Home for the Holidays
Rating: PG, for Spike's use of Spike-like words
Feedback: Yes, thank you very much. Melpomenethalia@aol.com
Spoilers: Takes place after "Wrecked," but ignores everything after it.
Distribution: The Bunny Warren and fanfiction.net. If you're interested, please let me know.
Summary: It's Christmas during season 6. Spike ends up playing Santa for Buffy and Dawn, but the results are... well, not always optimal.
Author's Note: The quote is from Charles Dickens's "A Christmas Carol," and yes, there are hints of "The Gift of the Magi" by O. Henry. Two other things: Dawn has completely forgiven Willow for the car accident, and my version of the Scoobies (particularly Spike) is a bit kinder and gentler than the one Joss gave us this year.
Disclaimer: All characters are owned by Mutant Enemy (Joss Whedon), a wonderfully creative company whose characters I have borrowed for a completely profit-free flight of fancy. Kindly do not sue me, please, as I am terrified of you. Thank you.
Dedication: For the Green Bunny Goddess, aka Venus Blue, fanfiction writer extrordinaire.
December 22: Decorate
Due to the very real possibility of impaling his heart while hanging ornaments, Spike decided not to get a real Christmas tree. Anyway, he remembered seeing a box for an artificial tree in the basement when he'd been stealing pictures of Buffy last year. He could only hope that it had been on a high enough shelf that it wasn't destroyed in the flood earlier that fall. Flipping on the switch as he went down the stairs, Spike was hit with the smell of mildew that had become an integral part the Summers basement ever since the pipe explosion. He wrinkled his nose in disgust.
Which was probably why he didn't see the pile of laundry sitting at the base of the steps and tripped, coming down with a most undignified crash on the cement floor. A very loud ow, followed by a torrent of curses, flowed from his mouth as he staggered to his feet, rubbing his offended posterior. With a grunt of displeasure, he began searching through the shelves on the basement until a red and green box emblazoned with the words "Winter Woodland Fantasy" caught his eye. After hoisting it onto his shoulder, he discovered five more boxes of varying sizes stashed behind it, all labeled "tree" in black marker.
"Five boxes? It's only one tree. How they fit that much on it, anyway?" he grumbled to himself. Still, if he was going to do this, he was going to do it right. After depositing the tree box in the living room, he returned for the others. As he stooped to stack the boxes, he noticed two large plastic cartons on the floor, each bearing the word "X-mas."
"You've got to be kidding."
Three trips up and down the basement stairs later, Spike was certain his earlier fall had bruised more than his dignity and it was beginning to irk him. Sighing, he surveyed the pile of boxes arranged in a disordered heap around the fireplace. He'd come to the conclusion that was the proper place for a tree, what with Santa coming down the chimney and all.
"Small tree," he muttered as he looked at the three-foot carton in front of him. "Well, best put that up first."
Opening the box, he expected to find a fake pine tree. Instead, he confusedly pulled out…
"Branches?"
Green artificial tree limbs were scattered all over the floor in moments. Spike was deeply confused. At the bottom of the box were a strange looking metal contraption and two tubes full of little holes. He stared at them with his eyebrow quirked so high it was in danger of disappearing into his hair.
"What the bloody hell?"
Joyce's picture stared at him from the mantle, seeming for a moment to register displeasure.
"Um, sorry," he mumbled in the photo's general direction. Then he slapped his forehead for feeling guilty about cussing in front of something processed by Kodak.
Despite his penchant for his plans tending to fail spectacularly, Spike was not stupid. The directions that had come with the tree were nowhere to be seen. He noticed the screw threads on one of the tubes, and quickly figured out that they fit together. After another few moments, he eventually realized that the other weird looking thing in the box must be a stand, so he stuck the now-six-foot-tall pole in the center and tightened the screws on the base. Proudly, he stood back to display his handiwork.
The trunk resembled the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
With a grunt, he tried to straighten the pole again, compensating for the heavy slant to the right, then stepped back once again.
It was now listing heavily to port.
With a growl that would have sent demons scurrying, he wrestled the center support into a perfect ninety-degree angle and turned the screws until they nearly broke the plastic. With a flourish of leather, he whirled round and surveyed the tree-to-be.
"There we go. Perfectly straight," he purred with manly satisfaction. "Now all I have to do is stick in the branches. Child's play."
Experimentally, he grabbed one of the larger limbs and stuffed its metal tip into a hole in the trunk near the floor.
Instead of going down as a normal branch would, it stuck up at an odd angle. Spike blinked in confusion. The second branch he put in did the same thing, as did the third.
"It's almost like the tree… is… upside…down…" he said slowly as realization dawned. He'd put the trunk in topside to the floor.
"Excuse me for a moment," he said as he turned Joyce's photo to the wall and proceeded to use language that would have melted glass. By the time the picture faced the room again almost half an hour later, the trunk had been replaced, right side up and straight, in the stand. "There. Much better."
Now all he had to do was put the branches on the tree and he would be well on the way to Dickens-ing up the Summers house. There was just one slight problem. He had no idea what order to put the branches on in. He'd found a few limbs that had what appeared to be color-coded stickers on their ends, but he'd found a much larger number of those same stickers littering the bottom of the box like so much sticky confetti. Almost two-thirds of the branches had no identifying marks whatsoever. The only thing to do was try to stick them on in the appropriate order by guesswork.
