Chapter 2
Tara knew the sun had risen even before she opened her eyes. Frankly, she was putting off opening them. The liquor and the mood from last night had worn off and she was feeling acute shame at her melodramatic behavior. She squinched her lids shut a little tighter - melodrama that was witnessed by somebody else. Someone who still in her stupid dorm room. Someone who was not known for his understanding or kindness.
Wait - she nixed that thought. Something told her that Spike didn't plan to tease her about any of this. For some reason she could even confidently believe that he wouldn't tell anyone else - just something about the way he'd been. But still...she'd made some sort of deal with him and she needed to make sure he wasn't taking it seriously. She intended to tell him he could go home now and that he didn't need to do anything else -- it was just a bad night and she was being maudlin.
She rolled over, a speech poised on her tongue, and found that Spike was not there to tell.
She blinked, looked around the small room. She found her magazines neatly stacked on her coffee table. She saw her mug sitting in the dish drainer, evidently washed. When she got up, she found the pills she had dropped were no longer on the floor, and the Schnapps bottle had been drained and thrown in the trash.
Tara felt her eyes well up again. She felt ridiculous, pathetic, but there seemed to be no stopping it. She smiled a little at the thought of how Spike had probably drained the rest of the liquor - she'd doubted he'd let it go to waste.
Even so, she thought quickly, she had to find him soon and make sure that he knew he shouldn't go through any more trouble on her account. It wasn't exactly sage advice to let Spike take over her counseling. He was a vampire, chipped or not, and she was naive to trust him. For one thing, he was obsessed with Buffy and would probably forget all about her the minute Buffy threw him a bone. Her cheeks flushed hot - she felt stupid for not remembering that sooner.
She would be fine...until the next time I'm not she thought cynically. A cold, knowing wave passed over her, but she shook her head against the knowledge it brought. If it gets bad, I can always...go to the counseling center, or something... she thought thickly. She turned toward her bathroom, dimly considering a shower or perhaps just going back to bed...
She found a note, taped to the inside of her front door.
Tara felt a tingly flash of something like fear or excitement. She unfolded the note, which simply said that he'd had to go to beat the sunrise, but that he certainly expected to see her again that evening, safe and sound. Tara wondered how he could tell that she'd do what he asked, because he was right.
The last part of the note told her to open her door. She did so, to find a bag at her feet. On the bag was scrawled "Reason #1."
She opened it, to find a thermos. She unscrewed the lid and her nose was immediately hit by steam and the aroma of chocolate. Hot cocoa?
She stared at it a minute, sniffed it, then took a careful sip. The warm, fragrant goodness flooded down her throat and into her belly, and the sugar rush shivered into her limbs. She stared some more, and then laughed out loud.
"Okay," she giggled to herself. "Chocolate's a gimme."
++++++++++++++++
Later that night, she was staring at a neon sign, listening to its buzz, and wondering what on Earth she'd gotten herself into. She looked back to Spike, whose face held a kind-but-closed, no-arguments expression. Her stomach flipped with fear - he would never let her out of this.
"A tattoo?"
"Yep."
"That's ridiculous, Spike."
"So's offin' yourself."
Tara felt a fresh wave of panic. Why couldn't she be home right now? She screwed up her courage and turned to him, her face as stern as she could make it. She wondered how stern that was. "You *have* to already know I am not the kind of person to get one of these."
Judging by Spike's calm, almost amused reaction, 'not very stern' was her answer. "I know that," he said patiently, "which is why you need me around to think of these things." And then his hand was on her shoulder, steering her toward the door and the bell was ringing as they entered and she was in this fluorescent-lit hell with scary buzzing sounds from the next room and ugly pictures all over the walls.
"So what are you going to get?" he asked.
"*Nothing*." she said. Her heartbeat hammered in her ears. "I can't do this."
"You can do anything you want to."
"I *don't* want to."
"Well then, anything you want to, plus this."
"Spi-ike." She immediately regretted the little whine in her voice. "This isn't me. Tattoos are ugly."
"I dunno," he mused. "I think the proper tattoo on a woman's right sexy."
"Do *you* have any tattoos?"
His face twisted in a leering smirk. "None that I could show you in public."
