Disclaimer: I do not own any the characters of BtVS, I'm just a girl with an infatuation for Spike and lots of time on her hands.
Rating: PG-13 for language.
Feedback: Of course! Feel free to email me feedback at Buggers267@aol.com if you like too.
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Chapter 3: Roommates
She entered the tiny apartment with a sigh, throwing the keys to a small desk. He stood outside the door, shuffling his feet awkwardly. She looked around and saw him staring through the doorway darkly so she sighed and rested against the frame.
Raising an eyebrow, she asked coolly, "Coming in?"
He sniffed and jostled his hands around in his pockets. "I find this quite strange."
She indifferently abandoned the door and disappeared into the apartment. "I don't like it any more than you do," she called. "But it's better than the alternative of you lying dead in the gutter somewhere."
He pursed his lips and entered the threshold with a frown. "Thanks for the jolly welcome," he muttered, shrugging of his duster. He studied the tidy little apartment carefully. It consisted of a bed, a desk, a dresser, a small bathroom tucked off somewhere and about five square feet of kitchen area. "Nice digs you got," he lied. " Small, but nice."
She emerged from the bathroom with a bottle of iodine, cotton balls and bandages. "Emphasis on small," she agreed. "It's all I can afford on my miniscule income."
"So you're perfectly willing to room with another flatmate? Wouldn't cramp your style?"
She gave him a steady, pointed look. "Didn't think it would matter much to you."
He returned her look with a glare. "Look, don't think you're doing me any favors. Contrary to what you believe, I don't particularly enjoy staying with people who can't stand me."
She sighed and approached him, trying to lead him to a chair. "I didn't say I couldn't stand you, Spike. I can. I just don't know how much of you I can."
He wrenched away from her grip. "Well thanks a bloody bunch for the courtesy you've shown me, but I think I'll be on my way. I'd rather sleep in a cardboard box than deal with this."
"Oh stop," she sighed tiredly. "You can't go back out there. That guy is still looking for you."
"Fabulous. Maybe next time he'll knock me deaf so I won't ever have to listen to your harpy yammering again."
She forced him into a seated position in the chair. "Sit. I have to take care of your injuries."
He eyed her skeptically. "I've gotta say, your version of Mother Teresa comes off a might bitchy."
She ignored him and dunked the iodine onto a cotton ball. "This'll sting," she said, reaching for his forehead.
"Yeah, well I figured living with you would be no picnic." He winced as the cotton made contact with his brow. "Oh, you meant the cut."
She made a face, but continued with her work with the bandages and the cotton balls. Quiet for a moment, Spike stared at her as she tended to him emotionlessly. He groaned a bit as she continued to dab his cuts, indifferent to his pain, but he relaxed a little as he finally asked softly, "Well . . . is it better?"
Her face was hovering near his as she taped a bandage to his forehead, but she didn't even turn to look at him. "Is what better?"
His eyes were fixed on her seriously. "Y'know . . . this. Being here. The whole deal."
She paused and drew her face away to look him in the eyes. His blue pupils were shining earnestly with a kind of emptiness that she could more than understand. She looked down quickly and began gathering the supplies together. "Does it matter?" she whispered brusquely.
"'Course it matters. It always matters."
"Does it matter to you?"
He paused. "It's different for me."
"What makes it so different?"
He grew visibly sullen, lips twitching. "I didn't leave better things. They left me. Didn't have much choice in the matter." His eyes were again on her, and she couldn't help but feel a pang of guilt. But she shook out of it and resumed with her apathetic front.
"Well neither did I."
"Yeah, but you make it sound so weight-of-the-worldly, like being here is such torture."
She straightened, offended. "I never said that."
"Didn't have to. You act like it. You've got this whole martyr complex going on. At least you got a roof over your head. At least you got a steady paycheck. More than I can say for myself."
"Wow Spike. You've just opened up my eyes. I can see now that I've got riches of the heart beyond the telling of it," she deadpanned.
