Fuzzy. Achy. Swollen. Sandpapery... =What is Buffy's brain for five hundred, Alex.=
Buffy squinted through crusted lashes into the blinding orb of the floodlamp overhead. Let there be not so much light. She wanted to raise her arm and shade her eyes, but her bones were made of lead. Maybe she should just lie here. Lying here was highly under-rated as a pastime.
Menacing ranks of machinery encircled her bed-table-platform-thingy, hissing and whooshing in time with her breathing. Hospital. She was in a hospital. Because...? They'd been in the parking lot at the grocery store. She'd finally gotten up the nerve to tell Spike about the baby, before he smelled it on her or something. And then Warren Meers had popped up out of nowhere and pointed that thing with all the tubes at her. Had she fainted? God, what a suckorama if she was going to spend the next eight months fainting at the first sign of danger. And she'd been carrying the grocery bag with the eggs in it, too.
Across a million miles of sheet her feet poked out, bare and tan, with a pale sandal-stripe across the arch. Hello, toes! She wriggled her feet, then her hands – were manacles really de rigeur in the emergency ward these days? – and managed to raise her head a little. Across the room, a technician in green scrubs was adjusting an IV line.
"...approximately six weeks of development, though it's always difficult to pinpoint with these hybrids," said the tech. "There's nothing cross-referenced in Bundt's Prophetic Index, and the genetic signature doesn't match any of the catalogued species that are cross-fertile with humans."
La, la, la, Buffy can't hear you, because Buffy is heavily medicated!
A shadow eclipsed the artificial sun. A balding man in a white lab coat and Coke-bottle lenses bent over her, then turned to examine the pulsing crimson line on the nearest monitor. "Intriguing," the doctor said. "This must be something of an occupational hazard in her line of work, don't you think? Let's take a closer look."
Bedside manner closer to the Abominable Doctor Phibes than J. Dorian? Time to check out. Beneath the sheet Buffy tugged ineffectually against the wrist straps. Why was she so weak? That IV must hold something stronger than your average dose of Percoset.
A hand plucked the sheet away from her midriff, and something oozed across her belly like a metallic snail. She blinked and looked down. The doctor was running some kind of goo-covered probe over her abdomen, while the tech adjusted the settings on an overhead viewscreen.
It wasn't a fuzzy grey blur, like ultrasound pictures. This was more like This Is Your Uterus by Industrial Light and Magic. Until a couple of weeks ago she'd never even thought about having a uterus. It was just one more pink squishy thing taking up tummy room. Now?
An alien squiggle of flesh with dark lidless eyespots stared out of the screen at her, floating in a transparent globe of fluid. Was that normal? Or some kind of freaky demon egg sac? It didn't look like a baby. More like some kind of unshelled, squishy polyp or nodule or... was that a tail?
When the Shadow Men said live and grow inside you she'd never, never thought it meant -
Half a dozen monitors broke into a chorus of frantic beeps and boops in counterpoint with her suddenly-pounding heart. "Doctor Sparrow!" The technician backed off a step, eyes widening above his mask. "She's regained consciousness."
The doctor let go of one rubber glove with a snap! "So she has." He frowned, pursed his lips, then shrugged. "Well, we don't have the facilities to study it properly here. Extract it, and we'll ship it back to the Home Office for analysis."
"Of course, Doctor." Techie Monster abandoned his attempt to control the horizontal and the vertical, and scuttled from machine to machine, switch-flipping and button-pressing. "Embryonic extraction initiated."
Spidery cybernetic arms tipped with everything from razor-thin scalpels to buzz saws extended over the examination table, black claws going snik-snik against the light. Buffy tried to choke out a "Stop!" but it came out closer to "Thuf!" A constellation of tiny red stars blinked into being on her goo-covered belly. With a whir of servos, Edward Laserhands realigned the sights, inscribing a deadly scarlet tattoo on her stomach, and a needle the size of a PT Cruiser angled straight for her abdomen.
Buffy jerked uselessly at her restraints. There should be a She-Ra moment here, but she was so tired. In a second it would be too late. A second wasn't enough. Was it?
A strange sick calm descended over her. She'd felt like this when it seemed so certain that Dawn would die no matter what she did, and some horrible cowardly part of her had been relieved, had just wanted it all to be over. In a second, all of this – the alien in her belly, the sleepless nights, the days of fear and nausea - would be over. All she had to do was lie here.
The technician looked worriedly at the Himalayan straggle of readouts on the nearest monitor. "Should I give her another dose of the adrenal blockers, Doctor?"
No one would blame her, sick and weak as she was. Especially not Spike, who'd turn all his rage and grief on the men who did this to her. To his child. (Their child? Her child? Not yet.) Buffy closed her eyes, seeing Spike's face, alight with joy at the news that terrified her. Contagious joy. In its glow she could believe that the child she carried was the best of both of them, not the worst, and maybe, together...
Sparrow hesitated, stroking his chin. "She's received the maximum dose already. Anything more might...well. Increase the anaesthetic drip and hurry along with the extraction, and we'll get her back to her cell."
Spike didn't care if she was knocked up with Rosemary's Baby; the only thing that mattered to him was that it was theirs. But she cared. She had to care, for both of them. One more second, and she'd never have to find out if that pea-sized alien blob would grow up to have scales, or horns, or a soul.
Or Mom's nose.
Or Spike's eyes.
Or...