Over three hours later, a vaguely tree-shaped thing stood beside the fireplace. Spike's hands were scratched from the wire needles, he had ripped his T-shirt on one of the branches, and he was in a very bad temper. His mood was not helped by the blatant fact that the tree was not perfect. Several branches stuck out at weird angles, and the middle of the tree was narrower in some spots than the top part. No matter how many times he rearranged the stupid overgrown green pipe cleaners, the tree refused to be symmetrical. At long last, he turned the most abnormal side of the monstrosity towards the wall, and nodded in grim acceptance.
"Not perfect, but it'll bloody well have to do."
Next came the problem of trimming the tree. The first box Spike opened contained dozens of round glass Christmas tree ornaments of various jewel shades: shimmering reds and golds, frosted pinks and blues, twinkling silvers and purples. In spite of himself, he smiled. They looked like happy, multi-colored bubbles.
"Hanging stuff on a tree. Anyone can do that," he told himself confidently as he grabbed up an armload of ornaments.
Unfortunately, he didn't quite comprehend just how slippery the thin glass bulbs were. Before he could stop them, the globes skittered out of his hands and pelted to the floor, reduced to a pile of shattered shards.
Joyce's picture was once again turned to the wall.
After the Big Bad of Sunnydale had swept all the bits of glass into a dustpan with a little flowered whiskbroom and dumped them in the trash, he decided to hang the remaining ornaments one by one. Meticulously, he tried to distribute the colors evenly around the tree, but no matter what he did, it seemed one section or another was always too heavily red or blue. At long last, he stood back and gazed at the tree, coming to the conclusion he'd done fairly well, all things considered.
The second box contained what appeared to be a load of wire scattered with little sparkly things.
"Oh, no," he groaned quietly. "No, no, no…"
Spike decided to leave Joyce's picture with its back to the room for the rest of the day. He'd forgotten to put the lights on the tree first.
After he'd taken off every last bulb, threaded the long strands of Christmas tree lights through the branches, and almost tied himself to the tree in the process, he plopped the plug into a nearby outlet to behold the glory of his illuminated masterpiece.
Said masterpiece did not illuminate.
He unplugged and replugged the lights desperately, trying vainly to get them to glow. Nothing worked. Finally, he went over each and every individual strand, and realized that two of them had blown out, which meant none of them were working. He stripped the lights off the tree, removed the offending dead lines, and re-arranged the remaining ones. At long last, he plugged in the lights and…
Nothing happened again.
With a battle cry, he tore the lights off the tree one last time, checked them again, got rid of yet another line of dead lights, and proceeded to arrange the working strands on the tree with the plug in the socket so it was already lit.
At long last, after much fiddling to try to eliminate the worst of the dead spots, the lopsided tree was moderately, though still unevenly, covered in colored lights. Gingerly, Spike rehung all of the ornaments he'd already taken down, managing to break only another half dozen in the process.
The third box contained yet more ornaments, though these were not, for the most part, breakable. They appeared to be homemade, and each had been wrapped very delicately in tissue paper as though they were indescribably precious. With an unexplainable lump in his throat, he found himself hanging up Popsicle stick Santa Clauses and cotton ball snowmen yellow with age, construction paper framed pictures of a little blonde girl with pigtails and a little brunette girl who was sticking her tongue out at the camera, and, with a small sigh, he hung in a place of honor an unidentifiable lump of hardened playdough that had the words "For Mom" unevenly scrawled across it in purple crayon.
After thoroughly blowing his nose and drying his eyes, due, of course, to the inordinate amount of dust that had collected in the tree branches, he opened the fourth box. It held a pile of shredded silvery strings. Tinsel.
Suddenly, Spike found himself having a blast. With wild abandon, he threw clumps of tinsel on the branches, thrilled that at last he didn't have to worry about something breaking. He stood back to survey his handiwork after the entire box had been emptied.
He then spent the next hour straightening the tinsel so that it was meticulously arranged on each branch.
Finally, he opened the last box. Inside it, he found exactly five items: three Christmas stockings, a star and an angel. He hung Buffy and Dawn's stockings on the mantle, but he was rather at a loss for what to do with the burgundy sock that bore the name Joyce in loopy cursive. To hang it with the others seemed like it would be painful for the girls, but to put it back in the box seemed disrespectful somehow. At long last, he decided that perhaps the best place for it was the tree. He placed it on a branch with a fond little pat. Then, he turned his attention to the matter of the tree-topper.
"So, what'll it be: the pretty star, or the ugly poof? I think you, Mr. Halo, can stay right in your little cardboard coffin until next year," he said with a small sneer as he closed the lid on the slightly offended-looking celestial being. With the help of a stepladder, Spike plopped the star on the topmost branch.
At long last, the tree was decorated. Spike looked at it critically. It wouldn't have made the cover of a decorating magazine, but it looked a lot better than no tree at all. As it was, he'd spent so long putting up the tree that dawn was already breaking outside. There was no way he could get back to his crypt. With a yawn, he made his way back down to the mildewed basement and collapsed on the cement floor, sound asleep in less than a minute.