Chapter Forty-Nine




“I still can’t believe that it was Spike.”

Willow’s voice conveyed the confusion and shock that they all felt. Though none of them could know it, Giles would have preferred to keep them in the dark about the entire situation. But Tara already knew, and he had realized that trying to keep it from the rest of them would be nothing more than an exercise in futility. Tara would feel obligated to tell Willow, who by turn would tell Xander, who would then tell Anya…best to just get it out of the way all at once. Now, two days later, they were still struggling with their bewilderment.

Tara looked thoughtful. “W—well, she wasn’t really with Spike,” she said. “I mean, he was human then…Buffy said that he was human. That he wasn’t—”

“I just don’t get it, though,” Xander interjected. “She knew that he was going to become Spike. She must have known it…she must have recognized him. And she went ahead and slept with him anyway. How could she do something like that?”

But no one had an answer to that.

“When do you think they’ll be back?” Willow asked eventually.

“The appointment is at ten,” answered Tara. She checked her watch. “It’s only a quarter ‘til, now. Probably, they haven’t even gotten there yet, and it will take a while once they do. I mean, especially if…”

Her voice trailed away, but all of them knew what she was thinking. Xander spoke up again, and his voice was almost defensive when he said, “Well, she’s not. She can’t be. Giles just took her as a precaution. But there’s no way she’s—that she could be—”

The rest of them were quick to nod, but after a moment, Anya frowned thoughtfully.

“Why?” she asked.

The others turned to face her, but it was Xander who asked, “Why what, sweetie?”

“Why couldn’t she be pregnant? I mean, she did have sex with him. I think we’re all pretty well in agreement there. Isn’t that the usual way people get pregnant?”

“People, yes. Not Buffy.”

“But she’s a person.”

“Anya, would you just drop it?” Xander snapped.

“She does have a point,” Willow conceded softly. “What if she is? What then?”

“Well, she wouldn’t keep it.”

The other three looked at Anya in surprise, and she stared back in confusion. “Well, I mean, would she?”

“No, probably not,” Willow said, just as Xander answered in horror, “No!”

“But she loved him,” Anya said. It sounded like a question, one that was echoed by all sets of eyes but one.

“She loved him,” Tara whispered. Her tone was almost regretful. She hadn’t told them that Buffy had asked her to be sent back to him.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~




“I apologize.”

Buffy turned as far as her seatbelt would allow and looked at Giles. He was staring at the road ahead, his hands positioned at ten and two, no expression at all on his face. When he had arrived at the house that morning, bent on taking her to the doctor for tests, she hadn’t resisted him. She was too tired to resist, too tired even to care. She hadn’t said a word to him since they left the house. Not until she asked him, “Apologize for what?”

“I know that I was too hard on you last night,” he told her in a tight voice. “Perhaps, in a way, I was even unfair. But you must understand how much of a shock it was, Buffy. How much of a disappointment. To know that you would endanger not only your own existence, but also everyone else’s…everyone in the world’s. And for nothing more than a fling with a man who you hardly even knew.”

“I knew him.” Buffy’s voice trembled. “I knew him better than anyone I ever…and it wasn’t a fling.”

He didn’t argue with her, but she could see the corners of his mouth turn down in displeasure. Still, his voice was measured when he asked her, “Did you recognize him immediately? I realize he looked quite…different…but you did realize who he was.”

“Yes, I did.”

“And you pursued him anyway.”

“How was I supposed to know that I would even come home?” she flared. “I was there for five months, for God’s sake! I didn’t have any way to contact you. For all I knew, Willow had screwed up so badly, she couldn’t get me back! Did you think I could just sit on my hands and not form attachments to people who were good to me?”

For the first time, he looked at her. The blank look was gone from his face, and he looked, instead, curious, almost pitying. “People who were good to you. Was he good to you? What did he do?”

Part of her didn’t want to tell him. But she hadn’t talked to anyone about it, no one at all except during her one brief conversation with Tara. And she wanted Giles to understand, to see that she wasn’t trying to hurt anyone, that none of it had been planned, and that Spike had nothing at all to do with it.

“How I met him…” she began slowly. It was hard to get the words out at first, and she hesitated. Giles prompted her gently.

“I was wondering about that. Odd coincidence.”

Coincidence? she wondered dazedly. Is that what it was?

“Did you meet him right off?” Giles asked.

Buffy shook her head.

“When I got there, I was taken in by the police. Because of the way I was dressed, you know. One of the cops was nice, and he sent me to a job house so that I wouldn’t have to go out on the streets and starve. I was there for a few weeks, and then he—William—saw me. Crossing the street. I walked in front of his horses and nearly got ploughed over. I didn’t see him, but he…”

“He what?”

“I was crying.” Buffy’s voice had grown soft and faraway. When Giles looked at her, he saw that her eyes were the same, staring out the windshield glass, glazed and distant. She murmured, “He said I was crying. His mother needed a nurse anyway, and he thought I looked lost, like I needed help. He wanted to help me.”

“My God,” Giles said.

