Disclaimer: No nouns you recognize are mine. That's goes for the person, place, thing, and idea varieties.
Note: My first attempt at anything Buffy (and maybe last!). Apologies to those of you who inevitably know the time line far better than I.
Ruby Red
Ruby Red
New Orleans, February 2006
"Oh, you have got to be kidding me!" Buffy declared with a decisive chopping motion of her stake hand.
"I second that!" Willow shouted with a pretty uncharacteristic amount of conviction. "I, also, am being kidded. Definitely. Double definitely. Gay here, remember? And not the happy kind. Right now, anyway." That was more like it.
"Come on guys," Dawn chided, doing her best to sound casual rather than whiny. She wanted a semi-normal eighteenth birthday. Just a mild amount of age related trouble with a couple of friends. That was all. "It's what Anya would have done." A little more difficult with the friends in question being a witch and a Slayer. And gay and sister, respectively.
"Oh, I'm sorry," Buffy said, looking down at her attired-for-an-evening-out torso. "Did I wear my 'What Would Anya Do?' t-shirt again without realizing it?" She twisted on the ball of her foot to get a full view while she plucked at the scalloped hem of a deep purple halter. "Nope. Will, did you wear yours?"
"Jewish," Willow reminded her. "And I don't think even the liberal sects have accepted Anya as the Messiah yet."
Dawn grinned at them both. She could already see it on their faces that they'd cave. Even on this. Today they would. "I'm eighteen," she said, making a mental note to try to play this new legal maturity card as little as possible to preserve its impact.
"And I'm your big sister," Buffy said, apparently not at all concerned with just how played out that card had been like five years ago.
"And more importantly, this is a strip club," Willow pointed out, face awash in neon greens and purples from the lighted windows. "The kind with boys." The neon lighting made her Icky Face substantially more effective.
"Look," Dawn said patiently, coaxing them toward the door, "I promised Anya she could throw me a surprise party when I turned eighteen. And you know how she was about event planning."
"Anya made you promise she could plan your surprise eighteenth birthday? Isn't that...." Buffy paused to consider and to rummage through her purse. "...Exactly something Anya would do."
Dawn decided to keep the high ground on this one and suppressed a 'duh.' "Right. And a strip club would definitely be on Anya's itinerary. Gotta celebrate my new right to view nudity. It could be worse, I could have demanded a carton of cigarettes and chained smoked them all."
"Or gone really overboard with the scratch offs," Willow said helpfully, still eying the front door warily.
"Fine," Buffy said, charging through the front door and jabbing her ID at the bouncer a little violently and then rounding on Dawn who was still outside. "But you know I would not have bought you cigarettes."
"I know. That's why yours is the nudity," Dawn called back and showed her ID to the bouncer with a nervous-proud smile.
The bouncer was looking a little confused by the time Willow was up. "We're just really excited about the... the men. And the naked." She said, nodding at Dawn and Buffy. "Girl's night out. Yay."
##
"Girl's night out should have more girls," Willow declared sullenly.
"Shake it off, Will," Buffy said in a half joking, half soothing tone and pushed her mixed drink across the table. "Or have some tequila."
Dawn made a face- Buffy was definitely rubbing in the remaining drinking age rule- and then turned her attention to the far more important task of teasing Willow who, a few minutes ago, had attracted the unwanted attention of one of the male dancers. "I think Javier kind of took care of the shaking."
"Yeah!" Willow agreed with a kind of choking noise in her throat. "He had the shaking covered. And the wrapping of the man parts in... glittery... ribbon. What ever happened to thongs? Couldn't there at least have been a thong?"
"Well it looks like you've got the merciless teasing covered, Dawn," Buffy said, standing. "So I'm going to the bathroom."
Dawn couldn't have wished for better timing. Just when she thought Buffy was probably out of earshot, a bit of a commotion started up at the door. Dawn heard a familiar voice raised in a familiar way. Annoyance. "Mate, I'm sure you like lookin' at all the pretty, young poofs that come round here but you can't think, for a second, I might be under eighteen. Even pretty as I am."
A few minutes later, and (amazingly) without violence, Spike, dressed just like her memories, presented himself at their table.
Willow gaped for sufficient time and with sufficient silence for Dawn to greet him properly.
"Would you look at that," Spike said, eying her sideways. "Niblet's all grown up. Maybe two-bite sized now. Could be."
"Toodles!" Dawn cried before remembering that he wouldn't understand the nickname she'd started calling him in her head (or sometimes with Buffy, when Buffy was in the mood to joke about Spike, which was almost never). She saved herself the explanation by launching herself square into his undead arms.
Spike wasn't one for lingering hugs, even after two year absence and presumed deaths, so the hug was quick but Buffy was quicker.
"Spike!" Her voice cut through the otherwise deafening base like a hot knife through I Can't Believe It's Not Butter.
Newly minted young adult and old as dirt vampire turned toward the blonde with the bullwhip vocal cords. Dawn looked at her sister with an even mix of excitement and anxiety. Spike looked at Buffy with... well who really knew with them?
"Spike," Buffy shifted between a forward and backward foot like she couldn't decide between stunned elation and shocked horror or which direction either emotion required. "What are you...? What are you doing... here?"
"Alive?" Willow tacked on.
