Chapter Seven: Loss
Spike awoke in a jail cell, his head thumping and his mouth dry.
"Oh, fucking marvellous," he groaned.
"Good morning," said a copper, looking in through the door.
"What am I doing here?" Spike asked, and the compulsion to ask 'Don't you know who I am?' was strong.
"Don't remember, sir?"
"No, I bloody don't. But I didn't do it."
"Actually, sir, all eyewitness accounts say you did. But the lady is not pressing charges, so-"
"Lady? What lady? Did I hurt someone?"
"Your stepsister, sir. You smashed a bottle on her head."
Spike covered his eyes. Glory. Of course. "Fucking little cow deserved it," he said. "She said... she said Buffy'd been sleeping around."
"Buffy?" the policeman looked confused.
"My wife."
"You married a woman called Buffy?"
Spike glared at him. "If someone accused your wife of having someone else's baby, wouldn't you smash something on her head?"
"The someone, or my wife?"
"The someone - look, just let me out of here, will you?"
The policeman stood back. "You're free to go."
Spike hauled himself to his feet. "What about her?"
"Who?"
"Glory, you twat. Where is she?"
"Still at the hospital, I believe."
"Not gonna die, is she?"
"I don't think so."
"Oh. Well, never mind."
"Oh, thank God," Tara clutched the phone to her ear. "It's ringing."
"Probably gonna run out of battery next," Willow said, her injured hand in her lap, her good hand stroking Buffy's damp hair.
"Yes, I need an ambulance," Tara said into the phone. Quickly. I think my friend might be dying. She went into labour last night, she was bleeding heavily and now she's lost consciousness... Yes, she has a pulse, but it's not very strong... She's breathing... I don't know, Will, can you hear the baby's heartbeat?"
Willow pressed her ear to Buffy's huge stomach. "I can't hear anything."
Tara's face was wet with tears as she put the phone down. "They'll be here soon. If there's no heartbeat, I don't think it's good."
"But Buffy will be okay?"
Tara nodded, although she really wasn't sure. "She's strong, and she'll be..."
They sat in silence, holding each other, trying not to look at Buffy's body.
"My lord," Davis said as Spike strode into the lobby of his house, "we've been trying to contact you all night-"
"Did you try the local clink?"
"Eventually, sir, they said you were asleep."
"Passed out through massive induction of alcohol," Spike corrected dryly. "And now I feel like hell. Where's Buffy? She still in bed?"
"Well, sir," the butler was twisting his hands, "that's what we needed to tell you."
Buffy didn't know where she was. Unconsciousness brought her breif releif from pain, but every now and then something vicious would tug her back up into semi-consciousness, where everything hurt and violent pain stabbed right through her body. Vaguely, she was aware of periodic voices, of blood, of frantic medical speak, of people touching her, machines, implements, needles, knives...
When she regained full consciousness it was, as before, because of the awful pain. Her hands travelled immediately down to her stomach and she gagged when she realised it was flat and soft. It burned with pain, but there was nothing there. No baby. The baby was gone.
The baby was dead.
Giles awoke to the ringing of a telephone. It was too damn early for a call - but then it might be something to do with Buffy, or Joyce...
He went downstairs and picked up the receiver. "Hello?"
"Rupert. Do you know where she is?"
"Who? Spike, is that you?"
"Yeah. Do you know where Buffy is?"
"No, I thought - is she not at home?"
"No, she's bloody well not at home." Giles heard something smash in the background. "She sodding left last night and I can't get an answer out of her bloody phone. The girls went too. I don't know where she is, Giles."
He sounded horribly, desperately worried. "Have you tried calling Willow or Tara?"
"Don't have their sodding numbers, do I?"
"No, right. Well, I'll call them. Perhaps she went into early labour - have you checked the hospital?"
"Oh, do you think? I hadn't thought of that. No, Giles, she's not at the sodding hospital."
Giles wasn't sure what to say. "I'll - I'll try the girls, and I'll, er, get back to you..."
But before he could dial, the phone started ringing again. He picked it up, "Spike, I said-"
"Giles?"
He had to think for a moment before he realised it wasn't Buffy. "Dawn?"
Her voice was very quiet. "Do you know where Buffy is?"