Ick, Spi-ike. She huffed out a sigh and turned her back to him.
"Look at it this way, love: if you die soon, you won't have to live with it long."
Tara's whirling brained suddenly slowed. For some reason, this bit of Spike-logic was calming her. She looked at him, and he at her. He did a kind of shrug with his face.
She sighed. "Okay."
He grinned. "Atta girl. Now whatta you fancy?"
She looked back at the samples on the walls. Her face scrunched up in distaste. Naked women, dragons, guns - things with too much swirly detail and far too much menace.
"Perhaps the lady might prefer something we've got over here." Tara looked to find a man behind the counter, a tall, barrel-chested guy with bright blue hair and a stud through his bottom lip. He seemed nice enough, though, and endlessly calm, like he'd seen everything. She smiled nervously at him, then followed his pointing hand to a new wall of samples.
Oh, he was right, these were different. She drew closer to the wall and traced a few designs with her finger. Yin-yang symbols, Celtic designs, moons and stars, all smaller and more discreet. She turned and smiled again at the blue-haired man, who nodded politely and walked away, taking a drag on his cigarette.
She looked at an ornate pentagram. "Maybe this one..." she said thoughtfully.
Spike peered at it over her shoulder. "You fancy that?"
Tara shrugged, finding she suddenly had to blink a lot to keep the wall from blurring. "Willow and I sometimes talked about getting matching pentagrams of some kind or another."
Spike thumped his hand over the pentagram picture, covering it. "No," he said adamantly.
Tara started, forgetting her former emotion in favor of gaping at him in surprise. He met her gaze. "It can't be a you-and-Red thing," he said firmly. "No intruders. You have to choose something that you love, all by yourself."
The resulting epiphany made Tara's arms cover with goosebumps. She stared at Spike, wide-eyed. He took in her look, smirked faintly and then turned his head down and away, seeming embarrassed.
She turned back to the wall, her fingers floating over the many drawings like they were rendered in Braille. She moved to a new wall, then squatted down to peer at something in a low corner. Her eyes lit up. "Oh!"
Spike squatted too, recovering his decorum with a crooked grin. "I take it we have a winner?"
Tara turned her now-glowing face to him, her finger settled on a picture of a quirky little laughing bear with his paw extended, the old Bear wheel alignment logo. "The Happy Bear! I can't believe they have this! I used to walk by a mechanic's shop with this bear on the sign, every day when I went to grade school." She turned back to trace it lovingly. "It was my favorite."
Spike peered at it, then nodded in amazement. "I 'member that. Those used to be all over the place, way back when. *Way* before your time, actually." He looked approvingly at the 20-something before him. "That's a classic. You've got taste."
They kept looking at each other just a moment more, smiling and nodding.
Tara couldn't quite describe the feeling of getting a tattoo -- sort of like being stung over and over again by a very angry, precise bee - millions of times a second, it felt like. The scraping sensation came right up to her pain threshold, but although she kept expecting it to, never went over it, never became more than she could stand. She glanced backward at the blue-haired man, wishing she could see what he was creating just to the left of her shoulder blade, but also not wanting to move too much or fidget. To be honest, she was not worried, just sort of giddy with the anticipation of it. She trusted him.
In about a half an hour, he was finished. "All done," he announced, in that calm way.
Spike nodded approvingly when she showed him, and with the help of a hand mirror she was finally able to see the results in another mirror on the wall. She was delighted at how perfect it was - she couldn't imagine how Mr. Blue Hair had gotten it so exact.
"Now then," Spike said carefully, once they were outside. "I want you to describe to me the process of what's just happened."
Tara looked at him quizzically. Spike's eyebrows said "humor me".
"Well," she began. "First I didn't want to get a tattoo, and I was scared and skeptical, and then you wouldn't let me not do it, and I found something I liked that I didn't expect to, and then, when I was getting it it kind of hurt but I could take it, and now..."
She peered back at her shoulder, ridiculously, since the new decoration was covered by a bandage *and* her shirt and coat. She couldn't help it - she was dizzy with a kind of happy disbelief, still charged with adrenaline.
"Now," she resumed, "I feel really cool and brave and I have something to show for it."