"Good one, Willow," Buffy said without taking her eyes off the vampire in the strip club.
"Well, Dawn asked me to pick something up for her, didn't she?" Spike said like it was all perfectly obvious. But Dawn noticed that he looked almost as shell shocked as Buffy and he had known that she was alive and that he'd be seeing her. "Seemed it'd make me a rotten old bastard to stiff her on her birthday."
With that, Spike reached into the pocket of his duster and produced a pack of cigarettes. "Don't much like the idea of you taking up smokes, Bit," Spike said, presenting them to her anyway.
"Spike!" Buffy cried again, her big sister sense breaking through even a very thorough case of shock and awe.
But Dawn accepted the cigarettes with a 'thank you' and promptly turned the pack around and presented them to Spike. "Just a little something I picked up. A 'welcome back to life' gift," She said.
"Oh, you shouldn't have," Spike said with perfect politeness, accepting the his-then-hers-then-his-again pack.
"But what you should do is tell me what the hell is going on," Buffy said, competing with the base again.
"Does this mean I owe you the scratch offs?" Willow asked.
"See, I figured for my birthday," Dawn began. "I wanted everyone... you know, a new...." But she didn't get to finish because Willow had ratted her birthday girl status out to the hostess on the way in and it was time to face the consequences.
The spotlight found the back of her head as a male dancer bounced his way through the tables with an unfrosted cupcake and a candle. Some weird mix of Happy Birthday replaced the heavy base. Then the most beautiful man Dawn had ever seen stepped out onto the stage. He had black hair and lashes so thick she swore she could count them from her seat. His face was Sistine Chapel worthy. Or at least GQ.
Her friends were equally stunned, so she was saved, momentarily from any awkward questions as the man approached her, loosening his tie and proffering a bottle of whipped cream. "Um..." Dawn gulped. But a more articulate little voice in her head said, happy birthday to me.
She looked up nervously at her friends, since she was the only one among them to have taken a seat again after the big Spike is Alive reveal. Buffy was gaping at the dancer almost as much as she'd gaped at the aforementioned reveal. And Willow, despite her protestations of sexuality, was a bout to start drooling. Spike, Dawn expected, to be wearing that 'trying not to be jealous' face but instead he looked as rapt as any of the women.
Maybe more so.
Maybe....
"Buffy...!" Dawn raised the alarm at the same time that Buffy broke her trance over the stripper to follow Dawn's gaze.
Spike was still staring, eyes gone yellow.
"You still have a soul, right?" Buffy hissed loudly, crossing the distance between her and Spike that a few minutes ago had been an unofficial DMZ. She gripped his arm so that her nails dug in.
Spike shook his eyes back to blue. "Yeah. Still got it." But a few seconds later his eyes were passing amber and on their way to deadly and Buffy was holding him by both arms. "Can't you smell it?" He asked.
They weren't exactly making a scene. Sure, Spike was being restrained and all but the club's attention was on the gorgeous specimen of maleness that was the stripper. Unfortunately, the stripper's attention was on the not-too-shabby-specimen of vampire-ness that was Spike. He'd frozen like a deer in headlights a foot or so from the table, giving him about six more until it was all pointy teeth and brow ridges. "She's holding him back." The dancer observed in a voice that probably would have been sexy as hell if it wasn't all dry and shaky. "Can she... do that?"
"Yeah... he's not... she's, um, she's strong," Dawn finished lamely.
But the dancer didn't seem to hear her. He sprayed a messy blob of whipped cream on the cupcake in her hand and said, "Make a wish, birthday girl."
Dawn was pretty sure he was supposed to have lost more of the clothes before the wish part but the guy looked so terrified (and Spike looked so ready to snap) that she didn't protest. It wasn't the most intimate of settings for the kind of sappy wish she had in mind. But she'd thought about her birthday wish long and hard and she wasn't going to pass up on it for lack of a decent setting. "I wish," she said, "I wish, sometime soon, we can all be in a place where we can be happy-- somewhere where that's even possible. Somewhere we feel... normal. As normal as possible."
There was a beat. She should have been blowing a candle out but the candle had never been lit.
Then the look of fear let the dancer's face for an instant. "That's perfect," he said. "Granted."
"What?"
Then Dawn noticed that the candle was lit. The wick must have been too long because the flame was kind of huge. It definitely threatened the integrity of the cake. Or, wow, maybe her hand.
The little light pulsed once, twice, then exploded outward and Dawn was caught in the blast, the bits of her rearranging with the shrapnel of light. It was like being caught in a universe exploding into life, like she was riding the leading edge of newly made space and time. Some part of her, some buried echo of memory that once belonged to the Key said that it wasn't like that at all. It was that.
The first thing she knew in that new place was the feel of its pavement. The second thing was the word, "ooof." The third was the the collected "ooofs" of her friends.
Spike was the first to recover his feet. He looked around, eyebrow raised. "All that flash to get us out to the lot?"
Buffy was next, standing and rubbing her her bruised backside. "Yeah, but it's not the same parking lot," she said.
Dawn felt a strong feeling of fault coming on. "I meant the place thing metaphorically," she muttered.
Willow, reasonable or just stunned, read the red, jazzy script of the nearest building's front door. "Fangtasia. Wait Fangtasia. Do you think the 'g' is silent?"