quite the problem child of fandom

She doesn’t tell Spike. Not when their night (okay, and that one day, and a couple of nights after) was just a huge mistake, and he’s a vampire anyway so there’s no way he’s the father, and if there’s ever been a time when she doesn’t need to feel any grosser about herself, it’s now. And he isn’t the father. It’s impossible. It’s all impossible.

“What’s impossible?” And there he is, leaning against her doorway as though he has some right (how dare he!) to her bedroom, and she must’ve been talking out loud, and it’s been two more days and is she showing yet?

“Go away,” she says weakly, and the familiar tinglings are starting up in her stomach, the familiar want and need for the vampire in front of her. She turns her back to him, inhaling fresh night air and focusing with renewed desperation on keeping herself from vomiting from the wafting odor of stale beer. “You need to go away,” she repeats, her voice strengthening as the distance between them grows.

And there’s another part of her that longs for something different from him, that craves his confidence as much as his body. He’s the one she can talk to, the one to whom she can admit all the things she can’t say out loud, and perhaps that’s why she blurts it out when he mock-whines, “But why?”

“I’m pregnant.” The words feel alien from her lips, but there’s a rightness to the certainty in her voice. “You need to go.”

There’s only silence from behind her, and for a moment she thinks that he’s already gone. That this is enough to repel him. Then he speaks, and her whole body is at once frozen from the chill in his voice. “I see,” he says, and then the door slams.

She watches him as he storms across the lawn, feeling very small and hurt that he’d be so angry. Do you think I was unfaithful? Not that I owe you my faithfulness! But…

But…

But.

She barely sees him for months, enough time to know that he’s avoiding her. But he doesn’t tell anyone her secret, and he patrols alone every night, and when she finally does stumble across his path, he shouts at her. “You’ve got a sprog to worry about! Now toddle off home!”

“I didn’t sleep with anyone else,” she calls after him one time, when she’s already five months in. He doesn’t turn. “I think it’s yours.” The doctors have reassured her that it’s a human baby, and there’s nothing abnormal about it. So not a mystical pregnancy, and Giles is uncomfortable but certain that Spike must, “though the very idea of it is unnerving and quite distasteful, Buffy,” be the father. He says her name a lot on the phone, as though to reassure himself that she’s Buffy, not Spike’s newly seduced dark princess or something.

The others don’t know who the father is, and Buffy is content knowing that Xander and Dawn won’t be hauling Spike in to ‘do the right thing’ anytime soon. She doesn’t want Spike around. (She needs him, oh god, all the time, and he’s hurt and furious and she’s feeling much too vulnerable to seek him out and what was she thinking, telling him the truth tonight?)

She waddles home, talks briefly with Dawn, prepares a lunch for tomorrow so Mini-Buffy won’t be eating Doublemeat Burgers, and heads up to her room.

The instant she sinks down on her bed, he slams the door closed from where he’s been lurking behind it and demands, “Is it true?”

“Is what true? Dawn’s A in math? We’re all a little stunned, but yes, she’s been-“

“Buffy.” His voice is pained, and she can’t help but trace the lines of his jaw with her eyes, feeling a very much pregnancy-induced desire to bite it. It’s easier to think of hormones than Spike, that she’s learned long ago.

“Yeah.” She tears her eyes away from him, focusing on the slow descent of a spider on her wall. “You have to be the father. There isn’t anyone else, not since Ri-“

He strides across the room in three steps, pulling her to him and swiftly kissing away her words. And for a moment, her pregnancy hormones rejoice, there’s a faint kick somewhere near the top of her stomach, and she’s kissing him back, missing his touch, memorizing his lips all over again.

By the time she can think of moving away, it’s too late, because Spike is murmuring words of comfort with every unnecessary breath. I’m a bloody idiot. Love you, never should have stayed away. Trust you. Missed you. Love you, love you, love both of you-

When they part, they’re lying on their sides across her bed, and she can’t tear her eyes away from his. “Okay,” she says, feeling her willpower fizzle with a mighty what’s the point?. “I…okay.”

She sleeps in his arms that night, and can’t seem to muster up a reason not to enjoy it. Not even when it happens the next night, and the next, and before she knows it, he’s curled up against her nine-month-large belly, laughing delightedly every time baby Anne rams him in the head.

And when Anne finally emerges a few weeks later and Spike is off sobbing all over Dawn, Buffy whispers her first words to her baby. “I think your daddy is growing on me.” 

Just a bit.