It was a quiet morning in the Magic Box. There’d only been two people in all morning, and neither had bought anything. In fact, they had come in together, looked around, laughed at the merchandise, and then left, joking audibly about the freaks who actually believed that stuff was real.
Their naivety provoked, as it always did, conflicting feelings of annoyance and a kind of longing in Giles.
Ignorance seemed so blissful at times. In their world, no ten-year-old boys were told that their whole lives boiled down to a handful of years in the service of a single, too-fragile teenaged girl. In their world, no one had to behead a friend to stop a homicidal demon.
As he watched them go, as though to punctuate his thoughts, he felt a small shifting inside of him.
Somewhere, in some other world, Anya was ranting about the dying consumer spirit, and how it heralded the end of life as all good Americans knew it. Distractedly, he suggested that she take an early lunch, in case things got busier in the afternoon.
The prospect of future customers seemed to cheer her, and she buzzed out the door a few minutes later, leaving Giles alone.
Well. Not alone.
He sat down heavily in one of the chairs beside the Scoobies’ table. He realized a moment after he’d done it that he’d placed his hand over his stomach again.
He suddenly regretted sending Anya away.
It was in these moments, these quiet moments, that it all seemed so hard to ignore.
He looked down at himself, at the slightly-too-pronounced curve of his abdomen. He ran his hand back and forth over it. Really, it still just felt like his stomach always had.
Except... it didn’t, exactly. He did feel different. Most likely it was hormones. God knew, he must have some uncharacteristic ones floating around in his bloodstream at the moment.
But he did feel different. Aware of it. That same awareness that had prompted him to buy the damn pregnancy test in the first place.
He shut his eyes, and felt a cold wash of fear roll up and over him, icy cold and paralyzing. His heart was hammering in his chest, frighteningly hard, and his chest felt tight, felt like he couldn’t quite breathe in deep enough. Couldn’t move.
Odd to know that to anyone looking at him, he’d probably appear perfectly calm.
Under his hand, he felt it shift again, as though it sensed his anxiety.
It was so easy, when he was with Willow, to forget it for a little while. Block it all out.
Too easy. And, much as he loved her, he knew he was using her.
He tugged his glasses off. Heard the clatter as they fell onto the table, and realized only then that his hand was shaking too hard to hold them. He watched it, for a moment, with a distant sort of fascination. Felt his heart, still doing a four-minute-mile in his chest.
The light was too bright, like a drugged hallucination, filled with creatures made of fire.
He understood that what this was was a panic attack, and a part of him wondered at that. He hadn’t even been entirely aware that... that it was really that bad.
He knew that he could get out of the chair he was in. But it seemed like an extremely bad idea. Like after waking from a nightmare, lying in the dark, trying not to even breathe for fear of summoning demons from the darkness.
The bell over the door jingled, and he wished he’d thought to turn over the closed sign. But then, he really hadn’t exactly been planning on... panicking.
“Giles?”
Willow’s voice. He’d like to have been able to say that just hearing her voice made things better. But, really, it was more making things worse.
“Giles?”
She stopped in front of him, and set the book she was carrying on the table.
“Are you ok?”
“Um. No,” he said, eventually. “Not... not really.”
Her brow creased with concern as he tried to concentrate on just breathing. She folded gracefully down onto her knees in front of him. Lovely, that was really helping his heart rate. She laid her hand over his on his knee.
“Whoa, your hands are cold. What... what’s wrong? Is it... is it demonic?”
He managed a small laugh.
“No. Er. No.”
Then, he saw understanding in her eyes, and she touched the hand that he was still holding on his stomach.
“Oh.”
She paused a moment, her fingertips light on the back of his hand, and then she pulled away and stood up.
“I- I think I can... help.”
She picked up the book and held it out to him. He saw her watching his hand shake as he took it.
“God, Giles... I.. I didn’t know it was that bad...”
He laughed again, softly, feeling a self-deprecating blush rise to his cheeks. *Good lord, man,* he thought, *pull yourself together.*
“I actually just had that precise thought myself.”
He looked down at the book.
At first, he didn’t realize what he was looking at. Then, gradually, in fuzzy bits and French-accented pieces, it began to sink in.
“My god,” he whispered.
“So?”
She had sat down in the chair beside his, and was turned towards him, her knees near his own.
So? *So?* This was hardly the sort of thing to be summed up in one-word questions. His stomach rolled in the kind of threatening-with-intent way it had developed over the past few months. He managed to get a breath deep into his lungs, and used the calming rush of oxygen to set the book aside and stand.
“Giles?”
“I’ll... I’ll be...”
He gestured towards the training room, and then went, grateful that Willow actually did somehow catch his meaning and stay put.
Everything still had a haze of dizzy unreality to it as he walked through the training room and into the small employee washroom in the back. Hitting his knees in front of the toilet on the neat blue and yellow tile Xander had laid felt far too familiar. Flu. He’d thought it was the flu. Why couldn’t it have been the flu?
The porcelain was cold and smooth under his hands, and he waited, silently conversing with his body. The nausea flickered low in his gut, flaring and then fading, and then flaring again. A little lower in his gut, something else stirred again.
For a moment, he was positive that, yes, he was going to vomit.
But then the feeling faded again, and was gone. He rocked back onto his heels, and sat, silently, there on the floor. Everything looked strange from this angle: the shining white curve of the bottom of the sink, the walls too tall and seeming to tilt inwards. The sense of strangeness was almost comforting. It felt right, like it matched the strange whirl in his mind.
He’d wanted to end this, from the moment that he knew about it. It still terrified him, on a level that was deep and primal. And it had never been his choice. It had been thrust upon him, an act of hateful vengeance.
And yet...
Yet...
It was alive. It moved inside of him. It had hands and arms and a head and legs. It had a gender, albeit one unknown to him.
And it was his. Much as it was half Ethan, it was also half him.
His child.
***
Willow was about to go in after him, when he finally emerged from the training room. He still looked pale and shaken, like he had when she’d come in, and she worried about him.
He stopped beside the table and stood there for a few moments, looking at the book.
She fought the urge to say anything, wanting him to speak in his own time.
He didn’t, for quite awhile. Just continued to look down at the page, with his neck twisted at an uncomfortable-looking angle, so he could scan the text.
And then, finally, he reached out, and gently folded the book closed.
“I can’t,” he said, just a breath of a whisper.
And then Anya swept in through the door, a one-woman hurricane of excessive enthusiasm, and she dragged a bemused and helpless Giles away on a mission to do some sort of inventory, and Willow was left, by herself, at the table with the book.
And a staggering revelation to contemplate.
“Whoa,” Willow said, finally, to the empty room.
[Reviews - 0] [Kudos - 760]
Download story PDF format or ePUB format or MOBI format
Table of Contents
Download story PDF format or ePUB format or MOBI format
Table of Contents