Buffy arced up and sideways, straining her bonds to their limits. The waldo controlling the needle jerked after her as the technician cursed and wrestled with the controls. She flung herself in the opposite direction and half a dozen blades and clamps collided overhead. Panting, she rammed her elbow into the little panel of buttons on the safety rail of the exam table. The table lurched, jack-knifing her knees up to her chest. A stray scalpel-arm bumped her wrist, slicing a shallow groove in the skin before scraping across the nylon restraints. Fibers frayed, fuzzed, and parted, weakening the bonds just enough to -
"Put her under, now!" Doctor Sparrow shouted.
Snap. Buffy surged off the table with a sob, (what was she mourning?) ripping the IV line free. She yanked the release on her ankle restraints and one flying heel took Renfield in the breastbone - savage elation welled up as something crunched wetly and the tech crumpled to the floor. She reached up, grabbed a bouquet of blade-tipped waldos - ooh, bone saw, bonus! She wrenched the saw off at the joint, and hacked through the strap on her left wrist.
She rolled to her feet, swayed dizzily, and took an unsteady step towards Sparrow. The doctor stabbed frantically at the intercom. "Security! Security to the infirmary, immediately!"
Buffy ripped the intercom off the wall. "You tried to kill my baby." Monochrome emotional haze gave way to blazing primary colors - fear, and anger, and a ferocious protectiveness that wasn't quite love yet, but might be - might be. Someday. She said it again, testing the words on her tongue. "You tried to kill my baby."
"Most extraordinary," Sparrow murmured. Sweat beaded on his high forehead. Buffy watched a drop trickle down his temple with interest. "Young lady, you'll be a great deal better off if you calm down and discuss this rationally. You've just damaged some very expensive equipment--"
She rammed the bone saw blade-first into the tangle of wiring and circuit boards in the wall. Sparks crackled. The lights flickered and dimmed for a second. A bank of monitors went dark. "Oopsie."
"Security will be here at any moment - "
An alarm sounded in the corridor outside, a steady whoop-whoop-whoop. "There has been a Class Twelve cell breach in Containment Block C," a calm feminine voice announced. "Security to Block C immediately."
"Sounds like Security has a hot date elsewhere," Buffy observed. Across the room the tech moaned, coughing up blood. She took a step towards Sparrow, licking dry lips. She'd felt like this before, too. The night she'd rammed a big-ass knife in Faith's gut. "If I were you, it wouldn't be the machinery I was worrying about."
"Miss Summers - "
"There has been a Class Nine cell breach in Containment Block A," the voice in the hall informed them. "Security to Block A immediately."
"Summers-Pratt, actually."
Doctor Sparrow glanced at his clipboard and raised an eyebrow. "Quite so," he said, as if the faux pas of getting her name wrong dwarfed any lesser transgressions. "You're laboring under a slight misunderstanding. You may have convinced yourself that a blessed event is in the offing, but let me assure you that it's anything but. Preliminary scans show a less than ninety percent correlation with baseline human DNA. Your average chimpanzee–" he favored her with a wintery smile, "would be a ninety-eight percent correlation. I don't know what's responsible for your current condition, but believe me, I'm doing you a favor in, er, relieving you of the burden."
"Can you tell if it's evil?"
The doctor blinked. "I beg your pardon?"
"Evil," Buffy repeated. "Can you tell for absolute certain if it's completely, totally, leather-pants-wearing irredeemable?"
"Cell breach in Blocks A through D inclusive. All Wolfram & Hart personnel report to the transfer chamber immediately. All security personnel will facilitate the evacuation of civilian employees..."
Sparrow cocked his head to one side. On him, it wasn't a very endearing mannerism. "It's part demon."
Rage boiled up like lava. "So am I."
Anger burned the grey lassitude from her mind. Anger lent strength and swiftness to her still-drugged limbs. And anger drove her fist at his face, nothing held back. How much was Buffy, how much was Slayer-demon, whether that distinction even meant anything any longer - right now? Not caring. Sparrow collapsed in a broken-jawed spray of blood. "Next time?" she hissed. "Don't do me any favors."
The doctor cowered against the door, his face a smashed ruin of blood and shattered teeth. If she hit him again, she'd kill him. Probably she ought to feel bad about that.
As she raised her fist, a pair of security guards in Kevlar and riot helmets smashed through the door and stumbled into the exam room, tasers aimed at something behind them in the corridor. "Shit!" one of them screamed. "There's another one in here!"
Buffy shoved Sparrow's gurgling form at the intruders and leaped behind the exam table. The first guard fired. The electrode darts hit Sparrow, who spasmed and collapsed. The second guard hit the exam table - Buffy whipped a rubber glove around the connecting wires, and yanked the taser out of his hands. Flinging it aside, she vaulted the table, hooked her fingers under the rim of the first guard's helmet, ripped it off, and bashed his head against the wall. He slumped to the floor and she wrested a billyclub from his belt and coshed the second guard in the kneecap before he could get out from beneath Sparrow's dead weight.
Exhaustion hit out of nowhere, not just a wave but a tsunami. Adrenaline only took you so far. Buffy swayed, staggered, folded to her knees and then to the floor, arms curling protectively around her belly. Shouts and the raw crackle of an energy weapon echoed in the corridor outside. There was a crash, as of ceilings collapsing. "Here! They went this way!" an eerily familiar voice yelled. Footsteps pounded on linoleum. The infirmary door slammed open again, and three slight figures skidded to a halt at the pile-up of bodies on the threshold.
