TITLE: Dry Kind of Love 1/?

AUTHOR: tanith

RATING: PG-13, just to be safe.

ARCHIVE: It's all yours, just let me know.

FEEDBACK: Bring it on. akirgo@yahoo.com

SPOILERS: Probably some minor ones here and there, through the ends of seasons 5/2.

DISCLAIMER: Several of these characters belong to Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, Fox, etc. The rest are mine, but they can have them as long as they agree to do exactly what I want with Spike on the show, and possibly let me keep him afterwards.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: I hate tons of exposition at the beginning of a story. Everything will be explained in it's own due time. More stuff will start happening, too; just think of these first couple of chapters as the calm before the storm. Oh, and BTW, the title of the story is taken from the song "Sweetest Thing," by U2.

AUTHOR'S NOTE 2: I wrote this last summer, and am working on an edit of it, in preparation of a sequel that will, I hope, be coming soon. I hope this part still holds up after all these months, and that with so many original characters, I don't veer too far into Mary Sue-dom. They're fun to write, though. ;-)

*************

Zoe Barnet runs up the stairs to the third floor laughing, her fingers feeling for the solidity of the walls for balance, leaving splotched fingerprints on the white paint. Roger Waxman races up behind her in a last feeble attempt to overtake her, but Zoe reaches the landing first and spins around to face him while he is still three steps away.

"Ha! Beat you!" she yells triumphantly, leaning back against the wall, a smug grin on her face.

Roger slumps up the last three steps. "Only because I forgot to take my socks off. I kept slipping."

"You're just slow." Zoe sticks out her tongue at him. She slides her back down the wall and lands with a thump on the floor, her legs splaying out in front of her. Roger plops down next to her.

"You just cheat," he says.

She whacks his arm playfully, and her whacks her back, but then stops, his gaze caught by the trap door in the ceiling above their heads, a two by two white square with a thin silver handle.

"What's up there?" Roger asks.

"Huh?" Zoe follows his outstretched finger. "Oh that? Just the attic." She turns to her friend, grinning. "When we moved in, my dad found a whole bunch of used bedpants up there."

Zoe is disappointed when the expected expression of disgust does not spread across her friend's features. Instead, Roger merely scrunches up his nose, inquisitively. "What are bedpants?" he asks.

Zoe finds herself grinning again. "Well, the guy who lived here before us, Mr. Drake, he was 103 when he died, and before that, he was really sick and couldn't get out of bed for anything, not even to go to the bathroom. So he had these special pants..."

"Ewww!" Roger makes a face. "Why did he keep them?"

Zoe shrugs. "I dunno. He was a weird old guy. When we moved in, there were also a bunch of handwritten notes tacked all over the place that said things like, This is the bookcase,' This is the pantry.' And there were like forty layers of linoleum on the kitchen floor. My dad spent over two days just scraping it up."

Roger is still fixated on the trap door. "So what's up there now?"

Zoe shrugs again. "Junk?"

A gleam appears in Roger's eyes. "You wanna check it out and see?"

She does not want to check it out and see. Dread settles in the pit of Zoe's stomach; at 12, she's still afraid of the attic and the basement, and after dark, even her closet seems sinister. But she will not allow herself to appear cowardly in front of Roger.

"Okay, sure," she says. "My mom keeps a stepladder in the kitchen. We can use that."

"We have to go back downstairs?" Roger whines.

Zoe rolls her eyes. "Well, you can see if you can reach the handle by standing on your tippy toes," she says sarcastically.

Roger sighs and pulls off his socks. "Fine, we'll get the ladder. But this time," he says, standing, "I'll beat you downstairs!" And he leaps off down the steps before Zoe has even had a chance to get up off the floor.

"Cheat!" she yells after him, but she trots down the steps anyway, still grinning.

*************

The attic is small and musty, the roof of the house sloping in to make it barely more than a crawlspace. It smells, Zoe thinks, rather like cooked cabbage. She swings her flashlight in a slow arc around the room as Roger pulls himself up through the trap door behind her, his own flashlight clattering loudly against the splintered wood floor. Zoe is glad she remembered to put her shoes back on.

"There's really not much up here," she says to Roger, who has also begun to peer about with his flashlight. "See? Just a bunch of old boxes."

"Yes, but what's in them?" Roger says mysteriously.

"As I said before, probably junk."

"But we won't know before we check, will we?" Roger smiles wickedly and squats before a box. He holds the flashlight between his teeth and rips off the long brown strip of masking tape.

Zoe decides there's nothing better to do than to follow suit. She walks over to another box and pulls off the tape.

Roger has pulled a partially deflated basketball out of his box. He holds it up for Zoe to see. "Obviously a priceless family heirloom!" he says. He chucks the ball over his shoulder; it makes a sad fwump when it hits the floor. "And this!" Roger continues, struggling to lift a heavy, old typewriter. "A historical artifact of unspeakable value."

