CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Spike struts down the darkened hallway to the maternity ward, bearing another bouquet of flowers and good news for Buffy.

“The nurse is on her way with your wheels and your discharge papers. I’ve got the car pulled up at the front---

He is halted by the frozen expression on Buffy’s face as she looks down at their infant, his naked, chubby arms and legs squirming. Buffy holds the baby’s terry cloth sleeper in her hands tentatively, as though she’s not quite sure what the next step is.

Spike watches her take her bottom lip under her teeth several times before he asks, “What’s wrong?”

A mist of tears scums her green eyes. “Oh, Spike. I’m just so afraid that I’m going to pull his arms out of the socket!”
“You won’t pull his arms out of the socket,” he says comfortingly.

“When I was in high school, we had this project. We all had to take care of these eggs as though they were our children. A-and I destroyed mine.”

“Well, accidents happen.”

Buffy shakes her head. “I did it on purpose. It was an evil egg. They were all evil.”

Spike has to laugh a little at this. He wonders what’s kept the town fathers from proposing a sign at the city limits reading, “Welcome to the Hellmouth. Even our eggs are evil.”

“That was high school, love. A long time ago and many Buffy’s past,” Spike says. “And this little one isn’t evil. You don’t have to worry about that. He’s all that’s good in the world.” A smile dances across his glowing face as the newborn curls his tiny fist around his index finger. “Now, come on. Let’s get him suited up. He puts his trousers on one leg at a time just like the rest of us, only he needs us to do it for him right now. So you, very gently, take one leg and put it in the there. Like so. And then the other. Now the arms. Gently, gently. And you zip him up and he’s all ready to go!”

Having witnessed Spike’s careful and caring handiwork in sparing their child from nakedness, Buffy has to say, “Wow. That was great. Where did you learn to do that?”

Spike shrugs. “Dru used to ask me to dress her dolls. They were all fine bisque porcelain. Very delicate. I had to be careful or they would break.” He sees that Buffy seems a little afraid of the information he has just relayed to her. “Now let us never speak of this again.”

“Gladly,” she says, expelling a deep breath.

Spike lifts his son, mindful of his head, kissing his warm forehead as he ferries him over to the carrier. Once Daniel is snug in his seat, Spike wraps his arm around Buffy, admiring the lump of flesh and blood that is, against nature, his flesh and blood.

“Come on, Sweetheart,” he says. “Let’s take our son home.”

There is an instant acknowledgement when a newborn is brought into a home that time has no meaning and sleep is just a dream.

Sleep doesn’t work anymore. Sleep is what you get when nothing else is going on. Buffy, as the Slayer, is somewhat used to this concept, but even so, it shocks her when the veracity of her baby’s tropical bird cries caw-caw her from a night’s rest at hourly intervals.

On his first night home, the baby, so docile and sweet in sleep and unreadable expressions during the day, comes alive at 9:00 in the evening. This is fine, with Dawn still studying and Buffy and Spike not even thinking about going to bed. Buffy simply undoes the buttons on her blouse and allows the infant to feed. He goes to sleep at her breast and she hopes that she won’t hear from him again until the morning.

But the morning comes early. 11:00 pm early. Just as Buffy is dozing.

She feeds him again, the baby tugging hungrily at her nipple as though he were famished. He falls asleep again against her breast, and she puts him in the cradle beside her bed.

But at 2:00 in the morning, Daniel is raging again for a sip at her nipple. She again takes the baby against her breast and as before, he slips back into sleep while nursing. But then comes 4:00. And not only is he hungry, but he has a little surprise for his parents in the form of a clump of seedy feces in his diaper. Buffy removes the soiled diaper and presses it into the Diaper Genie which, on the first day, is almost full. She has changed Daniel a dozen times and it seems she has fed him twice as much.

She feeds him again and replaces the sleeping infant in the cradle, climbing back into bed for what proves to be a two-hour nap. At six am, Daniel is awake again and starving, his diaper saturated with both number one and number two.

Buffy climbs back into bed, exhausted, the morning sun just hinted at behind the blinds. She hears Dawn’s door open. She buries her head in her pillow and groans as Spike rises.

“I’ll take care of Little Bit,” he says, pulling his jeans on.

The second night, Daniel doesn’t sleep. Ever. Not even for a minute.

“Daniel, Daniel, Daniel,” Buffy says against his forehead as she kisses him and tries to mean it, though it’s hard at 2:00 in the morning to feel anything but frustration. She taps a hand against his bottom. “Come on, sweetie. I’ve fed you, I’ve changed you. What else do you want?” The baby lets out another squall of displeasure and Buffy looks to Spike to turn the tide. “Help?”

Spike slips out from the covers and takes the baby in his arms, shushing and calming the infant with the rapture of his deep British-accented assuredness. “Come now, Daniel. Mummy needs her rest. She has a very important job, love. She has to save the world, time and time again. And that’s not as easy as it sounds. So she needs her rest. And so does Daddy, because he has to help her. Yeah, he does.” He kisses the baby gently above his eyebrow and then takes him on a walk-about around the perimeters of the bedroom.

After about a half an hour of marching he decides that a change of scenery might be what the baby needs.

“I think I know what you’re problem is. Same as mine, most likely. You can’t get enough of Mummy,” Spike theorizes as he carries Daniel into the living room. He settles down gently on the chair in front of the TV and picks up the remote. Daniel is still shrieking against his shoulder as Spike surfs through the hodge podge of infomercials and grade-B Mickey Rourke movies that characterize much of late night TV. “But your Daddy’s quite an interesting bloke too. I’ve lived a lot of years, have seen a lot of things, I’ve traveled loads. Someday when you can actually understand the Queen’s English, I’ll tell you all about myself. Well, maybe not all. But, right now, I think it’s about time I introduce you to an old friend of mine named Colonel Hogan. You were almost his namesake so I think it’s only fitting that you should become acquainted, even if you’re not the most sociable little fella right now,” he says.

At 5:00, Daniel’s cries have tapered off to a few staccato blasts here and there, but he is still very much awake. Spike is beginning to nod off when Dawn’s door clicks open and she tiptoes out into the hall.

Her touch startles him at first. In his near drowse, he has convinced himself that Victoria Principal is asking him to sample her new and improved eye cream.

“You want me to take over for a while?” Dawn asks. “I have to be at school in a couple hours anyway and I’ve still got a French quiz to study for. Daniel can keep me company while I cram.”

“Oh, all right,” Spike says, wiping his tired and strained eyes. “I think he’s just about ready for beddy-bye. But then again, I thought that two hours ago.”

Caring for the baby in shifts seems to be the way to go for the first few nights and, at least temporarily, keeps the trio from descending into a collective madness. What they very quickly come to know is that the barely animated and lethargic baby who exists during the daytime has a completely separate personality at night. He is feral and agitated as soon as the sun sets. This his harried and thoroughly depleted parents can only blame on themselves.

One night, as most of the neighbors are switching off their TV’s and bedside table lamps, Spike swings on his black duster and heads for the door.

“Wait, where are you going?” Buffy asks as she rocks Daniel back and forth in her arms.

“Patrol,” he says, as though she should know.

“B-but you said you wouldn’t be doing that for a while!”

“And it’s been a while,” he says, checking the supply of stakes in the chest at the foot of the bed. He can sense Buffy pouting behind his back. After collecting a suitable store of pointy sticks for the night’s cemetery jaunt, he turns to her and cups her chin. “Come on, love. You can’t expect Giles and the rest to handle patrol forever. You know they’re not as good at making a clean sweep. Not as careful about getting all the crumbs up. I wouldn’t be surprised to find a hundred head of vampires lurking about tonight.”

“Then you should have someone with you,” she says. “Why don’t you call Xander---

He cuts her off with a frown of disapproval. “You know I don’t work well with others, love. Especially others like him.”

“Then I can ask Dawn to look after Daniel and I can go with you,” she said hopefully.

“Now, now, Buffy. You know what the doc said. You should wait a full---

“Six weeks after the delivery before resuming normal activities. I know that,” she says, rolling her eyes. “But I heal faster than other people. You saw how shocked the doctor was when she went to suture my episiotomy and it was already closing by itself. And I stopped bleeding two days ago.”

He knows this and he couldn’t be more relieved. Lying beside her with that constant drip of warm and fragrant blood was making him feel a little like someone sworn off caffeine finding himself in bed with a cappuccino machine every night.

He clicks his tongue. “I still say you should do as the doc says. You’ll be tip-toeing through the tombstones soon enough and you’ll probably miss this time.”

“Oh, yay.” She looks down at her wide-eyed infant who seems content to just look around at this hour. She thinks about putting him in his cradle but she knows the minute she does, “Waaaahhhhh!” Though she is exhausted and even speaking words is a bit taxing, she starts to laugh.

“Why the giggles, love?” he asks.

“Oh, it’s just that, here I am missing Patrol. I’ve actually had someone tell me that I can’t do my job for a while and when I was in High School that’s all that I wanted. A normal life, without having to worry about some big, bad evil thing sticking his hand in the Hellmouth and pulling out more big, bad evil things.”

“Enjoy it while it lasts, then,” Spike says,” kissing her on her forehead before bussing Daniel on his.

Daniel yawns, his lolling tongue spackled with the white dot residue of Buffy’s breast milk. He scrunches up his face and she knows what’s about to happen. It starts out as just a little whimper before rising to a spine-tingling squeal. She puts the baby’s head on her shoulder and rubs his back softly as he fills her ears with the first few notes of his nightly Concert for the Weary and Bone-Tired. “I’m trying to,” she replies at length, long after Spike has left the room.

Buffy and Spike have both read over and over that until a child is aware that night is the time for rest, parents should just sleep when the baby does. But with Daniel catching most of his Z’s during the day, that doesn’t leave a lot of time for other things.

One day, Buffy is indulging in a quick nap after lunch when she is suddenly and rudely awakened by Spike loudly opening and closing the dresser drawers. His black tee shirt is draped over his naked shoulder and there is the distinct odor of sour milk wafting through the air.

“There’s no blood in the fridge,” he says.

“So you think you’re going to find it in the chest of drawers?” she asks.

“No. I’m just saying, is all. I’m looking for a clean shirt. I thought Daniel just needed to get rid of a little gas, but there was more to it, I found out, when I burped him,” he says before reaching the bottom drawer and realizing that there are no clean shirts. He swivels around, hands on hips. “You haven’t done the wash?”

“And I would have time to do that…when?” she asks.

“When you usually do it.”

“Spike, since the baby’s been home, I haven’t had the time to do any of the things I usually do! What’s wrong with your arms?”

Spike makes a quick assessment of his limbs. “Nothing. Why? Do they look different or something?”

She rolls her eyes. “I’m only saying that you could take the dirty clothes down to the laundry once in a while.”

“You yelled at me the last time I washed clothes. Said I put too much fabric softener in your knickers and they made you all itchy.”

“Well, that was your cue to say, ‘Memo to self. Less fabric softener next time.”

“So you want me to do the laundry now?” he asks.

