TITLE: Daily Bread
AUTHOR: leahalexis
SPOILERS ET AL: Set between *Lies My Parents Told Me* and *Dirty Girls*.
Spoilers up to *Lies*. No spoilers for *Dirty Girls*, but the fic is very
cognizant of the episode.
FEEDBACK: minxncognito@hotmail.com
Andrew is baking again. Cookies, chocolate chip from the smell. It makes Buffy sigh. The things he cooks are superfluous like his presence there. Cookies, funnel cakes, little details of confectionaries that rot the teeth. She asked him once: why not bread? Why not something they actually need? And he looked surprised as if he'd never thought of it.
It hadn't stuck, but he'd baked a loaf or two, because she asked and because he was still afraid of her. The silences she was greeted with whenever she entered a room told her his fear was hardly an isolated occurrence. Fine. They should be afraid. Let them shrink back a bit when she looked at them. And let them talk about her behind her back. That's what kids did, right? Let them complain-let Andrew alternately cower and try to ingratiate himself with lame jokes and crème puffs. She's going to be what keeps them alive in the end. Not cookies.
Not prayers, either, she thinks, as she enters the living room where a half dozen girls are kneeling, facing the window. What had begun as a once a week marker of the normal lives the girls had left behind had become a daily vigil for whoever chose to join. They mourned the girls they'd lost, taught each other the prayers they knew in foreign tongues.
Buffy tries to remember if there has ever been a time when prayers have eased her mind. Probably back when she hadn't needed them.
As she passes through, keeping her steps quiet, she catches a snatch of prayer, in English. *Give us this day our daily bread.*
*And forgive us our trespasses,* Buffy thinks. And thinks, yes, of Spike. Of Spike, but mostly of the girls who she can't help feeling as if she's betrayed. She's trampled all over the last of their childhoods. No, the First has. She's just been made to look like its agent. She feels an anger close to the panic she can't allow. They're like refugees from a war, they've got that look about them Buffy recognizes from social studies films; except they're not the survivors of a war, they're the unwilling conscripts to it.
In the dining room, Rona and a Swedish girl are going through a sequence Kennedy taught them, skin damp and faces set. Rona's eyes flicker to her a moment before returning to focus on her unseen, unknown foe. Of all of them, Rona comes closest to dealing with the stress of waiting the way she does. Getting pissed about it-but channeling the anger. Buffy notes this, like she notes the strength of the new girl's arms, how she'd be the most useful with a cross bow, how they'd only lose her in hand to hand at this point. Buffy heads back towards the stairs.
This is the way her world is now. Pared down to what she can use. She's always measuring what the people around her can take: She knows Dawn (still in bed this morning, sleeping or hiding) is strong enough to handle a knock to the head or two. She suspects that Wood will rise above his shame and her harsh words-but if he doesn't, if he can't, it's better to know now. She just hopes he doesn't do anything stupid and end up dead. If nothing else, he's a good principal, and it's about time Sunnydale High had one of those.
She thinks back to his face, one eye swollen shut, shirt torn at one shoulder to expose the savagery where Spike's fangs have ripped into his skin. She expects to feel compassion, to feel sorry, to feel something. This man, after all, hand-fed her brandy-soaked pears and said she reminds him of his mother. But she feels nothing. A little disappointment, a little irritation, but nothing soft.
She digs around a bit like her mind is a plum, looking for bruises she can depress with the calloused pad of her thumb. But it's all toughened, if smooth, and she wishes it were just a shell but is more convinced it's her now, all the way through. For a minute she misses the old Spike-the one she may or may not (her money's on the "not") have now-the way he used to open her up, find all the places she was soft and yielding and plunder them for his pleasure (hers too, sometimes), whether with cock or mouth or calloused fingers of his own.
And then she remembers, it *hurt* when he did it-the biting comments, the zingers, the "not as high, not as tight." She's pretty sure it's not the hurt she misses. Just what the hurting meant-the fact that she could. Spike could make her hurt long after everything else began to fail. It was what sent her into the desert for answers those few weeks before her death. Sure, she'd been upset when Riley left-really upset-but not the way she was used to being, not life or death the way her life was.
There wasn't time for that now. Her invulnerability was an asset now that the mission was what mattered. She remembers saying the words in Robin's sanctuary, seeing the blood on his clothes, the cracked lip, the bruising, and feeling resigned in a way she wishes could be called "sad."
The mission is what matters. She doesn't know this is what Wood's mother said to him that rainy night he first met Spike. She doesn't know that probably this means she is on her way to death, the way Nikki was on her way to death. But then, Buffy is on her way from death as well, something Nikki Wood never was, so how would she be able to tell? This is her life, death coming and going. For her, death is a coda, and she returns each time more sure of the notes she has to sing if less ready and willing to sing them, less invested in the tune.
