Written for kcarolj65's birthday. Happy birthday, dear!
Story set in late Season Seven, and then post-Chosen.
Enjoy, and please (pretty please?) review.
Dawn has a thing with calendars. She's incapable of throwing them away, come January 1. Either she's superstitious about throwing away past plans, or she's too nostalgic to throw away the Pokemon calendars and too embarrassed to keep them in her room. There's a Hello Kitty, one or two Pokemons that survived the fad's eventual fade, and a slew of tarty boy band calendars that have little to do with music, and much to do with curly hair and faux-pimp attire.
Spike knew because he found them, poking around in the basement one day. It amused him, especially the boy bands, and he had half a mind to tease her about it before he remembers that she pretended he wasn't in the room when he came upstairs.
He moved to slide them back, but the "too cool" pose of one N'Sync member points to the year it was from - 2000. Dawn told him once that she'd only truly been in existence since about the midsummer of that year. Curious, he looks at January, but no, the monks were thorough. The weekends are peppered with sleepovers and birthday parties in pearly pink, still smelling faintly of strawberry, the weeks with tests and study sessions. Buffy's love of playtime with Willow's devotion to study - that was Dawn.
In red pen, she marked birthdays, Buffy's, her mother's, Tara's, Xander's, and Willow's.
Flipping through the pages, he began to see tiny "S"s in the bottom right corners of some days, and began to realize that those were the days she visited him. Touched, he picked up 2001, emblazoned with studio shots of the Backstreet Boys. The cheery, happy dates continued through the months. As he reached April, finger gently touching the day Joyce died, he saw that she had had a sleepover planned that weekend. After that, the weeks were blank for a little while, until he saw the tentative scratching in pen of a meeting. But they trailed off after that again, and Spike could not find it in himself to touch a day in late May.
The summer months of 2001 were blank cubed slates, broken only by a day in late August that was the first day of school, and then the teacher-parent day. He touched the day after it, then flipped the page to September and saw the reemergence of the pink pen, writing furiously in bold, loopy script. The script continued, and he turned to the vaguely effeminate Orlando Bloom 2002 calendar.
He skimmed quickly over those early months, not really wanting to linger, but a date in April circled in red caught his eye - Anya and Xander's aborted wedding day. Before he could stop himself, his mind automatically counted…and the day stood before him, circled in innocent pink with Janice's name on it.
Gritting his teeth, he looked quickly at the day after that, and then realized that that was the day Tara died. He had been waiting for the sun to go down that day, before he could stow himself away on a freighter to India. He spent a week alone with his thoughts on the ship before they docked and he could secret himself on a ship to Madagascar, and then to the mainland. Which country it was that he'd eventually wound up in, he didn't know.
Spike steered himself by whispers after that, his questions leading him to a nameless demon feared by the people living on the coast of Kenya, north of Malindi. He stood out conspicuously with his shock of blonde hair, and for once, he found, he didn't like the stares. One woman pulled her children back as he marched through the stand of grass huts, clasping her daughter to her hip, interposing her body between his threat and the large eyes of her daughter.
And she was right to, he remembered thinking. He was a monster who terrorized little girls. Big girls, too.
A man shouted at him as he passed by on the way to the coastline caves. The words were bugger-all gibberish to him, but the tone he recognized immediately. Throwing back a remark he didn't remember now, he strode forward, following the directions given to him by a snuffling Ublad demon at a bar in Mombasa.
He reached the caves that night, and began the trials almost immediately. While he hadn't seen the outside world, his internal clock still wound to the presence of sunlight, and he estimated that he'd been in the caves five days before finishing the trials…and then, losing track of time altogether, before he wiped the blood and pain from his eyes to find himself in late September.
He went back through, and counted. That was it then, that was the day in early June, and he circled it lightly with a fingertip.
He doubted that anyone, even Dawn, would look at these calendars again, but he had to leave some record of this discovery, something to remember. He glanced around, and found a red pen that Buffy had discovered in her pants before doing the laundry.
With light, slanting strokes, he wrote a few words, then capped the pen, closed the calendar, and retreated back to the safety of his cot and chains.
They needed a place to remember, to mourn, a place to properly grieve. Standing atop the windy summit of a vast sinkhole did them no good, and so Dawn had suggested putting together a memorial garden, in England, of all places.