She snapped out of her stupor in an instant, and looked over at him.

“What?”

“He saw you crossing the road and immediately decided that you would make a good nurse for his consumptive mother? Does that sound even remotely plausible to you?”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“It means that he saw a pretty girl who had no means of supporting herself, and he decided to take her in for his own base purposes. My God, Buffy. How could you be so gullible? How long did it take you to let him…?”

“You don’t even know what you’re talking about!” Buffy’s voice was rising. “You don’t know him. You have no idea—”

“I know Spike,” Giles retorted. “And I damn well know that he would do anything in his power to have you. I shouldn’t be surprised to learn that he was no different a century ago.”

“Jesus,” Buffy exclaimed. “Are you deaf? I’ve already told you a hundred times. He wasn’t Spike. I was sent to 1879, and William was human. It wasn’t until afterward…after I left...that Drusilla…”

She looked at Giles accusingly.

“William wasn’t anything like Spike. You know that he couldn’t be like Spike. Vampires are just demons who take over a body when the soul is gone. They don’t have anything to do with the people that were there before.”

There was a pause. Almost infinitesimal, but it made the hackles on Buffy’s neck rise. Her eyes slid around to the windshield again, and she barely heard Giles’ voice as he said, very softly, “You’re right, Buffy. They don’t.”

~*~ ~*~ ~*~




“I know what happened between you and Buffy.”

Spike twisted around in his chair, looking for the source of the words. He might have felt shocked by the intrusion, but he’d drunk the better part of a bottle of Maker’s Mark, and it was hard to feel anything at that point. When he saw Dawn standing just inside the open door of the crypt, he gave a sardonic smile.

“Huh, you. Should’ve known.”

Taking this for the invitation he probably meant it to be, Dawn dumped her book bag on the floor and walked into the room. “I just thought you should know,” she added, as she perched on the edge of the sarcophagus.

Spike drained the bottle and threw it aside. “Yeah. What’d big sis do? Run right home and tell you? I’d have thought the details a little too NC-17 for—”

“She didn’t say anything,” Dawn interrupted. “I found out on my own. It was kind of obvious when you think about it. And there was a book…in the Magic Box.”

“A book?” he echoed in disgust. A nanosecond later, he realized what she was saying. Dawn was telling him that she knew about Buffy’s sojourn to London, not that she’d found out about Buffy’s visit to his crypt the night before. Relieved, he began fishing through the pile of bottles beside his chair, searching for one that hadn’t yet been emptied.

“The book…it was about you, and it mentioned something about…about a woman.”

“And you guessed that it was Buffy,” he finished for her.

“Well, wasn’t it? Isn’t it?”

Spike unscrewed the cap from a flask of Jack Daniels and put the bottle to his lips. After a long drink, he said, almost to himself, “Yeah…it’s always been Buffy.”

Dawn didn’t answer, but he could feel her eyes on him, scrutinizing. Annoyed, he snapped, “Don’t you have school or something?”

“It’s a free day,” she answered. Spike sighed. She was intractable. Just like her bloody sister.

“That being the case, what’s with the…?” He pointed the mouth of his bottle in the direction of her book bag.

“Well, there was a field trip thing; I was supposed to go.”

“Yet, here you stand.”

Dawn shrugged. “Who cares about Indian mounds? If I ever decide I do, I can go see them. It’s not like the bodies are going to get up and walk away—”

She stopped abruptly, having just realized what she was saying. Their eyes met, and Spike snorted.

“Yeah…’cause we both know the dead don’t walk, right?”

There was a long pause until Dawn, finally screwing up her courage enough to do it, told him, “I saw your picture.”

“Oh, yeah?” He tipped his bottle, drank deep. “What picture is that?”

“The picture of you as a human. It was in the book. A newspaper article. ‘William the Bloody Strikes Again’ and all that. Only the person who wrote the article…he thought that you were still a human, a serial killer. I guess they didn’t know yet…”

William the Bloody Strikes Again.

Jesus Christ.

Spike closed his eyes, and he could almost feel Angelus’ body crowding him into the cool, stout plaster of the wall. Through the muffled buzz of alcohol in his head, he could hear the angry snarl: See that? Do you see that? You lying little bastard—

Dawn’s voice broke into his thoughts.

“I thought about keeping it to myself,” she said. “But when Buffy saw it…I mean, when I gave it to her…she kind of…freaked.”

He opened his eyes.

“You showed it to Buffy?”

“Well…yeah.”

“What did she do?” he demanded. His urgent tone startled her, and Dawn widened her eyes.

“Nothing—”

“Nothing?”

“She didn’t do anything. Not while I was there. I mean, obviously, not while I was there. She wouldn’t even look at the book. But…”

“What?” he asked impatiently.

“There was this big ruckus last night. I was in my room, and I could hear Buffy come home because she slammed the door so hard she nearly cracked the plaster. So, I went to listen—”

“Eavesdrop,” he corrected. She looked defensive.

“It’s not like I’m the only one who ever does it!”

“Never mind, Bit. Go on.”

