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: To the darling people who had to wait until AUGUST for me to finish this fic, yet didn't complain even a little bit.
December 24: Food
Spike didn't get much sleep that night. Only a handful of hours after his head had hit the cushion on the couch, he was groggily pulling his eyelids open and pushing himself unsteadily to his feet. Sunrise was still quite a ways off.
Mumbling to himself blearily and rubbing his fists in his eye sockets to knock the sleep away, he padded barefoot into the kitchen and took stock of the provisions in the fridge. He'd managed to stick a couple bags of blood from his crypt in there the night before after stowing them in a cooler in the Desoto's boot all day. Breakfast, however, wasn't his first priority. After all, Christmas wouldn't be Christmas for the two humans in question if they didn't have a decent supper to look forward to.
As he drained the AB-, he noted a stack of violently orange processed cheese squares that were still unexpired, a half full gallon jug of still-good milk, five eggs, some apple juice boxes, a few cold cuts of indeterminate variety, and a loaf of bread a third of the way gone. Not exactly the makings of a feast. The cupboards, he was happy to note, did contain flour, sugar and salt, all of which appeared to be completely untouched. Apparently, baking was not a common activity around here. Still, nowhere near as bad as last summer.
He had one other thing to find, though. It only took a moment or two for him to spy the cookbooks stacked on the counter. He ignored the volumes that looked brand new and instead took out a spattered, disheveled book whose cover was held on by a rubber band. There was no doubt that this one had been Joyce's favorite.
A brief perusal of the index guided him to the pages he wanted: Roast Turkey, 336; Mashed Potatoes, 89; Steamed Peas, 18; Cloverleaf Rolls, 206; Gingerbread Men, 239; and Apple Pie, 218. He jotted down the missing ingredients and stared uncertainly at the very long list. Then he pulled out his remaining cash and stared with even greater uncertainty at the $50 in greasy bills. Well, he'd just have to do the best he could.
Nightmarish did not begin to describe his trip to the supermarket. The same plump housewives from the mall seemed to have descended upon the produce, hogging all the spices, blocking aisles with their carts, and forming crowds five deep at the meat counter. The vampire had hoped to avoid the holiday rush by showing up early. Instead, everyone else seemed to have had the same brilliant idea.
What was worse, he was having some serious problems coming up with all of his ingredients. Disheartedly, he wound up throwing a bag of dinner rolls in his cart, finding them cheaper than buying the mammoth "economy" sizes of yeast and bread flour, the other shoppers having already picked the normal sizes clean on these items. He flat out refused, however, to cave in and buy Insta-Spuds in place of mashed potatoes. Necessary spices for the gingerbread men, though, turned out to be very pricey, and he found himself reaching into the corners of his pockets and picking through the lint to find change so he could manage to afford the turkey, peas, and apples. Normally, he would have snuck the apples into the handy-dandy deep pockets of his duster, giving himself the five-finger discount, but that was now out of the question.
The line at the cash register seemed to stretch on forever. An annoying, bratty three-year old sat in the cart in front of him, his mother having wandered farther ahead to speak to the lady pushing the cart ahead of hers. The kid was wailing at the top of his lungs.
"I WANNA SUCKER! I WANNA SUCKER! I WANNA SUCKER! I WANNA SUCKER!"
Angelus's methods of torture had nothing on this tot. It was like listening to an air raid siren from the war, only that had been more in tune and it would, eventually, stop. The mother paid no attention at all to her errant offspring's eardrum-splitting cries. Spike's eyes unfocused, his cheek developed a tic, and his hands clenched the cart's handle so tightly he could no longer feel his fingertips. Finally, he snapped.
"You want a sucker, squirt? I'll show you a sucker," he growled quietly as he let his fangs descend and his forehead become ridged. He gazed furiously at the boy through yellow, demonic eyes, intent upon frightening him into shutting the bloody hell up.
The response was not what he expected.
"MAN FUNNY! MAN FUNNY! MAN FUNNY! MAN FUNNY!" the little bundle of joy shrieked in delight between full-throated giggles. He didn't let up until he was out of the market, his hysterical laughter floating back to the deeply embarrassed vampire as the automatic doors swished shut.
Spike's bill was rung up by the cashier, and he came up exactly four cents short.
"Oh, come on, sweetheart," he purred in his most seductive tone, purposely playing up his accent. "It's Christmas and all. Be a luv and let it go, eh?"
