Author: Elizabeth Wilde (aka Gabby Spike)
Disclaimer: I don't own any Buffy characters or the song "In the Absence of Sun" by Duncan Sheik [he's soooo amazing]. Don't sue, k? I don't have anything worth taking except my muses, and they don't like it outside my head. Too orderly for them in the real world.
Feedback: to wilde at biteyourtongue dot net Good or bad makes no never mind to me—I just like getting it.
Distribution: My site .net/wilde and anybody else who asks me. Oh, and Moist & Delicious. I'd actually be quite honored to have it up there.
Rating: NC-17
Spoilers: No, not really
'Ship: Spike/Xander
Summary: A much-changed Xander shows up on Spike's doorstep when he orders an escort. Can the vampire put him back on the right track?
Author's Notes: This is a response to a challenge from somebody or another. I absolutely couldn't resist. The idea was far too angsty and cool. Unfortunately, I forgot the person's name… and it was years ago now.
I was lonely. And bored. Mostly lonely. I could have fed on anyone, I suppose. The Slayer found someone to get the chip out a long time ago, and I've been a free man ever since, feeding on whatever I fancied. I mean, it's not as if humans are in particularly short supply. There's a whole bloody world of them. But just killing doesn't hold a lot for me anymore. I needed someone to pretend they were enjoying it as much as I do. Sue me. It had been a long time. I had found the number scrawled on the wall at a dive of a vampire bar in downtown LA. The place disgusted me, but it also provided a glimpse at a life that made mine look almost alright.
I have a nice little apartment with black sheets on the windows and a little television and I somehow suckered Angel into paying for it. Since I haven't been off terrorizing people and Buffy put in a good word for me, he seems to think I'm a good charity, which is fine by me. Whatever pays the rent.
So I called the number. The guy that answered sounded like he was about to drop dead from emphysema or some rot like that, kept coughing into the phone like he was losing a lung. I told him I wanted a guy sent over and gave the address and my dear nearly-departed friend said someone would be there in thirty minutes.
Something like forty-five minutes later, someone knocked. I answered, not really knowing what to expect. Prostitutes aren't a resource I make use of on a regular basis. I think I expected some jaded, scuzzy-looking git with hollow eyes who looked like he would rather have been killing himself but couldn't muster the guts. Come to think of it, that's what he was. I just didn't expect to know the poor bastard.
"Xander? Oh, bloody hell…" He just stared at me. He didn't look shocked or pleased or disgusted or anything. Tired. Dirty. Used up. He was staring right through me like I was a total bloody stranger. "You in there, mate?"
He blinked then, large dark eyes finally focusing on me. "Spike?"
"No, the Easter Bunny. Get your arse in here," I said, grabbing his arm and dragging him into the apartment, slamming the door. I stopped myself just short of demanding to know what he thought he was doing hiring himself out like that. I realized it wasn't my business. Of course, when have I ever cared about that? "What're you doin' here?"
"You called-"
"I damn bloody well know who I called!" I snapped, more embarrassed than angry.
He shrugged, indifferent to my annoyance. It had been seven, maybe eight years since I last saw him, since I got tired of watching Buffy from afar and pretending to be part of the Scoobies. He'd had his arms around that little ex-demon, whispering something in her ear and smiling the smile of someone whose life was finally working. Now he looked like any bloke pulled off the street to work this kind of job might look. He looked like the whores in the den where I'd found the Slayer's squeeze so long before. He looked old and young and painfully empty. And I felt sick. "You want a list of standard prices or-"
"What happened?" I asked, pulling him over to the couch and sitting him down. "Why aren't you in Sunnydale making babies with Anyanka or driving Giles to an early grave?"
"Anya left," he said, trying to keep his tone neutral, though I could hear an edge behind it. "I left. I came here. Things… things just… just didn't work out."
I noticed the scar on his face then, a line running from just below his right eye to his chin. Reaching out, I touched the pale patch lightly and he jumped back as if burned. "Sorry, mate. Just wondering where you got it is all." I couldn't remember the last time I sounded that worried for anyone. Maybe before Dru left. I know I used to worry after her. Never worried too much about Buffy. Well, I did, but I always knew she'd come through it, knew she was strong enough to take it all and then give it back without it breaking her. Strong girl, that one.
"I've got a lot of them." He hadn't looked me in the eyes since he came in. Not even at my face if he could help it. And he kept rubbing his wrist. He rubbed it the way some people toy with their jewelry or tap their feet when they're nervous.