She angrily strips back the covers and leaps out of the bed. “What I want is…” Standing in the middle of the room, she silently counts to ten before wresting the soiled garment from Spike’s shoulder. “Here. Give me the damn shirt. I’ll rinse it out in the sink. ” Before closing the door to the bathroom, he hears her off-handedly remark, “Maybe you should look into finding your old wheelchair since you seem to be handicapable again.”

In this period of adjustment, barbed words do tend to crop up now and then when the nights are long and sleepless and there doesn’t seem to be a solution in sight to Daniel’s eruptions of volcanic weeping.

A few nights later, Spike returns from his patrol quite late. It’s after 2:00 am when he strolls over the threshold.

The minute he enters, Buffy shoves Daniel into his arms.

“Take your son!” she orders.

“What?” he asks, wanting nothing more than to collapse onto the sofa.

“Take your son! Take your son! Take your son!” she screams.

He sighs and takes Daniel from Buffy’s arms. “What’s been going on?”

“Everything. Everything, everything!”

Because Buffy is saying her words in triplicate, it seems much more has been going on than usual, or just too much of the usual for too long a period.

Dawn emerges from the kitchen, looking as though she has just gone ten rounds with Lenox Lewis in Memphis. She puts a bottle of Buffy’s expressed milk in Spike’s hands. “It’s your turn,” she says to Spike. “I’m done. And if having a baby is anything like this for me, menopause can’t come soon enough.” As she is about to enter her bedroom, she says over her shoulder, “And menopause happens about fifteen years from now, right?”

“Only if you’re lucky,” Buffy glowers.

Spike holds back for a few moments, not knowing whether he should go to her or not when he knows that in this post-partam time she can go either way at any given moment. He watches her pace around the room, arms akimbo, her exaggerated exhalations blowing her hair from her forehead. She settles into a non-threatening stance in the middle of the room, but Spike doesn’t move to comfort her. There’s still a bit of electricity in the air that tells him sparks might fly if he touches her. Her emotions, which seem to be just a fraction of a millimeter below her skin these days, take a sudden dramatic turn and she convulses in a sob. “Nobody ever tells you how hard this is going to be.”

He wants to tell her she is wrong, but he knows better. For her entire pregnancy she was told, either by strangers on the street who just wanted to touch her belly or by the strangers who wrote the books she so voraciously read one after the other, that life with a newborn is never easy. She knows this, but seems to have conveniently forgotten it in the influx of this new reality around her.

“They tell you life is going to be different,” she continues. “But they don’t tell you how different it’s going to be. It just seems…it just seems like to me, anyway, that…And I HATE myself for even thinking this, but…” She purses her lips before howling out another sob of hopeless frustration. “Maybe this was a mistake.”

“Oh, now, sweetheart---

She throws up a hand in protest. “No! I mean it! I was just sitting here tonight with Daniel screaming at me for two hours and it was like he was saying to me, ‘Why can’t you be better at this?’ I’m the Slayer, for God’s sake! I go up against demons five times my size on a nightly basis and here I’ve got this little thing that I don’t know what to do with. I just don’t know what to do with him, Spike!” She hurls herself onto the sofa and lets her head fall onto one of the throw pillows.

For a minute all Spike can do is stand there and watch her because he senses that she does not want him to do anything else. For some reason she has convinced herself that she is alone in this, though the father stands there holding their child, who is now silent and maybe even a little concerned about his mother’s emotional outburst.

All at once Spike thinks he knows what the problem is. And when he really does put some thought into what Buffy is going through, he almost feels like smacking himself for overlooking the obvious.

He takes a seat beside her warily. He doesn’t touch her right away, though. Her shoulders heave in great waves of motion against the pillow she clutches and instead of diminishing, the volume of her sobs seems to be growing louder. He lays the pretzel twist of warm, languid flesh on his lap, the baby’s head nestled between his knees. The baby at first protests the new location, but then gamely tries to adjust. Spike looks down at his mewling infant and traces the soft down of the child’s barely there eyebrows. He trails the callused pads of his thumbs down either side of the baby’s chubby cheeks. He circles the shells of the baby’s ears with his index fingers. Just now, the baby turns his head down, pressing his face against Spike’s palm, the latest touch provoking an almost bashful look from the child.

“Ah, there it is. Right there,” Spike says with a victorious smile. “Buffy, look. I want to show you what he does when you touch his ears.” She remains facedown on the pillow, completely oblivious to him. “Really, Buffy. Look. This is quite amazing.”

Finally she does lift her head and through bleary eyes, she tries to focus on her baby’s face. After a couple squidgying wipes of her hand, she can see a little better. A little flutter of excitement begins to rail against her dampening self-pity.

“It looks like he’s…smiling,” she says.

“Yeah. A bit. I was holding him---I think it was the day before yesterday---and I thought I saw him smile. But I couldn’t remember what made him do it. But it’s his ears. His ears are really sensitive, it seems. Look.” He draws his finger down the slope of the baby’s earlobe and once again, Daniel scrunches his head against his shoulder. His rosy lips curl in a way that would be barely perceptible to anyone else except the two people who have been mentally cataloging everything he has done since birth.

“But he’s not really supposed to be doing that for another month or so,” she says in staggering wonder.

“Doesn’t surprise me. The men of my line have always been quick studies.” He lifts the baby into his arms, pressing his forehead gently against the baby’s delicate cranium. He turns an eye towards Buffy and grins. “I had to wait a long time before you’d smile at me.”

“Well, eventually when I stopped fighting you I realized that--- She stops herself right there. All of a sudden she knows with breathless intuition the wisdom her lover is ever so cleverly trying to impart to her, short of banging her upside the head with a frying pan. “Oh,” she says very simply. “So that’s what it is. I’ve been trying to fight Daniel.”

“Mmm hmm,” he answers while the baby catches him by the jaw with his tiny starfish of a hand.

Her eyes widen. “I mean, that’s how I do things. I-I find out what it is I’m up against and I fight it.” She takes her head in her hands. “Oh God! I am a terrible mother!”

“No, you’re just too good of a Slayer is all.”

“How am I ever going to shut off my instincts long enough to get this child to adulthood? If I keep trying to fight him---

Spike covers her hand with his. “Just finish what you were saying before, love. Eventually when you stopped fighting me you realized that…”

She returns a squeeze to his hand, smoothing her thumb against the stem of his own thumb. “I realized that I loved you.”

“Exactly,” he says. He hands the baby over to her, keeping a hand pressed firmly against the child’s bottom. He drops his jaw to rest on her shoulder and leans his head against her neck. “When he was born, and everyone was saying that he looked just like me, I wasn’t just flattered. It was like I was being given a second chance.” He swallows so hard his head trembles slightly afterward. “He’s not going to make the same mistakes I’ve made. I’m going to be absolutely certain of that. He’s going to be the sort I couldn’t be because I was too weak and cowardly. He’s going to be me, only without the being me.”

Buffy is about to make a comment about how she hopes Daniel won’t have the same predilection for insane vampire whores in alleyways, but she stops herself, her comment held in a brief smile that broadens when she sees the light in Spike’s face as his finger is caught once again by Daniel’s tight fisted hug.

“He’s got my heart in that tiny palm of his,” he says in a love-dappled voice. “I can feel him squeezing it every time he closes his fingers.”

Buffy can feel that same constriction too around her heart just when she looks into the baby’s face, but never more keenly than she does now. And there is a warming calm spilling its contents deep inside of her as she holds both her lover and her child close to her. She is happily at peace, happily seeing through the unclouded vision her lover is always able to give her when her perspective is fogged by uncertainty.

After all this time, he is always ready with the there, there pats on the back whenever she needs one.

Buffy is sorting through the basket of freshly cleaned laundry on the sofa, folding napkin-sized onesies and sleepers against her chest while Spike is nearly nodding on the chair in front of the TV, the remote pinned against his tee shirted torso. Dawn comes into the room, a faded denim jacket thrown over her forearm. She is wearing a white tank top and long, flowing floral shirt that swirls above her freshly painted toenails.

“Well, I’m off,” she announces casually as she strides over to the door.

“And where exactly as you off to?” Buffy asks.

She runs her fingers through her dark tresses. “Just out. I’m meeting Travis and Amelia and Greg at the coffee shop.”

“Travis isn’t picking you up?”

“No. It’s just a show-up type thing. You remember those kinds of dates, don’t you?”

“Yes, I think I remember those. Only we usually met up at the Bronze.”

“The Bronze? That place is so over, Buffy. I mean, I know you work there and all, but The Bronze is such a dive. That troll should come back and wreck the place again.”

Buffy nods and continues to dig through the drifts of Ivory Snow laundered clothing, finding her favorite lavender thong clinging to Daniel’s baby blue sleeper.

Dawn resumes her trek to the door. As she reaches for the doorknob, her fingers dance over the metal as though it were glowing with white heat. She stands there, not even attempting to open the door, her forehead pressed against the wood.

“Something wrong, Dawn?” Buffy asks.

“No,” she says firmly. Then she turns, her forehead creased with worry lines. “Well, maybe.”

“Maybe?”

She vigorously rubs the back of her head and shifts her weight nervously from leg to leg. “That’s just it. I don’t know. It’s just that…it’s just that…”

“Can you be a little clearer, Dawn? I’m not Miss Cleo, you know.”

“Well, Travis had been kind of…odd lately. Not acting like himself.”

“You mean he hasn’t been acting the part of the milquetoast poof?” Spike sniggers. “Someone ring Mulder and Scully. We might have one of those alien walk-in cases on our hands.”

Dawn comes to rest on the arm of the sofa, sighing deeply as she fusses with the buttons on the front of her jacket. “I dunno. He’s just been acting so strange about the baby. I mean, whenever I even attempt to talk about Daniel, he clams up and changes the subject. I’ve e-mailed him pix of the baby and he never looks at them. He says he’s afraid of viruses so he’s not opening any attachments these days.”

“Well, honey, he is a teenaged boy. They’re not exactly the oo’ing and aw’ing type over babies,” Buffy says, glancing over at her sleeping child, nestled safely in his carrier.

“Yeah, but it’s like whenever I talk about Daniel he gets all mad. He even yelled at me the other day at school. ‘Dawn, I’m sick of hearing about Daniel! It’s not like he’s your baby!’”

Spike wheels his head around. “He yelled at you?”

Dawn nods. “Definite yellage. And right at the beginning of geometry. That class is hell enough without---

Spike rises to his feet and tosses the remote into the abandoned chair. “I’m going with you.”

“What?” Dawn asks, mouth wide open.

“I’m going with you because I’m going to have to kick his Abercrombie and Fitch addicted ass and let him know that NOBODY yells at---

“Whoa, Spike,” Dawn says, bringing her hands up in front on her. “Take it easy. I let him know, in not so many words, that I didn’t appreciate him talking to me in that tone and he backed off and apologized. I’m over it now.”

Spike’s shoulders sag. “You’re sure?”

“Yeah. It was no biggie.”

