A few fruitless days later, Willow was sitting in front of her laptop in Giles’s apartment, surfing the web. It was still winter break, so she didn’t really have anything else to do. And besides, to be honest, Giles had been a bit... needy the past few days. She’d cooked dinner for them tonight, and even managed to make something that tasted good and not at all burnt. And now, here they were, researching again. Researching Glory. Well. Actually, Giles was researching Glory. Willow was researching... babies.
“So... when you say weeks, like, how many weeks are we talking here?”
Giles twisted around on the couch and looked back at her.
“I’m sorry?” he said.
“How many weeks since you and Ethan... you know?”
“Oh. Um.” He frowned a little. “Is it relevant?”
“Uh. Well, maybe.”
The website had cute little pastel storks all over it. And smiling babies. Willow had to admit to herself that she was fairly enamored.
“Um. Not so much weeks, I suppose.” He seemed to think for a moment, then said, “Actually, if I recall correctly it was sometime in early September.”
“September?” she yelped.
“Er. Yes. Why? Is there a problem?”
“Well, no. I mean. I just mean... you’ve been, you know, pregnant for... for four months and you didn’t even, like, realize it?”
“Well, honestly, it wasn’t exactly the first thing that sprang to mind.”
He glowered and turned pointedly back to his book. Willow sighed. *Bad, Willow,* she thought to herself, *he doesn’t need you ragging on him. Bad enough what Xander and Buffy are putting him through. Thank god at least Spike doesn’t know...* Willow shuddered at the very idea.
She gently closed her laptop, walked into the living room, and sat down on the couch beside him.
“Sorry,” she said.
He set his book aside and turned towards her, pulling off his glasses and beginning to polish them as he spoke.
“Well, it wasn’t that I... didn’t notice, precisely. I just... believed it was middle age finally catching up to me, I suppose. You know, aching back, and... well. Other things. And, of course...”
He put his glasses back on and looked down at his stomach, rubbed a hand over it absently.
“Yeah,” Willow said, “I mean, I didn’t want to say anything, but... you have... put on a little weight.”
He looked up at her ruefully.
“My girlish figure will never be the same.”
Stuck by the unexpected humor, Willow broke down in giggles. To her surprise, Giles joined in.
They quieted after a moment or two, then looked at each other.
And cracked up.
For a good five minutes, they were both completely swept up in it, and by the time they finally got ahold of themselves, they were leaning on each other and gasping, with tears running down their cheeks.
“Ok, ok,” Willow gasped. “Not that funny.”
She giggled, then clamped her hand over her mouth.
Which made Giles giggle. Then, he cleared his throat and tried to look serious.
“God, I needed that.”
She felt a sudden surge of tenderness for him, and said, softly, “Good.” And then, a beat later, she said, “So, did you say backaches?”
“Oh. Um. Yes.”
“How about the barfiness? Is that a problem?”
“Uh. No, no, not now. Nausea was an issue for awhile there, but... I assumed it was the flu.”
“Well, the website I was looking at did say that would settle down in the second trimester.”
He shot her a hard look, and she “eeped” softly inside.
“Website?”
“Uh. Well. Yeah. You know. About... pregnancy.”
“Magically-induced pregnancy, I assume?” he said, and there was a dangerous edge to his voice and glint in his eye. Willow inched back a bit.
“Um. No. No, just the normal kind.”
Oh dear, the glasses were off again.
“There is nothing normal about this, Willow.”
“I- I know that. But... Giles... haven’t you even considered that maybe this is-”
“No.”
He wasn’t looking at her now. He was sitting with his back stiff and straight, and glaring across the room as though the fireplace had slighted him.
“Well... maybe... maybe you should. I mean, there’s a chance, small as it is, that this is... a baby, Giles. What are you going to do if it is?”
He stood up and walked over to one of the bookcases, fingering the worn leather spines.
“I can’t have a child, Willow. The thought alone is ludicrous. I- I’m a forty-six-year-old single man who fights demons for a living.”
“Well, yeah. But... you own a shop. You’re either there or at home a lot. You have time, Giles. And you have us. You know we’d help.”
“Thank you, Willow. But it’s not a point that is up for debate.”
She watched as his idle fingering of the books changed to active searching, and he picked one off the shelf and proceeded to sit down with it in the armchair. Ok, so, maybe she’d known it was dumb to think about it. Giles’s baby. Because, first of all, it probably wasn’t even real. And, also, it was silly, and girlie, anyway, to wonder whether it would have his eyes. Or be all smart like him when it grew up.
Still, she was a little disappointed, if she were really being honest with herself.
***
Buffy pounced as soon as she saw him walk into the busy hospital hallway, all decked out as usual in his blue scrubs and stethoscope, holding a clipboard and clicking a retractable pen.