"No," Giles sighed, "but I'm trying to find out. Have you spoken to Spike?"
"No, I called there but they said he was busy and Buffy wasn't there... Giles, it's Mom," Dawn said, and Giles suddenly felt cold. "I think she's dying."
Buffy woke again and found that she was in a dark room, hooked up to hospital instruments. She looked around, just in case, but there was no crib by the bed.
Eyes burning with tears, she turned her head to the wall and cried herself back to sleep.
Light woke her, peeping in through her eyelids, and with it came the sound of distant voices. She tried to sit up and decided that one of the tubes sticking in her probably contained some kind of pain releif, because she wasn't in such horrible pain any more. She wore a hospital gown and nothing else. She was alone in the room.
Buffy wiped her sore, tear-crusted eyes and tried to work out a plan of action. Right. She wasn't going back to Spike - that was a given. The only reason they'd been together was the baby and now there was no baby, so it was stupid trying to go back. Best she ended it now, rather than trying to live with him and ending up hating him even more. Buffy didn't think she could live with someone who'd cheated on her, even if he did promise to change. It would just never be the same.
She'd go back home. She could finish her course and work in the gallery, yes, that would be a good idea. Her mom was probably still not feeling too good, so until she was completely recovered Buffy knew she'd have to take charge. She started to feel a little stronger at the thought. She needed a purpose - these last months in England she'd just been bored and frustrated. She wasn't cut out to be a wife or a mother...
She sniffed resolutely. There was no point crying for something she'd never had. It wasn't as if she'd lost a born baby: she still didn't even know what sex it had been. Maybe they could tell her. Maybe she could bury it, get some closure.
The door opened and it was a nurse, a cheerful Jamaican woman who seemed delighted to see Buffy awake and alert. She checked her pulse and temperature and a whole lot of other things, and asked Buffy if she'd like to see her friends.
"Friends?"
"The girls who brought you in."
Willow and Tara. Buffy remembered - the awful endless night in Giles's cottage. Who knew, maybe if they'd got out sooner then the baby could have been saved... maybe... Or maybe it was already dead and that was why it all hurt too much. Maybe it was Glory. Maybe it was Buffy. She didn't know. It hurt to ask.
"Yes," she said. "I would like to see them."
Willow and Tara rushed in, and Buffy was horrified to see Willow's hand heavily bandaged. "Did I do that?"
"You are kind of freakishly strong," Willow said. "Don't worry about it. It's not my writing hand anyway."
"How are you feeling?" Tara asked, and Buffy considered lying. But then she realised that she couldn't lie to someone who'd been through what they'd been through together.
"Pretty crappy," she said. "I mean, I think I'm on a lot of drugs 'cos I know it hurt more earlier, but really I think I could do with another kind of drug. You think they have anything to stop me crying?"
"Do you want to see him?" Tara asked. "That might help."
"No! No, I - I can't. Not right now. I just can't. I..."
"Oh, sweetie," Willow stroked her hair, "I'm so sorry."
"It will get better," Tara offered. "My mother died when I was seventeen. It's really awful, but eventually it does get better."
"That whole time thing?" Buffy said, thinking that it was hardly the same. "Well, I reckon it's been a good few hours, but I still don't feel too much better."
"You will," Willow said, looking pretty sniffy herself. "And we're right here for you," she said, looking over at Tara, who nodded. "Anything you need. We thought maybe you might need a place to stay, so-"
"I think I'm going to go back home."
"But - back to Spike's? I thought you-"
"Nooo," Buffy said, "not there. I really just don't think I can, well, ever see him again. Has he called? Does - does he know?"
"I think he spoke to Giles," Tara said.
"And he hasn't tried to come here?"
"We weren't sure if you'd want him to know where you are," Willow said uncertainly.
"No. I don't. I really don't think I could face Spike right now. As soon as they let me out, I'm going back to Sunnydale. Starting over. New life for Buffy."
"Well, that's good," Willow said. "You're more upbeat."
"If I stop I'll burst into tears," Buffy said. "I think I still have all the hormones and stuff."
"They said you might get really bad moodswings," Tara said, "while your hormones are sorting themselves out."