She giggled a little, and offered her face to him, to find his expression had become significant, and impossibly soft.
"There you are, then."
++++++++++++++++
Spike walked back to the crypt with a bounce in his boots that he would have thought bloody poofy, had he thought about it. But he wasn't thinking about it.
He felt pretty damn good about tonight's events. About making an impact on Tara, making an actual difference in her view of something, even if it was just tattoos. For changing her mind.
He felt a sudden warm flush up his neck and over his scalp: for touching her.
Without, you know...touching her.
Whatever you called it, it was a hell of a lot more satisfying than pounding his head against the Wall of Slayer. Granted, it was only a temporary distraction from that wall. An unpleasant wave replaced the warm, shivery one of a moment ago.
But then it was gone. Things were still nice for now. He resumed grinning.
And then he saw them.
They were headed his way, but when Dawn saw him, he watched her suggesting another route to her friends, steering them matter-of-factly away, with them never the wiser and Dawn shooting him an icy glare before turning to join them.
He wanted to fucking kill something.
He wanted to destroy everything in sight. He saw a mailbox near him and could instantly see himself ripping it free of its anchors and throwing it down the block toward the Bit and her adolescent disdain. He could see it pounding and scraping down the pavement, frightening the piss out of her and her diaper-clad friends who'd look back with everyone else on the block to see him in full game-face, roaring at them with power and madness. He'd trash everything within reach, terrorize every human in view, ripping limbs and draining blood till he was gorged.
The resulting pain in his skull would feel well-deserved.
The impulse shot through his limbs once, twice, barely contained, his whole body wracking with effort of stopping himself.
Because he had to.
If he ever wanted another chance with the Slayer, if he ever hoped to ride out this latest bit of Scooby hysteria and be granted even a moment of her time...he couldn't make things worse. He had to keep it together.
He stood rooted in place, still except for the angry heaving of his chest, the useless twitching of his fingers. He turned toward the mailbox, galled by its continued presence.
"S'your lucky day, you piece of shit," he muttered at it.
The mailbox did not respond.
++++++++++++++++
Tara knew the sun had risen even before she opened her eyes. Frankly, she was putting off opening them. The liquor and the mood from last night had worn off and she was feeling acute shame at her melodramatic behavior. She squinched her lids shut a little tighter - melodrama that was witnessed by somebody else. Someone who still in her stupid dorm room. Someone who was not known for his understanding or kindness.
Wait - she nixed that thought. Something told her that Spike didn't plan to tease her about any of this. For some reason she could even confidently believe that he wouldn't tell anyone else - just something about the way he'd been. But still...she'd made some sort of deal with him and she needed to make sure he wasn't taking it seriously. She intended to tell him he could go home now and that he didn't need to do anything else -- it was just a bad night and she was being maudlin.
She rolled over, a speech poised on her tongue, and found that Spike was not there to tell.
She blinked, looked around the small room. She found her magazines neatly stacked on her coffee table. She saw her mug sitting in the dish drainer, evidently washed. When she got up, she found the pills she had dropped were no longer on the floor, and the Schnapps bottle had been drained and thrown in the trash.
Tara felt her eyes well up again. She felt ridiculous, pathetic, but there seemed to be no stopping it. She smiled a little at the thought of how Spike had probably drained the rest of the liquor - she'd doubted he'd let it go to waste.
Even so, she thought quickly, she had to find him soon and make sure that he knew he shouldn't go through any more trouble on her account. It wasn't exactly sage advice to let Spike take over her counseling. He was a vampire, chipped or not, and she was naive to trust him. For one thing, he was obsessed with Buffy and would probably forget all about her the minute Buffy threw him a bone. Her cheeks flushed hot - she felt stupid for not remembering that sooner.
She would be fine...until the next time I'm not she thought cynically. A cold, knowing wave passed over her, but she shook her head against the knowledge it brought. If it gets bad, I can always...go to the counseling center, or something... she thought thickly. She turned toward her bathroom, dimly considering a shower or perhaps just going back to bed...
She found a note, taped to the inside of her front door.
