Disclaimers, etc, see part one.

Author's Notes: I do have all of this already written, so updates will keep coming. Thanks for the reviews.

New York.

* * * * *

It has never ceased to amaze me how accommodating and welcoming Angie can be. She learnt it from her mother, I know that much. But she dragged Robin and Faith with her to a little café we'd found off-off-Broadway.

I stepped back to walk with Robin while Faith and Angie asked each other questions about pregnancy and childbirth.

"She doesn't know what Faith is," I said, going for blunt. "I don't want her to know about that."

"Xander, it's part of you, it's part of what makes you everything you can be," Robin said, stepping up to the argument smoothly. Curse the man for turning the principled principal on me.

"No, it's not. Anya was who I was, and she died. Angie is who I am and she doesn't believe in monsters. She doesn't hear bumps in the night. She's never had anything to do with Spike."

Robin glowered at me. I knew I had hit a sore spot, but until then I hadn't realised how sore. Everyone had had something to do with Spike. Willow was the one he'd try to bite first time round. Anya slept with him. He understood Giles sometimes when no one else could and Giles had been part of the plan to kill him. Not to mention thinking he was Giles's son. Faith and he had had a reformed outsider thing going on the last days, and he'd killed Robin's mother.

Buffy had always seen Spike as he could be, rather than how he was. Enemy, but he was injured. Bad guy, but he helped her save the world. Killer, but he couldn't hurt people. Confidante, but he was evil. Lover, but he didn't understand. Warrior, but he was killing people. Then he could have been a champion, but in the end he was a sacrifice.

I wondered if she would ever get over him. I still wonder that. My world has crashed, so maybe he'll come back. Ha, what a laugh. Then I was more worried about keeping the worry of the Supernatural from Angie.

"Sorry, man," I offered. "I know you can't escape."

Robin shrugged, watching Faith. "I don't want to," he said. "I searched my whole life for the monster who killed my mother. When I found him he let me live and went on the save the world. I'm going to keep on till I've work out how that could happen."

"I think you'll be a while. Spike was odder than Buffy."

"Good," he said.

I laughed. I was glad he was watching out for the world.

"You've got a beautiful little girl, Xander," he said a moment later, unsettling revelations put away.

"I know," I said softly. I have always had difficulty describing how much 'my girls' mean to me. It's a little easier now because I've got practice at not being able to.

"It's gets better," he said. "She'll start talking one day. Then she'll know more than you do. Then you'll get scared."

I didn't really believe him them. But I nodded.

"You and Faith?" I prompted.

He laughed. "Don't sound so shocked, please. Three months. Six months and I'm going to be a dad. She refused to know what sex it is. We have to call it the Bump."

"Witch or Warlock," I murmured. That's what the mother-in-law in Bewitched had asked. You don't want to know how much television I've seen from crappy motel beds at four in the morning.

"Slayer," he said. "If it's a girl, it's got to be a Slayer. I just want to know if we'll need extra strong baby locks."

"I don't think they show that soon. Willow's last email said all potentials at the time of the spell, but that they thought potentials born after that wouldn't be Slayers at birth. The Council didn't start looking for potentials until the girls were about five anyway, so maybe you'll only need extra strong preschool teachers."

He had a far away look in his I know I had had several times in the last year. I elbowed him.

"She's also got a potion. Tell you if the baby's Slayer, witch or warlock when it's born."

"Thanks. But we'll have to stop this conversation now."

We'd reached the café. Angie and Faith were waiting outside for us. Robin offered his arm to Faith to follow Angie through the door. She took it and leaned against him.

"You were never that nice to me," I said.

"You weren't a gentleman at the time, Xander," she said.

"You were hardly a lady, Faith."

"And I was supposed to behave well because of that?"

"Sit down and eat some food," I said. "Are you still eating something normal people can stomach?"

"Never did."

Robin leaned over Faith and whispered in her ear. She eyed me carefully from beneath her eyelashes, so he must have told her what I'd told him. She caught my eye and nodded. An understanding and considerate Faith was someone I was going to have to get used to. I think she still had to, then too.