I grabbed his hand and jerked it toward me, almost pulling him into my lap with the gesture. I shoved his sleeve up and there they were, a network of scars. The other arm was the same. I looked into his eyes then, and he met my gaze, seemed caught in it. "You did this. Why?"
He tried to pull his arm away, but I held his wrist. "When it hurts on the outside, it's harder to pay attention to what's going on inside."
I jerked the wrist slightly, more to get his attention than anything else. "You tried to finish it. Couldn't quite get the stones to do it. You were bloody trying to kill yourself!"
There were tears in his eyes now, but he blinked them back and wrenched his arm from my grasp, standing. "What the hell do you care, Spike? I'm here to do a job, I'm not here for therapy from you!"
As if I cared what he was there for. "Why didn't you go to Buffy? Or Dawn? Or Willow an' Tara? Or anybody? You could've gone to Angel, for God's sake!"
"You think I'm going to go back to them like this?" Xander challenged, pulling up his shirt to reveal lines there as well, some faint, old scars, others bright and new, still scabbed over. "You think they'll understand what I've been doing?" He actually laughed then, a bitter, painful sound that felt closer to a sob. "You think I want them to?"
He looked almost like himself then. He looked lost, like a child. Scared. Lost and scared, and I'll be damned if I didn't want to make it better, to fix it. I've never exactly been Mr. Compassion, though, and I didn't have the faintest idea what to do. Xander took a moment to collect himself, then asked, "Do I have a job to do here or should I go back?"
"You're not goin' back," I informed him, my tone certain though I didn't have the faintest idea how I was going to keep him from leaving save brute force—which didn't seem a very appealing option considering.
"If I don't go, they'll replace me. There's… there's always somebody else. And I don't have anywhere else to go," he explained, the words an apology of sorts.
"You're stayin' here. You've got a place. This is it." There it was. He had somewhere to be and I had someone to be with. A perfect solution.
"I can't-"
"Yeah, you can. You said you didn't want to go to your friends. I'm not your friend. Never was. So you can stay here and then we'll figure out what to do with you," I said, standing to face him as if it would somehow make me more credible.
He stood there for a moment, torn between running and staying put. Finally, a ghost of a smile flitted across his lips. "Thanks."
I wasn't expecting that, and I was expecting what happened next. He closed the distance between us in a step, caught my face in his hands—surprisingly soft—and kissed me. He was damn good at it, and before I knew it, my hands were on his waist and I was returning the kiss. Then it was over. I stood there. If I'd had breath, my chest would have been heaving. As it was, I hesitated before loosing my grip on his waist. "You-you can stay on the couch," I stuttered, stumbling back and pointing to the place where we'd been sitting. "Th-the bathroom is-is in there," I said, gesturing vaguely down the hall.
Apparently I looked and sounded as rattled as I felt, because Xander smiled for the first time since he'd arrived. "I'll grab a shower."
"I've got some spare clothes in the bedroom. If anything fits…" His own clothes looked old and didn't smell all that great either.
"Gotcha. We'll burn these first thing in the morning," he said, tugging at the stained gray t-shirt. "Good riddance." Any humor seemed to drain from his form as he walked down the hallway. I found myself taking in the view as he moved. He wasn't in the kind of shape he had been back in Sunnydale—all that construction work had filled him out in all the right places—but he had a nice body. That was about the time I realized I was ogling Xander and poured myself a stiff drink.
The drink did little to ease my mind and any help it gave vanished the moment Xander walked back into the room wearing nothing but a pair of boxers. The scars stood out, pale and ghastly against the pink of his skin thanks to the heat of the shower. The man behind the skin seemed calmer, though, and I was glad for that. He deserved whatever kind of calm he could get. I held up the bottle and pointed to the cabinet. "If you want any-"
"Don't drink." He sat down across from me, and I decided not to press the issue. I wondered where the line was in all the logic that kept him working as a blood bank for money but not drinking. Of course, it was probably mostly financial. If he was whoring himself in the first place, he probably didn't have the spare funds to get properly drunk.
"Suit yourself, mate." I needed it. Deserved it. After all, I'd been a good Samaritan. I helped out a bloke who needed it. Even put off getting some to do it. I hadn't even thought about my lingering appetite until that moment and the thought annoyed me. Much as I've always enjoyed indulging my passions, I also don't fancy being a slave to them. I'd rather use them to make myself happier and more fulfilled, take what I want and sod all else. Of course, sometimes one's baser side demands a little indulgence. One of my favorite quotes is Oscar Wilde. "The way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it." Pretty accurate, that. The longer you hold off, the more it eats at you.