Giles granted that the plan had merit, and so quietly bought a small piece of secluded land near the home base of the new Council. Whenever she had time, Buffy went over to the garden to work, clearing brush, tilling soil for flowers, planting trees. Often, Dawn would come to help her, and they worked silently side by side, gaining back rhythms lost over the past year or so. Xander was always out there, building a bridge across a small brook that led into the garden. He too was silent, but in that silence, Buffy could feel old ties reassert themselves, perhaps in better ways.
Willow wasn't much in the garden - Kennedy had spirited her away through her family's many estates. She always came back bearing tales of loneliness and of Kennedy's parents, who were of the opinion that Willow was guilty of cradle-robbing. In late summer, however, two months after the final destruction of Sunnydale, Willow managed to thwart the girl's persistent need for affection and came out to the garden.
The night before, Buffy and Dawn had rolled up their pant legs and fished around in the stream for large rocks, the smoother, the better. A scrub, and they left them to dry in the garden.
Buffy had been compiling a list of names and birthdates for the stones, researching the ones she could not remember or never knew. The occupations and dates of death she always remembered. Merrick was first on her list, the Watcher that first guided her into understanding who and what she was. Giles had decided to do one boulder for the names of all those killed in the blast that destroyed the original Watcher's Council. Buffy added to her list Jesse, Xander's guy friend, almost since he'd known Willow, the kindly Dr. Gregory, Principal Flutie because…why not? Billy Fordham followed next, Miss Calendar, Kendra, Forrest, her mother, Tara, Jonathan, Annabelle, Chloe, Eve, Molly, Chao Ahn, Amanda, Anya…Spike. She went back over this list, adding in more names, dredging up history from a place that no longer existed.
In death (the more permanent kind), Spike still presented a problem for Buffy. Finding everyone else's birthdates was a relatively simple matter, found online and neatly printed on her pad. But Spike - should she use William's birth date (which she didn't know - the thesis on him had also been incinerated), or should she use the date of his death (which she also didn't know, for the same reasons.).
How long had she known him? One, two…six years. And she'd not known his birthdate. He'd saved the world, given her her life back - and she'd never asked his birthday.
The thought struck her as odd, trivial, and terribly tragic. For the first time, since the mechanic workings of creating this list began, she burst into tears. Not loud, gulping sobs - she had been without those for almost a week, and she hoped to keep it that way. This was a whimpering cry, defeated, not even strong in grief.
Lost opportunities, lost time, lost love - and not just about Spike. Who would look at this list and think that they'd won?
"June 6, 2002." Dawn's whisper tickled her ear as her arms encircled her big sister's shoulders.
"What?" Buffy pushed back the tears from her cheeks and met her sister's steady gaze.
"Spike's birthday. He once told me that his birth as William was September 28, 1854, and his death was November 13, 1880." Dawn furrowed her brow. "But he circled a date in one of my old calendars once, marked it as his birthday."
2002. The meaning of the date ripped through her. No longer William, no longer Spike, he'd muddled through the first few months of his new existence alone, tortured by demons internal and external.
"Where do you think I'd be, if I wasn't a Slayer?" The timorous question rose from her as she molded her forehead to his chest, lips brushing the fabric right above his heart.
"Easy," he murmured lightly, never venturing to speak above a whisper, as if the lull in the stranger's house where they lay clutching each other could so easily be broken. She tilted her head up, the better to see him looking at her, and the better to feel the rumble of his words against her cheek. "You'd be a gardener."
"Sounds boring."
"Nah. Used to do a lot before…well," he broke off, then tried a different tack. "You're pretty damn good at finding the ugly seed and pulling it out of the ground, makin' it flourish." A moment of levity. "And you could declare war on Japanese beetles, if you felt the need for violence."
Spike was usually right about such things.
The Hellmouth had been destroyed on June 10, 2003. Count back four days…to the best night of his life.
Each stone was placed in honor, surrounded by everyone who had given everything to make the world a better place, in little or big ways.
Buffy knelt by Spike's stone, placed just so underneath an oak tree, surrounded by anemones. Forget-me-nots would have been too obvious, and she doubted that Spike would have wanted a white rosebush near his grave. She wondered if Giles had figured it out yet.
She reached a hand out, her left, and traced the words on the stone.
Spike
Born William Pratt, Sept. 28, 1854 - Nov. 13, 1880
Born Spike, Nov. 13, 1880 - June 6, 2002
Born Spike, June 6, 2002 - June 10, 2003
Hero. Lover. Champion.
Buffy thought he would like it, not too somber, and not too girly. And no stone angels - the thought gave her a smile.
"Happy Birthday, Spike," she whispered.