"No need for glibness. I'm just saying if you hate it so much here, why'd you ever leave Sunnydale?"
She leveled a deathly look at him. He had entered into dangerous territory. "You know why," she murmured.
"I know why you think you left. Or what you tried to convince yourself into believing when you left. But that doesn't give me the real reason."
She sat back and laughed mirthlessly. "You have me figured out Spike? Highly unlikely."
He cocked an eyebrow at her and continued. "You left because your honey had an extreme case of bipolar disorder. He jumped off the high end and took you down with him. So you had to kill him and it suddenly turned you into Joan of Arc."
She flew up and rage sparked from her hazeled orbs. "Spike," she said in a cautionary tone that encompassed lurking fire. "Shut up."
Ignoring her, he lit up a cigarette lazily and carried on with his dissertation. "Sounds like a right waste if you ask me. He was worthless creature, soul or not."
Springing up from the chair, she shook her head furiously and began to pace the room. "No one did ask you. We are so not talking about this, Spike. Leave it alone."
He was relentless. "I mean, come on. With a soul, he feeds on helpless mothers and attacks innocent teenagers----"
"No one would call you innocent, Spike."
"And without one, he harbors apocalyptic aspirations and an insatiable thirst for chaos."
She grit her teeth. "You don't know what you're talking about. You have no idea what you're talking about."
"So really, kind of a chump, he was. Yet you still think he's worth getting worked up over."
"What about you?" she fired back harshly. "You're going to tell me the world crumbled the day you staked Dru?"
His features hardened and she knew she had hit the mark she wanted. "It crumbled for me," he rasped out roughly.
"Why Spike? Was it her dazzling display of logical reasoning? Or maybe it was her perfectly normal and all-consuming fixation for dolls. What made her so worthy of getting worked up over, huh?"
"I loved her!" He snapped back with such wrath that it alarmed Buffy for second. Casting a dark look down at her hands, she pursed her lips and replied quietly,
"Well I loved him too."
He clenched his teeth and shook his head. "Not the way I loved Dru."
Her eyes inflamed once more, she scoffed. "That's right. Because you're the only one in the world who can understand how to really love."
He looked up at her dangerously. "It wasn't love with you and Angel. It was obsession."
Shocked, her face went blank. "What are you talking about, Spike?"
"It was like a drug, wasn't it? Him being so bad. Come on, don't tell me you don't see it. Only the sickest girl in the world would fall for a two-hundred-year-old vampire. And a girl who's the slayer, no less."
She bit her lip and stalked to the kitchen. She had had enough. She aimlessly and frantically searched around in the kitchen for something to distract her from Spike. She clattered around with the pots and pans, hoping the sound would detract from Spike's stupid, hurtful lies. Except what made them so hurtful was the fact that they weren't lies. His even voice just rose over the noise.
"Admit it. You like the bad guys. Or . . . guy I should say. But considering he was two sides to an equally threatening coin, I reserve the right to make it plural."
She dropped a pot on the floor futilely and looked up helplessly. She was giving up. She couldn't stop his tirades. They just kept coming. The tears began forming under her eyes, so weakly, she whispered, "Spike . . ."
"You get off on the danger. It's a typical suburban valley girl impulse, but with you, it's ten times as twisted. Because he's a vampire and you're the vampire slayer. You like that he hurt you. For some reason, you think you deserve it. That's why you're here, exiling yourself from the real people who love you. The people you've left who need you. You don't care, all you care about is the burn he gave you. The burn you craved."
His words were vaguely razor-edged and malicious and she didn't want to listen anymore. "Stop it!" she cried.
But he was already on a roll, trying to bury her with his storm of barbed words. "It wasn't love. It was fascination. It was perverse compulsion. You like knowing that your fucking around with death, don't you?" He knew he was hurting her, but the words wouldn't stop, unfurling out of his sharp mouth like an exorcism.
That was the straw that broke her back. Infuriated, she suddenly found herself flung upon him, slapping him, despite his injuries. "Shut up!" she screamed. "Just shut up!"