The last thing she saw was her own face in triplicate, blotting out the electric sun.
***
Candles flicker on the nightstand, a charmed circle of light. She curls in the warmth of their bed, cocooned in blood-red sheets and ivory vampire. Sinewy arms hold her safe and tight against a lean, muscled torso. Spike's chin rests in the crook of her shoulder, and his hand caresses the great swell of her belly as their child moves within her. Her body thrums with his somnolent purring growl. All her own power is bent inward now, and knowing that his strength guards her while she wallows through these last days is its own kind of bliss.
The bedroom door opens, flooding their lair with light. Buffy blinks. Doctor Sparrow stands broken-limbed in the doorway, grinning with his ruined mouth. Blood drips down onto his snowy lab coat. He pulls one rubber glove on with a snap. "It's time," he announces.
What? That can't be right. She looks to Spike, bewildered, but he's pushing her away. "That's the way it works with demons, love," he says. "You knew that."
"I'm not ready!" she protests, but Sparrow limps over and pushes her down on the bed. Her bones are like water. Spike lights a cigarette and looks on with interest. Sparrow's blood drip-drip-drips onto her belly, a deadly scarlet tattoo. She grabs the sheet and tries to wipe it away, but it just smears, painting larger and larger swathes of red across her body. It's all over her hands now, and the baby is kicking, kicking hard.
"It smells blood," Spike says knowingly, and the doctor laughs.
"Remember," Sparrow says, "You asked for this." And he plunges his hand into her belly, and drags out...
Buffy woke to a crumpled moonscape of scratchy grey wool, damp with drool beneath her cheek. Blood. Bone. Smell of ozone. Panic rolled her off the hard cot and she stumbled upright, clutching her butt-baring hospital gown close. The drugged grogginess was gone, and her head was clear. She wasn't sure it was an improvement.
Where was she, anyway? A twelve by twelve cell with one open wall barred by an Initiative-style force field that crackled at her tentative finger-poke. A minimalist toilet decorated the wall opposite the spartan cot. The walls matched the paint job in the operating theater, so same Evil Underground Complex, probably. And across the hall...
"Beatrix Kiddo awakes," a sardonic voice – hersardonic voice – said. "And I wonder what her story is. I'd say I was dying of curiosity, but..." The owner of the voice tossed honey-gold curls. "Little late for that."
Her doppelganger smirked at her from across the corridor, milk-pale and stiletto-slim, lounging on a cot just as hard, in cell just as bare, as her own. It radiated cool sexual menace and something... something indefinable, a fillings-on-tinfoil shiver down the spine. Vampire.
The others hadn't been vampires. Robots? Clones? Whatever. She wasn't going for a face-off with a breeze up her backside. Buffy looked around; her clothes were stacked neatly on the foot of the cot. Grubby sneakers, grey knit workout pants, and an oversized hot-pink t-shirt weren't haute couture, but they were familiar, and hers. Buffy dressed as quickly as possible, conscious of the vampire's eyes upon her.
"Cat got your tongue?" her evil twin inquired.
"The doctor," Buffy croaked. "And that...other guy. Is he... did I...?"
The vampire snickered. "You did plenty. Or so I hear."
Blood and bone and... Her stomach made a break for freedom, and Buffy dove for the toilet.
When she finally raised her head, she felt... better. Surprisingly. Her throat was rough from barf-burn. She supposed she'd better get used to that. She fumbled with the spigots over the toilet bowl till one of them produced a thin stream of tepid water, and drank from cupped hands until she felt marginally human again.
Vampire Buffy scrutinized her through the force field, pink, perfect lips curled in a feline smile. After a moment she said, "What if I told you that the not-so-good doctor was one-quarter Slod demon?"
Buffy sat down on the cot with a thump, clutching her rebellious stomach. She scrunched her eyes shut. "What difference would that make?"
When she opened them, Vamp-Buffy was staring at her with golden-eyed intensity from beneath ridged brows, like her response had been a real surprise. "None, to me," she said. "And maybe none to you. But it'll mean a whole heck of a lot to them."
"There's a them?" Of course there was a them. There was always a them.
"They put you in the cell across from the vampire," her new best friend whispered. "Think about that. Right now? You're the crazy rogue who put the human doctor in traction for a year. If he dies? Not pretty. But if I let my little bombshell drop...all of a sudden you're the noble Slayer in pursuit of her duty." Her tongue slicked across her fangs. "Again."
Buffy's jaw clenched. "And you'll do me this awesome favor why?"
The bumps and ridges melted away from her alter ego's face. "They're planning a breakout. They're either going to kill me or leave me here to shrivel up into a stick insect and starve. For years. Or centuries. I've never looked into the details." Beneath the cool her voice was brittle, urgent. "Get me out of here. And I'll get you out of here."
"I don't make deals with demons." If this were a Disney movie, her nose would be three feet long by now.
The vampire's smile went from kitteny to tigerish. "Oh, please. How much history do we share? You've made at least one already. I can smell it on you - the stench of power." Her eyes sparked an avid gold. "All deep and dark and dangerous. Power I turned down - and how stupid was that, all things considered? Power they turned down." She nodded down the hall. "If they got to make the choice at all. But you? You said yes. And now you've got an extra dose of Slayery goodness...or badness...right inside of you. Living and growing."
