FINAL THOUGHTS, 1976
How do you tell a child you made a horrible mistake choosing his father, without the child thinking his existence must also be a horrible mistake? Especially since there could be grounds for that depressing assumption.
Nikki grimaced. Chief among the reasons why her child should not be was her what-the-hell-was-I-thinking choice of men; little Robin's daddy would top that list under even the best of circumstances. She glanced down at her son's face. Those cheekbones, those eyes -- even childhood chubbiness didn't blur them by much. Thankfully baby boy had her coloring; otherwise the resemblance to Spike would be glaring.
What had she been thinking, getting naked with William the Bloody? Nothing much, to tell the truth. She'd been lonely, horny, young and stupid. She couldn't really let go with a human, not without hurting him, and Nikki was not inclined to nibble when she wanted a big, meaty bite.
That left random, friendly demons, who always seemed to have some physical quirk she couldn't stomach, and vampires. Vampires left Spike. He was a rat bastard, but he was a straight-forward rat bastard and uncommon fine looking. Besides, since he and Sister Looney Tunes had been on the outs again at that time, all she'd had to deal with was Spike and she thought she could work with him.
She'd been right, and he'd enjoyed the game it made of their encounters. Nikki was almost sorry when he made up with Drusilla and moved on. She also spent some time worrying about what it meant that she as the Slayer was willing to let a dangerous vampire run loose because he satisfied some of her needs, until fate gave her something much bigger to worry about.
Crowley had been profoundly disappointed in her over the pregnancy, but had readily accepted her story that the father was one of the old crowd she'd run with before being chosen. He'd been somewhat mollified when she began taking an interest in the mystical side of their mission, assuming that motherhood was responsible for her sudden scholarly pursuits, perhaps as another way of protecting her child.
He wasn't too far off the mark. The child of a Slayer would be an obvious target for ambitious demons, and Nikki'd need more than just her fighting skills to protect her baby, if and when word of his existence got out. But she also wanted to find out how this happened at all, and what it meant that a vampire could father a Slayer's child. Nothing physical beyond animal release should have been possible between her and Spike.
Her searching through Crowley's musty old books, with frequent requests for interpretations of dead or demon languages, had yielded a few interesting prophesies. They found something about a child born of vampires, or of the issue of a vampire and the issue of vampires -- prophesies were nothing if not vague and hard to translate. Crowley found no value in this one in safeguarding her coming child.
Nikki, however, worried over it privately. She had connections, and even friends, in the underworld that her Watcher knew nothing about. He would have disapproved, so he wasn't told. She'd heard the rumors of Slayer origins -- that her kind had been made from vampire kind back at the dawn of humanity. That could make her the issue, and her baby the issue of issue, of vampires
It might also make her child a major player in the coming Apocalypse; whether for good or evil was another murky point. Of more immediate concern was the part of the prophecy claiming that either the son or the father would destroy the other -- Crowley hadn't been to sort out who slaughtered whom.
Nikki didn't care much about the idea of Robin killing Spike; in her view parricide hardly counted when your father was a vampire. But it didn't seem likely that Robin would be the killer, not with so many vulnerable years between him and adulthood.
Nikki tried to imagine Spike's reaction to being a father. Would he take any interest in his son at all? Would he kill him to satisfy the jealous anger of Drusilla, or worse yet, sacrifice him to Drusilla as a love offering? Would Spike turn Robin? It would be such a novelty, an eternal trophy of having knocked up a Slayer. Or maybe he'd just like having someone sane around to talk to when Dru was at her craziest.
It wouldn't do. In the end it didn't matter why this had happened: fulfillment of prophesy, test from the Powers that Be, or just some damn fluke. The point was no one could ever know the truth about Robin's daddy: not Spike, not Crowley, not even Robin. It was too dangerous from every angle.
And now Spike was back in New York, raising Hell on the subways as if the trains were his own private cattle cars. Nikki shook her shoulders, automatically loosening them before a fight. As soon as she dropped Robin off with old man Crowley, she'd settle things with Spike once and for all.
One of them was going down this night, and for her purposes it didn't really matter who. If she killed Spike, her boy would be safe, and if Spike killed her he'd be satisfied with that. He wasn't the type to go after a Slayer's Watcher as well, so Robin would still be safe, if motherless. Her hand tightened around Robin's automatically at the thought of leaving him, but she knew Crowley would raise her boy and protect him and that was the important thing.
There were missions, after all, and then there were missions.