He let her blows rain down on him, not feeling the pain. They were clumsy, for one thing, and hardly made an impact. Besides, he never really felt anything anymore when beaten. He was beaten down enough. But now, some life flickered in him as she hit him, tears running down her face. As she continued screaming and slapping him, he suddenly caught her frail wrists in her hands and grasped them tightly.
Hiccuping a sob, she stopped and stared back at him as he glowered. There was something in his expression that made her know that he was just as lost and broken as she was, despite how abusive his words had been. He was like a reflection of everything she had known and felt for the past few months. Even though she was the Slayer, far excelling him in strength and prowess, they were equals. He somehow understood and knew her. It was the reason he could hurt her so much. And she knew he was only hurting her because she had hurt him too. For a moment, they just sat there in silence, gazing at each other, mystified. She straddled his lap and he held her hands inches from his chest. His face had changed and grown softer somehow and she became aware of it, awkwardly. Suddenly uncomfortable with the position, she freed her hands from his grip and snarled under her breath, "Go to hell."
He blinked twice as if he had broken out of a spell. Baring his lips back from his teeth, he growled back, "Yeah, you like to send all your boys there, don't you?"
She climbed off of him quickly and grabbed her apron off the desk. "This isn't going to work. I want you gone." He opened his mouth to protest, but she cut him off quickly. "You can stay for the night, just to make sure that guy doesn't hunt you down, but that's it. I'm going to do a double shift at the diner and when I come back, I want to see an empty apartment."
"You and me both," Spike snapped back. "I wouldn't stay here if it was the last fucking sanctuary from a world of fire and brimstone!"
"Well good!"
"Fine!"
"Great!"
"Bloody great!"
It would have gone on like this forever if Buffy hadn't finally punctuated the conversation by thunderously slamming the door.
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The whole shift at the diner, Buffy scrubbed the countertops and served customers with unusual vehemence. She accumulated only a few dollars in tips the whole day due to her excessive surliness, but she hardly noticed. Every minute, her mind was preoccupied with hateful thoughts over one bleached-blond resident of her home. In her mind, she envisioned elaborate fantasies in which Spike was shot by a fifty-man firing guard. Or eaten alive by rabid wolves. Or drowned by sword-wielding pirates.
"Damn him, damn him, damn him," she muttered like a chant as she aggressively attacked the lunch top counter. "I hate him. I just . . . I hate him."
"That's obvious," Gina, one of the older waitresses mused. "Didn't register the first hundred times you said it, hun."
Whipping her head up, Buffy realized that she had been oblivious to all else in her fury. "Oh, umm . . . s-sorry. I'm just a little stressed out."
"Dearie, both me and that countertop you've scrubbed the veneer off of know that must be a massive understatement of some kind. Care to tell me what ails you?"
Buffy cautiously eyed Gina, the kind of waitress who was always amiably chattering with customers. She was used to listening to other people's troubles and giving them a good-natured word of advice. Buffy wavered, but shook her head. "It's okay, really."
Gina gave her a sly grin. "Let me guess," she prodded on. "It's a boy, isn't it?"
Buffy's closed her eyes, knowing that Gina imagined a scenario far different than the one currently happening to her. But still, she admitted, "How did you know?"
"I just know about these things. You have that look on your face. That, 'I don't know why I put up with him' look."
She twisted her lips into a half-smile. "I don't."
"No one does, honey. We only stand by our men because it's all we can do."
The thin connection between what Gina and Buffy were incongruously thinking of was loosing its correlation. "Oh that's not it," Buffy said hurriedly. "He's not . . . 'my man'. God no."
Gina gave her a knowing smile. "We all try to convince ourselves of that to make it easier," she replied, nodding affably like the sage. "We try to tell ourselves that they're not a part of our lives. But it never really works, does it?"
Buffy shook her head resolutely. "No, you don't understand. He really isn't. He's not a part of my life at all. He's more like a . . . an unwelcome visitor. A visitor who's soon departing. In fact, he's exiting my life as we speak."
