Trigger warning: abortion



Disclaimer: Buffy's thoughts and choices in this fic aren't meant to necessarily reflect mine. Same goes for Spike. We can talk about elsewhere, if you'd like, but please don't read this as me pushing some kind of agenda on anyone, or using characters as mouthpieces, because that isn't what this is about. We good? Good. :)



Some of my sources: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6

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It’s suddenly impossible to walk through the halls of her building. Impossible to walk past the next apartment and wonder, Was it him? To sit in the kitchen with Tumble and make avoid-y conversation and wonder, Was it him? To smile at utter strangers who laughingly bring up the night she can’t remember and wonder, wonder, so much wondering…

She doesn’t go to work the next day, not when she knows she can’t look at her boss anymore. She’s halfway to Dawn’s when a horrifying thought about Xander occurs to her, and she’s grabbing onto a bench on the sidewalk, arms stiff to keep herself standing while she doubles over with nausea, as a man taps her on the shoulder. “Miss? Are you okay?”

She runs.

I’m stronger than this. I’m not afraid of what I’ve done. But she can’t deny the aching fear that returns to her every time she thinks of her situation- and oh, god, that’s a completely different brand of terror.

She stands in her room and stares at her stomach in the mirror. Wonders what’s coming next. Wonders if her stomach’s going to pooch, if people are going to start handling her with kid gloves, if…

You don’t need to do this. She blinks at herself in the mirror, frowns at the intrusive thought. She’d never…well. She’d never had reason to consider it, had she? Pregnancy wasn’t in the cards for her. Babies weren’t something she’d thought about, beyond wondering if Xander and Dawn would ever have kids together and if they’d let her teach them self-defense. Aunt Buffy had had a nice ring to it. Not mommy.

She inhales too quickly, catches the suddenly repulsive odor of old laundry, and then she’s running to the bathroom, the cold rush of the water she’d just drunk shooting from her stomach.

When she looks up, Anaheed’s standing in the doorway, a troubled look on her face. “Totally not my business and you can just laugh this off if I’m imagining things, but are you…?”

She doesn’t need to finish the question before Buffy shakes her head. “J-Just a stomach virus!” she tries brightly. “Too much coffee, right? I should get a job in a salad bar or something.” Pep. Peppy Buffy is the name of the game. No one needs to know, not if I…

“Oh.” Anaheed still looks dubious. “Um…do you want me to get you a cup?”

“I’m fine.” She stands, a bit unsteadily, and sidles past Anaheed, yanking her coat off the hook by the door and heading outside.

She inhales the cool night air in a vain attempt to clear the bile from her throat. I miss Willow. It’s long past the time to object that life isn’t fair, at least for her, but it seems so cruel of karma to take her best friend away the day she needs her most. She needs…she needs…

She needs a good slay, and there, as though in answer to her thoughts, a scuffle is starting to get louder in a construction site not a block away. She runs, keeping her speed in check automatically and hating herself for it. I need to be better now. Not holding back. Not when a life is on the line.

“Hey!” She jumps on top of a trailer and smirks down at the vampire below, arms at her sides. (How threatening will I be with a baby bump?) “How about you pick on someone… a little more my size?” she finishes, frowning at the large man caught in a zompire’s grasp. One thing she’s noticed since the zompires first swept over San Francisco: their utter lack of discrimination in victims, which, more often than not, just means bigger corpses in the face of vampire strength.

The zompire snarls at her and she jumps down at him, crashing her boots into his face and landing unevenly behind him. He charges at her, and she dodges and lets her stake scrape across his chest as his fist smashes into her stomach.

“Oh god.” She can’t afford to do this, not now, but then she’s dropping to the ground in a crouch, protective over her stomach, and her mind is wild with fears and condemnation and shameful hope.

You didn’t do this intentionally. If something happens now…you were just doing your job. Not your fault, not your… But the words are empty, even in her mind. She huddles down and watches the zompire approaching, unsure of what to do- if there’s anything to do- the...something…within her weighing her down with uncertainty.

