One Year Later...

Buffy Summers tornadoed into her kitchen, shirtless and frazzled. "Willow? Help!"

Her friend briefly looked up from the tray of brownies she had been working on. "Buffy? Omigod, you aren't even dressed yet! Kalyn'll be here any minute!"

"Tell that to his Royal Highness, Mr. It-is-so-fun-to-blow-raspberries-with-my-membrane-slime-while-Mommy-is-getting-me-dressed. Will, I have nothing else to go with these pants. Can you find me something?"

She was about to answer when the Royal Highness himself toddled into the kitchen, a ring of smudgy brownish paste around his mouth and running down the collar of his tiny little dress shirt.

"Cal!" exclaimed Buffy. "What happened?"

He grinned a toothy smile. "Chocolate cookie," he said.

"Oh! Who gave you a cookie?"

He held out his sticky palm for her inspection. His hands had been sweaty. The cookie crumbs had solidified into a gluey sludge that oozed thickly through his fingers.

"I think," said Buffy. "That this looks like the work of somebody's Uncle Xander. Okay, we can handle this. Willow?"

"Got it. Take him upstairs and change his clothes, find his daddy on the way and recruit him to find you a shirt while you go yell at Xander for making Cal all hyper and gross."

The doorbell rang. "Damn!" muttered Buffy. She smiled sweetly at Cal. "Mommy didn't say that."

Willow wordlessly took off her own shirt and passed it to Buffy, who hastily wriggled into it. Willow had already vanished upstairs with Cal when Buffy opened the door.

"Kalyn! Flight okay?"

Kalyn edged her small, wiry frame past Buffy and into the house. "Oh, the usual, you know how it is. Long delays, smelly people..." She stretched with a delicious sigh. "It's good to be here again. Three months is too long to go between visits."

"We're happy to have you," said Buffy. "Especially for this. Our first father's day...it means a lot to Giles that you could be here."

"Wouldn't miss it for the world." She took in the room around her with a frown. "Did you do some redecorating I don't know about? That throw rug used to be cream."

"Tell that to somebody's Uncle Xander, who keeps giving somebody sticky chocolate things!"

Kalyn laughed. "Boys will be boys. Speaking of, where is the little guy?"

"Getting primped by his Aunt Willow after yet another chocolate disaster. And...oh, hey, there he is." She held out her hand to him, and Cal worked his way carefully down the stairs, toddling toward her.

He stopped mid-step when he saw Kalyn. "Otherma!" he squealed. He stretched out his little arms to her, and she scooped him up with a kiss.

"I missed you," she told him. To Buffy, she said "It always surprises me how much I miss him."

"Our offer still stands, Kalyn. You want to move to Sunnydale, we can help you get set up."

"I know," she said. "And I appreciate that, Buffy, really, I do. But I have my life in England, and really, I suspect I wouldn't miss him half as much if I were with him all the time." She put her boy down and appraised him fondly. "He's growing so fast."

His muscle tone was a bit scrawny for a boy his age---an inheritance from his mother's DNA. But her pink hair had thankfully been washed out by Giles' darker brown, and although the blend could make his hair look a snot-like green in certain lights, he was handsome--- a wiry, wily boy, and a bundle of energy.

"So, where's your daddy?" she asked him.

His eyes lit up at the thought. "Daddy!"

Buffy laughed. "And I thought I was your favourite. Honestly, Kalyn, when I'm with him, he couldn't love me more. And when Giles is with him, that's who he loves best. Get both of us together, and the poor kid doesn't know where to go first."

Cal tugged impatiently on her sleeve. "Get Daddy," he said.

On cue, Xander strolled in with Anya and Dawn, and the only thing that saved him from a talking-to from Cal's sugar-opposed moms was Giles' arrival a moment later. Cal immediately marched over to the table and picked up a brightly wrapped package, which he shoved into his daddy's arms with a curt "Do now."

Giles obediently found himself a chair and pulled his son onto his lap with him. "Did you make this for Daddy at your day care?"

Cal nodded.

"Careful," Buffy said. "It's fragile."

Giles tore off the wrapper carefully. "It's a plaster cast," he commentated to the others, as he examined it. "Of his...his stomach?"

"Most kids do hands," Willow told Kalyn. "Good thing we found a demon-friendly day care for him. Look, you can see the little bits of petrified mucous that got stuck in the cast when he was making it..."

Cal pointed to the imposing outline of his veins and scales. "I big," he said.

Giles chuckled. "Of course you are. Kisses?"

While Giles was distracted with an unusually slobbery display of love, Kalyn pulled a package out of her suitcase. "I brought something too," she said. "Happy Father's Day, Rupert."

He accepted the package with a shy smile. "Kalyn, you shouldn't have."

"What, and show up at a party like this empty-handed? I would never do that."

"You crashed the last big party he had with a baby," Buffy teased. "That'll be hard to top."

"I do my best. Open it, Rupert."

He tore off the paper to reveal two boxes---in the first was a full-size wetsuit, and in the second was a teeny tiny baby one.

"You always complain you can't take him to the beach," she explained. "Having to keep his stomach covered up...well, now you can take him."

Giles fingered the tiny sleeve. "I'm touched, Kalyn. It's a lovely gift." To Cal, he said "Daddy's going to rent a sailboat, Cal. We can go see the ocean. Would you like that?"

Cal nodded slowly, seeming to sense the gravity of the scenario.

"And Mommy's going to buy you a book about sailboats," Giles continued, drawing the boy closer. "We'll read it to you together. And then we'll pack ourselves a picnic and we'll find the biggest boat there is..."

"Or," said Buffy. "We can just go to the beach and sit there. Just sit there and veg. That sounds fun too. But you can still do the picnic thing."

Cal pondered the options for a moment. "All," he finally decided.

Kalyn laughed. "He'll fit right in," she said. "With the whole ozone layer thing, a lot of people have their kids wearing these anyway, demon or not."

Cal stuck his hand into the box and pulled out a corner of the fabric. "Mine," he said.

"Yours and Daddy's," Buffy corrected.

He reached in and grabbed for more with his other hand, but he couldn't get a proper grip of the shiny, slippery material. His hand came away, and they saw that the wetsuit was smudged with a splotchy cookie-brown handprint.

"Okay," Giles laughed. "Yours, all yours."

He gave his boy another hug.

-The End-

Thanks to everyone who sent me comments. If you have gotten this far, I'd love some feedback. Thanks also to Wenchie for setting the challenge, and to Liz for her fast beta. Hope you liked it :-)