In more ways than one. Could Vampirella smell her delicate condition? Buffy turned away, arms folded tight across her stomach. Probably; she was pretty sure the only reason Spike hadn't put two and two together before (last night? Last week?) was because he'd simply couldn't believe the evidence of his nose. "Is the doctor a Slod demon?"
There was no smile in those bright, wicked eyes. "I thought that didn't matter."
Of course it matters, she started to say, but the words jammed sideways in her throat. It hadn't mattered when it would have mattered for it to matter.
"Think fast," the vampire murmured. "Here come the Power Puff Girls."
Buffy sidled up to the force field, craning her neck. Down the hallway came... her. And her. And her again. A power-walking trio of Buffys - what the heck. Blossom, Bubbles and Buttercup. Three sharp-chinned faces, three pairs of inscrutable grey-green eyes. All three pulled up in front of Buffy's cell, Buttercup and Bubbles unlimbering the tasers slung over their shoulders, and stared in formation. This week only! Free visual laser peel with your incarceration!
"I want to see the men I hurt," Buffy said, before her captors could whip out the soft cushions. "I need to know if they're..."
"Is there supposed to be a 'dead' or an 'OK' after that ellipsis?" Blossom asked. She sauntered up to the force wall, matching Buffy's pose exactly. Not quite her face (harder), not quite her body (thinner), but close enough for weirdness. It was like staring into a funhouse mirror that conveniently changed wash-day grubbies into a hard-core Kevlar vest and vaguely military-looking fatigues. The outfit didn't quite match the mulberry leather Fossil clutch tucked under one elbow. "Let's cut to the exposition," Blossom said. "This whole compound is a Wolfram & Hart holding dimension. They've been collecting Slayers from a bunch of different dimensions - some of us have been here for weeks. I don't know what they wanted us for, but they've got a list, and I'm checking it twice, because some of them?" She nodded at the vampire. "Very naughty."
"Takes one to know..." the vampire across the hall murmured.
Blossom whirled around. "Shut. Up," she said in a voice of liquid nitrogen. The vampire zipped thumb and finger across her lips, smirking. Blossom turned back to Buffy. "So anyway. I had a little chat with Doc Sparrow. Kinda one-sided, considering the broken jaw, but to the point. He says that you're knocked up with mind-controlling demon spawn and we can't trust anything you say." She smiled a big bright fake smile. "His word against yours. So what's your word?"
Buffy caught her lower lip in her teeth. Across the corridor, her fangy alter ego blew her a kiss - One word from me will make it allll better. She'd made deals with vampires before. But only when she held the high ground, one way or another — even during the Angelus Affair, Spike had come to her. She wasn't desperate enough yet to indebt herself to that.
"Sparrow's not wrong about the pregnant part," she said. "He was trying to extract the baby. I freaked. I was out of control. Stopping me? Great idea. But - " she waved at the three of them. "Looks to me like you've all got some walking-around-free-now reason to be glad I was hopped up on cranky pills."
"She did fritz half the force locks," Buttercup pointed out, raking blood-red nails through short, spiky blonde locks. She was even thinner than Blossom, shrink-wrapped in black leather, the points of her collarbones razor-sharp beneath a lace cami. "We owe her one."
"Right. Like that was on purpose," Bubbles muttered. Except for the bright blue-green hair, she looked...well, not quite as thin as Blossom, and there was something a little weird about the cut of her clothes, but compared to Buttercup, who looked like she'd wandered out of a Heart video by mistake, definitely on the normal side. The two of them exchanged distrustful glares. Trouble in paradise?
"What I think," Buffy said, "is that you wouldn't be standing here swapping banter if you weren't already thinking about letting me out."
Blossom's lips quirked. "You know you all too well. We did some CSIing of our own." She held up her mulberry leather Fossil clutch - wait, no, Buffy's mulberry leather Fossil clutch, its stylish lines bulging with a familiar litter of receipts, credit cards, and scraps of paper with mysterious phone numbers scrawled on them. Blossom flipped it open. "Unflattering name change on all your ID. Checks with the wedding ring. Pay stub from Ice World. Business cards for Bloody Vengeance Inc., Magical Supplies & Slayage At Reasonable Rates. Buffy Summers-Pratt, mild-mannered skating instructor by day, vampire slayer by night! So far, so freakishly normal - except for one eensy thing."
She held up a snapshot. It was Spike, a-sprawl on the couch at 1630 Revello Drive. Dawn had taken it just a few weeks ago, testing out her new camera, and Buffy had snagged a copy and stuck it in her wallet on a whim. Quintessential Spike, smirking at the camera, black tee tight over muscled shoulders, one sandy curl working its way free of the tyranny of gel. She could almost smell tobacco smoke. Spike-missage hit, so acute it made her chest ache. She wanted to reach into the photograph and drag him out.
"I could be wrong," Blossom said, "but I've looked Spike in the eye a lot, and I'd bet a mani/pedi at the Grove that this is Spike 1.0, Soul Not Included. Which makes me wonder what he's doing taking up couch space. Not to mention wallet space."
Oh. Right. Once upon a not-that-long-ago time, the idea that Spike loved her had been unbearable. The idea that she might ever love him back, unthinkable. This could be tricky. Buffy took a deep breath. Alternate universes, right? Was a good(ish) Spike really that much more unlikely than a world without shrimp? "It's a really long story. Like, Tolstoy long. Does the Initiative ring a bell?"