“Hi! Ben! I need to talk to you!”
He stopped, and smiled, sticking the pen behind the clip on the board.
“Hi, Buffy. How’s your mom doing?”
“Oh, she’s doing great. Look, is there, like, somewhere private we can talk?”
“Uh...” he looked around, “Well, the locker room’s usually pretty empty. Come on.”
She followed, growing more nervous with ever step. Ok, so, it had taken a *lot* of convincing to get Giles to go for this plan in the first place, but Willow had been insistent, and they all, even Giles, knew better than to argue with Willow. Right now, though, Buffy was beginning to wonder if maybe he’d been right all along about the badness of this idea.
Then, well before she was ready, she and Ben were both sitting at a small table in the doctor’s locker room.
“So, here we are, in private. What can I do for you?”
Buffy took a deep breath, and folded her hands on the table in front of her.
“Um. This... is gonna sound a little crazy. A lot crazy, actually.”
Ben smiled.
“No problem. I deal with a lot of crazy people in my line of work. Give me your best shot.”
Oh, god, this was such a bad idea. She was gonna kill Willow.
“This guy, that I know... well. Is kinda.”
Long pause. Ticking clock. Odd look from Ben.
“Kinda... pregnant.”
Ok, really odd look from Ben.
“Um. When you say ‘guy,’ you’re just meaning, like, person, here, right? As in a... female person.”
“Um. See, that’s the thing. No.”
“No.”
Think Buffy, think!
“It’s a- government experiment! Gone... wrong. And... cruelly abandoned.”
“Ah. Right... and I suppose your friend, the one with the really bad tachycardia, was part of a government experiment too, huh?”
“Uh. Well. Actually... yes. But don’t tell anyone!”
“You guys seem to have a lot of run-ins with government experimenters, don’t you?”
“Look, that’s really not the point. The point is... He needs help. You know, like, medical help. But... we need to keep it quiet.”
There was another one of those long pauses Buffy despised so much. Then, finally, Ben said, “Ok.”
“What?”
“Ok.”
“Wait, is that an ok as in ‘I’ll help you,’ or an ok as in, ‘you really are one of those ever-popular crazy people.’”
He smiled a little.
“It’s an ‘ok, I’ll help you.’”
“Oh. Oh! That’s great!”
But she was still going to kill Willow. Just on principle.
“Yeah. I mean, I don’t want to get into too much detail, but I know a thing or two about secrets that need keeping. And being a little out of the ordinary. So, uh, how far along is... he?”
***
“I still don’t like this,” Giles was muttering, and yet, he continued to drive along the darkened Sunnydale streets towards the hospital, a week and a half after that day in the Magic Box. Xander watched the show from where he sat, crammed in the backseat with Willow and Anya. Not that that was a bad place to be crammed, of course.
“Well, I don’t care, Giles,” Buffy said, “Do you know how weird it was telling this guy I barely know that this other guy I know is *pregnant*? Come on, Giles. Make my trauma worthwhile, ok?”
“*Your* trauma?” Giles said, “Excuse me, but I think-”
“Oh, get over yourself. All you’re going to have to do is show up and lie there.”
Xander couldn’t resist the urge to chip in: “Oh, no, you’re forgetting, Buffy. He gets to lie there half-naked after drinking about a hundred glasses of water while some random guy probes his innards.”
The car stopped rather unnecessarily abruptly for a red light. Willow was sighing deeply, in that disapproving way she had.
“Aw, come on Will,” he said, for the thousandth time that week, “We’re just joking around.”
“It’s not funny, Xander,” she muttered.
By the time they’d reached the hospital, and were walking into one of the side doors, Giles and Buffy had been reduced to simply glaring eloquently at one another, and Willow was shooting Xander looks of death if he so much as opened his mouth. She was very touchy lately.
“Hey, Willow, what’s with the attitude? Giles is the one who’s-”
“Shh!” Willow hissed, but as it turned out, the man who was walking down the hall towards them was actually Ben, anyway, so it was all right.
“Hey,” Ben said. “I see you brought the whole gang along. I hope you guys can be stealthy.”
“Oh, it’s all right,” Anya spoke up, “None of them are speaking to each other right now, anyway. We’ll be very quiet.”
“So, wait,” Ben said, peering at them through the dimness of the hall, which was lit only by a few fluorescent emergency lights. “Which one of you is-”
He was pointing between Xander and Giles. Xander wondered what he was talking about. Then, he realized.
“What? No! No! Him! Not me!”
Ok, now Giles *and* Willow were giving him death glares. Wonderful.
“Yes, it’s me,” Giles said, sounding tired.
“Right. Ok. Right this way.”
