Last Step

by Anna Queen

Somewhere along the line, loving him got easy. Buffy and Spike, the back porch, one last time. Set late Season 7.

Somewhere along the line loving him got easy.

Like breathing.

Not when she stopped fighting it, and not even when she started fighting for it, but when she stopped having to think about it at all. It's like her whole life she's had this box inside of her marked 'love', and now at last she goes to open it she finds that there is no box, only love.

And somehow love isn't the thing between them anymore. It's the nothing between them.

Like sun set like night fall like moon rise.

Like this moment; this silly moment where she's sat with a stack of bills in front of her and she knows that he's there; but even if she didn't know, even if she didn't think of him at all, she'd still be sitting there loving him because that's what loving him is. That's how easy it is.

"Hey." She looks up at him as she says it, not to check that she's right, but because she'd rather be looking at him than not.

He doesn't answer straight away; watches her eyes on him as he stands framed in the doorway; feels his own space as she draws its outline in every thought, every breath. She is his audience, all his, and he feels her in front of him like a whole auditorium focused on him, and he feels her in front of him like a girl, just a girl in a room.

"Buffy."

It's not the line delivery the crowd in the auditorium were waiting for, but the girl in the room hangs on to his eyes and his mouth in a way that makes the throwaway edge he was aiming for impossible.

"Spike."

He's still stood there in the doorway, and she can't help but bask in the way he looks, in the way he looks at her. She loves that it came gift-wrapped, this whole part of her life she'd hardly dared acknowledge was hers.

"You can sit down."

"Yeah, and then what are you gonna have to distract you from those sums?"

"Don't you underestimate how distracting that doorway is." She grins, her face relaxing into mock despair. "Oh god, Spike, do you know we have eleven different kinds of breakfast cereal right now?"

"Feeding costs getting out of hand, love?" He tilts his head towards her, his eyes conspiratorially dark. "You want me to turn them all? Make things cheaper if we're all following the blood-only diet plan."

"Thanks. I'll let you know."

"Just say the word."

"I might just do that."

What was it she said to him this time last year? We do not joke about eating people in this house.

They do now. They joke about lots of things. When her army of would-be slayers are tucked up safely in bed, the two of them find a hundred reasons and a hundred ways to forget the mission they work so hard to keep everyone focused on, this best of enemies and very best of friends.

"You going somewhere?"

He nods. "Just out the back. Getting some air."

"They make air in packs of twenty now?" She laughs up at him. "C'mon, it's not like you breathe."

"Not so much."

"I'm coming with."

It's a question, he knows that, and he nods his assent.

"Mm hm." But something about the turn of his shoulders as he leads the way out says, of course you are. Where else would you be?

Outside the night is cool, and the air drawn into her lungs fills her with a sense of being so alive that every demon and hellgod and apocalypse could rise up at that moment and she'd still go on breathing it; breathing him; still find a way back here. This is what she always comes back to. The back step. Him. And he's stood in front of her thinking about nothing but the nicotine fix grasped between his fingers, but he's there, and she's there, and right now it's all that matters.

She stretches her feet out in front of her, presses her hands against the hardness of the step.

"Mmmm. God, it's a beautiful night. Big sky, making crazy with the stars."

He laughs at her.

She'd never tell Dawn, but she loves cigarette smoke, likes the way she feels it in her throat. It tastes of him. She curls her fingers over the edge of the step, leans into the haze that colours the world in front of her eyes monochrome, and the world in her head a thousand hues that glow like jewels.

When she thought about this, tried to make it work in her mind, she couldn't. He wasn't for this, not for bathroom queues in the morning, and coffee, and late night TV. He took her out of her world. Wasn't that why she wanted him? And yet here he is, fitting into her world in a way she could never have imagined.

Of course, there's a reason for that.

He is her world.

She sits there, saturated in the wholeness of him, remembers every light and shadow of him. And in her head she traces every well-worn fingertrack, remembers every curve, every line she knows like the shape of her own name.