Buttercup looked blank, but Blossom and Bubbles nodded. "So he's chipped," Blossom said.
"Um...actually...not anymore." Buffy took aim at breezy and confident. "Willow took the chip out."
"So... he's got a soul?"
Oh, great. Blossom's Spike had a soul? He probably picked up his own towels, too. "Not as such. But it's OK. He's reformed. Mostly." From their expressions, a global crustacean shortage would have been an easier sell. "Remember the me-being-pregnant part? Spike's the father. And my husband. Hence the living in my house. Did I mention he's alive now?"
At least, she hoped so. What if Warren had zapped him someplace, too? Or worse...what if Warren hadn't? Most humans had no idea how fast a vampire could move. Even if the dimensional zapper thingy hadn't needed time to recharge, Spike could have had Warren by the throat before his finger could tighten on the trigger a second time. And Spike... would be really, really ticked off. Recipe for badness, coming right up. She trusted him, she really did...but everyone had limits. And Spike's were a little more limiting than most people's.
Bubbles scowled, oblivious to her angst. "Oh, no. Do not tell me that he shanshued. Not without a soul."
Shan-what? Wasn't that Angel's prophecy thing? "I didn't say he was human," Buffy replied with an impatient head-shake. "Just alive. Hence the fatherhood. There was Mohra blood. It was a thing."
"So let's sum up," Blossom said drily. "You've gone rogue, and you're working a pay-for-slay black market demon parts racket while knocked up with the demon spawn of the second-worst vampire in history. And the first thing you do here is beat an unarmed doctor half to death." She flicked the business card at the force wall; it sparked briefly and fluttered to the floor.
Anya was so right; it was all in the marketing. Buffy gritted her teeth. "The racket," she said, "is a legitimate business. With W-2s and everything. I'm a consultant, in the copious spare time I have left over from my day job and the pro bono slayage, in which Spike is my consultant, thank you very much. And no, I'm not on speaking terms with the Council, if it's any of your business, which I'm thinking not. And even if it is, since when is telling the Council of Watchers to go play with their bookmarks a reason to keep me on the Group W bench with Velma Kelly over there?"
She shot a look across the hall; Vampire Buffy was grinning. Spike could be dead. Or making Warren dead, and she wasn't sure which was worse. Maybe she was that desperate, after all. "And besides," she forced out, "I think the doctor might have been... part demon."
Her three inquisitors exchanged looks - started, wary, suspicious. "What makes you think so?" Bubbles asked.
"Just a feeling," Buffy mumbled. A big neon sign saying "LIAR" was probably popping on over her head. "You know. Like with that roommate we had freshman year."
Blossom looked at Bubbles, who looked at Buttercup, who shrugged. "Don't ask me. I went to the college of hard knocks."
"What, none of the rest of you noticed?" the vampire inquired mockingly. "I smelled it the minute I saw him. For God's sake, he works for Wolfram & Hart."
"We already have one rogue in the clubhouse," Bubbles said with a stiletto glance in Buttercup's direction.
"And one quitter." Buttercup twirled a finger. "Go team."
Bubbles's cheeks blazed. "It's not quitting when there's no world left to save!"
"Stop it, both of you." Blossom inspected Buffy narrowly through the shimmer of the force wall. Buffy could see it in her eyes: belief. Grudging, unhappy belief, but it was there. Wouldn't believe her, but when an evil bloodsucking fiend stood up for her, boy howdy... "Any minute now Wolfram & Hart may realize that something's wrong and send the Brute Squad after us. Or just wait for us to starve. We don't have time to waste. Or a lot of choice about who we trust." She tossed her no-nonsense ponytail over her shoulder and stepped aside with an after-you gesture at Buttercup, who shrugged and punched a code into the electronic lock next to the cell. The force wall disappeared with a crackle. "I'd say this was the beginning of a beautiful friendship, but so far? I really don't like you."
She spun on her heel and headed back the way they'd come. A breath of fresh air didn't actually rush into the cell as the force wall came down, but Buffy shivered anyway. The vampire smirked at her as she walked past. "Remember," she whispered. "You owe me."
"How do you know I won't just leave you in there?" Buffy hissed back.
The vampire smiled. "Because when I was you, I wouldn't have."
Half the light panels in the ceiling were out, but the walls of the passageway glowed a faint eerie green. There was a Twilight Zone seamlessness about the compound, like it had been extruded rather than built. If this was a pocket dimension, maybe it had been. Walking down the corridor, Buffy felt light. Free. As if instead of something weighing her down from within, some burden had been lifted. She didn't think the mood would last, but while it did, she was willing to take advantage. My baby. She put a hand to her stomach. Say the magic words. Presto-change-o, abstract to concrete. In a weird way, that made it easier to deal with. She was better at concrete.
She studied her not-quite-captors not-quite-covertly. Bubbles didn't trust Buttercup, and Blossom didn't think much of either of them, and if she obsessed over their backstory enough, would it keep her from thinking about Sparrow's cheekbone crunching beneath her fist? Buttercup seemed the least aloof of the three. Buffy stepped up her pace to catch up. "Hey. The vampire," she asked. "Is she from a world where the Master...killed us?" How weird, to think she'd been so scared of dying, once.
Buttercup shot her a curious look. "God, no. It was Spike."
"Oh." Ow. "When? Parent-Teacher Night?" If Mom hadn't shown up with that axe... "Halloween? Or that time with the Gem of Amarra?" Those were the only times she could remember Spike really, truly having her on the ropes.