"Yeah. Well. I think I know which direction most of them are going to swing in," Buffy said, feeling her eyes start to sting again. "God," she sniffed, "it's just not fair."
"I know, Buffy," Willow said. "They say God just takes back the ones he loves."
"What about the people down here who loved them? What do we get for it?"
"You get to remember them," Tara said.
"Remember? I never even - I mean, all I have to remember is nine months of pain and discomfort and worry and a failed marriage."
The girls looked confused, but Willow said, "Yes, but at the end of that at least you have a baby to show for it."
"But I don't," Buffy sobbed. "I don't even have that."
"Erm," Tara said.
"Didn't they tell you?" Willow said.
"Tell me what?"
"Well, he's a little shaky right now, but they're pretty sure he's going to be fine."
"Who? Spike?"
"William."
"He's not Spike any more?"
Willow and Tara exchanged another look. "Was he going to be called Spike?"
"That is a little, well, odd, Buffy."
"What?" Buffy stared. "Okay, I'm grieving and hormonal, what's your excuse?"
"We're not talking about Spike, your husband," Tara said slowly, realising, "we're talking about William. Your son."
Buffy froze. The world stopped for a few seconds.
"My what?"
"Your son. You were pretty out of it, Buffy, but I remember you saying you wanted to call him William."
"I did?" Was this so they could bury him with a name?
"Yes. They asked you what his name was and you-"
In a flash, Buffy remembered. "His name? They were asking for the name of the father," she said, a half-remembered voice sliding through her brain. She'd barely been conscious, but it seemed very important to establish Spike as the father, not Riley like Glory kept saying.
"No, they were asking for the baby's name."
"I think it suits him," Tara said.
Buffy tried to put all of this together, and came up with, "My son is called William?"
"Yes." Willow beamed. "You want to see him? They had to put him in a special unit because he was kind of weak, but they said he's doing really well. I'm sure they'd let you see him."
"He's not dead?" Buffy croaked.
"No, of course not! Why did you-"
Tara elbowed her girlfriend, and Willow shut up. "I'll go get the nurse."
The nurse said that of course Buffy could go and see the baby, so in a kind of daze Buffy was put in a wheelchair and pushed through antiseptic corridors to a ward decorated with garish cartoon animals. Small children limped about with broken limbs, babies cried, and Buffy clutched Willow's hand as they went towards a door marked Neonatal. Behind it were half a dozen glassy cribs, incubators, each one containing a baby with lots of tubes attached. It was very warm.
The nurse wheeled Buffy in and took her to an incubator containing the tiniest baby Buffy had ever seen, small and pink and chubby, with wisps of dark hair and tiny, tiny little eyelashes.
"This is your son," the nurse said, "William."
Buffy stared, entranced. "But - but I thought he was - I woke up and - all last night, it-"
"It wasn't last night," the nurse gave a big smile, "it was the night before. You've been out all day. Your baby's twenty-three and a half hours old."
"Oh," Buffy said, looking down at him, unable to think of anything else to say. "Oh."
She was allowed to touch him and talk to him, and after a doctor came by to check on the baby, allowed to finally pick him up and hold him. Buffy cried for hours and hours, not sure whether it was hormones or genuine emotion and not caring, either. Baby William felt incredibly right in her arms, and Buffy knew she would never, ever get tired of loving him. Everything else in the world went away, and it was just her and William, and total, unconditional love.
Eventually she was told to go back to her room and rest, and she could go back to see him later. Babbling to Willow and Tara about the total fabulous of her baby, how he was the best baby, the cutest, the smartest - already, he was a genius, because he'd opened his eyes and looked right at her while she was talking to him - how much she totally, utterly, completely adored him, Buffy got happily back into bed and let the doctors inspect the damage William had done while he was trapped in her womb.
"Stupid damn placenta," she said, when she was told that it had been blocking the baby's exit. "It's just dumb. Totally gets in the way of everything."
They checked over her stitches - they'd had to perform an emergency C-section as soon as they got to her - and said she was healing well.
"Well, I'm a strong healthy gal," Buffy said. "William's strong too. He'll be fine in no time. Probably we'll wake up tomorrow and he'll already be crawling around. We'll have to catch him before I can take him home."