Spike approaches Dawn, his hand going to the curve of her defiant chin, his other hand smoothing her dark hair. “You never let any boy treat you anything less than the goddess you are, you hear me?”

Dawn smiles and captures one of his hands in hers. “I won’t,” she says, blushing slightly.

He chucks her on the chin. “I say this because big sis here has a history of letting hulking brutes unworthy of her affections break her heart all to pieces.”

“Um… ‘big sis’ here heard that,” Buffy says, placing another onesie into the delicate pyramid of folded laundry.

Spike shifts the muscles in his jaw and hoods his bright blue stare in a lingering blink. “Well, it’s true.”

“Hmm…hulking brutes. Would you be referring to the one who applauded my slaying of one of his minions and then announced that on a Saturday he would kill me?”

“That hulking brute was more than worthy of your affections,” Spike grins. He struts, cat-like, over to Buffy and peels the static-cling charged sock from her shirt before bringing her to him, cupping the bounty of her post-pregnancy bottom with his hands. “That hulking brute is probably the best thing that ever happened to you.”

“Oh, so he thinks,” she smiles, desire flooding her as his growing excitement pulsates against her thigh.

“You know that’s true,” Spike says, teasing her lips with the point of his tongue.

Her head is giddy with a sudden gush of lusty thoughts. “Say it’s true. Say I do want to dance.”

“Beneath me?” he whispers seductively into her ear.

“OK, you guys are getting mushy,” Dawn says, throwing up her arms. “I’m outta here.”

Buffy and Spike mumble a goodbye, still locked in each other’s eyes.

Buffy brings Spike’s head closer to hers, kissing him deeply, her tongue nearly glancing the aged tonsils at the back of his throat. An errant hand scampers up the flesh of her recovering belly, admiring the suppleness of soft skin that quivers under his touch. In time, his hand captures the swell of one fully rounded breast, finding the nipple fully erect and dripping with milk.

“Mmm, honey, remember when we were talking about resuming normal activities after six weeks?” Buffy asks, shuddering at the touch of his hand down her back.

“Yes?”

“Well, being beneath you would fall under the umbrella category of things to avoid---

“For six weeks after delivery. I know,” he says, his chin dropping in defeat to his chest.

“Aw, honey,” she says, pulling her fingers through his hair. “I guess there was a time when Dawn left the apartment, we’d say to ourselves, ‘Alone at last.’” She takes a quick peek at the sleeping infant and sighs. “But I guess we’ll never be alone at last ever again. Or at least until Daniel is Dawn’s age.”

“That’s a long time to wait to be alone at last,” Spike pouts, his hands drifting down her backside once again.

Buffy places her lips squarely on his, drinking in the plushness of his bottom lip with the scrape of her teeth. He purrs in pleasure as she sinks a sinister incisor into his delicate flesh.

“We could make out a little,” she suggests in a whisper against his mouth.

“Sweetheart, it’s been so long since we’ve made out, I’m afraid a little won’t be enough,” he says, pressing his hips against hers.

From the coffee table, Daniel is emitting sounds signaling his nap is over and he is hungry.

Buffy groans against Spike’s parted lips. “One night beneath you would be good.”

“Definitely,” Spike answers, full of groans himself.

Buffy tears herself away from his clutches and heads over to the newly awakened Daniel. With the efficiency of a long-time factory worker, she unbuttons her blouse until her right breast is exposed and the child fuses his mouth with the swollen gland.

“But this is good too,” Buffy smiles as Daniel begins to make the tiny coos she has come to interpret as signs of satisfaction.

“Yes it is,” Spike says, sitting down beside Buffy, watching the baby drawing Buffy’s nipple further and further into his mouth, until the areola disappears under the rose colored flesh of the baby’s lips. “So until he’s Dawn’s age, eh?”

“Well, maybe not that long,” she says, adjusting the baby’s weight in her arms. “Anyway, I don’t even want to think about Daniel being sixteen. He’s growing so fast as it is. He’s not even sixteen days old and some of his sleepers are getting a little snug already.”

“Is that right?”

She nods. “I can’t believe it either.”

“That’s my boy,” Spike says, bending to kiss Daniel.

She skims her hand across the soft locks of hair covering the baby’s veined scalp. “Yep. He is that. Though I shudder to think what the world is going to be like with two of you running around.”

He smiles. “It’ll be twice as interesting as it is now, I assure you.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The bed is quaking beneath her. This is the first thing Buffy realizes when she wakes from a deep sleep as the clock by her bed ticks off the five minutes before seven. But this time her boyfriend is not locked into a nightmare. Instead, the nightmare is all around them.

The earth is coming apart.

On the tilt-a-whirl her floor has become in this decidedly rude awakening, Buffy trudges over to the cradle as though making her way through a snowdrift. Securing her child, she yells for Spike to go get Dawn, but as the words leave her mouth, she sees Spike coming through the door with her sister firmly in his arms.

Spike reaches for Buffy and folds her to him. He braces himself against the doorframe, with Dawn and Buffy clinging to him, as the quake tears apart their lives before their eyes.

Objects are flying off shelves, crashing onto the floor, soaring to opposite corners of the room so quickly, with such utter arbitrariness, it’s as though some inner earth god is out for a wilding. The mattress they have just vacated holds on bravely for a few brief moments before slipping to the floor like a graceful white sloop surrendering to a storm. The baby’s cradle dances in a half-figure eight across the floor, sidling at last up against Buffy’s mirrored vanity. Buffy’s perfume bottles leap one by one onto the floor, breaking and soaking the floor in a bittersweet rain shower.

Elsewhere in the apartment, more unseen, and from the sounds of things, more violent destruction is taking place. Inside the kitchen dishes are pounding to the floor, no doubt the ones still stacked in the strainer because Buffy was just too tired to put them away last night. Something large and heavy falls with a resounding thud in the living room. Is it the TV? The curio cabinet? The mantle piece Buffy knows was not so much nailed to the wall as it was pasted with Elmer’s School Glue? From down the hall, there is a groan and a thunk from Dawn’s room. Dawn gasps and holds on tighter to Spike whose glowering visage shows nothing except how much he is raging to wrap his hands around the throat of this invisible force and kill it.

At last, the shaking begins to subside. With one last show of force, the earth’s movements select a few of Buffy’s heftier college texts from her bookshelf and send them to the floor like poorly arranged dominos. At first it is difficult to tell whether or not the quake is over. The curtains by the window are still swaying. It takes Buffy several minutes to realize that it is the wind coming through the window and Southern California’s unique way of waking its residences is all a memory laid out in a mosaic of smashed belongings.

By the clock’s ticking, the whole thing has lasted about three minutes.

Buffy is still in Spike’s arms and she finds him panting. She has often wondered why he does this when he doesn’t have to. Dawn is still clutching him, her face a pale moon, her eyes flickering with fear.

“Is everyone all right?” Spike asks, above the din of the sirens and car alarms coming from outside.

“Yeah,” Buffy says in a hoarse whisper as she untangles herself delicately from Spike’s embrace.

“The baby?” he asks.

“Sleeping like one,” she wonders, passing a hand across his soft velvety forehead. Daniel furrows his brow a few times, yawns and flexes his tiny fingers against his cheek, but he quickly settles back into a deep, expressionless drowse.

Dawn is surveying the damage in her sister’s room and suddenly is aware that hers is just down the hall and was just as vulnerable. “Oh, God!” she mutters as she ducks under the archway of Spike’s arm and dashes for the ruined sanctuary of bedroom. “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” she shrieks once she is there.

Buffy is looking with detachment at her surroundings, observing what’s there and what was there before and what’s just gone. Her piggy bank bleeds tip money from the neck onto the carpeted floor. She sees Mr. Gordo pinned helplessly under the weight of Maggie Walsh’s freshman psych book. Her bureau mirror is cracked and when she looks into it, she sees herself as though her image has been transferred onto a frame of ruined film.

When Spike touches her shoulder, she almost cries out.

Wincing from her flinch, Spike stands back in bewilderment.

“Love?” is all he says.

She bends towards her beloved stuffed pig and frees him from his confinement, tossing the book aside as though it were a biohazard. Taking Mr. Gordo in her free hand, she rubs the stuffed toy’s worn and pilled face against her own.

Strong hands go against her shoulders, shoving her back into reality. Her eyes meet a tempestuous blue stare.

“Darling, are you all right?” Spike asks.

She nods, hearing a cry that would have sent her hurtling over tall buildings in a single bound a year before. Down the hall, she can hear Dawn sobbing. “Go to Dawn,” she says.

“Buffy---

“Go to Dawn,” she instructs again, sliding a hand down his forearm. “Please.”

To her relief, he does and she is left alone. She can hear Dawn saying, “It’s all gone! It’s all gone!” and Spike’s murmurs of assurance that all is not gone. They are all still alive.

And there is one in her arms who always comes alive at night and who always spoils her sleep at least ten, fifteen times a night. In the eight hours that have led up to this great awakening he has slept and is sleeping still. Buffy looks down at her sleeping infant, so completely unaware of what has gone on this morning, so seemingly content a shiver sprints down her spine and she expels a brief, “Oh.”

It is the first time Daniel has slept through the night.

Buffy enters the Magic Box, stray hairs catching in her mouth, baby in tow, colorful diaper bag clutched under her arm.

“We got here as soon as we could,” Buffy says, wiping her wrist across her perspiring forehead as she approaches the troubled roundtable of Xander, Giles, Willow and Tara.

“And your boyfriend-cum-combustible during daylight hours?” Xander asks.

“He’s on his way,” Buffy says, turning just in time to see Spike barreling through the door, his blanket smoldering but not quite on fire. He whips the blanket away from his leather-clad form and dashes in as though seeking shelter from a sudden downpour.

“Hello all,” Spike says.

The “all” he is addressing nod a general acknowledgement. Before them is a myriad of opened texts, some so old the mildew is perfuming the room in an aged incense.

Buffy sets the baby’s carrier down gingerly on the table as Spike sidles up beside her and takes his own seat, straddling the chair rebelliously as he makes sure that Daniel’s Nuk is plugged securely into the baby’s mouth.

“We had to bring the baby with us,” Buffy apologizes. “Dawn just had to go see Travis and after all she’s been through this morning…” she trails off.

From behind the counter, Anya is sobbing as she finds another loss. “Oh, God! Not my imported wolf bane from Lithuania!”

Buffy is shamed when she realizes she was too caught up in her own circumstance to realize that all around her, the previously perfectly aligned shelves are now at an angle and most of their contents have been pushed onto the floor. Under her sandled foot, she smashes, quite by accident, a vial of precious mummy extract.

“We just have to buy a new TV. Everything else is OK, just kind of…moved. Except for a lot of mugs, some of Mom’s Fiestaware, my perfume, and Dawn’s sea shells from her Dad visitations. She’s been collecting them in a mayonnaise jar since the divorce,” Buffy says, bending to collect what she can of the glass vial.

Willow and Tara clash loving shoulders. “We lost a couple glass orbs and an antique wishing urn. There are only two left in the whole world,” Willow laments.