The victim is long gone, the zompire approaches…and then he’s gone, and a familiar figure is walking toward her, duster sweeping the dust away in an irritated stride. “What the hell, slayer? This some kind of new put on-?”

And then he stops and stares at her, and she stops and stares at him, and all she can think is Spike couldn’t have gotten me pregnant.

“Buffy?” he whispers, and when he crouches in front of her, she nearly bursts into tears and climbs into his arms.

She doesn’t, though. That’s not what they do. Instead, in a small voice that isn’t really her own, she whispers, “What happened to me at that party, Spike?”

His eyes widen, then move down to where her hands are still tight over her stomach, and she knows the moment he understands because of the way he moves to put a trembling hand on her own.

“Who?” he says finally, and she ducks her head so she doesn’t have to see the pain in his eyes, and her heart twists at the thought of it, of Spike giving up on her, too, because she’s hurt him in ways she’d never meant to.

She chokes out her answer in a sudden silence that seems to coat the whole city in a motionless tableau awaiting her shameful confession. “I don’t know.”

--

He’s silent as they walk quietly toward his ship, a hand loose at the small of her back, and she notes it as another thing that’s changed already. Spike isn’t accustomed to pregnancy, she suspects, not since he was human (and god, if he knows more since she doesn’t ever want to think about it soulsoulhehasasoulnow), and he seems to have reverted back to Victorian gentleman in the minutes since her revelation, peering around corners first and gazing at her watchfully whenever she makes a sharp move.

She hates it. (Well, except for the hand at her back, a gentle presence that makes her aware of him. Not too much, just lightly in touch with the fact that the vampire whom she can’t fathom living without anymore is by her side, and it warms her in ways she’d thought were gone now.) But she doesn’t say anything, not when he’s so attentive and she needs him to understand, though there’s a sinking suspicion that he won’t.

And he doesn’t, she realizes in a flash, when he sits her down on his ugly green couch, fetches a pillow from his bed to slip behind her back, and says earnestly, “I want you to know that I’m going to be here for you, whether or not you find out who thewanker-“ and his eyes glow angry yellow and she can see the barely leashed fury that he seems to recognize that this isn’t the time for just below the surface- “who did this to you is. Make sure you eat your greens, patrol for you, get you to the doctor if you need? Car garages were made for vampires, yeah? Well, usually for the bad ones to prey on unknowing patients, but I know you wouldn’t like that.” He smiles a bit at that, trying to coax out her own humor, but she can’t, not when there’s a sinking suspicion that he isn’t going to understand.

But if she can’t tell Spike, it’s going to keep being like this, lost and alone in what she already knows is the answer. “Spike…you know I can’t keep this baby, right?”

He freezes. Frowns. Shakes his head, and she can see him not comprehending. “Adoption? If that’s what you want-“

“No.” She cuts him off, can’t bear to hear him talking about what’s happening inside her as something unchangeable. Something that will ensue, rather than something that she can amend. “No, that isn’t what I mean. I can’t…”

And it all pours out of her in a torrent of words she couldn’t keep in check if she’d tried. “I can’t slay like this, I can’t spend nine months trying to protect myself and I can’t stop fighting, ever! Not when people are going to get hurt, not when I need to save them because I can-“ She gulps in a breath. “And I don’t want a baby whose father I can’t remember, who might’ve-“

Raped me. She remembers college pamphlets, remembers insubstantial, false comfort about sex when you can’t stop it, about how date rape is still rape and-

She retches again, slimy water coating the front of Spike’s shirt. “I don’t want a baby,” she says softly.

And there’s the truth of it, hidden under all the other reasons, because that’s all it needs to be, right? She isn’t ready to be a mother, not while she’s still picking up the pieces from last year, not while she has a sacred duty that always comes first. “I want to slay vampires and try to live my life without a baby complicating everything. I don’t want to spend nine months waiting for it to become a person I can’t be a mother for.” She’s crying silently, and it’s easier to blame hormones than the emotions overwhelming her at Spike’s still face. “I want things to stop happening to me and start doing things instead.”

