Chapter One Hundred and Forty

A Tale As Old As Time

A/N Sorry about this, it was supposed to be less Anya and more other stuff, but the plot kind of drove itself, I needed more time on Anya.

New Sunnydale, the world without shrimp - November 2006

Anya sat at the table, staring through a clear glass of water. Her chin rested on her folded arms as her misery and boredom continued. Usually at this time she would be bustling around the magic shop, preparing orders and serving customers for the services of capitalism. Her most favourite task, and a job she was very good at. But she wasn't. Because for the last week, everyday she'd woken up feeling completely sick to her stomach. She'd never felt such a thing before and it was bewildering her.

Now, if Anya had been the type of person to watch more daytime TV - something she most definitely wasn't - she would know that this was a definite pregnancy symptom. But she hadn't, she was too busy with the shopping channel and capitalism. So she had no idea. Mostly, she just thought she was dying, and was mildly panicking. She was in the early stages of realising she had to break this news to Xander and was sulking about it. She didn't want to die. And she loved Xander so much, she didn't want him to be sad. So she'd been holding it off for a few days. But now it was Monday again and she couldn't avoid it any longer. So she got up from her chair and picked up the phone.

Anya stood impatiently in the kitchen, her back against the counter, her cell phone in her hand, the loud bringing of the call going through making her question if she had to tell him at all. Then he picked up. "Hey An, everything okay?" She couldn't back out of this now, so she bit her lip and started talking.

"I think I'm dying," she blurted out. "I keep being sick, every morning, like I've been poisoned. Do you think I've been poisoned? Has someone got into the house and poisoned me in the night? But I was so careful about the locks-" she went wittering on, but Xander interrupted.

"An? Anya? You're being sick? Hun, you've probably just got a sickness bug or something. Did you eat anything funny? Prawns?" He said, convinced she was overreacting. Something he was well-versed in dealing with, not that Anya was something to be dealt with, but rather than she wasn't quite through learning all of modern human customs and was an incredible hypochondriac.

"No Xander you're not listening, it's the same time everyday, by the afternoon I'm fine. It's some kind of torture device isn't it. I'm going to need Marborrow root to sort this out." She started stressing again, clearly if Xander wasn't going to take her seriously, she had to take this into her own hands.

Xander was in the middle of saying, "no An-" when she cut him off mid word. She immediately started dialing another number.

"Willow hi," she said when the redhead picked up the phone. "No, I'm not alright, I'm dying. But I just wanted to ask you what age of Marborrow root you think would be best for sickness. Only in the mornings though, I was thinking-"

"Morning sickness? Wait Anya, are you pregnant?" She replied, raising her eyebrows at Tara who was making lunch on the other side of the room. She mouthed a quick 'what?' but Willow shook her off.

Anya was taken aback, she couldn't be pregnant. Not like having-a-baby pregnant. She wasn't ready for that. The plan was to put it off a bit longer, because she heard having a baby hurt, a lot. "What, pregnant? No. Obviously not, I'm dying, I've been poisoned by something." She recoiled, in complete denial of what was happening, in her head there was definitely some demon out to get her. Human problems were always so much harder to get rid of.

"No Anya, you're being sick every morning?" Willow continued, wondering exactly how this particular news was going to be broken to Xander. And desperately hoping he didn't pull another disappearing act.

"Well, yeah."

"And you've put on weight," Willow hoped to all the goddesses that Anya got this soon, she wasn't about to explain how exactly one got pregnant. She assumed Anya would be able to manage that one herself.

"Only a little!" Anya was not impressed by this answer, and not happy about the fact that she had no control of this.

"Anya. You're probably pregnant. You need to go down to the drugstore and get a pregnancy test. That'll tell you you're not dying, I promise." Then Willow swiftly hung up, because she didn't want to have to walk Anya through how exactly you took a pregnancy test. Meanwhile Anya was standing completely dumbfounded, Xander ringing a few more times whilst she collected her purse and left before. She couldn't talk to him again until she knew, until she'd had time to process that this was really happening.

"How are there this many different ones?" Anya said to herself, staring at the dozens of different pregnancy tests in different coloured boxes. Being a vengeance demon had prepared her for many things, but this wasn't one of them. Sometimes she really wished Hallie were still here so she could ask her for advice, not that she'd have known much in this situation either, but at least she wouldn't be alone. Eventually she settled for reading the backs of all the boxes and picking the one that seemed the most accurate. She didn't a want a fifty-fifty on this, if she really was pregnant (a fact she was still violently denying was the truth) she wanted to know with the utmost certainty.

She smiled with a retail worker's familiarity at the woman on the checkout, who looked her up and down and decided to judge her. But Anya shook it off, assuming the woman thought she was a single mother or something. "No, I'm married, to Xander," she reassured her, putting her hand down on the counter and showing off her wedding ring, which didn't actually seem to appease her. So Anya settled for fiddling with her keys as she waited to pay.