“We just lost a sugar bowl, my autographed picture of Timothy Dalton, and some bad wedding gifts,” Xander says.

“I loved that juicer!” Anya cries, still trying to salvage the wolf bane. “It was the best thing we got.”

“I myself incurred quite a few losses,” Giles says, dropping his voice to a nearly inaudible level. “My recording of Tuscanini conducting a 1942 radio broadcast of La Traviata. My favorite teapot. My mother’s Waterford crystal bowl.”

“It was a big one. 6.5 on the Richter scale,” Xander says.

For a moment, Spike admires Xander. But his high regard doesn’t last long. Xander did have access to TV, which Spike doesn’t have anymore. No more TV. No more Hogan. Hogan!

“Buffy, we have to go to Best Buy after this,” Spike whispers into her ear.

“I know, I know,” she says, swatting him off as though he were an annoying beetle. She is focusing on Giles’ concerned stare. She only sees him this pensive when times are dire. They have been through the roughest of times. When she looks at him now, she sees every crisis they have ever gone through times ten and she can’t help being just a little fearful, especially when she sees him looking at her swaddled baby, who has slept through most of the hurried morning, waking only for a feeding just before they left the apartment.

“Of course, we should all be very glad that we all survived,” Giles says, injecting a note of cheer into his voice. “As we all know, a few years ago when these quakes occurred, the Hellmouth was opening. And when the Hellmouth opened the time before that, we almost lost someone very dear to us.” His eyes jut briefly to his Slayer charge who is watching her baby nursing sweetly at his Nuk while his father strokes his fine-haired scalp.

“I’d like to prevent of repeat of that if at all possible,” Buffy says as her baby expels the Nuk from his mouth with a disapproving tongue. The pacifier lands squarely on the front of his sleeper and Buffy plugs it back in, only to have the baby reject it again.

“That’s not the one he likes,” Spike says. “You left his favorite at home.”

“Well, honey, I picked the first one I saw and I don’t recall you being in helpful mode as we were packing to leave.” Buffy picks up the diaper bag, tearing through the contents until she produces half a dozen black and white drawings of smiley, happy faces on heavy cardstock. She holds one in front of Daniel and he focuses for a while before his features contort, giving a thumbs down to Buffy’s attempts at amusing him.

“The best thing we can do is discern what may have precipitated this latest quake,” Giles says in a volumized voice, trying to compete with the baby’s cries. “Has anyone seen anything unusual on patrol?”

Xander shrugs. “Just the usual bad vamps with bad breath.”

“W-Willow and I saw some demons playing poker with kittens for chips,” Tara says. “W-we didn’t kill the demons, but we did cast a spell that made them return the kittens to the shelter.”

“To this day, four of the six kittens have been adopted,” Willow says with glee.

“Xander and I saw some Koulder demons going to go see the latest Adam Sander film which was weird, because no one else was in line to see it,” Anya says, “But then we watched the E! Channel and it turns out no one except them saw it, judging by the poor opening.”

But there is one thing that happened just under a month ago.

Every hair on the back of Buffy’s neck bristles as the full weight of Giles’ stare settles on her and her baby.

“Oh, my God!” Buffy says. She rushes to collect the baby in her arms. She sees all of her friends rise, passing shy glances her way. They all assume the same thing. Daniel has something to do with the quake.

She has known what they have thought all along. Slayer+Vampire=anomaly. And this baby, it has to be some sort of sign. When her friends woke this morning they were feeling their fears under their feet in the vibrations that made their worlds sand in an hourglass. But she cannot blame them for being afraid. She is afraid too.

Giles lets his eyes fall to the floor. His helplessness tightens Buffy’s throat until she gasps for air. “Just say it! You think Daniel has caused all this!”

“Buffy,” Spike begins.

“You do think that he’s some sort of portent!”

“Buffy, Daniel needs---” Spike tries to continue.

“You think he’s some kind of new evil that is opening the Hellmouth!”

“Buffy, Daniel!” Spike yells.

“What? I just fed him!” she says, her eyes spilling over with tears.

“Yes, and now he needs to be changed,” Spike says.

As the mewling infant’s cries come to a full throttle demonstration against her breast, Buffy takes the baby into her former training room, now a makeshift changing room.

As she splays her baby’s legs wide enough to replace the soiled diaper, Buffy sniffs back tears still, seeing her sweet little baby’s cloudy blue eyes, just hinting at recognition of who she is and why she’s doing these things for him.

An arm comes up under her swelling breasts and then there is a cold kiss against her neck. Buffy ignores him, icily, wiping the baby’s hind parts with a cleansing cloth.

“Buffy, please don’t shut me out,” he begs.

Buffy does not look at him. She reaches into the diaper bag and retrieves a new diaper and fits it under her baby’s bottom. While Daniel busies himself by blowing bubbles from his mouth, she is remembering the Master’s mouth. He had Kool Aid mouth. He bit her. He almost killed her.

In her mind she is perusing the branches of Spike’s family tree. The Master sired Darla. Darla sired Angel. Angel sired Drusilla. Drusilla sired Spike. Spike tried to sire Buffy. She sired him instead. And from that union came Daniel.

“Buffy, look at me!” Spike commands.

Buffy turns to Spike and sees the twisted spiral of the Master’s mouth in Spike’s pillowy bottom lip. She is forced to remind herself that Daniel is a member of that line.

She has given birth to evil.

Giles ducks his head into the training room, ruefully. “Buffy,” he says. “Xander and I are paying a visit to the Hellmouth.”

“I’m going with you,” she says resolutely.

“You are not,” Spike says. “I’m going with them and---

“You’re staying with your childe,” Buffy says. “And I’m going with them.”

He hates the way she says “child”. He hates the implied “e” at the end which suggests that he is Daniel’s sire. And he is not. Daniel is the life he doesn’t have anymore. Daniel is the affirmation that he and Buffy truly love each other. Daniel is…

Another branch on the Master’s family tree.

“Buffy, listen to me,” Spike says, chasing after her, Daniel sobbing in his arms. “Buffy, stop!”

Buffy’s jutting shoulders shrug off his protestations as she continues on with Xander and Giles, heading for the door. Spike passes off Daniel into Tara’s scrambling arms as he pursues his glacial Slayer. At the tinkling of the bell, he should stop walking, but he keeps stalking her, still trying to convince her that what he has in his arms is not evil. The sun singes his skin and he is forcibly beckoned back inside as Giles, Xander, and Buffy head up the street and out of sight.

His skin parboiled, Spike limps back inside, howling, as he powers over to Giles’ Mr. Tea Pot, not even bothering to make an internal comment about how Giles has sold out to his adopted country. He pours the water onto his blistering skin and sinks into a corner as the liquid soothes the wounds.

Willow crouches beside him, taking his injured hands into hers, recoiling as steam curls from his flesh. “Hold on. I think we have something to at least make you a little less owie.” And she skips off behind the counter.

Spike looks up at Tara who is rocking Daniel in her arms. She is the consummate earth mother in her long, flowing skirt and loose-fitting peasant top. She is whispering against the baby’s forehead, cooing to him softly, her eyes closing as her full and rounded lips form a gentle lullaby just for his small and sensitive ears.

“Tara, you don’t think he’s evil, do you?” he asks.

Tara is whipped out the enchantment of her own voice and blinks back at Spike. It is the first time she can remember that he has ever called her by her real name. She regards the now calm infant with the tender caress of her heavily hooded stare and bends to kiss him. “No. He’s not evil. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t something evil out there that wants him. Because, you know, vampire and a Slayer having a baby? It’s kind of the stuff that apocalyptic dreams are made of.”

Spike eyes her quizzically. “You think that there’s something coming after him from the Hellmouth?”

“Well, I’m not s-s-sure,” she answers, suddenly bashful in the beam of his probing stare. “I’m n-not really good with portents. Just potions. But it would seem logical that if something evil were setting its sights on Daniel, it might be c-coming through the Hellmouth.”

Willow returns with a mortar and pistil, grinding a heady scented herb into a powder. “Living on the Hellmouth, we do lose sight of the fact that we are also living on a fault line.”

“Yeah, if it were only so simple as just earthquakes,” Spike says.

“A-and even if something is after Daniel, we can stop it. I mean, so we go up against another Big Bad. He’ll be just a Little Bad in no time when he squares off with seasoned vets like us.” Willow catches Spike’s scowl and remembers that she is talking to a former Big Bad in the flesh. “Oops. Sorry, Big Bad.” She quickly sprinkles the powder over his pinking skin and gives the invocation, “Vigorite!”

Spike watches as the powder swirls into his reddened hands. Within seconds, the sting is subsiding. Once he can move his fingers again without pain, he beckons for Tara to hand over his son. As the baby finds himself in the familiarity of his father’s arms, a trusting glow emanates from his serene little face and Spike feels that recurring tightening around his heart. “Yeah, I’m the Big Bad,” he mutters, passing his bottom lip over the baby’s mouth. “I’m the Big Bad.”

Dawn bangs on the front door of Travis’ house, noting that the hedges are still handsomely arranged, that the furniture on the front porch is still in place.

“Dawn, what are you doing here?” Travis asks. “You should be home---

She invites herself in with a brush of her hand against his shoulder. Warily, she inches into the front hall. At first she sees the chandelier, hanging in perfect symmetry. A quick pass of her eyes to the right and she observes that the so-called Mud Room is just as mudless as ever. To the left, all the furniture in the living room is in yardstick alignment, the carefully and tastefully chosen knick-knacks all in one piece. Even the oil painting of Salome holding the head of John the Baptist is still holding ghastly court over the heavy marble mantelpiece.

She hoped that it wouldn’t look this way. On her walk over, she saw cars skidded in zigzags all over the road, water exploding from underground pipes and glass poured from shattered windows sprinkled over the sidewalks. As she neared Travis’s neighborhood, the visible damage began to diminish and her heart began to lose hope. It’s not that she wanted Travis to have gone through what she did in the early hours. No, she just wanted to see something out of place in Samantha Singleton’s Palace of Perfection. But the house looks as HGTV-ready as usual.

“We, uh, we were lucky,” Travis stammers in a psuedo-apologetic voice. “We were far enough away from the epicenter, I guess. We heard that Springfield Heights got hit real bad. I was worried you were hurt, but then the news reporter said there were no casualties. The church where we go. It was almost demolished. That’s where my Mom and Dad are now. Seeing if they can salvage anything.”

Who cares about your fucking church! Dawn’s mind screams. Dawn can imagine his family gathered around their 60-inch flat screen TV, whispering prayers that they were fortunate enough to be passed over, but not giving the smallest offering to those who had lost everything. Dawn can almost hear Mrs. Singleton sneering, “So they lost everything? How much could people like that have?”

Bitter tears collect in her eyes as she remembers how this morning, Buffy poured her cereal into a chipped ceramic bowl and realized it was the only bowl left that wasn’t broken. “Here, Dawn. You eat it. I’ll have a banana. They bruise, but they don’t break.”

Dawn surveys a row of optimistic Hummel figurines with their angelic, open mouths and wonders to herself, “Why couldn’t one---just one of those have been destroyed?”