The phone rings and because she's beside it when it does she picks it up. She's not sure why because at this point everyone she knows (and then some) lives there, but then as she hears "Hello? Buffy?" she remembers that Willow's out of the house.
"Will?" she asks. "What's up?"
"You would not even believe," Willow says, and for a moment Buffy can imagine they're back in high school and she's found something in one of Giles's books about the cool way to kill that week's demon-du-jour, from the sparkle in her best friend's voice. It takes a moment for Buffy to realize that even her good high school memories are insane, and that said best friend is recently evil, as is her recent-former. *former*-lover, and luckily she doesn't have time to get mired in this because Willow's already going on.
"Listen, Buffy, I've got Faith."
"Faith?" Buffy echoes.
"Figured she could be some help, what with the apocalyptic devouring being upcoming and all," Willow perks. Buffy's still trying to struggle back from the shock when Willow says, "I'll explain the whole thing when I get back, I swear. Just, for now, I mean, it's of the good, right?"
"Right," Buffy says. She can't shake the daze.
"Tell Kennedy I'll be back tonight, okay?"
Buffy finds Kennedy in the kitchen with a couple of the newer girls and Spike, just up and downing his "morning" mug of blood. No Weetabix left, Molly made short work of the last box the night before. Spike is scowling as the girls tussle over opening a tricky jar of peanut butter, skulking against the fridge out of the beams of direct sunlight coming in through the window slats, but he doesn't look uncomfortable or out of place. Buffy hangs back behind the door frame.
One of the girls holds the jar out to Spike. He puts down his blood and gives it an unsuccessful twist or two. He spots Buffy in the doorway, tosses it. She catches it as easily as he threw it, not a beat missed between them.
"There's a girl, Slayer," he says. "Put that super strength to some good use for a change."
She pops the lid open, hands it to one of the other girls, who almost looks afraid to take it. But she's hungry, so she does.
"Willow's on her way back," she says as promised to Kennedy, who looks pleased and eager at the news. "Spike, I need to talk to you."
She wants to go out to the porch, because it's where they always have these information talks, it's sacred ground safe from sexual tension and innuendo, but remembers, right, daylight, and heads back the way she came instead. With a shrug, Spike rinses out his near empty mug, chucks it into the dish drainer, and follows her upstairs to the room she still thinks of as "Mom's" even though Joyce has been dead for two years almost to the day and the room hasn't been empty since.
Buffy shuts and locks the door. "Faith's coming."
Spike cocks his head to the side, sits down on the bed with hands clasped and elbows rested on his knees. He's leaned forward in that posture that says *I'm listening*, and when Spike listens, *really* listens-though it isn't often-you know that for those minutes you're the only thing in his world. It makes Buffy squeamish, because it is too close to the look he used to get lying beside her, propped up on one elbow, other hand splayed across her stomach as she brought herself off at his behest, his harsh, darkly arousing words steadily filling her ears. He watched her just that way, as if he was listening to her body, breath, blood, and moan. Hearing cells divide. Hearing her open to him.
When it becomes clear that she's not going to say anything else, he leans back. "Well. The rogue slayer."
"Less rogue than she used to be," Buffy admits. She pauses, then explains, "I just thought you should know."
"'preciate the heads up pet," he says, "but you could have said the same downstairs."
She didn't think of that.
"I didn't want to tell the girls just yet," she says.
"Uh-huh." He raises both eyebrows at her.
She's braced for the expected sexual innuendo, but instead he says, "What's on your mind, love?"
She presses her lips together, looks down. She wants to tell him what she's thinking, wants to tell him how things tend to happen when Faith's around, how things tend to happen to *her* when Faith's around-she's already feeling reckless just thinking about it, about Faith *being* there. Faith does something to Buffy's brain chemistry, triggers her insecurities, sends her world into a tailspin. There are bad decisions made. People get killed, and she's not quite sure it's only Faith's fault.
Spike just waits.
She wants to tell him she's afraid of how he'll take advantage of the recklessness, the hunger for *more*, blooming inside of her. She realizes dimly that the very fact she dragged him up here-and locked the door behind her-can probably be attributed to her current state of mind. She's a little off balance about him anyway, been watching him more and more lately, sneaking looks at the lean muscle of his arms, the shape of his back, eyes sliding to him in between instructions to the potentials.
Potentials. God, she thinks, possibly for the first time, what an awful thing to call a person, wasn't that one of those things her teachers used to say to her mother at parent-teacher conferences? Buffy has a lot of Potential? And look at her now, with her army of malnourished fifteen year olds and her trigger-happy vampire ex-sextoy.
"Buffy?" Spike asks gently, jolting her out of her troubled reverie.
She fixes on the safest part of the last thought-the trigger-and almost cries at how funny it is that *this* is the safest, most predictable think in her life right now.
