TITLE: A Normal Life
AUTHOR: Laure Alexander
RATING: PG-14
PAIRING: None (Olivia sort of)
SUMMARY: The overturned buggy in Restlesshas been driving me nuts since May, 2000. This is my theory of why Olivia is crying and why she hasn't returned to Giles. It deals with miscarriage, though isn't too graphic. Olivia POV
DISCLAIMER: Buffy the Vampire Slayer belongs to Joss Whedon, the WB Network and a whole bunch of other people. They do not belong to me; I am only borrowing them for a non-profit use.

I can never tell him.

But, then, I wasn't going to tell him, anyway. Within twenty four hours after discovering the truth, I had decided that.

Not that he didn't deserve to know, but...

His life scared me. It still does, and I don't want to be a part of it, no matter how much I miss him.

So, I wasn't going to tell him.

Now...

Now, there's no reason to.

It was a girl.

Not fully formed, but enough that the midwife could tell...

Even deformed and disfigured by something so far the opposite of God that it terrifies me, the woman attending me could tell she was a girl.

One broken condom brought me to this. We were careless. I paid the price.

And our daughter died before she could truly live.

I had just grown to accept that I was going to have a baby, when the nightmare came. Overturned baby carriages, a full grown Buffy acting like a child, vampires and graveyards and dusty crypts.

I awoke bleeding, miscarrying.

I couldn't believe it. I thought I was past the dangerous period. But, when I saw the remains of my child...I understood.

I was barely five months pregnant, just beginning to show, and trying to think of how I would explain this to my very religious mother and father.

Now, I don't need to tell anyone anything.

No one knows. None of my friends or co-workers.

And never Rupert.

A part of me really wants to know what he put inside of me. I could tell it wasn't human. There was nothing natural about the birth defects. There's intensive inbreeding in the Watcher community, but even inbreeding can't explain what I saw in my one glimpse of my child.

Or explain the horror and shock on the face of the midwife as she hastily bundled up the body and swore never to tell anyone.

A recent immigrant from Haiti, she knew things, probably more than I myself. She had seen this kind of thing before.

But, I didn't expect it. Once I got over the shock of being pregnant, I expected a healthy child. I'm young, healthy, fit. I eat right and exercise, and I cut out alcohol as soon as I knew.

I thought Rupert was normal, like me, but he's not. Maybe, like Slayers, Watchers just aren't quite human.

That scares me so much I know I'll never be able to ask him why his seed created something that could not survive.

I like him. I miss him. But, this has only reinforced my desire to have a normal life with a normal man and normal children. I need that. I wish he could be what I need. I tried to make him so, but now I know for certain that he can't fill that empty space inside me.

I'll never tell him what happened. It would only hurt him needlessly, and he doesn't deserve that.

I'm sorry for him, and I'm sorry for the child that was not meant to be, and I'm sorry that I can't be there for him, but sometimes a person has to be selfish.

His life scares me too much.

Rupert deserves a normal life, too, but he's not going to get that.

But, someday...I will.

End

AUTHOR'S NOTE: I know that it's rare for a miscarriage to occur after the first trimester, but I wanted the fetus to be formed enough to tell the sex. So, demon blood, demonic influence, weird watcher genes--whatever it was, that's what caused the miscarriage.