“Oh, Dawn,” Travis is saying in a sympathetic tone. “I can’t imagine what you must have gone through this morning. Was there much damage? Can anything be saved?”

She can’t beat down her surging emotion any longer and a sob builds to a painful crescendo in her chest. “It was just a jar!” she screams.

Travis stands back. “Huh?”

She sucks back a wave of tears and tries to speak as steadily as she can. “It was a jar I had been s-saving. With seashells. Every time I went to visit Dad, I brought back s-sea shells and I put them in this jar that my Mom helped me decorate with puffy paint. The jar was sitting on my desk. A-and it fell off during the qu-quake and the jar was crushed to bits. I couldn’t believe it. I-it was just gone! All those memories…”

“Well, isn’t that where you keep your laptop too? Is it gone?”

Dawn narrows her eyes to slits. “I don’t give a shit about my laptop, Travis! But that’s just like you. Juuuuust like you to value something that cost a lot over something that meant a lot. What do you fucking care, anyway? You have this big house. Your two-car garage. Your mother and father. You actually have a real family, Travis. I don’t really have a mother and father anymore. All I have are broken shells on my bedroom floor!”

A warm hand comes to land on her shoulder and she is reminded that at her first discovery of the smashed mementos, she wanted her sister so badly. But instead, there was Spike.

“And Buffy doesn’t even care,” she says. “She had to stay with the baby. Even after she saw he was all right, she wasn’t letting him go. Not even long enough to see if I was OK.”

The baby. Travis’ mind spins back to the morning when he heard his parents’ footfalls on the carpet outside his room as they hurried off to the church. He ducked out into the hallway, thinking the house was on fire and they had neglected to tell him. Then he heard the hysterical pitch in his mother’s voice as she shouted over her shoulder to his father, “Oh, God, Steven. Do you think he’s really coming now? Have we waited too long to perform the sacrifice?” A part of him cheers when he hears the slight semblance of resentment in Dawn’s words. “So, uh, Buffy acted like she cared more about the baby then she did about you?”

“Well, I don’t know,” Dawn says, forcing herself to remember Buffy’s cereal surrender at 8:00 am. “I just really needed her then. That’s all. I know she has someone else to mother now. Someone who really is her child. But it still isn’t easy, you know? After all this time, being her number one concern. And now I’m here at number two. They say it’s lonely at the top. It’s even lonelier the step below.”

“I know,” he exhales. “I know.”

“What?” she blasts. “How could you know? You’re an only child!”

“Listen, I know, Dawn, because…” He realizes how loud he is yelling when the crystals in the chandelier above begin to tinkle and sway. He gathers up his anger in a sigh and says, “I know because my Mom and Dad had a baby when I was twelve. He didn’t live very long. He was fine when he was born and he was healthy and all, but one night he went to sleep and he didn’t wake up in the morning. The doctors really didn’t have any explanation except it was just one of those things.” Travis’ mouth twists to one side and his eyes roam the walls, the floor, the doorframes…anyplace where he can’t see Dawn’s shocked expression.

“Oh, God, Travis…” All at once in makes sense to her. All the times she tried to talk about the baby and he would hastily, sometimes angrily change the subject. The rejections of the baby pictures, the complete refusal to come and see Daniel…She stands there in complete shame, wishing back all those entreaties uttered before the first bell in the morning, “Travis, you really should see Daniel.” She reaches to touch his arm, which he withdraws and tucks under his other arm. “Travis, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.”

“Well, yeah. You didn’t know. But you do now.”

“Why didn’t you tell me before?”

“Because. I didn’t want to put any thoughts in your head that the same thing might happen to Daniel.” That something can come, in the night, and steal the baby you love and leave nothing behind but an empty cradle.

“Oh, Travis…I just don’t know what to say. I feel so horrible now.”

“Don’t. It was a long time ago. He’s all but forgotten now, buried back in Los Angeles. My parents never even talk about him.”

Dawn can tell by the anguished look on his face that something in him still wants to talk about him. She tries again to touch him, this time successfully maneuvering her hand around his wrist until their fingers are wrapped together. “What was his name?” she asks.

“Michael,” he says, finding it strange just saying his name again.

“I’ll bet he was adorable,” Dawn says.

“He was,” he swallows. “I’d show you pictures, but I don’t know where they are.”

She doesn’t have to see pictures. She is seeing the infant in the memories reflected on Travis’ haunted face now, how precious he was in his pastel sleepers, his little hands curling and uncurling as he slept peacefully. She thinks about how she stares at Daniel sometimes and he is so still she wonders if he’s OK. And then he will flinch or his eyelids will flutter and she knows he is safe. To think that something could just come and take him away without explanation…

“Oh, Travis,” she says, drawing him gently into her arms. There is resistance at first, but then his arms come up around her back, pushing gently against her, his after school jock activities becoming more and more apparent in his firm and muscular hold on her. She kisses the side of his face, directing her lips cautiously to his. When their mouths join at last, there is vulnerability there like the taste of liquor.

He holds her, feeling her tremble against him and wondering how she could be requiting some need in him when he does embrace her, hoping against hope that what he is feeling is not love, because it can’t be. He has to ultimately disappoint her. He will become that thing in the night. But he adores her. He has known this since the day he saw her, Slayer sister or not. Even as he uttered the tarnished line, “You’re different from the other girls,” he meant it. There was a perpetual sadness about her, an inner wound so like the one festering in his own body. He would see her laugh at their friends’ jokes, but always, there was a shadow of some secret pain lurking around the edges of her smile. She was just like him.

“I love you, Travis,” she says in a shudder against his cheek.

He curls a finger and loops a lock of her hair around it, smiling down at her as she waits breathlessly for a reply. “And I love you, Dawn.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Dawn slowly ascends the stairs to her apartment at Sunnydale Heights. As she nears the fifth floor, she is aware of a nagging intuitiveness. There is something tugging at her conscience, reminding her that this day wasn’t just about being in a sunny living room in her boyfriend’s arms in a house situated in a neighborhood where, apparently, nothing ever goes wrong.

She remembers a time, not too long ago, when she and Spike were coming home from an impromptu trip to L.A. to buy a dress for her first high school dance. She walked the green mile to her apartment with a sense of dread and actually felt her sister’s anger glowing hot from inside the apartment, even before she entered. Today she doesn’t know what to expect. If Buffy were concerned about her whereabouts today, she would have called. But the phone didn’t ring once while Dawn was at Travis’ house. Not once.

Maybe the phone lines are down, Dawn thinks, making her way down the hall to the apartment. And then a second thought comes into her head that almost makes her gasp: Maybe she has been trying to call and couldn’t reach me!

Dawn hurries to the door, fumbling with her house key.

The Key.

She looks at the gold key in her hand. She was so close to telling Travis this afternoon about her life before she was a teenager, specifically that she wasn’t alive before she was a teenager. Some powerful monks, they were, able to cast a spell over the entire populace of Sunnydale and convince the denizens that she was always a part of their midst. But how easy would it be for her to tell her boyfriend that she used to be mystical energy? She wrestled with that notion all afternoon, finally convincing herself that it wouldn’t be a good move until she clarified her confession with Buffy.

Dawn inserts her house key. Normally when she does this, and she is late or has gone missing or is about to be grounded for some reason, the door is opened automatically. This time, she has to go through the act of putting in the key and twisting the knob.

This is weird.

Travis skips easily up the stone steps leading to the bricked walkway of his home. He takes easy strides, hands in pockets as he heads for the entrance. The minute his hand touches the knob, the door is thrown open and his mother is standing there.

“Oh, Travis!” she almost moans as she draws him inside. “Something terrible has happened.”

Samantha Singleton escorts her son into the living room where he is greeted by a clutch of familiar congregationalists. Mr. Chapman. Mr. Walliston. Mrs. Wright. Reverend Estey is seated on the sofa. And this is not an after-church luncheon.

This is weird.

Inside the apartment, Dawn observes that things are slightly askew, and not just the things tossed about during the quake.

Buffy is on the floor, sweeping up shards of whatever with a hand-held broom. Spike is over by the TV, fiddling with the knobs on the back.

Buffy lifts her head briefly to acknowledge her sister’s presence.

“Oh good. You’re back. Here,” she says, shoving a Hefty bag Dawn’s way. “Go into your room. Anything that’s broken and can’t be repaired gets put in the bag.”

Dawn takes the bag, bunching the drawstring top worriedly in her hands. “OK.”

Buffy suddenly looks as though she has caught the scent of something dead and rotting in the apartment. “You been with Travis all this time?” she asks.

“Well, yeah,” Dawn says shyly. From her sister’s nonchalant demeanor, Dawn quickly discerns that she has not been missed. Gone are the days when a trip to the public restroom lasting more than five minutes would warrant a countywide search. For a minute, Dawn feels very much the grown-up, but at the same time, she is crestfallen. No one cared where she was…

“Oh, come on!” Spike yells as he slams his hand against the side of the TV. “Work, sod you!”

“Yeah, that’s the way to get it going again,” Buffy mutters. “Slap it around a few times.”

“That usually gets you going again,” Spike returns.

“What did you say?” Buffy asks acidly.

“Nothing, dear. Nothing,” he says, directing his attention once again to the picture tube. “Ooh, wait! I think I see something!”

“It’s your own reflection,” Buffy sniffs.

Spike frowns. “I’m a vampire, love. Reflections don’t come standard with the package, you know.”

This sort of acrimony is not completely unknown to Dawn. She grew up with it, after all, her parents’ marriage a shamble by the time she was nine and completely over when she turned ten. For a long time she assumed that such animosity was not only natural, but also integral in a couple’s relationship. Dawn has born witness to Buffy and Spike’s more intense moments of spontaneous passion, as well as their just as intense and impulsive quarrels. But always in the heat of their arguments, there is a lilt of promise, as though their anger will diffuse and in a day or two they will once again be tugging each other’s clothes off and humping in a corner when they think no one is looking. There is something different about this particular rift. Dawn can almost feel the jagged edges of it snagging the molecules of air in the room, giving her the illusion of suffocation.

“Is there something wrong, Dawn?” Buffy asks.

Dawn shakes her head. And then, “Well…I don’t know,” she says, continuing to fiddle with the top of the garbage bag. “Can I talk to you in the kitchen?”

Buffy sighs and rests her hands on her hips. “Yeah, I guess so.”

Once they are alone in the kitchen, Dawn asks, “First of all, are you and Spike OK?”

Buffy frowns and waves a casual hand in the air. “It’s just been one of those days. With the quake and then nothing new or exciting at the Hellmouth to tell us what might be wrong. We’re just sort of on edge, I guess. Why? What’s wrong with you?”

“Well…it’s just that…um…” She doesn’t even know where to begin with this. But she can see her sister’s patience is wearing thin. “It’s just that Travis and I are getting beyond the hand-holding stage in our relationship and---

“Oh really?” Buffy interjects, folding her arms. “And just what are you holding now?”