Zoe crinkles her nose at what she has pulled out of her box: a large ceramic horror, possibly the ugliest vase on the face of the earth. "I think that this is all nothing more than yard sale rejects."

She puts the vase back in her box and stands, shakily. The darkness is starting to get to her; she can feel the blackness that lives in the corners seeping closer, like smoke, like fog, ready to consume her the moment she drops her guard. "Let's go back downstairs," she says, trying to hide the pleading in her voice. "I'm hungry," she adds. It seems like a logical excuse.

Roger ignores her, clamoring to his feet and heading over to one of the corners of the room, where it's darkest. He shines his flashlight down on a large, black object. "Cool! Check this out!"

Zoe walks over slowly, clutching her flashlight. The skin on the back of her neck burns, pins and needles. "Hmm?" she says quietly.

"It looks like a treasure chest!" Roger says with enough enthusiasm for the both of them. The end of his flashlight goes into his mouth again. "Here, help me get this open."

Zoe fingers the small silver cross she has worn since she was a baby, her poker tell, her single nervous habit, but she kneels beside her friend anyway. The chest is huge and wooden with a large gold lock; it *does* look like a treasure chest. Roger is pulling on the lock ineffectually, so Zoe pushes his hand away, an expression of scorn plastered on her face to mask the fear.

"Not like that, silly," she says. She plucks a thin metal clip from her mane of wavy brown hair and inserts it into the lock. After only a couple of seconds of maneuvering, the lock clicks open. The expression of awe on Roger's face is enough to make Zoe smile for real.

"Where did you learn how to do that?"

Zoe shrugs nonchalantly. "My dad taught me."

Roger looks at her incredulously. "Your dad?" he starts to ask, but grows silent as, with a creak, Zoe forces back the lid of the trunk.

Zoe is half expecting the chest to emit a deep orange glow, like a mystical object in an Indiana Jones movie, and bask her and Roger in golden light. Either that, or a large swarm of bats. Instead, a small cloud of dust wafts ups and fills the air, leaving Roger coughing, and then disperses. And the contents of the trunk sit before them, in all their mundane glory.

"Aw, it's nothing but more junk," Roger laments. He gets up and moves to the other side of the attic, but Zoe stays on her knees and shifts through the trunk's contents. Her Nancy Drew-reading instincts tell her that no one, not even her over-protective and paranoid parents, would bother to lock a trunk entirely filled with old clothes, as this one appears to be.

Her hand stops moving as it comes across the somehow comforting texture of worn leather. She pushes away the other clothes and lifts out a long black leather duster. She holds it to her face and breathes in its scent, which reminds her of baseball gloves and cigarette smoke. Why would such a nice coat be stored away in the attic? Even if her parents don't want it any more, she could still wear it. She pictures herself walking down the street at night with this coat flapping behind her like a cape, and she grins. She would look so cool...

She has nearly made up her mind to bring the coat back downstairs with her when she hears a door slam from far away and her mother's voice calling, stretching up three flights of stairs and through the trap door into the attic.

"Zoe! Roger! I'm home! I brought lemonade!"

"Crap!" Zoe drops the coat and slams the trunk shut. "Hurry, we have to get downstairs! If she catches us up here I'll be in so much trouble!"

Roger doesn't argue; he is already halfway down the ladder. Zoe shimmies through the trap door after him, pulling it shut behind her. She tucks the stepladder into the corner of the playroom's closet; she'll have to sneak it back downstairs later when her mom is distracted.

Unlike now, since her mom seems pretty focused. Anne Barnet's feet are pounding up the stairs and she is calling Zoe's name, an edge of worry creeping into her voice. "Zoe? Where are you?"

Zoe darts down the steps and meets her mother on the second floor landing. Relief floods Anne's face.

"Sorry, mom," Zoe says. "I didn't hear you. Roger and I we're playing on the computer with the headphones on."

Roger appears on the stairs behind them. "Headphones," he says.

"You guys should get outside some," Anne says. "But if you want, I can give you some lemonade first."

"Lemonade sounds great, mom," Zoe says, grinning from the natural high that comes with getting away with something just barely. She and Anne and Roger walk down the last flight of stairs together, all three smiling broadly for their own private reasons.

Only later, after Roger has gone home, and Zoe's dad has returned from the library, and they have all eaten supper, and Zoe is staring at herself in the mirror as she brushes her teeth, does she realize that she never found out what was so special about the contents of the trunk that it should be padlocked. As she slips between the covers and her parents kiss her goodnight, Zoe vows to go back up to the attic soon, to face the darkness and find out the truth. Tomorrow, she thinks. The stepladder's still on the third floor; it would be fairly easy to sneak up there when no one's looking. Tomorrow she'll go back up there and she'll find out.

But tomorrow she and Sarah go swimming at the town pool, and then they meet Roger at the Ben Franklin and they end up at his house, where they gorge themselves on the penny candy they bought. And the summer days all fade into one another, and then school starts, and even though Zoe always means to go up to the attic and check, she never does.

Pretty soon, she forgets all about it.

*************

TBC