Apparently the man across from me was a bit more observant than I gave him credit for and he was staring. That didn't bother me much. If somebody wants to stare like a slack-jawed yokel then they're the ones who look like backwoods idiots not me. Those dark eyes fixed so intently on my face made me uneasy though, and I finally met the gaze. "What're you staring at, mate?"
"You."
Well, of course. I really should have assumed that, eh? Rolling my eyes, I pressed, "That's a given. Just wondering what was so bloody fascinating about me all of a sudden."
He didn't look away—not for a second—but his eyes narrowed a little and I could see him thinking, considering. I was trying damn hard not to think myself. Knew at some point I'd end up thinking about how fucking good it felt to have him pressed up against me earlier, and I'm not one to think about something for too terribly long before I start getting a yen to act on it. "I was just wondering why you'd help me. I mean, you're… you." In that moment he sounded a lot more like the Xander Harris I knew before. "You took care of Dawn, you respected Joyce, you loved Buffy, you never seemed to care one way or another about Willow or Tara and you and Giles both had the English thing going, but… it's not like we were ever friends."
He paused a moment and looked away, fingers of his right hand brushing over a scab on the left. "You came closer to having her than I ever did. I hated you. I hated you because I wanted… I wanted to be you. I wanted to take what I wanted and," he slipped into a bad approximation of my accent that made me smile, "'sod all else'. Maybe if I could've been more like that Anya wouldn't have left. Maybe… Guess maybe doesn't really help anything."
Again any trace of the young man vanished, replaced by the shell that appeared in the doorway when I first answered it. "Not your fault. I didn't know the girl well myself, but your little demon didn't seem like the marrying kind. Neither were you. Both of you scared out of your bleeding minds and doing your damndest not to show it. It wasn't going to work," I informed him. The words sounded cold, but lying wasn't going to help him get over anything. He didn't need sweet assurances. He needed facts. Maybe that's why he ended up on my doorstep instead of Buffy's. I know, I know, he didn't know he was coming to me, but he did. They coddled him enough in the scoobies. That's why he crumbled so easy when he lost them. He didn't know what to do but fall apart when things went really wrong. I could help him without being his mother.
Xander looked up at me with a strange mixture of bitterness and something very like happiness on his face. "Yeah… maybe. Still wanted it to work. I know I wasn't ever destined for greatness or anything, but… hell, even I thought I could do better than this. Guess I was wrong again."
Something inside me snapped just a little at those words, and my hand shot out to grip his wrist tightly. "Not another damn word like that, Harris, or I'll finish you myself. Everybody hits bottom. Just a matter of clawing back up again 's'all." Seeing the wince of pain on the young man's face, I released his wrist and sat back. "You're staying here. You'll get things together. Not like there's any rush to go out and save the damn world. Slayer's still taking care of things on that end. We just have to save ourselves." That almost immediately made me wish I hadn't watched so damn much Oprah when I was sitting around alone and bored in the middle of the afternoon, unable to sleep. "Just don't give up before you even bloody start. You wanna be me? You've at least go to learn to know your own strength. Everybody's got something good about them, and much as I would've hated saying it a few years back, you've got a few yourself."
Oh, fuck. Now he's going to want to know what they are, isn't he? "Like what?" Dammit!
I shifted a little in my chair and then looked up to meet those hungry eyes again. "First off, it's been a damn long while since I had a kiss that fucking good." There, the hardest one was out of the way. "You've always had a weird sense o' humor. Like that. Well, alright, sometimes I wanted to snap your neck to get you to shut up, but homicidal tendencies are sort of part of the package with me. Not much I can do, y'know?" All in all, not too bad so far. He seemed to be kind of liking it too. "May've been Buffy's pants I wanted into, but… I respected you even back then. You were the only one who really bothered to take a stand. You didn't like me, and you came right out and said it instead of dancing around and acting like a stupid git. Rest of 'em seemed to think they could just sort of ignore me out of the way." Yep, I'd done a good job. Certainly seemed like enough to get the boy feeling a bit better.
I hadn't anticipated quite how much better, though, and the finger tracing suddenly over the sensitive skin of my wrist and down to my palm sent shivers through my body. "Guess we had a nice silent mutual admiration society going." Though I hadn't yet looked up, I could feel Xander leaning forward across the table to get just a bit closer. "Maybe Anya wasn't ever the one I should've been screwing."