The cashier, whose nametag bore the word "Wanda," eyed him with a world-weary glare.
"Use the take-a-penny, leave-a-penny tray," she drawled slowly, as if speaking to a very small child.
Feeling like a dope, he selected four battered copper coins from the dish by the register and added them to the rest of his money on the conveyor belt. It had taken every last cent he had. Not only would his stocking be empty tomorrow, but so would his fridge.
Spike shuffled out to the parking lot, strategically placed brown paper bags covering his exposed skin. Transients were looking at him suspiciously by the time he reached his Desoto, threw the groceries in next to the table he was still hauling about, and made his way back to the house to begin a day's worth of, unbelievable at it might seem, slaving over a hot stove.
Cooking had changed a lot since he was mortal. First of all, he didn't need to haul in any kindling to get the oven going, which was just as well considering he wasn't overly fond of either fire or small pieces of wood. Still, he'd never so much as touched most of the gadgetry that paraded through the kitchen, mocking him with their blinking electronic buttons. The microwave, admittedly, had become an old friend, but that wasn't going to be called for today.
With a determined set to his jaw, he opened the cookbook to the first recipe: steamed peas.
"First, shell the peas. Shell?" he said aloud, no longer caring he sounded dottier than Dru.
He picked up the plastic bag full of pea pods and dug back through his memory, vaguely recalling his mother sitting in the back garden and taking the little parcels apart, separating the small green spheres from their leafy wrappings. Ripping things asunder. Spike smiled. Now this he could handle that.
With gusto, he began shucking the shells, depositing the peas in a large bowl. In a few minutes, thanks to some pent up rage and some good old-fashioned supernatural speed, he'd left a pile of disemboweled little green canoes on the counter.
"Line a pot with large, wet, green lettuce leaves," he read. "Lettuce, check."
He pulled a few leaves off the head and stuck them under the faucet, sousing them thoroughly before he suddenly stopped.
"Wait… how big is large? How wet is wet? How many does it take to 'line a pot'? And how big a pot, at that?"
The cryptic tome before him held no answers.
With a shrug, Spike decided that if it wasn't important enough to the writers to mention, it couldn't be that crucial. He slapped about ten sopping wet leaves into the largest pot in the cupboard then added the peas and plopped the whole mess on the electric range.
"Add 1 teaspoon sugar and 2 to 4 tablespoons water. Bloody Americans! Why can't they just go by weights," he grumbled as he hunted through six drawers for a set of measuring spoons. He plopped the sugar in, but was unsure about the variance on the water, so he went with the least amount.
"Nobody likes soggy peas… leastwise, it doesn't sound appetizing," he reasoned. "Now all I have to do is 'cook for twenty minutes until tender.'"
He stared at the different markings on the burners. Low, Medium, Medium High, and High all glared at him in bright, shiny writing. "Which one?"
The cookbook kept its secrets well, offering no advice to him. Apparently, this was such basic knowledge that no one would need to ask -- no one except vampires who were trying to cook Christmas dinner for a bunch of mortals, and he was willing to bet they weren't part of the book's original target demographic.
"Right then. When in doubt, go with high," he decided. Ratcheting the heat all the way up, he plopped a lid on the pot and left it to bubble away.
"Next up, mashed potatoes. 'First, cook the potatoes.' Fine, so how do I do that?" he yelled at the book.
Once more, the book kept silence on the topic.
With a grimace, Spike stared at the potatoes. "Use your brain, you dolt. Even Harmony can probably mash a spud. Okay, they need to get out of the skins, I'm betting, so, knife. Yeah, that sounds reasonable."
He opened the silverware drawer and, completely ignoring the bladed article that was, in fact, a potato peeler, he grabbed a steak knife and set about removing the brown, rather dirty-looking peels from the potatoes in question. Spike had, in his time, been quite handy with a knife. The problem was, the victims in question had never been vegetables. Consequently, before he'd managed to finish the job, he'd lost enough blood to be feeling a little woozy.
Next, he threw the peeled potatoes into the deep pot Joyce had used for spaghetti, but was undecided about what to do next.
"Well, suppose you have to cook 'em in something… best fill up the pot with water, I guess," he declared, taking thepot over to the sink and filling it nearly to the brim with water. With a satisfied grin, he plopped the pot down next to the one containing the peas, turned this burner up to high as well, and slammed the lid down. This was just too easy! Of course, he had no idea when the potatoes would be done cooking, but why worry yet?