Tara felt a tingly flash of something like fear or excitement. She unfolded the note, which simply said that he'd had to go to beat the sunrise, but that he certainly expected to see her again that evening, safe and sound. Tara wondered how he could tell that she'd do what he asked, because he was right.
The last part of the note told her to open her door. She did so, to find a bag at her feet. On the bag was scrawled "Reason #1."
She opened it, to find a thermos. She unscrewed the lid and her nose was immediately hit by steam and the aroma of chocolate. Hot cocoa?
She stared at it a minute, sniffed it, then took a careful sip. The warm, fragrant goodness flooded down her throat and into her belly, and the sugar rush shivered into her limbs. She stared some more, and then laughed out loud.
"Okay," she giggled to herself. "Chocolate's a gimme."
++++++++++++++++
Later that night, she was staring at a neon sign, listening to its buzz, and wondering what on Earth she'd gotten herself into. She looked back to Spike, whose face held a kind-but-closed, no-arguments expression. Her stomach flipped with fear - he would never let her out of this.
"A tattoo?"
"Yep."
"That's ridiculous, Spike."
"So's offin' yourself."
Tara felt a fresh wave of panic. Why couldn't she be home right now? She screwed up her courage and turned to him, her face as stern as she could make it. She wondered how stern that was. "You *have* to already know I am not the kind of person to get one of these."
Judging by Spike's calm, almost amused reaction, 'not very stern' was her answer. "I know that," he said patiently, "which is why you need me around to think of these things." And then his hand was on her shoulder, steering her toward the door and the bell was ringing as they entered and she was in this fluorescent-lit hell with scary buzzing sounds from the next room and ugly pictures all over the walls.
"So what are you going to get?" he asked.
"*Nothing*." she said. Her heartbeat hammered in her ears. "I can't do this."
"You can do anything you want to."
"I *don't* want to."
"Well then, anything you want to, plus this."
"Spi-ike." She immediately regretted the little whine in her voice. "This isn't me. Tattoos are ugly."
"I dunno," he mused. "I think the proper tattoo on a woman's right sexy."
"Do *you* have any tattoos?"
His face twisted in a leering smirk. "None that I could show you in public."
Ick, Spi-ike. She huffed out a sigh and turned her back to him.
"Look at it this way, love: if you die soon, you won't have to live with it long."
Tara's whirling brained suddenly slowed. For some reason, this bit of Spike-logic was calming her. She looked at him, and he at her. He did a kind of shrug with his face.
She sighed. "Okay."
He grinned. "Atta girl. Now whatta you fancy?"
She looked back at the samples on the walls. Her face scrunched up in distaste. Naked women, dragons, guns - things with too much swirly detail and far too much menace.
"Perhaps the lady might prefer something we've got over here." Tara looked to find a man behind the counter, a tall, barrel-chested guy with bright blue hair and a stud through his bottom lip. He seemed nice enough, though, and endlessly calm, like he'd seen everything. She smiled nervously at him, then followed his pointing hand to a new wall of samples.
Oh, he was right, these were different. She drew closer to the wall and traced a few designs with her finger. Yin-yang symbols, Celtic designs, moons and stars, all smaller and more discreet. She turned and smiled again at the blue-haired man, who nodded politely and walked away, taking a drag on his cigarette.
She looked at an ornate pentagram. "Maybe this one..." she said thoughtfully.
Spike peered at it over her shoulder. "You fancy that?"
Tara shrugged, finding she suddenly had to blink a lot to keep the wall from blurring. "Willow and I sometimes talked about getting matching pentagrams of some kind or another."
Spike thumped his hand over the pentagram picture, covering it. "No," he said adamantly.
Tara started, forgetting her former emotion in favor of gaping at him in surprise. He met her gaze. "It can't be a you-and-Red thing," he said firmly. "No intruders. You have to choose something that you love, all by yourself."
The resulting epiphany made Tara's arms cover with goosebumps. She stared at Spike, wide-eyed. He took in her look, smirked faintly and then turned his head down and away, seeming embarrassed.
She turned back to the wall, her fingers floating over the many drawings like they were rendered in Braille. She moved to a new wall, then squatted down to peer at something in a low corner. Her eyes lit up. "Oh!"