"You know anything more about the trigger?" she asks, crossing her arms, her voice reaching for normal and finding marginal success.
Spike gives her a look that she imagines says he'll let it alone for now but this isn't the end of it; she wonders why that comforts her. "It's gone," Spike says, and adds, registering the shock on her face, "Didn't Rupert tell you?"
"We're not exactly speaking," she admits, hugging herself a bit.
"Well, then," Spike muses, and there's a smile ghosting around his lips.
"Wait," she says. "Why are you two speaking?"
Spike shrugs. "Not the first time he's tried to off me. Thought he was doing right by you."
"That's no excuse for-"
He smiles an absurdly fond smile. "I know, pet. I'm yours, Buffy. To kill or to keep. Not his." Not even looking for her response, he ducks his head, gets back on subject. "Didn't even know he was in on it 'til I went to tell him I was all fixed up, that his trinket and a little prodding from the principle did the trick. Now we're not so much speakin' as I spoke to him an' now we're keepin' out of each other's way."
Buffy digests this. "So no trigger. You're safe again."
She's lying because she knows he was never safe to begin with.
"Slayer, you're lucky I'm in too good a mood to get offended at that," he says, grinning.
And grinning like that he's certainly not safe now. He looks young, and harmless. Charming. And the more harmless he seems, the riskier it is to be around him. Because she lets her guard down. Because he recovers from his harmlessness faster than she can slap her walls back up.
It's easiest to care for him when he's injured and out of his mind. She knows what her role is, and she doesn't have to worry about things getting messy. Because as long as he can speak with that mouth and that voice, and those words that know her, as long as he can move the way her nightmares do, the way she does, hunting out her weakness, stalking her prayers, he always makes things messy. Lives for it. And she can't take that just now, doesn't have time to handle it, and if she lets anything happen, she's just going to hurt him because she doesn't have time to deal right now with the feelings she doesn't have but suspects he might make her have, because the way he *feels*? He couldn't settle for less. He'd draw it out of her, torturous twinge by terrible ache, with his mouth, and his hands, and all that damned *sincerity* he's been carrying around since he got back.
Any time but now, she thinks, she could take him to bed. To more than bed. He's a good man, he deserves to be loved. Buffy realizes her heart is starting to throb with feeling, recognizes the slow, aching surge of it as sorrow, and clamps down. Nothing soft. It's fruitless, feelings like this always spoil inside her anyway.
She moves to the bed, sits at Spike's left. He's her right-hand man. She shifts to speak, and winces in pain.
"All right?" Spike asks.
"Just my shoulders. I can't remember the last time they *weren't* it knots," she tells him.
"Weight of the world's weighin' heavy on them of late," he hypothesizes.
She sees his hand move cautiously towards her, and just flops her head forward in acquiescence. She shouldn't let him touch her-shouldn't let herself be touched-but the strength his hands promise as they begin to work deep against her muscle tissue is exactly what she's been missing.
"So much tension," he murmurs, "in one small, beautiful body."
She groans, just a little. His hands aren't hot but she feels heat in them, heat in her. His proximity creates it. This is as close as they've been in weeks, at least when there isn't blood and dust and fifteen year olds involved.
Head still down, she says, "Spike, do you remember a couple of years ago, that whole out-of-body experience I had going on there for a few days?"
He chuckles. "Couldn't forget it if I tried. Not everyday a girl says a thing like that to a man. His mortal enemy in particular."
He feels the alarm all through her. "What did I say?" she asks, and her voice is high.
Nervous, he stills his hand, withdraws a bit. "Well, I couldn't quote it from memory precisely-"
"Spike. . ."
She's turned to pierce him with those sharp, green and hazelwood eyes of hers, the kind of look that kills, and so he mumbles, "Somethin' about ridin' me at a gallop 'til my knees buckled, an' I popped like. . . like warm champagne."
She stares at him, shock on her face.
"Or thereabouts," he finishes lamely.
"I. . .she. . . *said* that?"
"Or thereabouts," he repeats in a mumble.
She moans, covering her face with her hands. "Oh. God."
"You, ah, ever figure out who it was with your body?" he asks timidly.
She moves her fingers to glare at him. "What, so you can go look her up?"
"Jesus Buffy, no," he says, then pauses. He grins, leaning close. "You sayin' you'd care if I did?"
She groans again.
"Take it easy, Slayer," he says mildly. "You know I'm yours."
"I'm not jealous," she grits out, but she is and she's well aware. Because Faith is coming. She's thinking of Faith and Angel, of Faith and *Riley*. She's imagining kinky, clandestine basement sex while she's upstairs training potentials. It's making her burn with things she was sure she was past. She's imagining, mostly, Faith taking Spike away from her. Spike, the one thing in this world that is unequivocally hers. Spike, who's got her back even when nobody else does, even when it's not the best thing to do.