"Apple pie next on the agenda. Let's see… need a crust. Well, can't be too hard to do that, now can it?"
About ten minutes later, Spike had assembled the flour, salt, butter and water. "Mix together one cup of flour with 1 teaspoon salt," he mumbled. With a loud plop, he dumped the flour in a bowl and sprinkled the salt on top.
"There. Mixed. Cut in 1/3 cup butter. Huh. If you say so, Mrs. Crocker."
He threw the butter on top of the flour and hacked at it a few times with a knife.
"Must melt together in the oven or summat. Alright, now all I need to do is flatten it out," he reasoned.
The rolling pin was not going to happen. It was too wimpy and far too domestic. If he wanted a pair of flat pastry crusts, he was going to smack it until it was paper-thin. With a blood-curdling battle cry, he flung himself at the dough and began pounding it as though it were the Skasnak demon who had once insulted his cheekbones. Unfortunately, the result wasn't exactly what he'd had in mind.
Flour dusted his face, his shirt, his jeans, his hair, and even his Docs like so much drifting snow. The dough was covered in tiny splits that showed the butchered tablecloth underneath. In retrospect, he thought it probably wasn't such a brilliant idea to neglect removing that first. A loud sneeze, thankfully directed over his shoulder instead of at the pastry in question, actually made his teeth rattle. Okay, brutality wasn't working here. He was being defeated by flour. This called for drastic action.
A few minutes later, a deeply mortified Spike was not only wielding a rolling pin, but had actually sunk so low as wearing Joyce's white apron that had "Kiss the Cook" written across it in an annoyingly feminine script. The dot over the "i" was a daisy with a smiley face. Before him on a cutting board lay what had to be the thinnest two circles of pastry ever, barely stretched out through a liberal, perhaps overly liberal, dose of water.
"Okay, it's rolled out. Now how in blue blazes am I supposed to get it off the board and in the tin?" he asked the air around him.
The process was long and complicated, and by the time the first crust was in the pie pan, Spike had utilized a spatula, a butter knife, two canapé spreaders, three chopsticks, a pancake turner and a set of coasters in the delicate operation. When he was finished, he stood back in admiration. It had only ripped three times, and he'd managed to pinch all the edges back together. It even looked as though it was only a little too small for the pan. Now all he had to do was peel the apples…
And stop the giant geyser erupting on top of the stove.
By this point, Spike had resorted to swearing in Esperanto as he had exhausted his usual treasure trove of profanity. He had, of course, completely forgotten about the potatoes. Boiling water was frothing over the burner. The vampire pulled the pot into the sink and dumped out the water to find very brown chunks clinging to the sides of the pot.
"Um… guess I can cut off the burned bits. They're just going to get mooshed anyway," he mumbled as he began to scrape out the pot.
It was at this point that plumes of smoke started to erupt from pot number two.
Obviously, he'd forgotten the peas as well. Unhappily, he wasn't quite so lucky this time. A black, coagulated mess of lumpy, putrid-smelling muck wrapped in charred lettuce was revealed to his frustrated gaze when the lid was raised. Shoving them into the other basin of the kitchen sink, his eyes now turning gold with demonic impatience, he proceeded to walk, with as much calmness as he could muster, back to the table.
"No one," he assured himself, "likes peas."
Deciding to simply pretend that none of this had happened, he returned his attention to the pie. What was the saying? Easy as pie? He hoped that whoever had coined the phrase shouldn't have been sued for bending the rules about truth in advertising.
"Peel and slice five large apples, then add to pie with butter, sugar, and cinnamon," he rolled his eyes once more at the lack of any amounts to go with the last three ingredients.
In a short while, there were five peeled, chopped apples resting in the pie tin quite prettily. The fact that he had named the apples Riley, Angelus, Harmony, Dracula, and Darla respectively while he had removed their skins may have had something to do with Spike's semi-improved mood. He plopped a full stick of butter on top of the apples, then added five tablespoons of sugar. The cinnamon had him a bit puzzled. It smelled quite nice, very Christmassy, but he had to make sure there was enough left for his gingerbread men. At long last, he decided that holding the shaker over the pie and thumping its bottom five times – once for each apple, of course – would be sufficient.