Spike squatted too, recovering his decorum with a crooked grin. "I take it we have a winner?"
Tara turned her now-glowing face to him, her finger settled on a picture of a quirky little laughing bear with his paw extended, the old Bear wheel alignment logo. "The Happy Bear! I can't believe they have this! I used to walk by a mechanic's shop with this bear on the sign, every day when I went to grade school." She turned back to trace it lovingly. "It was my favorite."
Spike peered at it, then nodded in amazement. "I 'member that. Those used to be all over the place, way back when. *Way* before your time, actually." He looked approvingly at the 20-something before him. "That's a classic. You've got taste."
They kept looking at each other just a moment more, smiling and nodding.
Tara couldn't quite describe the feeling of getting a tattoo -- sort of like being stung over and over again by a very angry, precise bee - millions of times a second, it felt like. The scraping sensation came right up to her pain threshold, but although she kept expecting it to, never went over it, never became more than she could stand. She glanced backward at the blue-haired man, wishing she could see what he was creating just to the left of her shoulder blade, but also not wanting to move too much or fidget. To be honest, she was not worried, just sort of giddy with the anticipation of it. She trusted him.
In about a half an hour, he was finished. "All done," he announced, in that calm way.
Spike nodded approvingly when she showed him, and with the help of a hand mirror she was finally able to see the results in another mirror on the wall. She was delighted at how perfect it was - she couldn't imagine how Mr. Blue Hair had gotten it so exact.
"Now then," Spike said carefully, once they were outside. "I want you to describe to me the process of what's just happened."
Tara looked at him quizzically. Spike's eyebrows said "humor me".
"Well," she began. "First I didn't want to get a tattoo, and I was scared and skeptical, and then you wouldn't let me not do it, and I found something I liked that I didn't expect to, and then, when I was getting it it kind of hurt but I could take it, and now..."
She peered back at her shoulder, ridiculously, since the new decoration was covered by a bandage *and* her shirt and coat. She couldn't help it - she was dizzy with a kind of happy disbelief, still charged with adrenaline.
"Now," she resumed, "I feel really cool and brave and I have something to show for it."
She giggled a little, and offered her face to him, to find his expression had become significant, and impossibly soft.
"There you are, then."
++++++++++++++++
Spike walked back to the crypt with a bounce in his boots that he would have thought bloody poofy, had he thought about it. But he wasn't thinking about it.
He felt pretty damn good about tonight's events. About making an impact on Tara, making an actual difference in her view of something, even if it was just tattoos. For changing her mind.
He felt a sudden warm flush up his neck and over his scalp: for touching her.
Without, you know...touching her.
Whatever you called it, it was a hell of a lot more satisfying than pounding his head against the Wall of Slayer. Granted, it was only a temporary distraction from that wall. An unpleasant wave replaced the warm, shivery one of a moment ago.
But then it was gone. Things were still nice for now. He resumed grinning.
And then he saw them.
They were headed his way, but when Dawn saw him, he watched her suggesting another route to her friends, steering them matter-of-factly away, with them never the wiser and Dawn shooting him an icy glare before turning to join them.
He wanted to fucking kill something.
He wanted to destroy everything in sight. He saw a mailbox near him and could instantly see himself ripping it free of its anchors and throwing it down the block toward the Bit and her adolescent disdain. He could see it pounding and scraping down the pavement, frightening the piss out of her and her diaper-clad friends who'd look back with everyone else on the block to see him in full game-face, roaring at them with power and madness. He'd trash everything within reach, terrorize every human in view, ripping limbs and draining blood till he was gorged.
The resulting pain in his skull would feel well-deserved.
The impulse shot through his limbs once, twice, barely contained, his whole body wracking with effort of stopping himself.
Because he had to.
If he ever wanted another chance with the Slayer, if he ever hoped to ride out this latest bit of Scooby hysteria and be granted even a moment of her time...he couldn't make things worse. He had to keep it together.
He stood rooted in place, still except for the angry heaving of his chest, the useless twitching of his fingers. He turned toward the mailbox, galled by its continued presence.
"S'your lucky day, you piece of shit," he muttered at it.
The mailbox did not respond.
++++++++++++++++