"I'm *not*," she repeats.
She looks at him. He looks back at her, grins that little tongue-curled grin of his, and the gratitude she's just worked up wars with the desire to smack him. She has a moment in which to register how poorly timed this whole thing is. And then she's on him, mouth taking hungrily from his, taking advantage of his surprise to unbalance him back onto her bed.
She flings off her shirt, shucks out of her pants, and then starts on his. He's babbling, his hands all over her, "Oh Buffy, fuck, why. . . don't tell me why, you're so, god, you're magnificent. . ."
*I'll show you champagne*, she thinks, sliding swiftly down over him, surrounding him, as he rears up. His hands bite into her waist and they freeze there for a moment, registering where they are, what they're doing, the way the other feels. And then they're rolling, and she's below him and he's slamming into her for all he's worth, she's arched up and back, grinding against him, steel grip on the back of his neck, holding him to her.
Oh, she's missed this, missed really using her body when it's not about death. Her breaths, his grunts, the synchronization of their bodies, it's only him she has this with. It's from fighting, she assumes, from the years of fighting against and, she realizes, surprised, the years now of fighting beside each other. They've got a rhythm that, on patrol, Wood could never match.
Spike sinks blunt teeth into her shoulder and she clenches down in shock and they both cry out.
When she can focus again, he's sprawled over her, hasn't shifted off the way he always used to, breathing heavily.
"The oxygen makes the blood moves faster," he explained to her once. "Just because I don't need it doesn't mean I can't use it. Smoke and speak, too, don't I?"
"Speaking of habits past needing to be broken," she had muttered, flopping on her stomach a minute before pulling on her clothes to leave.
Not even the shame of that memory can quite touch her mood, not yet, as she lays there, sore and sated and languid-limbed, enjoying his weight. When he starts to get heavy, she says his name and nudges him. He mutters, but rolls off of her, onto his back, to let her sit up.
"You okay?" she asks him, amused at the way his eyes are still closed.
He opens the right one, looks at her, responds cheekily: "You still here, Slayer?"
"O-ow," she laughs.
"You deserved it," he comments, smiling.
She did. She's left him so many times before, hurt him so many times before, so she couldn't be left, couldn't be hurt. Because she was going to be in control of this, in control of herself, no matter what it cost, and she was going to use him to do it. She was a textbook case straight out of her psych 101 book. And she realizes uneasily that she's made a mistake again, because this is not how she pictured a reunion, those scant times she allowed herself to picture one-to even think of one.
She needs to set them straight, clear the air. She doesn't want him to think. . . to think what she's not sure. But they can't be a couple, not the way she knows he wants (or wanted). Not the way she might want, either, but that's inconsequential, nothing new, not getting what she wants. It's him she's worried about.
"Look Spike, I want to make sure. . . this doesn't mean. . ."
He chuckles. Third time that night. It may be the most she's ever seen him laugh.
"I love you, Slayer."
"Spike."
"You know it. An' you care about me, or you wouldn't have come to rescue me from the good principal's death trap, yeah?"
"Yeah," she says cautiously.
"It's just sex, Buffy. You feel better?"
"Yeah, I do," she acknowledges, fighting a smile.
He smirks, stretches his long limbs. "Me too."
"Okay then." She takes a deep breath, grins full out. They're friends. They're partners, who occasionally have sex. Really, really great sex. "Thanks Spike."
"Oh no, thank you, Slayer." He nips her shoulder and pokes her in the ribs. "Now get goin', bit was callin' for you awhile back. Somethin' about the grocery an' how Shrinkin' Violet'll only eat 7 grain?"
"Oh God." She sighs, puts her head in her hands. "Generals shouldn't have to worry about bread," she muffles into her fingers.
He shrugs, fastening his pants. "Hard life, bein' the leader. Glad I'm a common foot solider. I'm headed out for a smoke."
She finishes pulling her shirt over her head and looks over at him. "Should be easy, what with the daylight and all," she says prettily.
"You're not funny," he informs her, and drops a kiss on her head on his way out.
Well, that was. . . normal, Buffy thinks to herself.
Spike pops his head back in. "We slaying later?"
Maybe not so normal. But normal for her, so kind of soothing in its own bizarre, Hellmouth-y way.
She fights back another grin. "I was."
He looks at her pointedly.
"But I guess you wouldn't be too much of a liability, if you came along," she says.
He mutters something about "chosen" and "big bad" and "show her a liability" and then asks, looking sharper than he should after the tumble they just finished: "Hey, why'd you bring up that whole body swap thing anyway?"
"You know, can you believe I forgot?" she tries with a winning smile. "You were *that good*."
He snorts but lets it go. "Get me some more Weetabix while you're out," he says, and shuts the door.