With a smug grin, Spike popped the other pastry crust on top of the pie and gazed in awe at his creation. It actually didn't look half bad. Now all he had to do was pop it in the oven and bake it at 375. Of course, he had no idea what the word "preheat" meant, so he simply shoved the pie plate in the oven, turned it on, and remembered to set the timer after his last fiasco.
At long last, only the gingerbread men and the turkey remained. An end was in sight. Deciding that after all he'd been through a spot of whimsy might be in order, Spike flipped to the section on making little, edible humans. For a moment, the horrible thought that the chip might zap him if he ate one gave him pause, but he soon came to his senses and concluded he'd been inhaling far too much flour.
Spike actually had some fairly homey memories of eating gingerbread men when he was a lad, which was why he'd chosen that particular cookie. He could remember his mum taking them out of the oven, piping hot and steaming, the rich scent tickling his nose. He remembered being a holy terror to the poor woman as the cookies cooled, asking, "Can we ice them yet?" at least three times a minute. But when she finally nodded her permission, the wait had been well worth it. Practically an entire village with slightly askew faces populated the kitchen, only to be devoured greedily with a glass of cold milk. Ah, the good old days… perfect training for a vicious vampire-to-be.
Promenading down memory lane wasn't getting him anywhere, though, so he quickly scanned the recipe in question. Finally, things seemed to be going smoothly. The molasses may have taken forever to pour, and he'd spilled a bit of it, accidentally put his hand on it, and then absentmindly run his hand through his hair, but at least he couldn't see the result. Sifting the flour had created another sandstorm of powder, but his Docs really couldn't have gotten much whiter after the pastry incident. The brown sugar had fought him valiantly, but he'd eventually vanquished it and plopped the required amount in the bowl. At long last, he had lined up on the table almost the entire contents of the spice rack.
"One teaspoon each," he read. "Well, not too hard, that."
With a flourish, he leveled the teaspoon against the top of each metal box in turn: salt, allspice, ginger, cloves, cinnamon. The only problem was, there wasn't enough cinnamon left after the pie. Frantically, Spike clawed through the drawers vainly searching for another box. Unbelievably, he found one, and it too was added into the mixture.
Happily, the aroma of the spices was starting to take away the acrid aura of burned peas, and Spike caught himself humming a bit as he stirred the dough together, pleased to see that it was, in fact, looking quite normal. The rolling out went a bit more smoothly than the piecrust, and Spike was soon confronted with a smooth, empty canvas of brown dough.
There were no cookie cutters to be found in the kitchen, so Spike once more wielded his trusty steak knife. Several of his gingerbread people looked like Quasimodo, but there were a few that bore some resemblance to regularly shaped humans. The finished products were scooped onto the cookie pans he'd found shoved behind the microwave, and it was at this point that he encountered a problem.
One oven. Two temperatures.
Somehow, these jolly fellows needed to be baked a full 25 degrees cooler than his pie.
"Nothing for it but to wait until the tart comes out," he grumbled.
However, he still had a pot full of slightly crunchy potatoes to mash, so his hands would be far from idle. Since the second step in the recipe titled "Mashed Potatoes" was, unhelpfully, "mash your potatoes with salt and pepper," he wasn't quite sure how to get them into the desired pulverized state. He dumped the spuds into yet another bowl, taking the time to note that he was beginning to run out of crockery and that the sink was starting to look very frightening, then rummaged through a utensils drawer, clueless as to what he was looking for. Nothing seemed to suit his purpose. Then, his eyes alit on something he'd had a bit of experience with at the librarian's: a blender.
"This ought to work," he purred defiantly as he plopped several of the potatoes into the glass pitcher, sprinkled in the salt and pepper, sagely put the lid in place (after all, he wasn't a moron), and then hit frappe. The appliance complained loudly, but it eventually bent to his will and cut the potatoes into chunks, then bits, then… glue.
"Add warmed milk… not saying how much, what a shock," the vampire snarked. Considering the potatoes all but resembled milk as it was, he decided less was more. The microwave soon chimed happily and he poured a mug of warmed milk, then hit frappe once again. Soon, the paste had turned into light, fluffy mashed potatoes… well, actually, no. It had turned into soup. But Spike was trying desperately to convince himself that this was not the case, and he was succeeding in doing so rather well.
At this point, the timer on the oven buzzed loudly. One apple pie coming up, he thought happily as he pulled on a pair of flowered oven mitts and opened the stove.
What he saw inside confused him mightily.