The teenager blushes. “Don’t worry. We’re still playing it safe. What I mean is, we’re getting to the point where we really aren’t keeping secrets from each other. And I was just wondering what you thought…or how it would be if…” She starts again. “You see, Buffy…Travis told me something about his past today and now I really think I should tell him about mine.”

Buffy studies her sister carefully. “You mean…?”

Dawn nods. “I want to tell him about me being the Key.”

Travis stands in the middle of the living room, equidistant from the church members, his pastor, his mother, and his father. He is the featured player now and apparently the ensemble has been waiting for his entrance for some time just so that they can continue with the scene.

“The first death has taken place,” Samantha Singleton says, adjusting a crystal dolphin figurine on her coffee table as though noticing it were half an inch off from its usual position.

“Who?” Travis asks, noting his throat has suddenly gone bone dry.

There is silence from the gathering as they each pass sheepish glances. But out of the silence arises a tiny, choked voice, like that of a man, hypnotized into recalling how he sounded before adolescence.

“She went in early. Said she had a lot to do, with the sesquicentennial coming up so fast,” the man says.

Travis slowly realizes that this is Mr. Walliston speaking. His lips are barely moving and his face is frozen as though he is wearing his own death mask over his features. Travis does not know whom he is talking about at first, though. Then it hits him. It’s his wife, Mrs. Walliston, the church secretary, who has died.

“She said she was going to be typing and sealing envelopes all day,” Mr. Walliston continues. “She asked me if I wanted to help for a couple hours before I had to go into the office, but I said no…that I’d rather sleep. I told…her…I’d r-rather sleep.” He buries his head in his hands, his face showing red between his fingers.

Travis knows---or knew---Mrs. Walliston. She worked at the church for years and kept a jar full of antique ribbon candy on her desk. She hated computers and still printed out the church bulletins on her aged mimeograph machine, cranking them out one at a time. The bulletins always smelled like grapes when hot off the press, but did not taste so sweet, as Travis found out one Sunday when he drew an inquisitive tongue across the words of the doxology. Mrs. Walliston often tagged along as a chaperone on youth group trips, an embarrassing caboose of a woman in her tight fuchsia stretch pants and straw hat. Some of the kids in the church called her Mrs. Wallis-Two-Ton. Travis recalls being one of those kids.

“How did she die?” Travis asks before he can even think about the inappropriateness of his question at this moment.

“She was in the church office when the floor collapsed,” Phyllis Wright says quietly, rubbing Stanley Walliston’s heaving back.

“Are you sure?” Travis asks. “I mean, she could have stepped out or gone to another room or---

Reverend Estey rises from the sofa to hush Travis with a wave of his hand. “She’s gone, Travis. As is most of the building. The walls remain. The basement is nearly gone. The sanctuary has begun to sink as well. It won’t be long before…” The pastor cuts himself off before he can admit to himself and everyone else that their worst fears are coming true.

Travis feels a hand on his forearm. He turns to see his mother’s gray eyes looking at him with what appears to be sympathy. “That’s why we have to have the baby. And soon.” After she speaks, her lips peel back in a feral baring of her teeth that makes Travis visibly shudder.

Travis scans the room helplessly for a compassionate countenance, but finds none. He is hopeful that his father will be regarding him with that unspoken cheer behind his dour expression. But his father is facing away from him in the wingback chair, drawing his fingers across the pink and white stripes of the upholstery as though strumming a guitar.

“I can’t do it,” he mutters under his breath and dropping his head.

“What did you say?” his mother says in a near hiss.

“I said I can’t do it,” Travis says again, this time louder and with enough courage to look his mother straight in the eye. “I’m really sorry to disappoint everyone, but I just can’t take Buffy’s baby.

He watches as the comprehension of his words slowly drains all the color from his mother’s face. After a few agonizing moments of stony silence, she takes him by the arm. “Travis. I believe we need to talk.”

Buffy’s mouth has remained open for about five minutes, so long that Dawn is beginning to wonder if she should shut it for her.

“Well, Buffy? What do you think?” Dawn asks warily, already knowing the answer.

“What do I think?” Buffy flares. “I think that you and Travis must have spent the afternoon smoking crack.”

“Huh?” Dawn asks, truly dumb-founded by her sister’s response.

“Honey! Think!” Buffy says, rapping a fist on the top of her sister’s head. “If you told Travis you were the Key then you would have to tell him why the monks sent you to me. And it wasn’t just because I knew where to find all the good shopping in Sunnydale.”

“Well, what’s wrong with telling him you’re the Slayer? I think he could handle that. He’s lived in Sunnydale long enough to know that the things that go bump in the night are generally kind of bumpy.”

“Dawn, being the Slayer is supposed to be a secret identity. No one is supposed to know.”

“But there are people who do.”

“Yes. My friends. And sometimes I wish I never told them because I am constantly having to put their lives in danger when it’s supposed to be my job to protect innocent people from the demons of the world.”

“OK. So they’re your friends. And they’ve helped you save the world since high school. Maybe Travis could help you too. He is very strong,” she says, remembering the muscular clutch she found herself in for most of the afternoon.

“Dawn, I have enough to do watching out for the necks of the people who do know about me. And really. Would you really want your boyfriend putting his life at stake, with a stake?” Buffy reaches out to touch her sister’s arm. “I just don’t think you’ve really thought this through.”

Dawn folds her arms, defiantly cocking her jaw. “You’re right. I didn’t think you would react like this. But I should have known that you’d turn something so completely about me into something so completely about you.”

“Excuse me?”

“I don’t know why I expected you to be any different about this,” Dawn huffs. “You’re so damn self-centered, Buffy. ‘Oh, Dawnie can’t tell her boyfriend she was the Key because then he’ll know all about me and my nightly cemetery visits.’” Dawn shakes her head. “So I guess the only people who can find out about you are those that can fight the good fight. Or fuck the good fuck.”

A scarlet flush completely envelops Buffy’s face. “Dawn!”

“Too bad for Parker you never told him about you’re being the Slayer. I’m sure he would have considered bedding someone with super powers to be a real conquest. He might have even called you the next day. You know. After he was back from finding a special knife to carve another notch in his bedpost.”

All of a sudden Spike is between them and the two take turns staring at him as though he has appeared in a cloud of smoke. “All right, that’s enough!” he bellows. “Normally, I find your little spats amusing, but tonight I’m a mite short on chuckles. I simply cannot stand idly by while you’re saying such cruel things to the mother of my child. Dawn, how dare you even think about accusing your sister of being self-centered when you, you little prat, have authored enough books on the subject to fill a bleedin’ Barnes and Noble! You apologize to your sister right now, do you hear me?”

A nervous laugh escapes Dawn’s lips. “Oh, come on Spike, I---

“Say you’re sorry to your sister or so help me I’ll reach down into your throat, tear out your vocal chords and beat an apology out of you!”

Dawn’s breath is caught somewhere in her chest. Her eyes are fixed on the furious vampire whose cerulean stare is now tinged with gold. His demon is so close to the surface his skin is straining to contain it.

“I’m sorry,” she says softly.

“Say it again, Dawn. And this time to your sister and not to the lino.”

“I’m sorry, Buffy,” she says

Buffy is still a little shaken by her sister’s harsh verbiage, especially the from-out-of-nowhere Parker reference. “It’s OK,” she says in a slight rasp.

“Right, then,” Spike says, only half-satisfied with Dawn’s apology. “Now I believe your sister asked you to go tidy up your room. So I suggest that you get tidying.”

The whole time, the garbage bag has never left Dawn’s hands and now she holds it now like she wishes she could jump right into it and seal herself up. The Slayer and her vampire lover watch the girl skulk away slowly, her shoulders stooped and her face still plastered with an insolent scowl. Once the door to her room is shut, Spike lets out a long-held breath. He looks at Buffy. He isn’t completely certain, but he thinks there may be a little gratitude trying to emerge from all the excesses of her misguided anger toward him. But she doesn’t say a word to him. She was never one to wield the words “thank you” carelessly, even when warranted. To admit appreciation in a situation she thinks she could have handled is like admitting she needed someone else’s help and the warrior in her simply won’t have that.

Her face as inscrutable as ever, she turns slowly and heads back to her broom and dustpan. Spike joins her, bending again at the TV and hoping for a miracle.

Travis watches his mother cross the cramped space of the breakfast nook several times before she finally pauses. One of the hands that has been clutched behind her back flies away from its constraints and connects with his cheek.

He recoils, smarting only lightly, and meets her gaze with a resolve he didn’t have a day ago because today he knows for certain he loves Dawn. He loves her. Even now with his mother presented so angrily in front of him, he is remembering Dawn’s arms and her sweet impassioned lips against his. And what they did to put that glass dolphin figurine out of place on the coffee table…

His mother is still storming around, thinking that the closed doors will cushion her remarks when Travis can hear his parents’ heated arguments from this very place from his second floor bedroom, even with the doors shut. In the next room the Congregationalists are hearing…

“How dare you!” Samantha thunders. “How dare you!”

“Mom, please! I just can’t do it. It’s murder!”

“Yes!” Samantha hisses. “Murder! Murder of thousands of souls! All of our souls going to hell. When Satan finally digs himself out of that hole---

“He’s going to claim us all. I know that, Mom. But a baby. Daniel’s just a baby.”

“He is a demon!” Samantha shrieks, tearing two twin streamers of her hair completely out of her skull. “He is born from hell!”

“No!” Travis exclaims, clamping his hands over his ears.

“He is the Devil’s spawn!”

“Mom, stop!” he says, squeezing his eyes shut.

“He was fathered by a vampire! A creature who spilled his seed into the womb of a living woman.” Samantha twists her son’s chin in her direction. “Do I have to remind you of the words we have lived by all these years?”

“No,” he says reluctantly.

“Do I?” Samantha asks again, her fingernails digging into the flesh of Travis’ chiseled chin.

“No!”

“Then get the child!” Samantha says, giving his chin a final pinch before relinquishing it.

He turns away from his mother, the skin of his chin still stinging. Inwardly he is looking at a gallery of faces, chief among them the plump face of his baby brother who lived for just a short time and was born from parents who were both human of species, but not nearly so in practice.

“Mikey,” he says.

“What?” Samantha asks.

“Mikey. You and Dad called him Mikey.”

His mother’s lips tighten around a series of expletives she is holding in, Travis is certain, for the purpose of decorum. The one that is acceptable emerges as, “You bastard.”

“You can’t stand knowing that there is a woman out there who has a living, healthy baby,” Travis says, seeing his mother begin to wilt.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about!” his mother says weakly.

“I think I do. And I think you know what I’m talking about. Little Mikey.”

“Travis!” Samantha wails.

“You woke up one day and he was dead and there was nothing you could do about it!” Travis makes plain with an accusatory index finger.

“Travis!” This time it is his father who is saying his name, in that deep, monotone voice that has always either sent shivers or assurances through Travis. There is no happy medium between the two. He shakes his son by his shoulders. “We can’t stop it!”