She rolls her eyes at the instruction, but she's still smiling. Pulling on her jeans, Buffy feels ready to go buy bread.
Andrew is baking again. Cookies, chocolate chip from the smell. It makes Buffy sigh. The things he cooks are superfluous like his presence there. Cookies, funnel cakes, little details of confectionaries that rot the teeth. She asked him once: why not bread? Why not something they actually need? And he looked surprised as if he'd never thought of it.
It hadn't stuck, but he'd baked a loaf or two, because she asked and because he was still afraid of her. The silences she was greeted with whenever she entered a room told her his fear was hardly an isolated occurrence. Fine. They should be afraid. Let them shrink back a bit when she looked at them. And let them talk about her behind her back. That's what kids did, right? Let them complain-let Andrew alternately cower and try to ingratiate himself with lame jokes and crème puffs. She's going to be what keeps them alive in the end. Not cookies.
Not prayers, either, she thinks, as she enters the living room where a half dozen girls are kneeling, facing the window. What had begun as a once a week marker of the normal lives the girls had left behind had become a daily vigil for whoever chose to join. They mourned the girls they'd lost, taught each other the prayers they knew in foreign tongues.
Buffy tries to remember if there has ever been a time when prayers have eased her mind. Probably back when she hadn't needed them.
As she passes through, keeping her steps quiet, she catches a snatch of prayer, in English. *Give us this day our daily bread.*
*And forgive us our trespasses,* Buffy thinks. And thinks, yes, of Spike. Of Spike, but mostly of the girls who she can't help feeling as if she's betrayed. She's trampled all over the last of their childhoods. No, the First has. She's just been made to look like its agent. She feels an anger close to the panic she can't allow. They're like refugees from a war, they've got that look about them Buffy recognizes from social studies films; except they're not the survivors of a war, they're the unwilling conscripts to it.
In the dining room, Rona and a Swedish girl are going through a sequence Kennedy taught them, skin damp and faces set. Rona's eyes flicker to her a moment before returning to focus on her unseen, unknown foe. Of all of them, Rona comes closest to dealing with the stress of waiting the way she does. Getting pissed about it-but channeling the anger. Buffy notes this, like she notes the strength of the new girl's arms, how she'd be the most useful with a cross bow, how they'd only lose her in hand to hand at this point. Buffy heads back towards the stairs.
This is the way her world is now. Pared down to what she can use. She's always measuring what the people around her can take: She knows Dawn (still in bed this morning, sleeping or hiding) is strong enough to handle a knock to the head or two. She suspects that Wood will rise above his shame and her harsh words-but if he doesn't, if he can't, it's better to know now. She just hopes he doesn't do anything stupid and end up dead. If nothing else, he's a good principal, and it's about time Sunnydale High had one of those.
She thinks back to his face, one eye swollen shut, shirt torn at one shoulder to expose the savagery where Spike's fangs have ripped into his skin. She expects to feel compassion, to feel sorry, to feel something. This man, after all, hand-fed her brandy-soaked pears and said she reminds him of his mother. But she feels nothing. A little disappointment, a little irritation, but nothing soft.
She digs around a bit like her mind is a plum, looking for bruises she can depress with the calloused pad of her thumb. But it's all toughened, if smooth, and she wishes it were just a shell but is more convinced it's her now, all the way through. For a minute she misses the old Spike-the one she may or may not (her money's on the "not") have now-the way he used to open her up, find all the places she was soft and yielding and plunder them for his pleasure (hers too, sometimes), whether with cock or mouth or calloused fingers of his own.
And then she remembers, it *hurt* when he did it-the biting comments, the zingers, the "not as high, not as tight." She's pretty sure it's not the hurt she misses. Just what the hurting meant-the fact that she could. Spike could make her hurt long after everything else began to fail. It was what sent her into the desert for answers those few weeks before her death. Sure, she'd been upset when Riley left-really upset-but not the way she was used to being, not life or death the way her life was.
There wasn't time for that now. Her invulnerability was an asset now that the mission was what mattered. She remembers saying the words in Robin's sanctuary, seeing the blood on his clothes, the cracked lip, the bruising, and feeling resigned in a way she wishes could be called "sad."
The mission is what matters. She doesn't know this is what Wood's mother said to him that rainy night he first met Spike. She doesn't know that probably this means she is on her way to death, the way Nikki was on her way to death. But then, Buffy is on her way from death as well, something Nikki Wood never was, so how would she be able to tell? This is her life, death coming and going. For her, death is a coda, and she returns each time more sure of the notes she has to sing if less ready and willing to sing them, less invested in the tune.
The phone rings and because she's beside it when it does she picks it up. She's not sure why because at this point everyone she knows (and then some) lives there, but then as she hears "Hello? Buffy?" she remembers that Willow's out of the house.