All the way down the hall, Xander kept thinking to himself, *no! not me! I could never be-!* And then it occurred to him, suddenly, briefly, in a way it never had before, that Giles must kind of be feeling exactly the same way. Only, in Giles’s case... he was. Xander felt his brow furrow as this thought churned around his brain.
Luckily, though, before it could really settle in, Ben brought the whole group to a halt by turning around to face them and raising his arms, like an elementary school crossing guard. They were right outside of the only open door on the whole darkened hallway, and yellow light was spilling out from the opening.
“Ok. Before we go in, I have to tell you. I brought someone else in on this.”
“What?” Giles, Buffy, and Willow all said at the same time.
Ben made the “don’t walk” sign again, and said, quickly, “I trust her, all right? I got her to go over the ultrasound technique with me, and it was just too complicated for me to learn this quickly. So. She doesn’t know who you are. You can walk out now, if you really want to. But... I think you really shouldn’t.”
Giles only considered a few minutes before giving in with a sighed, “What the hell. I’m already here. Let’s do this.”
And so they all trooped into the room, and Ben shut the door behind them. The nurse that Ben had enlisted was an oldish woman, with a seen-it-all expression on her face. And, being a nurse on a Hellmouth, she no doubt had. She just gave Giles a kind of tired, but mostly friendly smile, and launched into a rapid-fire recitation of instructions that Xander completely tuned out in favor of gazing at Anya for a little while. Because gazing at Anya never got old.
By the time he reeled himself back out of his happy place, Giles was lying on the table with his shirt pulled up. There was some kind of clear goo all over his stomach and the nurse was running a medical gadget over it. This was the moment of truth.
Xander followed everyone else’s gazes to the little screen next to the nurse and saw...
A pulsating mass of black and white.
“Eww,” he said, “What’s that?”
Ben chuckled.
“Nothing yet, really. She’s just getting oriented.”
“Oh.”
He found Willow, fully expecting to be on the receiving end of yet another glare, and prepared to take it like a man, but at the moment, Willow seemed completely enthralled by the nothing on the screen. And she was standing right next to Giles. And... holding his hand.
Weird.
“Oh!” she said, suddenly, and her eyes lit up.
The nurse smiled at her, a much more genuine smile, this time.
“Good eye, young lady,” she said, and Xander looked back at the screen. He still didn’t see anything. And then, the image shifted a bit, and he *did* see. A hand. A little hand... with fingers.
“Whoa,” he said. “That’s...”
“A hand, yes,” the nurse said, and froze the image. “And here’s an arm, and a little bit of leg,” she added, running her finger along the curve of human-shaped stuff on the screen.
A baby. It was a real baby. He stared, distantly aware that his mouth was probably hanging open, as the images flashed by on the screen... a spine, a ribcage, a head, two feet... a little heart that was pumping away wildly.
“Everything seems perfectly in order, Mr. Giles,” the nurse was saying, “In fact, if you weren’t here in front of me, and all I had was this ultrasound, I’m not sure if I would pick up on anything out of the ordinary at all. Were you born a hermaphrodite?”
”Most certainly not!” Giles said, half-sitting up in protest. The image vanished from the screen until the nurse got him settled back down.
“Sorry, but I had to ask. This is just simply remarkable. And you don’t even have any surgical scarring. How-”
“I don’t know,” Giles said, in his this-conversation-is-over voice.
The nurse was looking at the baby on the screen again.
“I’d say you’re about sixteen weeks along. I could tell you the gender, if you’d like?”
“Ooo! Really?” Willow said.
“No,” Giles said, at the same time.
The nurse smiled again, apparently quite warmed up to them by now.
“Want to be surprised, then, do you?”
Giles was looking at a painting that was hanging on the far wall, and Xander realized he had hardly even glanced at the screen the whole time.
“No. I want to terminate as soon as possible.”
“What!” Buffy yelped.
“Huh?” Xander said.
Willow just looked kind of sadly resigned.
“Why?” Anya said, “I mean, it’s small and ill-proportioned, but it is oddly attractive. I’d want one.”
Ok, that wasn’t good. Xander looked over at her and his heart clenched in pure terror at the way she was making doe-eyes at the monitor. Ben was saying something, probably something important, but fear had a very detrimental effect on his hearing. Anya gave him a strange look, and said, “What?”
“Nothing,” he said, and looked back over at Giles and the others quickly.
“It’s going to take major abdominal surgery to get it out, in any case,” Giles was saying, “What difference does it make when you do it?”
“All I’m saying,” Ben said, “Is that it would be hard to keep it quiet. I’d say odds are pretty good that somewhere along the line, something would get out about this. Give me some time, and maybe I can find a way around that.”
“How much time do I have?”
“At least a couple of weeks.”
“All right.”
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