Chapter 3: Back Into the Fold
Xander stood, staring at the two visitors, an expression of sort of deadened senses and surprise coloring his face. Buffy recovered quicker and nudged him out of his trance. "Huh---what? O-oh, yeah sure come in," he stammered, stepping out of the way for Anya while motioning her in. Spike started to follow her, but Xander soon stepped back into the doorframe, blocking him. "Um excuse me, but we didn't say any sociopathic rapists were welcome here," Xander cut snidely, rejoicing in Spike's guilt-ridden response as he began to slump out the door.
"Xander!" Buffy exclaimed. No matter how many good intentions Xander was made of, he was becoming tirelessly tactless when it came to Spike. Not that anyone had any obligations to be polite to Spike it was just . . . Buffy gazed at Spike uncertainly and wondered why she did feel an obligation, albeit, the tiniest, almost non-existent one to him, especially after what he did.
"Attempted rapist," Anya corrected brightly, sounding as if this redeemed Spike to the manner of a saint. Xander alternated incredulous glances at Anya and looks of pure hatred at Spike.
"Well you heard me, perioxed scum. Out! Make with the track marks. No one wants you here."
"I want him here, Xander," Anya insisted firmly. "He's with me, and if he's not welcome, I'm not welcome." Xander cast a sullen and spiteful glare.
"Oh. I see. So not so different from days of yore huh? You and him, buddying it up, making with the horizontal mambo in other venues of retail?"
Anya frowned desultorily and Spike straightened, incensed. "Careful Harris," he warned, the old edge of danger lurking in his voice.
"Or what? What are you gonna do to me, Spike? Try gnawing me to death? Use me for your teething toy? I'm not really shaking in my boots here, bud."
Spike turned to Anya. "I can make a wish on him right? Grant him penile warts and flamey, burning infections? You can do that right?"
"I could. Let's just see how this meeting goes first though," Anya whispered back conspiratorially.
"Stop that!" Xander interrupted. He looked despairingly at Anya. "Look, if he comes with the package, I'm sorry. I want to talk to you, but not with him around, if that's the way it goes you can leave---"
"He can come in," Buffy said softly. All three turned to her in surprise. Spike gazed at her in the kind of heartbreaking, awed stare he gave her when he first saw the night she came back. It gave her chills then, as well as now. She looked at him resolutely and any notion she had about feeling nothing for the vampire before her faded. Now she just had to figure out which feeling it was. Xander just gaped at her, appalled. She returned his look with a steely, expressionless one.
"Buffy can I talk to you?" He motioned her away from Spike and Anya and hunched over near her secretively. Buffy crossed her arms and Xander began speaking to her with his characteristic emphatic gesticulating. "Okay. Don't take this the wrong way, but . . . has your brain self-imploded and begun to trickle out your eardrums?! This is Spike we're talking about."
"I know that! And I'm saying he can come in. I knew it had to come to this eventually." She gave a tired sigh. "I should have known he would come tromping back to Sunnydale."
"Buffy! How can you be so calm and composed about this?!"
"Because I don't have a choice," Buffy hissed. "I could rant and rave and carry on hissy fits about what Spike did to me, but it's pointless. I have to handle this like an adult."
"Handling this like an adult wouldn't count out handling splintery stakes would it? 'Cause I think that would be very mature of you."
Buffy took another serious glance at Spike, who was pretending not to be staring at her and instead conversing with Anya. "I'm not counting out anything just now. But I think we should try approaching this in a civil way first. If wackiness ensues, well then, we'll just see if I have to bring out some necessary stakeage." She said it all in a hushed sort of tone and with a somberly wistful look on her face and for a moment, Xander didn't know if he could believe her. Buffy approached Spike and Anya with strange calmness and motioned them in.
"You um, are welcome in." Anya clambered in first, nervously plopping herself onto the couch as Spike entered a lot more slowly, deliberately, looking at the whole house wonderingly as if he had never seen it before.
"Umm . . . the lil'bit?" Spike said softly as he gazed around the foyer.