"Will?" she asks. "What's up?"
"You would not even believe," Willow says, and for a moment Buffy can imagine they're back in high school and she's found something in one of Giles's books about the cool way to kill that week's demon-du-jour, from the sparkle in her best friend's voice. It takes a moment for Buffy to realize that even her good high school memories are insane, and that said best friend is recently evil, as is her recent-former. *former*-lover, and luckily she doesn't have time to get mired in this because Willow's already going on.
"Listen, Buffy, I've got Faith."
"Faith?" Buffy echoes.
"Figured she could be some help, what with the apocalyptic devouring being upcoming and all," Willow perks. Buffy's still trying to struggle back from the shock when Willow says, "I'll explain the whole thing when I get back, I swear. Just, for now, I mean, it's of the good, right?"
"Right," Buffy says. She can't shake the daze.
"Tell Kennedy I'll be back tonight, okay?"
Buffy finds Kennedy in the kitchen with a couple of the newer girls and Spike, just up and downing his "morning" mug of blood. No Weetabix left, Molly made short work of the last box the night before. Spike is scowling as the girls tussle over opening a tricky jar of peanut butter, skulking against the fridge out of the beams of direct sunlight coming in through the window slats, but he doesn't look uncomfortable or out of place. Buffy hangs back behind the door frame.
One of the girls holds the jar out to Spike. He puts down his blood and gives it an unsuccessful twist or two. He spots Buffy in the doorway, tosses it. She catches it as easily as he threw it, not a beat missed between them.
"There's a girl, Slayer," he says. "Put that super strength to some good use for a change."
She pops the lid open, hands it to one of the other girls, who almost looks afraid to take it. But she's hungry, so she does.
"Willow's on her way back," she says as promised to Kennedy, who looks pleased and eager at the news. "Spike, I need to talk to you."
She wants to go out to the porch, because it's where they always have these information talks, it's sacred ground safe from sexual tension and innuendo, but remembers, right, daylight, and heads back the way she came instead. With a shrug, Spike rinses out his near empty mug, chucks it into the dish drainer, and follows her upstairs to the room she still thinks of as "Mom's" even though Joyce has been dead for two years almost to the day and the room hasn't been empty since.
Buffy shuts and locks the door. "Faith's coming."
Spike cocks his head to the side, sits down on the bed with hands clasped and elbows rested on his knees. He's leaned forward in that posture that says *I'm listening*, and when Spike listens, *really* listens-though it isn't often-you know that for those minutes you're the only thing in his world. It makes Buffy squeamish, because it is too close to the look he used to get lying beside her, propped up on one elbow, other hand splayed across her stomach as she brought herself off at his behest, his harsh, darkly arousing words steadily filling her ears. He watched her just that way, as if he was listening to her body, breath, blood, and moan. Hearing cells divide. Hearing her open to him.
When it becomes clear that she's not going to say anything else, he leans back. "Well. The rogue slayer."
"Less rogue than she used to be," Buffy admits. She pauses, then explains, "I just thought you should know."
"'preciate the heads up pet," he says, "but you could have said the same downstairs."
She didn't think of that.
"I didn't want to tell the girls just yet," she says.
"Uh-huh." He raises both eyebrows at her.
She's braced for the expected sexual innuendo, but instead he says, "What's on your mind, love?"
She presses her lips together, looks down. She wants to tell him what she's thinking, wants to tell him how things tend to happen when Faith's around, how things tend to happen to *her* when Faith's around-she's already feeling reckless just thinking about it, about Faith *being* there. Faith does something to Buffy's brain chemistry, triggers her insecurities, sends her world into a tailspin. There are bad decisions made. People get killed, and she's not quite sure it's only Faith's fault.
Spike just waits.
She wants to tell him she's afraid of how he'll take advantage of the recklessness, the hunger for *more*, blooming inside of her. She realizes dimly that the very fact she dragged him up here-and locked the door behind her-can probably be attributed to her current state of mind. She's a little off balance about him anyway, been watching him more and more lately, sneaking looks at the lean muscle of his arms, the shape of his back, eyes sliding to him in between instructions to the potentials.
Potentials. God, she thinks, possibly for the first time, what an awful thing to call a person, wasn't that one of those things her teachers used to say to her mother at parent-teacher conferences? Buffy has a lot of Potential? And look at her now, with her army of malnourished fifteen year olds and her trigger-happy vampire ex-sextoy.
"Buffy?" Spike asks gently, jolting her out of her troubled reverie.
She fixes on the safest part of the last thought-the trigger-and almost cries at how funny it is that *this* is the safest, most predictable think in her life right now.
"You know anything more about the trigger?" she asks, crossing her arms, her voice reaching for normal and finding marginal success.