"Right. Which is why you've been stewing in hatred for him all night. Face it, Blondie. They don't really exit your life until they exit your mind. Which he apparently hasn't done yet."
Buffy paused, not knowing how to respond to this. Gina was making the whole situation sound like a simple lover's quarrel. She clearly knew that this wasn't the case, so why did it bother her so much?
The diner clock struck 6am, signifying the end of her shift. Sighing with relief, she handed her apron to Gina. "That's my cue. I'll see you later."
Gina nodded. "'Course dear. And remember . . ." Buffy turned around to face her and Gina smiled reassuringly. "Things will work out between you and that boy of yours. Just you wait and see."
Buffy turned away, filled with disgust. Spike would never be her 'boy', not if she could help it. Good thing he would be gone by the time she came home. She would never have to ponder over the revolting possibility.
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"Spike, what the hell are you doing here?!"
Buffy stood in the door, hands fixed on her hips with dismay. Spike turned around from the tatty old chair that faced the TV.
"Just watching the telly. What are you doin' here?"
"I live here!! You DON'T!!" her voice exploded with frustration. She stormed into the room and flew to turn off the TV. Spike sat up quickly in protest, waving a frantic hand at the screen.
"What are you doing? That's Starsky and Hutch, woman!"
"I don't care if it's buddy-cop show starring the Pope and Courtney Love. I want to know why the hell you're still here!"
Spike sank back down into the recliner lazily. "You said I could stay the night."
"Spike! It's 6 am. AM as in . . . Aye! It's MORNING!"
He sniffed. "Clever. But I'm not fully rested yet."
"What are you talking about? What happened to not wanting to stay here even if it was the last place on earth?"
"That was before I found out you had cable. And those marvelous Hot Pocket things in the fridge."
"Oh my god, Spike, you've got to get out of here!" Buffy cried. "I can't believe you!"
He looked up at her blankly. "You were the one who told me I could stay here last night. To guard for my life, you said."
"That was before I figured out I didn't care whether you lived or not!"
He went to turn the TV back on. "You wouldn't be able to live with yourself if I died as a result of you putting me out onto the streets."
She squared her teeth. "It's a chance I'm willing to take."
"Sorry luv, but I've got to be concerned for my own welfare."
"Well be concerned for it somewhere else. And don't call me that."
"Come on. We could keep each other company. And I get to watch my programs. Get Smart s'on in ten."
She was astounded. He was acting like nothing had happened only a few hours before. He was acting like he hadn't said those hurtful words, like she hadn't attacked him hysterically. She couldn't figure him out and she wasn't sure if she wanted to. All she knew was at the moment, she was far too fatigued to launch into a protest strong enough to pry him from the apartment. So she just sighed and shook her head at him.
"You can stay for one more day, Spike, but that's it. And don't think I'm giving in. I'm just too tired to lift you from the premises."
Spike didn't turn around, his eyes fixed on the screen. "Whatever you say, luv."
"Don't call me that," she retorted sharply before drifting off into the bathroom to change for bed. When she returned to the room, she awkwardly covered herself up. She was wearing what she always wore to bed, a skimpy camisole and short boxers. But she was only now aware of her appearance in the presence of Spike. He simply raised an eyebrow as she self-consciously made her way to bed, but didn't say a word. As she climbed into bed and slid under the sheets, she paused and gave him one last word of uneasy semi-harshness.
"Only one more day, Spike."
"We'll see, duchess."
"I said one more day," she said, her voice stony now.
"And I said we'll see."
She threw her hands up in ire. "I hate you, Spike."
"Likewise, luv. Now go to sleep."
His tone was emotionless, but strangely comforting. Frowning, she fluffed a pillow and sank down into her bed, feeling unsettled. Somewhere inside, she knew her 'only one more day' riff was a lie. Whether she liked it or not, Spike was her roommate now. There was some strange and unspoken link between the two that couldn't be so easily severed as Buffy desired.
TBC………………….