She trekked home on her own, brushing her hair behind her ear as she avoided the gaze of various jogging moms and dog walkers. It was back to it's dyed, domestic blonde, but cropped at the shoulders, the way she'd had it when her and Xander first moved in together. It reminded her of happy times, the first leg of their relationship before things went wrong. Thinking about her hair kept her mind off the box in her bag and the impending doom of the test's possible positivity. In truth she was starting to doubt her denial. She didn't feel like she was dying anymore, she just felt a little more emotional than usual. Especially over the fact that her favourite jeans didn't fit anymore, but she was certain that had nothing to do with it.

She opened her front door with a deep breath and a pause before stepping inside. She chucked her bag onto the kitchen counter and rummaged through it until she found a small square box containing the answer to her fate. She read the instructions twice before debating whether to call Willow back. But she didn't want to be patronised and there was a part of her that wanted to take this seriously, wanted to do this by herself because if she really was pregnant, there was a baby there, right now and she'd have to protect it.

So she did it. She peed on the stick. Then she waited ten minutes to look at it (seven more than the recommended three.) It was ten minutes of freaking out and waving her arms around, then she closed her eyes, gritted her teeth and snuck a peak at the stick. "Oh." She said stoically. Then something broke, "oh my Gods. It's really happening," she said under her breath, dropping the positive pregnancy test in the sink and running into the kitchen. She felt like this was supposed to be something momentous, but all she felt was fear. She was scared that Xander wasn't ready for this, that they couldn't do this, that she was going to royally screw this up. It wasn't that she didn't want to have a baby, in fact it was the next stage in her life plan, which she insisted on having because 'human lives were too short' and she had to stay on top of it. But she kept putting it off. Because they were married now and they lived in a nice house and they both had good jobs. There hadn't been an apocalypse for a couple of years. Everything had been going so smoothly that introducing a baby into the mix was going to change things. Things Anya was not ready to have changed. In her one thousand plus years of living, having a baby was something she'd never done before.

So she cried a little and then called Xander to ask him to come home.

"An? Are you okay?" The man himself called through the house, he was still wearing his hard hat because he'd rushed home from the site so quickly. "Are you still feeling sick?" He found her sitting on the couch with the test stick in her hands. He stood over her, hard hat in hand, she looked up and found his eyes. "What's that?" He asked her.

Anya stood up, "I need to tell you something."

Xander looked down at her hands again, "is that? Is that what it- what is that?" He kept stopping, he knew, of course he knew what it was. But it wasn't real until she told him.

"It's a test. Willow told me to," Anya started.

"Willow?" Xander mumbled to himself, still staring at Anya.

"Xander," she reached forwards, reaching for his hands, nudging the hard hat out of his fingers and replacing it with her own. "Xander, the test is positive, which I think means we're going to have a baby." She lifted the test stick up to show him the plus sign. He stared at it for a few minutes before shaking his head.

"No," he whispered, but she thought she misheard him. His head was suddenly swimming, this couldn't be happening, not yet. He hadn't planned for this, he had a whole half a town to build before he was ready to think about this. He looked down at the test before hastily handing it back to Anya. She was trying to speak to him, trying to appeal to him but he wasn't listening anymore. He turned his back on her and walked out of the house. Anya was left standing alone, the pregnancy test still in her hand.

Xander sat on the front doorstep. He couldn't leave Anya completely alone, and he didn't want to. He just wanted some space. He took out his cell phone, dialed and leant his back against the door as he waited for Willow to answer.

"Hi Xand," she said, blissfully unaware of everything that'd transpired and was wondering if Anya was telling people.

"Anya's pregnant." Xander said bluntly, hoping his best friend would have some way of helping him with this. He waited for her shock and surprise but it never came.

"Oh it's official then!" Willow replied excitedly, Xander's first kid, this was totally a wow moment, for her. Xander was still in his confusion/depression stage about it. "When she called earlier I thought she probably was, call it witchy powers."

"No, Will, what? You don't understand. This can't be happening. I-I'm not ready. I just have everything on the site sorted for another housing project, I'm going to be busy with that for another six months, I can't just back out. A baby Willow? This is a baby. I can't be a father. Not after-" He hung his head in his hands. Willow hadn't expected this from him today, she thought things had changed, she thought getting married and moving to New Sunnydale, starting their lives over and over again, that Xander. But no.

"Woah woah, Xander stop a minute. This is you and Anya, not your parents. And the site will be fine, you guys live like five minutes from it, you must have people you trust, you can be home in minutes for whatever Anya and the baby needs, okay?" She felt him nodding, "you love Anya, don't you?"

"Well, yeah. Of course I love her Willow, I love her so much, but what if it's got three heads? What if it's some kind of demon baby and I don't know how to take care of it."

"Xander. Anya's a human now, and so are you. So why would the baby be a demon?" Willow didn't let him get an answer in for that particular question. "You love Anya, so go and tell her. You'll be a great dad Xand, I know it. Go and talk to her, because if she's anything like she was earlier, she'll be freaking out just as much as you."

"Thanks Will, I needed that." Xander said then hung up the phone, popping it back into his pocket. He did feel strangely better, and Willow was right, he was over most of that stuff, it was just old wounds. He got up and opened the front door, walking into his own living room and calling Anya's name. But she wasn't there. He looked over the whole house, but she wasn't there. He had no idea where she would go, but he knew it was all his fault...