The top crust of his lovely tart had a huge, gaping hole in it the size of a fist. It also appeared that the pastry was a very deep shade of ebony, which was unsurprising as he'd been using a recipe for a one crust pie without doubling the amounts, while the apples were in a haphazard state, not quite fully cooked except for the chunks of fruit that had poured out of the rent in the top crust and landed on the oven's floor, resembling a blackened lava flow. Hanging like a bizarre chandelier above the pie, the missing piece of pastry dangled from the roof of the oven, charred to a crisp, obviously having been blown there when the steam trapped inside the pie had erupted through the crust since it lacked any vent holes.
"Bollocks."
Soon, the pie was keeping company with the peas in the bottom of the kitchen trashcan. He rationalized frantically that only one dessert was actually necessary or even desirable at a single meal. He turned the dial down on the oven and left the door open, both in hopes of making the temperature inside drop faster and so the ashy, burnt smell had a chance to dissipate a bit before it permeated his gingerbread men.
It was at this point that Spike realized things were perhaps not going so well. Dazedly, he wondered if Ming's Oriental Palace delivered on Christmas Eve. But he was not one to give up without a fight. His honor was at stake here. Setting his jaw with a level of determination that made his cheekbones stick out like coat hangers, he shoved the pans of cookies in the oven, set the timer, and confronted his greatest enemy.
A turkey.
It lay there in the refrigerator, mocking him with its featherless skin and its gaping body cavity. Its dangly wings flopped about in what he almost fancied was a show of aggression. He would have stared the bird down, but the lack of head made that rather impossible.
"Alright, you big… turkey," he snarled at the bird in question. It was a mark of just how bad things had gotten that he couldn't come up with a better taunt. Then again, the mere idea that he was taunting a dead turkey probably wasn't a very good indication of his current status either. "You are going to come out golden brown and succulent, just like in the picture on the front of the cookbook, or else."
The bird's neck returned his feral gaze coolly.
"Okay, first, I wash and dry you," he growled. The sink, unfortunately, was overflowing with dishes, and it took him a few minutes to put them on the counter and lower the carcass into the basin. With great vigor, Spike proceeded to rinse every last inch of the turkey so thoroughly that his hands were wrinkled. Emeril would have been proud. He then washed his own hands in time to pull his cookies from the oven and set them on a cooling rack while he continued to read the instructions.
"Fill it with stuffing? What kind of stuffing?" The book kept mum. He vaguely remembered the Slayer making Thanksgiving dinner over a year ago, and that bits of cut up bread and celery had been distributed in a bowl around the table, though at the time he'd been ogling the gravy boat hungrily. Hoping against hope, he opened the vegetable crisper and, oh happy miracle, found two stalks of limp celery that hadn't gone fuzzy. He chopped them up and tore apart several slices of bread, slamming them into the turkey.
At long last, the bird lay, breast side down, in a very large pan, ready to be popped in the oven. All he had to do now was cook it for…
"FOUR HOURS!" he yelled disbelievingly. A glance at the clock confirmed his suspicions. It was now five o'clock. Buffy and Dawn could be home at any time. "Well, if it takes four hours at 325, it must take two hours at 650."
He spun the dial to the desired degree and waited a few minutes for it to gain the required, nearly white-hot intensity before shoving the turkey in the oven. Now, all he had to do was ice his gingerbread, clean up the dishes, and set the table. Easy. No problem. Nothing to go wrong. And if he just kept repeating that to himself, he might start to believe it. Maybe.
The royal icing was, thank evilness, fairly simple to make, and as the gingerbread people were lined up in front of him on their cooling racks, he could barely suppress a grin. This, at least, was something he wouldn't foul up.
Precisely, using his highly attuned vampire eyesight, along with a toothpick, he began to paint faces and clothing on the cookies. Almost subconsciously, he started to make them resemble the Scoobies. Sure enough, a pair of glasses perched on the nose of a gingerbread librarian and a fist of dollars was clutched tightly by the gingerbread ex-demon. A sprightly gingerbread teen was grinning mischievously up at him holding, what else, a ring of keys. A pair of gingerbread witches sat side by side, making eyes at one another. The gingerbread construction worker, for some reason, seemed to have a rather unintelligent expression on his face, which may or may not have been accidental. Finally, only two cookies remained. Carefully, he iced in the Slayer's eyes and mouth, being very precise in getting the shape of her nose just so. The cookie wasn't complete, though, until he'd added the requisite stake in her hand. That left just one cookie, and he had plans for it.