Spike gives her a look that she imagines says he'll let it alone for now but this isn't the end of it; she wonders why that comforts her. "It's gone," Spike says, and adds, registering the shock on her face, "Didn't Rupert tell you?"
"We're not exactly speaking," she admits, hugging herself a bit.
"Well, then," Spike muses, and there's a smile ghosting around his lips.
"Wait," she says. "Why are you two speaking?"
Spike shrugs. "Not the first time he's tried to off me. Thought he was doing right by you."
"That's no excuse for-"
He smiles an absurdly fond smile. "I know, pet. I'm yours, Buffy. To kill or to keep. Not his." Not even looking for her response, he ducks his head, gets back on subject. "Didn't even know he was in on it 'til I went to tell him I was all fixed up, that his trinket and a little prodding from the principle did the trick. Now we're not so much speakin' as I spoke to him an' now we're keepin' out of each other's way."
Buffy digests this. "So no trigger. You're safe again."
She's lying because she knows he was never safe to begin with.
"Slayer, you're lucky I'm in too good a mood to get offended at that," he says, grinning.
And grinning like that he's certainly not safe now. He looks young, and harmless. Charming. And the more harmless he seems, the riskier it is to be around him. Because she lets her guard down. Because he recovers from his harmlessness faster than she can slap her walls back up.
It's easiest to care for him when he's injured and out of his mind. She knows what her role is, and she doesn't have to worry about things getting messy. Because as long as he can speak with that mouth and that voice, and those words that know her, as long as he can move the way her nightmares do, the way she does, hunting out her weakness, stalking her prayers, he always makes things messy. Lives for it. And she can't take that just now, doesn't have time to handle it, and if she lets anything happen, she's just going to hurt him because she doesn't have time to deal right now with the feelings she doesn't have but suspects he might make her have, because the way he *feels*? He couldn't settle for less. He'd draw it out of her, torturous twinge by terrible ache, with his mouth, and his hands, and all that damned *sincerity* he's been carrying around since he got back.
Any time but now, she thinks, she could take him to bed. To more than bed. He's a good man, he deserves to be loved. Buffy realizes her heart is starting to throb with feeling, recognizes the slow, aching surge of it as sorrow, and clamps down. Nothing soft. It's fruitless, feelings like this always spoil inside her anyway.
She moves to the bed, sits at Spike's left. He's her right-hand man. She shifts to speak, and winces in pain.
"All right?" Spike asks.
"Just my shoulders. I can't remember the last time they *weren't* it knots," she tells him.
"Weight of the world's weighin' heavy on them of late," he hypothesizes.
She sees his hand move cautiously towards her, and just flops her head forward in acquiescence. She shouldn't let him touch her-shouldn't let herself be touched-but the strength his hands promise as they begin to work deep against her muscle tissue is exactly what she's been missing.
"So much tension," he murmurs, "in one small, beautiful body."
She groans, just a little. His hands aren't hot but she feels heat in them, heat in her. His proximity creates it. This is as close as they've been in weeks, at least when there isn't blood and dust and fifteen year olds involved.
Head still down, she says, "Spike, do you remember a couple of years ago, that whole out-of-body experience I had going on there for a few days?"
He chuckles. "Couldn't forget it if I tried. Not everyday a girl says a thing like that to a man. His mortal enemy in particular."
He feels the alarm all through her. "What did I say?" she asks, and her voice is high.
Nervous, he stills his hand, withdraws a bit. "Well, I couldn't quote it from memory precisely-"
"Spike. . ."
She's turned to pierce him with those sharp, green and hazelwood eyes of hers, the kind of look that kills, and so he mumbles, "Somethin' about ridin' me at a gallop 'til my knees buckled, an' I popped like. . . like warm champagne."
She stares at him, shock on her face.
"Or thereabouts," he finishes lamely.
"I. . .she. . . *said* that?"
"Or thereabouts," he repeats in a mumble.
She moans, covering her face with her hands. "Oh. God."
"You, ah, ever figure out who it was with your body?" he asks timidly.
She moves her fingers to glare at him. "What, so you can go look her up?"
"Jesus Buffy, no," he says, then pauses. He grins, leaning close. "You sayin' you'd care if I did?"
She groans again.
"Take it easy, Slayer," he says mildly. "You know I'm yours."
"I'm not jealous," she grits out, but she is and she's well aware. Because Faith is coming. She's thinking of Faith and Angel, of Faith and *Riley*. She's imagining kinky, clandestine basement sex while she's upstairs training potentials. It's making her burn with things she was sure she was past. She's imagining, mostly, Faith taking Spike away from her. Spike, the one thing in this world that is unequivocally hers. Spike, who's got her back even when nobody else does, even when it's not the best thing to do.
"I'm *not*," she repeats.