"What?" He looks across at her, eyes crackling amusement.

She pouts at him. "Don't think because you're standing there looking all commanding in that coat I'm gonna answer that."

He grins.

"Don't think because you're not gonna answer I'm not gonna know." He's teasing, she knows, but she feels the truth in it, and it feels right, like something she's been waiting to hear all along.

Once upon a time they screwed up this relationship because they couldn't talk about it. Couldn't do anything except screw up. Screwed up and down and round the bloody mulberry bush, that would be the way he would describe it. And now this relationship works because they don't have to talk about it.

He's still grinning at her, his eyes flitting over the deep cut of her jacket in a way she thinks ought to make her feel self-conscious. "You must be cold sitting there all exposed like that. Here, move up. We'll share body heat."

"That would be my body heat we'd be sharing then."

"I'd say you were hot enough for the both of us."

Not so very long ago he could have looked at her like that and she would have trembled with fear and hate and longing, but then, there's a lot that's happened since not so very long ago.

She still has her hand on the step beside her, and he's there next to her before she thinks to move it. She finds herself smiling in spite of herself at the silly debate playing in her head: if she moves her hand, will he move closer? But as long as she keeps it there, she's touching him at least, and if she takes it away she runs the risk of not touching him at all. And she laughs at herself, laughs at them both sitting there on the back step a hand-width apart.

He shifts, reaching for the lighter in his pocket, and the edge of the duster falls across her fingers. She picks it up, half-instinctively, folds it back over his knee, her fingers lingering, involuntarily, as they find a curve of his thigh they were supposed to have forgotten.

Only the flicker of an eyebrow tells her that he takes hold of her hand anything more than absently, as he lifts it silently from his lap and places it back on the step. And neither of them say a word about the tangle of fingers that keeps both their hands there.

I love you, I love you, I love you. She beats it out in a tattoo across the back of his hand, fingers spelling it out over and over until it's written all across the stars in the smoke-laced sky.

He hooks his thumb around hers, and she giggles, catching his eye as the Slayer and her mortal enemy lock in combat with one another in the contest of their lives, the thumb-wrestling match to end all thumb-wrestling matches.

She likes that he wins.

If they had more time, she could have found a thousand words to tell him, but she doesn't have the words, doesn't have time to find them, so she tells him every other way she knows how, every moment that she has. Maybe there aren't enough words anyway.

"What do you think they'll write about us when we're gone?"

She looks up at him, surprised at the question. "Don't you start getting all end-of-the-worldy on me."

"I'm not, I'm just saying – " He looks at her, suddenly serious, as if there's something he's not sure he'll get another chance to say. "I'm just saying – "

Her fingers curve closer into his, her eyes holding onto him. "I know."

It's not that she needs him to make her happy. She needs him, she knows that, but she needs him for everything he makes her: sad, and happy, and angry, and hurt, and strong, and brave, and alive. And she can be those things without him; she knows that too. But he is part of her happiness, always, because every morning when she wakes up to a sun rising over a world he doesn't get to see, she wakes up knowing that he dared to love her.

She knows that it won't always be like this. She knows that maybe tomorrow she'll wake up scared, really scared. She knows that when it happens it will hurt and she might have to let go of him, and she doesn't want to. God she doesn't want to.

But this is why they came back. This is why they both got their second chance. Not to save the world, although God knows maybe they're the only hope this world has right now. Not to prove anything. Not to be brave, or strong, or heroic. Not to be sorry, or to forgive, or to put anything right. But just to sit here, this night, this back step. Two tiny people in a great big world.

She looks up at him, and she smiles.

"I think they'll say we did alright," she says. "You and me, we did alright."

A/N:  Fifth and final part to my Season 7 ficlet series: My Treasure, Someday I'll Tell You, Still The Night and Resolution.  My tribute to a show and a couple I loved.