Bubbles dropped back a step, whether out of suspicion or a healthy desire to get in on the dish Buffy wasn't sure. "As a matter of fact? Just last year. She acts like it was all her idea, but really? She just got careless."
"Oh, please," Buttercup said with an all-too-familiar eyeroll. "Put the high horse out to pasture. You boinked him too. In fact, everyone who hasn't boinked Spike raise a hand!" She waved an arm wildly above her head. "Golly. And I thought I was the bad Slayer."
Bubbles's lips compressed to a diamond-hard line of disapproval. "At least I learned from my mistakes. Soul or no soul, Spike's bad news." She waved Buffy ahead of her. "Come on."
What mistakes, Buffy wondered, had those been? It had been almost four years since her Spike had realized he was falling in love with his mortal enemy - just short of an eternity in Slayer years. It wasn't that she couldn't imagine worlds where Spike hadn't fallen, or where she hadn't fallen back. But why on earth would any version of her sleep with a Spike she wasn't well on the way to being madly in love with? Sexing up a guy who'd tried to kill you on multiple occasions wasn't exactly something you did for yuks on a slow Saturday night.
The corridor terminated in a high-tech door with a thumbprint lock - smashed now, and the door wrenched open. Beyond was a circular room lined with consoles. Some kind of guard station, she guessed. Viewscreens overhead showed empty cells, trashed labs, and something that looked like a bunkroom, where half a dozen bruised and dejected guards slumped around on cots. A cushioned conversation pit right out of an Austin Powers flick took up the center of the room, along with a few low shelves holding books, CDs, and an X-Box. Three more doors ringed the room - Buffy caught a glimpse of another cell block through one, a kitchen through another.
Sprawled across the cushions, rifling through the shelves, prodding at the consoles... was her. And her. And her. And her and her and her. Blonde Buffys and Buffys au naturel, wire-thin Buffys and curvy Buffys, Buffys in camo and Buffys in chiffon. A dozen iterations of her own face, staring at her with curiosity and contempt and an entire thesaurus in between. The concentrated eyeballage could have peeled paint, if there'd been any paint to peel, but Buffy squared her shoulders and marched into the guard station with all the aplomb one could reasonably expect of someone wearing a novelty t-shirt.
"I'd introduce everyone," Bubbles said, propping her taser rifle against the wall, "but it would get awfully repetitious."
Blossom was already striding towards the biggest and most impressively blinky console, hands on hips, glare on stun. A Buffy in techno-ninjawear looked up from the console spilling its technicolor guts across the floor. The nametag on her fatigues read B. FINN.
"So? What's the communications sitch?" Blossom demanded.
B. Finn's eyes narrowed in annoyance. "Remind me again who jumped off a tower and made you the boss of us?" She pulled something with lots of wires loose from one panel and plugged it into another. "Try it now."
Buffy was suitably impressed; she couldn't even get the DVD player to stop flashing 12:00. Blossom bent to twiddle with the controls, and the staticky screen overhead blinked, spat, and fuzzed out. Buffy's attention was drawn to another screen: one showing a slightly cock-eyed view of the operating theatre she'd smashed up. She could just catch the foot of a cot holding a bandage-swathed figure - whether it was Sparrow or the unfortunate tech she couldn't tell. Probably Sparrow. She was pretty sure the tech only had a broken rib. She hoped.
"If you're thinking tearful apology, unthink it," Buttercup informed her. "They're not going to let you anywhere near him." She hitched one hip up on the back of a console, produced a wafer-thin gold lighter and lit up a cigarette, to the vocal annoyance of several surrounding Buffys. Buttercup ignored them and blew a smoke ring. "Not that I'd lose any beauty sleep if Doc Sparrow accidentally tripped and impaled himself on a bullet, but we may need him to buy our way out of here."
"And here would be...?"
Buttercup waved her cigarette at Door Number Four. Unlike the rest, it hadn't been ripped open - it was reinforced steel, with a porthole window of heavy, double-paned plexiglass, proof against even Slayer strength. Curious, Buffy walked across the room and placed a hand flat against the steel panel. The metal was warm against her palm. If she stood on tip-toe, she could see through the porthole: a rolling expanse of ruby sand stretched away to an encircling range of hills. The horizon was unnervingly close. No sun, just a flat golden sky and brilliant, shadowless light, everywhere. Here and there jagged spires of obsidian rose out of the bloody sand.
She studied the not nearly distant enough hills. The last deserty pocket dimension she'd visited had been over-supplied with bitey things, but nothing moved out there beneath the brazen sky. Why didn't anyone make pocket dimensions that looked like Waikiki? Or even Kansas?
"Home sweet home," Buttercup said. "No water, no plants, no animals. No place to go from here. We found an orientation video," she added. "Very Dharma Project."
"If there's a way in, there's a way out," Buffy said, dropping down off her toes.
"Sure. If you have a shaman and a specially blessed rutbaga." Buttercup stubbed her cigarette out on the console top. "The access ritual can only be done from the outside. Once they figure out what's going on, the Home Office can just leave us here till we starve - unless we can find a bargaining chip."
Buffy's stomach interrupted with a loud, embarrassing gurgle, and Buttercup looked her up and down with an amused little snort. "Eating for two, huh? Or if it's demonspawn, maybe twenty. Come on."