Moving with great care, Spike traced in hair standing straight up, a sloping brow, and somewhat dull-looking eyes. The nose was on the large side, and the mouth was slack, creating a baffled, yokel-like expression. A few more deft strokes succeeded in painting on a tutu and ballet slippers. He stood back to examine his masterpiece, and, as a finishing touch, added a crooked halo falling over the figure's right temple.
"There we are. A nummy treat for yours truly. At least I'm getting one cookie out of this," he declared as he proceeded to merrily bite off his nemesis's head.
A moment later, the same decapitated head was arcing through the air like a cannonball shot from Spike's mouth.
"HOT! HOT! HOT! HOT!" he hollered as he sped to the sink, wrapped his mouth around the tap, and turned on the cold water, emitting a high pitched whimper through his nose all the while.
When he finally removed his head from the sink, Spike looked as though he'd been through a war. His tongue was lolling out of his mouth, and his face was beet red.
"What the…"
He knew the cookie had cooled off. It had to be something in it. His eyes fell on the little tin boxes of spices still lined up on the countertop, and he read their labels again.
"Allspice. Ginger. Cayenne. Cloves. Back it up a second… cayenne? What happened to the cinnamon?" He stared at the large red letters. Obviously, he'd been in a bit of a rush when he'd been searching for another container of cinnamon. There was enough powdered cayenne pepper in his pretty little cookies to start a five-alarm blaze. He glared at the headless vampire ballerina cookie that lay on the table.
"I strongly dislike you," he mumbled pathetically as he hit his head repeatedly against the fridge, "and this is your fault. Somehow. Not sure how. But it is."
With a miserable groan, he dumped his masterpieces down the garbage disposal and watched them whirl to their little cookie deaths. The chip, slightly confused, gave him a sharp twinge of pain.
"Bloody lovely," Spike groused as he tramped off to the bathroom and downed a pair of asprins to chase away the migraine.
When he returned, it was with exactly two resolutions. The first was that he was going to make the best of this damned dinner if it was the last thing he did. The other was that, the second everything was done, he was going to go home and get plastered. How, he had no idea, since he hadn't a single dime to his name, but even if it meant terrorizing the bums on the corner for spare change, he was going to be flying higher than Santa's sleigh come midnight.
"So, all I have to do is wash the dishes, set the table , pull the bird out of the oven, and scram," he told himself. "They've got one of them dishwasher thingies, so it can't be too bad…"
Spike swung open the door of the dishwasher to find a note hanging from the top level.
Dawn,
I knew you'd forget it's broken! Good thing I put this here or you'd have flooded the floor… again… for the fifth time.
Your I-told-you-so sister
"It's busted? I have to do all of these by HAND?" he moaned. The tottering piles of pots, pans, bowls, measuring cups, cutting boards, and various apparatuses he didn't even remember using stood around him like so many skyscrapers. He briefly considered smashing all of them to bits, but then sighed and started in on the nearest set, shuddering to think of what Angelus would say if he could see him now.
Over an hour later, Spike had prune hands. He had detergent burns. He had scalded his forearms. He had even manged to get cayenne pepper in the cut he'd gotten from the tinfoil box. He had also used every last dish towel in the kitchen. But the dishes… ah, the dishes were done! Clear countertops as far as the eye could see greeted his weary countenance.
He grabbed an armload of the good china and a red tartan tablecloth from the linen drawer, and began to set the living room table. Unfortunately, since the entire dinner was going to consist of storebought rolls, a turkey and very runny potatoes, the board looked rather barren. In an effort to spruce things up a bit, Spike grabbed a pair of candlesticks off the fireplace and plonked them on the table. It actually did make things look a bit more festive. Reaching in his jeans' pocket, he pulled out his Zippo and lit the candles. On impulse, he crunched up the day's newspaper, shoved it under the fireplace grate, put on a few more pieces of wood, and started a merrily crackeling fire, creating a warm, festive glow in the Summers living room. What with the tree and the and the presents, the stockings hung from the mantle and the good china set out, even though things weren't quite perfect, it looked downright cozy.
"Not bad, old boy, if I do say so myself," he said, giving Joyce's picture on the fireplace a cocky wink. "Not bad at all."
It was, of course, at this moment that all hell chose to break loose.