“When I got to the top of the stairs, Buffy was going kind of nuts, telling Tara that he was going to die without her, that something terrible was going to happen to—”

She stopped abruptly, as if just realizing something.

“You.”

“Me,” he answered grimly. “Now, are you going to tell me the rest of it, or am I going to have to break this goddamn bottle across your skull?”

She tossed her head at the last.

“Please. As long as you have that chip in your head, I can so kick your butt. Anyway, like I said, Buffy was in the living room with Tara. She wanted Tara to send her back...she said that something terrible was going to happen to him if she didn’t go back to stop it. Tara asked his—your—name. And then…Giles showed up.”

“The Watcher knows?”

Dawn nodded, and Spike groaned.

“Bleeding hell. What happened after that?”

“Nothing, really. Except that Giles found out Buffy had cut your picture out of that book—I think that hacked him off almost as much as the other. He accused her of not doing her duties as a slayer; she said she didn’t want to be a slayer. Then, he and Buffy starting fighting, and she ended up storming upstairs to her bedroom. Big surprise there.”

He smiled humorlessly. “Been doing that a lot lately, has she?”

“Pretty much. She stormed out of the house last night and was gone a couple of hours. When she got back, after the thing with Tara and Giles I just told you about, she stormed upstairs. She didn’t come out until this morning when Giles came.”

Spike snorted.

“Yeah? And what did the big librarian want this time?”

“To take her to the doctor.”

Immediately, Spike’s expression changed. He sat up a little straighter.

“Not hurt is she? Not sick?”

“No…”

Relieved, he raised his bottle to his lips.

“Good.”

“…Giles thinks she might be pregnant.”

Spike choked, spitting out the liquor he’d just swallowed. When he finally stopped coughing, he wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and stared at her.

“He what?”

His shock made Dawn’s heart jump into her throat. Her own eyes widened, and she yelped: “It’s not the truth is it?”

Spike dropped his head down, resting his forehead against the palm of his free hand. His shoulders were trembling, and he was making an odd, guttural sound; for a moment, she was almost frightened. Then, finally, he looked back up at her.

He was laughing.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” he said.

She had absolutely no idea what to make of that.

“So, then, it’s not true?”

Spike wasn’t sure if it was the liquor or merely the absurdity of his situation, but suddenly he couldn’t stop laughing. Hoarse, hysterical laughter. He shook his head at Dawn.

“Well, how can you be so sure?” she persisted. Clearly, she was torn between disbelief and a desire to believe. When he didn’t answer right away, she jumped off the sarcophagus and made her way over to him. She shook his shoulder as if to bring him out of a stupor. “How do you know—?”

Like a switch being flipped, the laughter suddenly died. He threw the liquor bottle at the sarcophagus, and Dawn winced as it shattered. He turned to her with a snarl.

“Who the fuck do you think would know better?”

“Spike…”

“Do you think that it never occurred to me?” he blazed. “I had her with me five months—I had her three times—I had her. Of course, I bloody thought about it!”

Dreamed about it…

Dumb with shock until now, Dawn slowly shook her head. “Then, how do you know she isn’t? Are you really sure…?”

The worst of his anger gone, Spike looked momentarily stricken. She tried to put a comforting hand on his arm, but he swatted it away as if it were a bothersome fly.

“Of course, I’m sure. Jesus, I’m a vampire aren’t I?” He was weary now.

“Why does that have anything to do with it?” she asked, bewildered.

“Increased hearing, taste, sense of smell…all part of the package, pet. I can hear your little heart beating right this minute; I can smell the blood in your veins. And Bit, I know your bloody sister. I’ve been memorizing her for the past five years. Shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, yeah? If she were harboring a stowaway, I’d know it. Not far enough along to hear another heartbeat, but her blood would smell different. Hormones.”

His words were bitter.

Dawn sank onto the arm of the chair, almost catching his elbow, which he quickly pulled out of the way. For an instant, she was able to enjoy some relief. Then, something else occurred to her, and she frowned.

“Uh, Spike…”

“What?” His tone was sullen.

“You seem like you know a lot about it.”

“About what?”

“Pregnancy.”

“So?”

“So…how…where did you learn all that stuff? Blood and hormones and heartbeats. You haven’t ever…”

“Haven’t ever what?”

Something in his tone frightened her, and she quickly shook her head. “Never mind.”

But he had already guessed what she was going to say.

“What? You’re asking if I’ve ever noshed on a pregnant woman?” His voice was a notch higher than usual, and much louder.

“Well—” She hesitated, uncertain of how to go on. His eyes narrowed.

“Get out, Bit. Just get the fuck out, all right?”

Dawn slid off the arm of the chair, immediately looking contrite. “Spike, I didn’t mean—I wasn’t trying to accuse you of—”

“Would you GO?”

She did.

Afterward, he vented his feelings by kicking over the makeshift crate that served as his coffee table, shattering several more empty bottles in the process.

“God damn it all. Nobody ever has any bloody faith in me.”

And then, with a start, he wondered why he thought he deserved it.


~*~ ~*~ ~*~