucks him up by the collar of his Eddie Bauer button down. "You said you loved me!"
"And…I…do…" Travis says, clutching at the tightening collar around his throat. "You liar!" is her retort as she punches him again.
Travis spits out a fountain of blood, looking surprised to not find a stray tooth or two contained within the scarlet spray. He struggles in her grasp, only to be felled with another punch to the jaw. "Listen!" he begs sibilantly. "Dawn, please!"
"I'm done listening to you!" she says, drawing his collar tight across his neck.
"Dawn, I mean it!" he gasps, trying desperately to pry her hands away. "I came back for a reason."
"And I'd like to hear it. Right after I do this."
A strategically aimed knee to a particularly sensitive area sends Travis back to the floor where he lies curled in a fetal position, ruing the day that he ever sprouted nuts.
Through his whimpers of pain, there is another sincere apology and then the words, "We're all going to hell, we're all going to hell. If Daniel doesn't die, we're all going to hell. The church is burning. Satan is coming." He takes a breath and then says. "Daniel is our savior."
"Your pitiful church's savior? I don't think so!" Spike answers, placing protective arms around Buffy and his son.
"Not just ours," the boy says hoarsely as he winces from another ripple of pain. Everybody's. The whole world's."
The living room is silent now.
Travis sits on an ottoman, an icepack on his jaw and between his legs. Giles paces the floor, seized in thought, going over the details of Travis' confession in his mind. Buffy rocks Daniel in her arms, worry knitting her brow, aging her far beyond her twenty-one years. Spike stands behind her, his demon muted for the time being, but it's taking all his strength not to make Travis' throat a memory. He studies Dawn, just steps away from where he stands, finding her reeling in a demon of her own. Her eyes are cold, her expression steely and fixed as a general's in the trenches, wearing the gore of battle. A few teardrop sized spatters of Travis' blood scar her face, but she is either unaware of the blood or is wearing it proudly. He is not sure. If there is anything that he is certain of, he knows that she would have killed Travis if the news of the impending Armageddon hadn't spilled out in his cries of post-traumatic ball injury.
Travis has told them about the church, the minion from hell who helped construct it, the promise that Satan would return, the opening that appeared in the basement, inconspicuous at first, now roaring at full-throttle in the sanctuary, slowly consuming the earth with the fire down below.
Giles pauses momentarily, scraping his tongue along the inside of his cheek. "Your congregation conjured up Satan."
"Yes," Travis answers slowly. "But it wasn't our fault. Or their fault. They just wanted to build a church. That's all."
"And you think that Buffy and Spike's child will stop this?" Giles, again, uses his words carefully. He's not about to speak aloud anything that might allude to the child's death.
Travis is still not ready to divulge the secret. The altar boy in him is still keeping the flame. When the Watcher fists his unruly hair and jerks his head upward, he is more willing to speak. "We're all going to hell."
"Oh, stop with the Billy Graham-isms already!" Spike says. "Tell us something useful!"
"That's it," Travis says softly. "We're all going to hell. Tonight. Oh, God…" The boy buries his face in his hands. "We are. We're all going to hell."
"You've told us this," Giles says, relinquishing his hold on the boy's hair. "Now. Once again. How is Daniel supposed to stop this?"
The boy repositions the icepack on his jaw, flinching from the sight of Dawn's still curled fist.
"'The Slayer and a demon shall combine and raise for you a savior.'" Travis mumbles.
"Come again?" Giles asks.
Travis stiffens, knowing that speaking this bit of liturgy outside the church and to non-church members is the unwritten eighth deadly sin. He sighs and repeats, "'The Slayer and a demon shall combine and raise for you a savior.'"
"But how did you…?" Buffy aims an accusatory glance Dawn's way which is answered with a shrug of the shoulders.
"You didn't have to tell me," Travis continues. "Mom was kinda suspicious. She sent me out, one night, to the Bronze, just to test her theory."