She kept looking at Robin throughout dinner as if she were surprised to see that he was there. And she kept touching her stomach, steeling herself that she could do what she would have to do.

"How do you guys know Xander?" Angie asked them.

"I was the last High School principle," Robin answered straight off the bat.. "Xander was in charge of the school's construction. Faith came to visit a friend of Xander's who I'd hired as a counsellor. That's how I met her."

Faith smiled at him in a sickeningly sweet way. The glace she threw said it had been a deliberate attempt to unsettle me. I couldn't help being aware that I was older than Faith, and more experienced, and more able. I blinked. It was the strangest feeling because most of the time I had known Faith she'd been absolutely in control, or at least making a good show of being sure of herself. She wasn't putting that face on anymore.

"Faith had come through Sunnydale a few years before, on her way to L.A," I explained.

Faith laughed and Angie gave her an odd look. I could understand though, it was a fairly innocuous description of how I knew Faith but her laugh said that there was a lot more going on.

"It seems so strange that you would bump into each other here," Angie said.

"It is strange," I said. "I thought I'd managed to run away from you lot for good."

"Willow caught up with you for your wedding though?" Faith said. "I would have liked to see that, little Xander, all growed up."

"I am older than you Faith," I said.

"But I was always more experienced," she said.

"That wasn't har— difficult. That wasn't difficult," I said.

Faith chuckled. Sarah banged her spoon on the table.

"How long are you in New York for?" Angie asked.

Faith and Robin were going to stay until the baby was born. Then they were going travel a bit until they ran out of money. They explained that Robin was getting a bit of money as a research grant, and Faith had inherited an amount from her uncle. They were both, actually, on the Watcher's Council, or possibly the school's payroll. I'd been given a bonus, plus a disability allowance by the Watcher's Council. I, too, passed the bonus off as an inheritance.

Angie was talking about the difficulties of caring for a child while you were on the road. And Robin was describing some of his childhood. I sat back and listened to how normal it sounded. Faith didn't describe any part of her childhood. I'm not sure why that was. She couldn't describe most of Sunnydale, of course, without resorting to euphemisms. Robin was raised by a friend of his mother's after she was killed; her Watcher. Faith's life was really too complicated for that sort of explanation, from what I knew of what had happened to her.

Sarah was getting bored to I started playing peek-a-boo with her. She always laughed at me. I only had to cover one eye not to see her and she'd point at the patch.

"When are you going to get a real fake eye, Xander?" Faith asked.

I shrugged. "I'm not sure I will. The patch makes me mysterious."

"No, the fact that you never talk about your adolescence makes you mysterious," Angie said. "That patch just makes you look creepy."

"I want one like Professor Moody had in Harry Potter," I said.

There are, of course, chances that they can be made. I just haven't found any one who could do it.

"That'd be creepier," Angie said.

"And more conspicuous," Robin said.

"No, but you'd still be able to wear the patch," Faith said. "The eye could see through things. That's how they knew that Draco was in that room."

Trust Faith to have read the books and completely upset the images I had of her. The conversation moved fairly rapidly into an argument over the means used to finally destroy Voldemort. Faith seemed to disagree with the characterisation of the big bad. But we all thought that Dumbledore, at least, saw through it.

It was a nice evening out. I was glad that both Robin and Faith warmed to Angie. Their opinion came to mean a lot to me the last few months together. In a way it meant more than Willow's opinion because they weren't going to like her for my sake.

"She's an odd girl," Angie said as we walked back our motel.

"Faith?" I said. "Yeah."

"How well do you know her?" Angie asked. Her tone was mildly suspicious.

"Too well for someone I don't really know," I said. "We had a thing once," I explained.

Angie nodded. I hoped she though it was enough to answer the questions she had.

"What's her story?"

Angie liked to know people's stories. She's very good at talking to people and getting them to tell her things. It works out really well in PR, actually. But I've managed to get a hang on not being drawn in.

"I don't know," I had to say. "She was always a bit wild."