In his father’s eyes, he sees the whole sinking hole of the sanctuary. He sees the flames licking from the depths of Hell. He sees the whole city engulfed in those flames. He sees his life gone and everyone else’s. He sees Dawn and projects her own painful descent into Satan’s realm and how he can stop it with the singular sacrifice of one small child, even if it is someone she loves.

“I never thought it would be this hard,” Travis says, his stomach tightening as he imagines Dawn in the aftermath of the sacrifice. He doesn’t know how he can face her after that.

His father loosens his grip. Within seconds he is crying. Samantha as well. The inevitable end is hitting all of them. A baby must die. Travis thinks about the last e-mailed picture Dawn sent him. Daniel was blue-eyed, blond-haired, and generous of lip, like his father. But there was something that reminded him of Dawn. Maybe the recessed chin given to pouting or the way, in the picture at least, that he peered at the world so desolately.

“He’s a demon,” Samantha insists through her tears. “Daniel is a demon.”

He can’t help who his parents are, Travis thinks sadly. No one wants this. The baby’s death is a consequence of pre-determined origins. Dawn will understand this. And Buffy, being the Slayer, will understand this further. Travis says this to himself so it won’t be so much a murder as it is a needful thing to seal the world off from the conquering of Hell.

“I’ll do it,” Travis says.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

About an hour past sundown, Buffy and Spike find themselves at Sunnydale’s Wal-Mart Super Center amid throngs of quake victims combing the aisles for Rollbacks and avoiding the occasional spillage. Like many others, they have waited out aftershocks, which, on the Hellmouth, tend to stretch out days beyond the initial quake. After a week, most are assured that the seismic activity is over and they can save their Styrofoam plates for picnics. Hundreds of citizens are now carting away their new lives in paper or plastic.

Buffy is looking at a rack of faux-Fiestaware when Spike slams an economy size pack of baby diapers into the cart.

“Buffy, they have TV’s here.” Spike says enthusiastically. “Some of them are scratched and dented from the quake, but they work, and they’re being sold on the cheap. $150 for a 27-inch Magnavox!”

“Spike, you got Pampers!” Buffy says, feeling the weight of the expensive diapers against the balance of her checking account.

“Yeah? So?”

“So? We can’t afford diddly squat if we get those. Daniel’s going through about twelve diapers a day. If we buy Pampers, we may as well be wrapping his butt in gold leaf,” she says, shoving the offending would-be purchase into his hands.

“Buffy, there is such a thing as being frugal and there are such things as explosive bowel movements that get all over you and everything you own.” He puts the Pampers back into her hands. “Think about it.”

“I don’t have time for this. Do you have to argue with me about everything?” She forces the diapers back into his hands. “Just go and get the store brand, OK?”

“Fine then!” he exhales. “Just don’t come crying to me when your favorite halter top gets relegated to the rag pile when Daniel takes one of his epic shits.” He turns and walks down the aisle. Midway, he jettisons the diapers, hurling them high into the air and knocking over a row of coolers on the top shelf. From the other side of the aisle someone yowls, “Ouch!” Spike smiles broadly. “Oh, Slayer, dearest,” he says in a sing-songy voice. “It seems there is a bit of humanity that needs protecting from a vampire on aisle nine.”

She is holding a coffee mug at the time, one that her lover will probably use for his nips of blood. Without even thinking about it, she launches it down the aisle. But her aim is off. She misses him by a hair, by a flaxen hair on his infuriating head.

God, why have I been letting him get to me lately? She wonders to herself, combing her fingers through her hair. She wakes up some mornings and sees him lying beside her and it’s just like the old days when they were adversaries: she just wants to beat the crap out of him. It’s not that he’s changed or that he is less helpful than before. Some mornings he is by Daniel’s crib before she is, hearing his cries while she’s still clinging to sleep. She finds reasons to be irritated by him more often than she used to. A few mornings ago he went into the bathroom to shower and let one of her silk panties fall from the shower rod and onto the floor where it was subsequently drenched because even after all this time of living in civilization, he still forgets to put the curtain on the inside. She screamed at him for an hour. Just this afternoon he was singing I Wanna Be Sedated and every time he got to the chorus she wanted to just fling him headfirst outside the window. She views him with a stranger’s eyes sometimes, like he’s some random subway rider who keeps elbowing her accidentally at every stop. She has often asked herself, “Could I love him more?” Lately she has been asking herself, “Do I love him anymore?”

“It’s all right. Everything is going to be all right,” he tells her over and over on nights when she can’t sleep, when he knows that her mind is fixed on the Hellmouth and what may be coming out of it next, or if there is anything at all. There are the romantic musings he intones while nuzzling her neck and letting his hands roam under her nightgown. “I love your shoulder, Buffy. I wish sometimes I could make myself small and just live on it, rolling my whole body there.” She feels nothing. She crawls away to her own side of the bed and he knows, by this point, that following her is a no-no. This doesn’t keep him from trying the next night, though.

He sleeps beside her, dead. There’s nothing about his countenance that suggests that he is anything other than a dead man when he sleeps. Sometimes his face takes on his demon self and she knows he is either recalling his hunting days or is hungry for a feed. She rises from the bed, takes her leave and sits silently in the den, occasionally curling up on the sofa and drifting off to sleep while reading or just staring off into the darkness. She will listen from time to time to the arguments between the couple in the adjoining apartment, but she can only imagine what they are fighting about. She doesn’t understand Spanish.

She doesn’t understand what she and Spike are fighting about, if they are fighting at all. When she woke up to the quake, she had a new understanding, a new outlook, and it wasn’t something that she welcomed with open arms. This was the realization of the good girl who longs to be bad and has run wild for a time, mad with the notion of being rebellious with her arm around the guy everyone has told her she is too good for. She doesn’t know if the novelty had worn off or if he was never the guy she thought he was. At any rate, as she thinks about him in aisle eight of the Super Wal-Mart past seven on a Friday night, she is shocked to hear herself mutter:

“Killer.”

Spike is in the baby section, searching for the store brand diapers. His eyes fall on a tube of Desinex and he remembers that Daniel has been having some irritation on his bottom from the multiple changes he goes through in a day. He reaches for the Desinex, but them remembers: they’re on a budget. Best to get the store brand to avoid another fight.

Why have we been fighting? He asks himself again. It just seems to him that the earth’s restlessness has unleashed a whole lot of trouble, even if they have been unable to discern what exactly is escaping from the Hellmouth this time.

There wasn’t anything there, no new energy being emitted. He knows this because he went to the Hellmouth himself one night after patrol. The place was quiet, tomb-like, almost engaging to him. But there was nothing out of the ordinary. Lately the old high school has been a shrine to graffiti artists who stake their claim by leaving such amusements as, “Fried Mayor here” with an arrow drawn towards the ash remains of the snake form still rotting away to nothingness after five years. Further exploration of the ruined space reveals that Jason is still the cool J and Tiffany and Graham as 4-ever.

Nothing new from Hellmouth central. But still, Buffy thinks there is.

He is accustomed to her rejections, but not in their bed, where they have slept together for over a year and have created a child together. These days they retire early, at nine o’clock, and they go to sleep quickly, unless Spike is feeling adventurous and tries again with the seduction. He loves her bare shoulders and he kisses them, laving affection and praise on them. But she always turns away.

At night he dreams horrible things, visions he could never voice to Buffy because she would worry, or, even worse, she wouldn’t care. He can’t read her these days. He dreams that Daniel is being taken away. He dreams that he sinks his fangs into multiple necks, trying to find the person responsible. His body gorging with blood in his dreams, he wakes thirsty and alone. Then he walks to the kitchen he finds Buffy on the sofa, sound asleep.

He doesn’t know what has driven her away from him, because he has been as loving and supportive as any man could be through this. He wakes before she does some mornings and guides the nipple of a bottle of Buffy’s expressed milk into Daniel’s mouth so that she won’t have to get up. But it’s never as good as the real thing. Daniel is old enough to tell his parents what he wants. And what he wants is Buffy.

Spike wants Buffy, but not the way she is. After months of warmth and terms of endearment and lusty touches under the covers, she is as distant as she was when he first fell in love with her. She knew whom she was falling in love with. Now she seems to be realizing what she was falling in love with.

He has changed to the point that drinking blood is almost repulsive to him, but he does it because it keeps him alive. He holds Daniel, sees his little, trusting face staring back at him and wants to cry, almost, because he has never known a more innocent face and has never felt such goodness run through him. He is bathed in holy water every time he holds his son and instead of burning, he is baptized.

He looks at the array of baby things, bundling teething rings and cushy toys under his coat. There are so many things to pacify the baby, but not one to appease the mother. He will find it one day.

He shakes his head. “Slayer,” is what he says as someone on the loudspeaker begs for customer service at check-out counter fifteen.

Buffy is comparing prices between deli turkey, packaged or sliced, when she hears a feminine voice calling her name. She turns in the direction of the voice and finds a woman, crop-haired and care-worn, lumbering in her path with a cart full of everything from pre-cooked bacon to refrigerator magnets.

“Candyce!” Buffy says, taking a few minutes to put a name to the face.

“Oh my goodness! It’s been ages!” Candyce says.

“Yeah. Since last Christmas,” Buffy says, seeing many late nights with a screaming baby crammed in the spaces of Candyce’s premature wrinkles and wondering if she might be starting a few of her own.

“How’ve you been? Oh! Silly question. I see how you’ve been. You’ve been busy!” she gushes, seeing the baby cradled in the front of the cart. “Wow. When did that happen?”

“About four weeks ago,” Buffy replies.

“Oh!” Candyce says. “Boy or girl?”

“Boy. Daniel. His name is Daniel.”

“What a little sweetheart!” Candyce breathes as she worms a finger under Daniel’s lax hand. “Aren’t they great?” she asks as the baby grabs her finger.

“Yeah. A lot of work, but he’s wonderful,” Buffy says.

“Every woman should be a mother. It’s just the best thing that’s ever happened to me. I’m sure you feel the same way.”

Buffy doesn’t answer. She knows there are mothers out there who can sit in sunny rooms with gingham upholstered journals and write in calligraphy all their feelings about babies and getting in touch with one’s true self. But all Buffy can think about at the moment is how tired she is and how she just wants to go to bed.

“So, I guess your hubby is home with your little one, huh?” Buffy asks, changing the subject, hoping Candyce doesn’t notice her suddenly prickly demeanor.

“Oh. Stuart.” Candyce winces. “Oh, gosh,” she says, smoothing her hands down either side of her jeans. “This just doesn’t get any easier.” Candyce takes a deep, steadying breath and anchors herself on the handle of her cart. “Um, Stuart died six weeks ago.”

“Oh no. Oh no…” Buffy finds herself saying, goo-brained at uttering anything else in the wake of what Candyce has told her. “Oh, Candyce. I’m so sorry. What happened?”

Candyce shakes her head. “His cancer came back. He was in another round of chemo when he caught pneumonia. His immune system was just too weak to fight it. He went just like that.” Candyce’s gray eyes well up with tears and she blinks them away bashfully. “Whoo. Every time I think I’ve cried my last cry, another one catches me by surprise.”