Buffy smiled a little. It had been so long since she had heard that nickname, the nickname only Spike uttered. The gentle Spike, the Spike who had stayed a whole summer to protect her sister from the fires of the Hellmouth. The Spike who loved both her and Dawn. Was this the same Spike? "She's upstairs working on some homework."
"Homework? A little early in the year to be starting with that isn't it?"
Buffy laughed. "She said the same thing. Well . . . not as much said as grumbled but . . ." She and Spike exchanged an extremely uncomfortable semi-smile, which Buffy abruptly broke out as she sat down in a chair. Spike twitched where he stood and looked conflicted, not knowing if any false movement would result in immediate death. Finally he settled on standing by the fireplace. Anya and Xander sat a few feet apart on the couch, averting their gaze from each other. Buffy clasped her hands anxiously where she sat. And they all listened to the deafening silence.
"Well," Anya said, her voice always alarmingly chipper. "This is nice isn't it? Not awkward at all, just a friendly gathering of four old friends, yes four old friends who---" Stares from the others silenced her ramblings. Anya was doing this thing lately where she tried to compensate for being so tersely blunt in her observations by saying the opposite situation. She learned a long time ago that part of being human meant giving into the number one human characteristic---denial. She was just practicing this new anti-observant nature of hers, the one where she didn't say what was going on, but instead, what should have been going on. It was as well received as her old nature.
Buffy sighed. "This is . . . weird," she said lamely.
"Really? I going for 'suicidal'," replied Xander.
"We came to talk," Anya explained.
"Really?" Xander was giving the evil eye to Spike. "This guy talks? He's not too busy raping girls?" It was already up and started. Spike lunged towards Xander menacingly and Xander looked about ready to take him up on his offer but Anya separated them.
"Xander, enough!" Buffy exclaimed exasperatedly.
"Buffy---"
"No Xander, I mean it! This thing you have with Spike----it's tired."
Xander stared at her. "This coming from the attentions of his sex offenses?"
"Oh sod off, you bloody ponce!" Spike exploded, frustrated.
"Okay, so I see 'talking' not really going on here," Anya said, trying to mediate. "And we figured that. Which is why we thought it would be a good idea to go to dinner."
Buffy and Xander whirled around towards Anya in surprise. "Who's 'we'?" Xander questioned.
Anya shifted uncomfortably. "Me and . . . Spike. But see, it wouldn't be me and Spike, it would be me and you and Spike and Buffy----"
"Anya, we've got it," Buffy interrupted. "But dinner?"
Anya straightened. "Why not? You and Spike obviously have issues, and so do Xander and I. So if we all have issues, why not double up, talk it all out at the same time whilst enjoying a good meal. Eating and talking, two not entirely sucky activities."
"So what is this, a double date? Because if it is, it's like out of some non-existent nightmare where I wake up in a cold sweat." Xander trembled at the prospect.
"Well if that's what you bipeds are calling it these days," Anya chimed. "Come on. It's not a totally horrible idea. A little conversation, a little risotto, what's the big?" She simply couldn't understand all the stoic glances she was rewarded with.
"You know Anya, maybe this wasn't such a good idea," Spike mumbled.
"For once, I'm inclined to agree with-----that," Xander spat.
"Spike!" Anya looked at her partner-in-crime dismayingly. "We . . . we already planned this, the . . ." she neared him and whispered to him roughly. "The gifts!"
Spike nodded, but looked over at Buffy sadly in another penetrating glance. "I'm just thinking that maybe we---I didn't think this through . . . maybe . . . maybe it's too late to repair the damage I've done." Xander was about to open his mouth to agree, but Buffy hastened his comments with a hand motion. She had been staring back at him, silent and eerily expressionless the whole time.
"Maybe it's a good idea," she said, never taking her eyes off Spike. Anya brightened, Xander fell back into alarmed disagreement.
"Buffy!"
"What? Anya's right. A lot happened last year. And maybe . . . now we can find ways to deal with it . . . to heal. We owe ourselves that." She made sure to make her point firmly as she gazed at Spike. "Closure." Spike seemed to painfully understand everything eclipsed in that little word and nodded back slowly.