She looks at him. He looks back at her, grins that little tongue-curled grin of his, and the gratitude she's just worked up wars with the desire to smack him. She has a moment in which to register how poorly timed this whole thing is. And then she's on him, mouth taking hungrily from his, taking advantage of his surprise to unbalance him back onto her bed.
She flings off her shirt, shucks out of her pants, and then starts on his. He's babbling, his hands all over her, "Oh Buffy, fuck, why. . . don't tell me why, you're so, god, you're magnificent. . ."
*I'll show you champagne*, she thinks, sliding swiftly down over him, surrounding him, as he rears up. His hands bite into her waist and they freeze there for a moment, registering where they are, what they're doing, the way the other feels. And then they're rolling, and she's below him and he's slamming into her for all he's worth, she's arched up and back, grinding against him, steel grip on the back of his neck, holding him to her.
Oh, she's missed this, missed really using her body when it's not about death. Her breaths, his grunts, the synchronization of their bodies, it's only him she has this with. It's from fighting, she assumes, from the years of fighting against and, she realizes, surprised, the years now of fighting beside each other. They've got a rhythm that, on patrol, Wood could never match.
Spike sinks blunt teeth into her shoulder and she clenches down in shock and they both cry out.
When she can focus again, he's sprawled over her, hasn't shifted off the way he always used to, breathing heavily.
"The oxygen makes the blood moves faster," he explained to her once. "Just because I don't need it doesn't mean I can't use it. Smoke and speak, too, don't I?"
"Speaking of habits past needing to be broken," she had muttered, flopping on her stomach a minute before pulling on her clothes to leave.
Not even the shame of that memory can quite touch her mood, not yet, as she lays there, sore and sated and languid-limbed, enjoying his weight. When he starts to get heavy, she says his name and nudges him. He mutters, but rolls off of her, onto his back, to let her sit up.
"You okay?" she asks him, amused at the way his eyes are still closed.
He opens the right one, looks at her, responds cheekily: "You still here, Slayer?"
"O-ow," she laughs.
"You deserved it," he comments, smiling.
She did. She's left him so many times before, hurt him so many times before, so she couldn't be left, couldn't be hurt. Because she was going to be in control of this, in control of herself, no matter what it cost, and she was going to use him to do it. She was a textbook case straight out of her psych 101 book. And she realizes uneasily that she's made a mistake again, because this is not how she pictured a reunion, those scant times she allowed herself to picture one-to even think of one.
She needs to set them straight, clear the air. She doesn't want him to think. . . to think what she's not sure. But they can't be a couple, not the way she knows he wants (or wanted). Not the way she might want, either, but that's inconsequential, nothing new, not getting what she wants. It's him she's worried about.
"Look Spike, I want to make sure. . . this doesn't mean. . ."
He chuckles. Third time that night. It may be the most she's ever seen him laugh.
"I love you, Slayer."
"Spike."
"You know it. An' you care about me, or you wouldn't have come to rescue me from the good principal's death trap, yeah?"
"Yeah," she says cautiously.
"It's just sex, Buffy. You feel better?"
"Yeah, I do," she acknowledges, fighting a smile.
He smirks, stretches his long limbs. "Me too."
"Okay then." She takes a deep breath, grins full out. They're friends. They're partners, who occasionally have sex. Really, really great sex. "Thanks Spike."
"Oh no, thank you, Slayer." He nips her shoulder and pokes her in the ribs. "Now get goin', bit was callin' for you awhile back. Somethin' about the grocery an' how Shrinkin' Violet'll only eat 7 grain?"
"Oh God." She sighs, puts her head in her hands. "Generals shouldn't have to worry about bread," she muffles into her fingers.
He shrugs, fastening his pants. "Hard life, bein' the leader. Glad I'm a common foot solider. I'm headed out for a smoke."
She finishes pulling her shirt over her head and looks over at him. "Should be easy, what with the daylight and all," she says prettily.
"You're not funny," he informs her, and drops a kiss on her head on his way out.
Well, that was. . . normal, Buffy thinks to herself.
Spike pops his head back in. "We slaying later?"
Maybe not so normal. But normal for her, so kind of soothing in its own bizarre, Hellmouth-y way.
She fights back another grin. "I was."
He looks at her pointedly.
"But I guess you wouldn't be too much of a liability, if you came along," she says.
He mutters something about "chosen" and "big bad" and "show her a liability" and then asks, looking sharper than he should after the tumble they just finished: "Hey, why'd you bring up that whole body swap thing anyway?"
"You know, can you believe I forgot?" she tries with a winning smile. "You were *that good*."
He snorts but lets it go. "Get me some more Weetabix while you're out," he says, and shuts the door.
She rolls her eyes at the instruction, but she's still smiling. Pulling on her jeans, Buffy feels ready to go buy bread.