Buffy wraps a comforting hand around Candyce’s suddenly trembling forearm. “I’m just so sorry, Candyce. You know, I only met him that one time but it seemed that you and Stuart had something very special.”

“We did. We really did. But also, we knew we might not have a lot of time together, so we spent every day loving each other as much as we could. Stuart was always optimistic. The day he died, I was sitting by his bed and we were planning our sunroom addition that we hoped to build in the spring. He was really excited about it. All the building materials are still stacked in the yard, covered by a tarp. I think I’m still going to have it built just because, you know, it was something we wanted.” Candyce laughs and a few tears spill from her eyes. “He said he could almost see Matthew finding a new territory in the house to claim as his own.”

It is strange to Buffy that in her lifetime she has faced snorting demons, hissing vampires and at least one ill-tempered and badly coiffed hell god, but looking at grief, naked and raw grief, is sometimes the scariest thing in the world. In all sorts of situations she can just bound in and take control, but here, with her long-lapsed school acquaintance in such terrible pain, her super powers are completely useless.

“How are you doing? Really?” Buffy asks.

“Oh. I think I’m doing OK. But I’ve heard it’s when people stop asking you, ‘Are you doing OK?’ that you’re really back on track. I’m doing all right, though. I keep telling myself that better days are ahead, that one day I’ll actually be able to take a deep breath without letting a sob out. Matthew keeps me going.”

At this same time, Spike puts the store brand diapers in Buffy’s cart as though already anticipating the child’s BM’s, shaking his hands upon delivery.

“There you go! One pack of store brand diapers. And a pooper scooper for when the inevitable happens,” he says.

Candyce purses her lips as though she has gotten a bitter taste of the tension between Buffy and Spike and she takes a few steps back.

Undaunted by Candyce’s shrinking response to his presence, Spike is ever the charmer. “Hello. Do I know you?”

“Spike,” Buffy says. “You remember Candyce, don’t you?”

Spike nods pleasantly. Buffy thinks she can discern a hint of a wolfish grin in Spike’s face as he takes in Candyce’s full-figured form.

“Your son is a little angel,” Candyce says.

“I beg your pardon!” Spike exclaims heatedly. Then he demurs. “Oh. Right. You mean. Well, thanks. Thank you. We have been very blessed,” he says, tightening an arm around Buffy’s shoulder.

Buffy knows this show of affection is just for Candyce’s benefit, but for a moment she is struck by the strength of his arm and the closeness of his body. How firm he is. In the fluorescent light he does appear dead to the world, his pallor made more intense by the dark clothing he wears. But as his arm leaves her, she feels its absence and wonders why he makes a point at standing two paces away from her, and how, in just a few days’ time, they have become so remote. She knows why, though. She can’t admit it to herself now, but she knows. She has been thinking about him as being less than human. To her credit, he is. But to his credit, he is not.

A collective memory arises before her senses like a field of sweet scented wildflowers. In the mornings when she is sleepy, barely functioning, not even able to walk to the cradle on steady feet, Spike is awake, albeit still under the seductive pull of drowse. She thinks about the times when she is so exhausted and she feels she will die if she is pushed just an inch further into what, by her birthright, she is already being forced into day by day. Spike is on patrol and he comes home, the dust of his vampire comrades still clinging to the leather of his coat. He reaches for his son and cradles him. “My baby,” he says. “My sweet little Daniel.”

Even now as the baby is waking from his nap, Spike is quick to shush him and make him know that there is someone around to love him and care for him. He just takes Daniel into his arms and pats his bottom, jiggling him up and down in his arms.

“You’re a good father,” Candyce says with admiring eyes.

“I try to be,” Spike replies, kissing his son on the side of his face.

“Well,” Candyce says. “Take care of each other. You have a great little family. You really do.” She wheels her cart away from them, leaving the caress of her words.

Daniel is crying in short spurts against Spike’s shoulder. Spike smoothes a hand over his back and sings into his ears. “To ra loo ra loo ra. To ra loo ra yay.” The baby is rooting against the cloth of his shirt and Spike gives a wearied look toward Buffy. “I think he needs you.”

Buffy’s breasts are huge, full to bursting. But suddenly she is a little needy herself. Why does she refuse to see the man in demon’s clothing, and not the demon in man’s clothing?

Her thoughts are arrested as she stares at the being with whom she has coupled many times, most memorably on a Christmas eve when she is certain they conceived their baby boy. On the day before the most holy of holy days, she and her demon lover seeded a child.

Buffy feels such love towards the both of them her heart turns suicidal in its efforts to betray any thoughts about souls and demons and her souled demon child. There are no demons present before her eyes. There are only the two males she loves more than anything in the world. Suddenly it seems very silly to be playing six degrees of separation with the Hellmouth. If Spike’s love weren’t genuine, he would be gone or she would be dead. And they certainly wouldn’t have a baby.

“Buffy, he needs to feed,” Spike insists as they baby is nearly clawing at him for sustenance.

She nods and takes the baby into her arms. “It’s time to go home then.”

The apartment is silent and dark when the pair enters. By the lamp of an in table, there is a note written in Dawn’s hand. “At the library. Be back @8:00.”

Buffy says nothing as she passes the note into her lover’s hand. She untwines the scarf from her neck and places it on the easy chair. She then divests herself of the heavy coat and drapes it over the chair as well. Silently, she lifts her baby’s carrier and transports Daniel into the bedroom. Spike follows her, not knowing where this is going, but he is going with her, no matter what. So he looks at her in their bedroom, lifting their infant child from his seat and putting him in his cradle beside their bed. Buffy watches the child for several minutes until she is sure that Daniel will sleep. She nursed him on the way over. He should be fine for a while.

Buffy turns to Spike slowly, her face cloaked in shadow. Her approach is measured, her feet barely making a sound as she crosses the space between them. Standing in front of him, she cups the back of his head and she brings his mouth to hers. For a moment, their lips are stone as though they are marble statues attempting a mating ritual in a museum after hours. When their lips do move, they are trembling. A dark moan is shared between them as their mouths simultaneously open for one another.

Buffy’s hands go to his back, searching for definition in the muscular space between his shoulders. His hands are wrapped around her waist, his thumbs kneading her bared flesh where her tee shirt doesn’t quite meet the top of her pants. When his shirt comes off in her hands, he is almost as shocked as she is. When hers follows, Spike presses his chest against her weighted breasts, allowing himself to feel the heaviness of her milk and the extent to which her breasts have grown because of it. He groans under the influence of the peaked nipples and wonderfully formed orbs of flesh against him. He pulls away to look at them, to appreciate them, to revel in their size and shape. A drop of her milk escapes from her nipple and he laps it up, thinking it as sweet as cantaloupe juice. He drops his head to her navel, his tongue circling the puckered hole while he unfastens her jeans, popping each button with agonizing slowness. She arrests his hands and snaps his head back. This is not about her; this is all about him.

She gets to her knees and jerks the buckle of his jeans open in one quick motion. She unleashes his erection and, once totally unveiled, she guides the silken head of his throbbing member into her mouth.

Fully immersed in the seemingly endless cavern of her mouth, Spike steadies himself on the dresser. He watches her, taking him in, and he closes his eyes, reluctantly, as waves of pleasure overtake him and occlude his vision from Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, going down on him like an eager, horny teenager in a locker room with a popular jock.

Her next move spins his thought processes out of control as he lands on his back on their bed, his jeans bunched at his ankles. Buffy doffs her own jeans, toeing them off, along with her shoes. Naked now, she is quick to straddle him. In one quick stroke, she impales herself on him.

His hands rise mummy-like to catch the twin ovals of her backside, pushing her just a little deeper. He almost cannot bear to watch, seeing himself spear her over and over again, his shaft immerging slick and wet with her juices. He places his fingers between her legs to catch the drippings of their lovemaking and he licks her essence off his fingers.

She sweeps a hand over his face and commands in a whisper, “Change.” And under her fingertips, his demon visage takes hold. She bends to kiss his mouth, loving the feel of his teeth raking against her tongue.

She brings him closer to her, at last coercing him into a seated position, until she is sitting on his lap, her legs crossed around his backside. She is bounding off and on him, delighted by the feel of sex again, overjoyed to know that this is who she wants to have sex with forever.

“Feed,” she says.

His mouth is cracked open in a lock-jawed response to her request. He can’t stop the gyrations of his hips, not now when he’s feeling her warmth and her walls closing around him. And her need.

She takes him by the jaw and levels her stare with his. “Feed,” she says again, without even a hint of fear. She lifts her hair from her neck and bares her throat to him.

Spike shamelessly salivates as his eyes devour the throbbing cord of blood underneath her skin. In an instant his mouth is there, his teeth drilling straight into her flesh. Buffy gives a strangulated cry and her body goes perfectly still. After the initial shallow piercing, his fangs delve deeper until the vein is tapped and is pouring torrents of fresh, rich blood into his mouth. Buffy slaps her body against his, her inner muscles now clenching around him. The combined sensations of her blood flooding his throat and her warmth enveloping him quickly force him to the edge. He maneuvers a hand between them, commandeering the protrusion of her clitoris, working the hardened nubbin over and over with persistent strokes until she screams and he does as well.

Afterwards he lies against her, licking the wounds he has created with a loving tongue. She is lying quietly, letting him love her in a way he has never done before. Daniel is crying now from his cradle. Buffy rises slowly and instantly sees a vision of bright lights. Then her head is caught up in a dizzy sway that causes her to swoon and fall back into bed.

Spike retrieves the baby from his cradle, placing him gently into Buffy’s arms. The child feeds hungrily from his naked mother as his equally naked father lies beside them. Spike’s mouth bears the twin v’s of Buffy’s blood at the corners of his mouth. He kisses his son.

“Spike, I don’t know what’s coming from the hellmouth, or if anything is coming from it at all,” Buffy says as Daniel takes more and more of her breast into her mouth. “But I know for certain that I can’t fight it without you by my side.”

Warmed by the blood inside of him and by the loving green-eyed gaze of the woman at his side, he feels a sob building within him. When it is unleashed, he spasms against her. “I couldn’t live without you. I tried, once, and it was horrible. Darling, please. I want to be with you forever.”

She rifles her hand though the springy curls on his head and captures his jaw with an affectionate hand. “And I want to be with you too.”

“Then marry me,” he says so quickly and so impulsively, as the words leave his mouth, he can’t believe he’s hearing them. Buffy draws in a breath, as though his proposal has pinched something deep inside of her. He clutches her hand. “Buffy, for all my posturings at being the subversive man for all seasons, I am an old-fashioned bloke. And I think that if two people have a child together, they should be married.”

An invisible calendar flips before her eyes. She sees the months and the days of 2002, 2003, 2004, all leading up until her twenty-fifth birthday, the one she’s not supposed to have, or, at least, the one that will her last. Each calendar is blank, empty without him. Her once mortal enemy lies naked in her bed and is asking her to spend the rest of her life, however long it is, with him.

“Yes,” she says. “I will marry you.”

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