She looks up just as Spike quickly retracts a hand, and that makes her smile through her tears at how Spike it is to be so afraid of being anything but tough and aloof. “Spike? What am I supposed to do?”

He shakes his head, and she can see how lost he is in this new mire of logic and emotions and what’s supposed to be right andoh god what would Mom think? What would Giles say? “I can’t…it’s a baby,” he finally says helplessly. “I dunno what that means, but it could be a Buffy baby, and the idea ‘f that is something so precious that I can’t tell you…” His voice trails off again, and she notices for the first time that he’s fighting tears, too. “You want me to give you answers but this is you, pet, and you know that ‘ll love you and be by your side no matter what you do, no matter how you…” He pauses, and somewhere within her she dimly realizes that this is the first time that he’s admitted that he loves her since Sunnydale. It doesn’t seem to matter here, not with this tiny creature growing within her, not with its life on the line- oh god it really is my baby how can I do this how can I not?

And then he continues, and it’s a bare whisper, laden with feelings she can’t handle, even from him. “Do you have insurance? Because I’m not one to know, but an…abortion… seems like something you’ll need a lot of dosh for.”

She bursts into tears again, this time noisy and gulping and ugly, and when he reaches out to touch her again, she remembers that she’s action girl now and kisses him swiftly instead.

--

She sits silently in the clinic, staring woodenly at the video on the screen. Spike is in the waiting room, a comforting tingle at the back of her neck her only comfort as the voice drones on about choices and procedures. She wishes he were in here, that Dawnie or Xander (not Xander, what if they find out and- it wouldn’t be him it couldn’tcouldn’tcouldn’t) or Willow would be sitting with her now, telling her that this is the right option, the only option, that she isn’t destroying something she never had imagined in the first place.

“I don’t have options,” she tells the doctor when the woman returns. “I need. This is what I need to do.”

“I know that it’s scary,” the woman begins, “But if there are other factors keeping you from keeping the embryo-“

“I was date-raped,” she says flatly, and it’s the easiest answer even though it shreds something else inside her to say it out loud, because the doctor’s mouth closes and she doesn’t need to talk about slaying or the duties she’s long been accustomed to.

There aren’t reasons to keep this baby, not images of a little girl who looks like her being rocked in Spike’s arms or playing pattycake with Dawn or gurgling up at her with trusting eyes-

Or being kidnapped by demons to use against her, or hating her because she’s never home or Xander and Dawn having to raise the baby, now an orphan. Or being born into an apocalypse because her mother can’t protect the world properly, or being hurt and confused and caught in death and destruction-

“I won’t have this…this b-baby” she repeats, forcing the words out. “I can’t.”

And there’s nothing left to say.

--

The actual appointment is later that day, and she finds that she’s reluctant to leave the clinic to wait. Instead, she reads and rereads the forms she’s been given, aftercare instructions and permission waivers and informational pamphlets, and passing each one to Spike when she’s done.

He doesn’t ask if she’s sure about it, doesn’t question her decision again, and she’s silently grateful for it, even though he’s shaking the whole time and hurting for the baby that isn’t. And in a strange way, it’s almost comforting to know that he’s going to mourn, that this non-child is something he already could love, because Spike is a constant she doesn’t want to give up even if she makes a different choice about another baby someday.

Spike isn’t allowed in the room with her for the procedure, and it’s probably for the best, because she’s suddenly terrified and unsure, and having his own doubt so close by might have torn her apart.

But when he’s waiting for her in the recovery room, when she’s pale and silent and afraid to meet his eyes, his face is clear of indecision and judgment; and she cries freely one last time for lost opportunities and choices she can’t undo, regret and relief washing over her all at once until she can’t tell the difference between the two emotions and all she can feel is pain.

She doesn’t want to go home, not with the identity of the (not-)father still hanging over her head, but it’s too soon to slay and she needs time to heal, so she lets Spike guide her to her apartment and into her room. They sit in silence in the darkness, Spike on the floor beside her bed and she lying on it with her fingers rubbing the side of his neck, and there’s no space for sorrow in this dark, tiny place.

The sun is bright and warm behind the drapes the next morning.