Buffy remembers this. The sleazy vamp looking for a feed, the intended victim eating spicy hot buffalo wings dipped in dressing. Revulsion overcomes her as she says, "Your mother sent you out to be---
"She knew the risks. So did I," Travis says with a slight shiver. "I was in it for the church's sake. When you're told you're going to hell, you're going to hell, over and over, you'll do almost anything not to." He demurs, not able to look at Dawn without wanting to cry. "But I fell in love with you, Dawn, before I knew that Buffy was your sister."
"Like I'm going to believe you now," Dawn says through clenched teeth.
"Believe what you want. I love you. And when I found out Buffy was what Buffy was, I wished I had never seen you because I do love you more than anything in the world."
"Don't say that!" Dawn says, moisture rippling over her hate-filled eyes.
"You don't know what it is to love someone more than anything in the world," Spike says, cradling Buffy and his son.
"But I do," Travis says. Dawn's hatred of him is scoring his heart, leaving open, bleeding wounds. "When I held Daniel, I couldn't let them…do what they were planning to do." He looks at Daniel, nestled in Buffy's loving embrace. "A mother's love. It's the most powerful instinct in the universe. Probably more powerful than a Slayer's strength."
"It is," Buffy says softly, curling her index finger under Daniel's feather light grasp. She never knew what it was to love until she had Daniel. She never knew what it was like to suffer until she thought she lost him. And her heart has never grieved more at the thought that her child, the minute replication of her flesh, bone and blood, is being counted on to die for the world. "Travis, why did you come back?" she asks.
Travis' expression is blank at first, but then his features soften when he looks at the baby's contented face as he stares adoringly, trustingly, at his mother. "I've been asking this for a long time. I've asked Mom, my Sunday school teachers, Reverend Estey. Is there some other way to stop this? And I'm always told, 'The Slayer and a demon shall combine and raise for you a savior.' But tonight, when I was holding Daniel, I knew he was just a normal baby, a tiny little person who is loved by his parents. I couldn't go through with it. There has to be something else. Something else to keep us from going to Hell. I thought that Giles, as Buffy's Watcher, might know."
It is so bizarre to hear an outsider refer to him as Buffy's Watcher that a breath catches in Giles' throat.
Travis offers a crooked smile. "In Sunday school, we're told about Watchers. They're sort of like prophets to us."
"But how did you know that I was---
"You're older, not her father, not her sugar daddy. Give me some credit," Travis says.
Giles nods. "So this phrase you keep saying over and over. 'The Slayer and a demon will combine and raise for you a savior.' Where did this come from?"
"From St. Catherine herself. She appeared to the members of the original congregation and that was her message. Some of the church members did some research. They found some old text that told about how the Slayer and a vampire would become lovers and the two of them would produce a being to save the world."
"Do you know what text it was?" Giles asks.
Travis shrugs. "I don't know. Something about Aurelius or something."
"Aurelius?" Giles says. "You don't mean the prophecy of Aurelius, do you?"
"That could be it. I don't know."
Giles' stare comes to rest on Spike. The latest bit of information is settling uncomfortably on his shoulders, his already blanched skin whitening further as he takes it all in. For the first time that Giles can remember, he and Spike are sharing the same train of thought and at the bend in the track, there is a wreck.
"Good God," Spike mutters.
"What?" Buffy says, swiveling around to meet Spike's shock-riddled face.
"The prophecy of Aurelius," Giles says, shoving a hand under his jaw. "I thought that it had been fulfilled with Angel's death."
"I sort of hoped it had," Spike says dejectedly.
Buffy whips her head from Giles to Spike and back to Giles, not knowing whom to look at as neither has a particularly hopeful expression. The conspiratorial nature of their unspoken communication is taking her breath, so much so that she sputters when she asks, "W-what are you talking about? W-what prophecy?"
"Centuries ago it was predicted that a member of the Master's line would die to save the world," Giles says matter of factly. "The Slayer would take a demon as her lover and from that union would arise a savior to rescue humanity from Hell. It's only natural that the church would assume that the savior would take the form of a infant, since the whole of Christianity is based on the birth of a child and God's sacrifice of His only son."
"So what has to happen?" Buffy asks, her heart pounding as though she already knows. And she does.
"It's very simple, love." Spike says, swallowing hard as he draws her closer to him. "In order to keep the world from ending, I have to die tonight."