The kitchen was cramped and utilitarian, all brushed steel and black plastic. There was a pantry, thoroughly ransacked, its metal shelves bare of anything save a few empty cardboard boxes and an industrial-size can of refried beans. Scrunched between the microwave and the freezer unit was a spartan Formica counter you could have chopped a carrot on, provided that it was a really small carrot. The refrigerator contained six cans of dolphin-safe albacore tuna, a dozen eggs, one package of whole-wheat crackers, and three tomatoes. "These are my groceries," Buffy pointed out.
"Correction," Buttercup said. She selected a Wheat Thin and hopped up to sit on the counter. "That, plus Tub O' Beans, is our dinner for the next whatever. We were one day short of the next supply run when you went cuckoo for Coco-Puffs. The good news? If we can't manage to break out, we can still make tuna loaf."
"Good thing I wasn't holding the bag with the pig's blood," Buffy muttered. She picked up a decimated can of tuna and dabbed a cracker into it, scraping the crusty dried flakes off the sides. Memory of the incredibly pointless argument she'd had with Spike last week, about her insistence on depriving him of the meager joys of indirect long-distance dolphin slaughter, almost made her tear up. Stupid baby hormones.
"So... why'd you do it?"
Buffy stiffened. "Which it? You're going to have to get more definite with your articles."
"Hook up with Spike." Buttercup chin-pointed in the direction of the guard station. "Half of them out there boinked him, too." She licked tuna juice from her fingers and gave Buffy a sidelong, speculative look. "But they all stopped. You didn't. That's different. And different is interesting."
She'd always known that 'long shot' was rosy optimism when applied to her and Spike, but was she really that much of a freak? "It seemed like a really good idea at the time." Buffy regarded the wodge of tuna adorning her cracker with limited enthusiasm. Shouldn't she have some tomato? For vitamins? And wasn't fish full of mercury or something? How was she supposed to know the nutritional requirements of the possibly unholy spawn of a partially-demonified Slayer and a slightly non-standard vampire anyway? "What I don't get is why they started. Doing it. With Spike. Because obviously? They didn't think it was a good idea."
Buttercup took a delicate nibble of cracker. "'I was in a bad place, I just wanted to feel something, I was helpless in the face of his sinister attraction!' You know what I think? They did it because they could. And now a couple of them are all boo hoo about it, but if they had it to do all over? They'd do the exact same thing. It's always about power." Her eyes were bleak. "That's who we are."
It's not who I am. Or not all of who I am. Or, or... The tuna smell was making her queasy again. If it was a vampire baby maybe she should be eating raw liver. Mmm, liver...oh, God, if she was going to crave liver instead of ice cream for nine months she might as well end it all now. "You didn't sleep with him. But I can't help notice you don't get much love either."
"Oh, me? I told you I was the bad Slayer. I work for Wolfram & Hart." Buttercup brushed crumbs from her hands. "Make that past tense. I think we're due for contract re-negotiations when I get back." Her eyes narrowed at Buffy's expression. "Watch your step. That moral high ground is awfully slippery."
"Noted. What do you do for them?"
"I make problems go away." Buttercup stretched, tiny pointed breasts tenting the sheer lace of her blouse. "It's a living. Silk teddies don't buy themselves. Besides, someone has to keep Faith out of trouble. If you're done poking at that - "
Buffy dropped her third cracker guiltily. Probably for the best. You weren't supposed to gain a lot of weight when you got pregnant, were you? Between the muscle she'd put on since taking up figure skating again, and Spike's evil "Oh, come on, Slayer, one more bite isn't going to kill you," blandishments, she was already shopping for jeans sized in positive integers; better not go crazy. She stuck the can back into the refrigerator. "You know...nobody did a ritual to send me here. It was just zap and go."
Buttercup shrugged, but her gaze was sharp and attentive. "That's peachy, if you have whatever it was that zapped you in your back pocket."
"At the moment, pocketless. But it was your bosses who had me zapped, so if anyone knows how it's done..."
"There might be a record of it in the computer." Buttercup hopped off the counter. "Come on."
B. Finn and Blossom were still crouched over the main console when they returned to the central control room - it looked like they'd managed to bring in an infomercial for miracle carpet spot remover, but no W&H Central. Buttercup headed straight for an empty terminal and fired it up. "We used Doc Sparrow's login to get into the system," she said cheerfully, "and he has top clearance for this place, so you should be able to read just about anything. We've got you to thank for that, too - hardly had to rough him up at all, just told him that if he didn't spill we'd let you have him again."
"Yay?" Buffy muttered, sliding into a chair at the next terminal.
She moused through a couple of folders at random, lower lip caught between her teeth. This would be a lot easier if she know where she was looking, and what she was looking for. Blueprints? Plans? Would a pocket dimension have a fire escape? Did evil corporations have to comply with OSHA? It wasn't that she was bad at computers, exactly, it was just that Willow was so much better that it was always easier to yell for her when bits and bytes were involved. Wills could have had this whole place singing and dancing the rhumba by now.
Patient Files - Confidential
That looked snoopworthy, if not exactly on topic. A dozen files, most labeled B. Summers and distinguished only by a string of numbers. Plus one B. Summers-Pratt. At least the bad guys could get her name right. She dithered for a moment between clicking on her own file and reading one of the others. It wasn't really an invasion of privacy when it was your own life, was it? But her own file might have a clue or three about what exactly Wolfram & Hart thought they could accomplish by kidnapping her, besides bringing The Wrath of Spike down upon their collective heads. Obviously it hadn't been about the baby. (Her baby. Their baby.) Sparrow had been as surprised to find out about that as she had been.