The occupants of the living room had self-consciously turned silent once more, but thankfully, the thunder of a teenager galloping down the stairs interrupted what could have turned into an eternal stretch of awkwardness.
"I finished my homework!" Dawn called brightly, heading for the kitchen. "Wasn't that hard, just an essay about what we did this summer. I just basically put 'slept, ate, tramped around like an immobile slug'." She giggled heartily as she came back to the living room, bearing cookies. "I couldn't really put down the tidbits about me training up and slaying vampires though, I don't think Mrs. Olsen would have really gotten that----" A cookie tumbled out of her slackened mouth when she caught sight of who was standing apprehensively next to Anya. "Spike?" she whispered.
He turned to Buffy. "You didn't tell me she was slaying," he said, an eyebrow cocked in concern. Buffy shrugged.
"Spike!" Dawn continued mumbling incredulously. "Y-you're . . ."
"Back," he finished with a small, nervous smile. "How are you, Nibblet?" He rubbed the back of his neck uncertainly and shuffled his feet about. He had been aching to see Dawn ever since he stepped in the door, almost as much as he had to see Buffy. Dawn was the only person in the universe he was sure who loved him, loved him with that pure, undying, child-like, idealistic, adoring kind of love. The kind of love that placed the object of the affections in a position of eternal "Knight-in-Shining-Armor" status, the kind of love----
"What are you doing here?" she snarled darkly, interrupting his illusions of her welcoming him back in a joy-filled embraced. He looked a bit jarred for a second, unprepared for such a hostile response.
"Why, um, I-I'm back. It should be pretty apparent----"
"I know, but why did you come back?" Dawn's eyes narrowed into dangerous slits and Spike suddenly felt hopelessly lost for words.
"I-I . . . I thought you'd be happy, Platelet---"
"Happy?" she said flatly. "Happy that you'd show up after months of never calling, never telling us where you were? Happy that you can just be 'oh hey, I'm back' after just up and leaving without so much as 'goodbye'? H-happy that you can even be here after what you . . . did to my sister?!" Her eyes were shining now, her chin jutted out in anger. Spike seemed overcome with a look of pain as Buffy tried swallowing the sudden lump in her throat. It's funny how Dawn was so much like her, yet so much simpler as well. Dawn was never burdened with the convoluted sense of morality the way Buffy was. She was young, but clear-headed and intelligent enough to see things for what they were. She never saw Spike as the cookie-cutter mold of 'evil vampire' Buffy put him in, although she knew that it was more complicated than that. Dawn loved Spike, just Spike, and she expressed it. Now she was rightfully angry at Spike and she was expressing it. Buffy wished she could break it down as easily as her sister.
"Dawn, I---" Spike was still lost and grappling for anything to say to redeem himself.
"What? Thought you could just come back and I'd forgive you for what you've done?" She approached him and looked at him earnestly, a hint of the old tenderness lurking beneath her hardened anger. She shook her head, tears glistening in her eyes and for a moment, she was almost pleading with him, trying to find that old white knight she knew. "Why did you do it, Spike? I-I thought you c-couldn't . . . that you weren't capable of . . . I trusted you, with my life, with my sister's life . . ."
Spike was beginning to tear up himself and looked at her speechlessly. "Dawn---"
"I guess I should of listened to them all along when they said that you were a monster," her voice grated as she hardened again and turned away with a rebellious shake of her long brown mane as she ran back up the stairs and slammed her bedroom door.
Everyone fell victim to the inexorable silence again, especially Spike. He stood shaken and shocked after Dawn's display and was visibly wracked with guilt. Buffy just stared at her hands, tears welling up in her eyes as well as she quietly sat stiffly on the couch. Even Xander, who could have taken this as an opportunity to cut into Spike with usual fervency, was appropriately quiet. Only Anya would have what it took to try to brightly salvage what was left of the evening's ruins.
"So Thursday at 8 sound okay?"