The doctor smiled. "It might be a while before he can leave the hospital," he said, "although with any luck he might be out of the incubator soon."
Just as the doctor was about to leave, there was a knock on the door. "Visiting hours are nearly over," the doctor said.
Buffy stretched to see past him and broke into a smile. "Let him in," she begged, "please."
Giles kissed her cheek and gave her a tired smile. "I came as soon as I could," he said. "How's William?"
"He's perfect," Buffy gushed. "Well, not perfect, he's still really tiny and he needs to gain a load of weight before they'll let him out, so I guess I have to get him some doughnuts and hamburgers to eat, huh?"
He smiled. "And how are you?"
"I'm not so bad," Buffy said. "Better than I was when I woke up. Now I've seen him." She didn't want to tell him she'd thought the baby was dead. It seemed really foolish now.
"And," he paused, "what about Joyce?"
"Oh, God," Buffy clapped her hand to her mouth, "I haven't even called yet! I'm pretty sure Dawn said she was in the hospital, but maybe I can get the number for her there - Giles, it'll be a hospital-to-hospital call!"
"Buffy," Giles interrupted, not seeming to find her joke funny, " didn't they tell you?"
"Tell me what?" Buffy was still smiling, composing in her head what she was going to tell Joyce.
"Your mother... died yesterday. There were complications in surgery. The tumour had spread more then they thought, it was impossible to totally remove. I don't know yet completely what happened. Dawn was understandably distressed when she called me."
Buffy found it hard to breathe. "Mommy," she said.
Giles touched her hand and she threw her arms around him. That's what Willow and Tara had been talking about. Mom, oh God, Mom...
When the circumstances were explained, the doctors agreed to discharge Buffy as soon as possible, and she left the hospital within a few days, got on a plane, and took as many sleeping tablets as she could without killing herself. Part of Buffy wanted to slide down into nothingness, to just tip the whole packet of tablets down her throat. But then she remembered William, safe in his incubator in the hospital, and knew she had to live for him. Besides, Giles was with her, and he was relentlessly upbeat.
Xander met her at the airport. He was quiet, not sure of what to say, his usual jokes completely useless in the face of such depression.
"How's William?"
"He's okay," Buffy said. "I called when we got off the plane. He's gaining weight. He should be allowed out soon."
"Can't wait to see him."
"Me neither."
Dawn was a dissolving mass of tears, desperately glad to hand over all responsibility to Buffy. The funeral had mostly been arranged with Xander and Anya's help, so all Buffy really had to do was hold herself together long enough to get through it.
It took Spike a while to track down Joyce Summers's funeral. No one in Buffy's camp was speaking to him at all and he suspected it was just some ingrained public school courtesy that made Giles tell him in the first place.
His sister Harmony used to live just outside Sunnydale, but since she'd discovered her latest husband, a rich doctor, boning his secretary, she'd moved back to LA. So he had to drive around all the cemetaries and funeral parlours before he recognised Xander's rather dull car outside one of them and made his way between the graves to the flock of mourners crowding round Joyce's disappearing coffin. They dispelled as he got closer, no one giving him a second glance, and Spike thought for a second that there were definite advantages to wearing so much black.
Xander and Anya walked right by him, and Dawn, sobbing, clinging onto Giles, nearly broke his heart. But it was Buffy who caught his attention, standing there alone watching dirt being shovelled over her mother's body in its shiny wooden box, not crying, her body still, her back straight.
"Buffy," he said, and she flinched. Didn't look at him.
"What are you doing here?"
"Came to pay my respects."
"Can you afford that?"
He didn't bite. "Are you alright?"
Buffy flicked her eyes scornfully at him. "Peachy."
"I mean-"
"Can you go now, Spike?"
He stared. "What?"
"Go. Now. Please."
Momentarily at a loss, he eventually managed to say, "The baby-"
"There is no baby."
Silence.
"The baby died, Spike," Buffy said harshly. "There's nothing to keep you here."
Shocked, he reached out to her. She must be in so much pain.
But Buffy pushed him away. "Could you just leave?" she said, emotion high in her voice, and Spike tried to think of something to say to her. But there was nothing - nothing she'd listen to, anyway.
He took one last look at her, and walked away.
Buffy waited until he was gone before she let herself cry.