B. Summers-Pratt
Classification: Slayer.
History: Born January 19, 1981, eldest daughter of Henry and Joyce Summers. Called at the age of fifteen, first Watcher...
Blah blah blah Angelus, blah blah blah Adam, blah blah blah Glory... she already knew her life story.
Notes: February 2003 - Subject received a transfusion of demonic power of unknown origin. Further study is indicated to determine the precise nature of this power and its effects...
So that was it. Figured. Everyone from Giles to Vampire Buffy made such a big deal of her bargain with the Shadow Men's pet smoke monster, why shouldn't Wolfram & Hart horn in on the do-think-of-the-consequences-Buffy! action? She had thought of the consequences - if she'd done nothing, six girls would have died. Becoming a Slayer sucked in a lot of ways, but it was definitely better than being slipped a fatal mickey by Quentin Travers in the name of the greater good. Fine, she'd taken the power, but only to pass it on to those who needed it. She wasn't any stronger or faster. It hadn't changed her. Much. Except...
...subject's recent interactions with the demonic inhabitants of Sunnydale has been highly non-standard. Subject has enlisted allies from the demon community and initiated liaisons with local human authorities, and has been observed to employ negotiation and arbitration in conjunction with more standard slaying techniques...
He hand went to her belly. Fred had done all those tests, and the results had been conclusive: Spike was alive, but he was still a demon. He had about as much chance of getting a human woman pregnant as he had of knocking up Miss Kitty Fantastico. Which meant...
Her stomach knotted as she imagined the residue of the power she'd carried into the world lingering in her cells like some unholy bathtub mold. Living and growing. She still felt normal. As normal as you could feel with super-strength and accelerated healing and the occasional quasi-prophetic dreams and an uncanny affinity for weapons she'd never seen in her life before. How much demon did a 'normal' Slayer have in her? Two percent? Three? How big did the percentage have to get before she couldn't really call herself human any longer, and did numbers even mean anything, and breathe, Buffy!
Conclusion: The subject's unconventional behavior poses a potentially serious threat to the Senior Partners' long-term objectives. Widespread public scrutiny by mundane authorities could compromise numerous projects that the Senior Partners deem essential. While the likelihood of the subject inducing demon communities to accept human codes of conduct in the long term is small, any non-zero possibility of success is alarming in the extreme.
Threat Level: Very High
Recommendations: Subject's sudden death or disappearance has the potential to create a martyr situation, which the firm should avoid at all costs. A program of capture, re-education, and release is far more likely to -
The stomach-knot dissolved in renewed anger. Re-education, huh? Don't think so. She hadn't liked school the first time.
She'd just flicked the mouse pointer to another file when Buttercup piped up, "Hey. Look at this."
Buffy glanced across the console. "Whatcha got? Handy dandy Marauder's Map?"
"Not quite. But it's got the CEO's signature on it, in something I'm pretty sure isn't red ink. It's a copy of a contract between Wesley Wyndam-Pryce and..." she squinted at the crabbed print. "...someone called Dinza?"
"Dinza?" All of a sudden Bubbles was standing over them, fingers tight on the back of Buttercup's chair. "Are you sure it says Dinza? Demi-goddess of the lost, only talks to dead people?"
"You'd know better than I do. Apparently." Buttercup's expression was way too innocent. "Friend of yours?"
"Not. " Bubbles scowled at the screen. "Angel mentioned her once."
There was an undropped shoe there, or possibly a whole undropped Payless, but no time to pursue that now. "So - contract," Buffy prompted. "What's it contracting?"
"'Contract for turnkey design/build construction and related services between
Wolfram & Hart and Dinza, Lady of Shadows, Mistress of Lamentation, etc. dated the 28th day of June, 2002...' Blah, blah, blah lawyer talk, 'In consideration of the compensation detailed in Section 3.65, the Party of the Second Part agrees to the design, development, construction, and testing of one (1) limited-access Riemann-Polyenkov fold ("POCKET DIMENSION") to be multidimensionally anchored as specified in Section 4.23, including engineering, procurement, assembly, installation, start-up, and calibration of air, gravity, ambient temperature, ambient lighting, and all other materials and systems necessary for the operation of said POCKET DIMENSION in the manner specified in the applicable Contract Documents (defined in Section 2.5)...'" Buttercup whistled. "Looks like your BFF Dinza built this place."
"She's not my - " Bubbles began heatedly, but Buffy'd stopped listening. A blazing inspiration seized her.
"Guys!" she broke in. "This thing's our ticket out of here! If this Dinza's the contractor, they're bound to have some way of contacting her on file. Xander always says that when anything goes wrong the first thing you do is call up the contractor to bitch."
Blossom gave her a skeptical look. "If this Dinza only talks to dead people - "
Buffy gave a shaky laugh. "Yeah. Well. About that."
"I knew I could count on you," Vamp Buffy purred, low enough that Blossom, punching the release code into the lock, couldn't hear.
"Don't get used to it," Buffy hissed. "We're even now."
"Oh, don't worry. I'll be good. I want to get out of here as much as you do." The vampire smiled, a hungry baring of teeth. "I think we're all going to be the best of friends."
TBC...