(5/6)
Spike
"I am happy to report," Buffy said, pushing the bedroom door closed with one hip. "That the house still appears to be standing."
Spike shook his head. "We'll have to do better next time."
Buffy lowered her chin as she walked toward him. "Easy, stamina boy. I have to renew my resources." She tilted one bowl at him. "In the form of ice cream. You --" She shoved the other at him apologetically. "There's a little - meat juice or something, do you think that'll hold you?"
"I'll survive. So to speak." He pretended to look at the bowl, instead sneaking a glance of her breasts inside the loose kimono. He hadn't thought it possible, but her body was better than he remembered. She'd filled out since he last saw her; lost that wan look. It suited her. There was a new roundness in her hips, and she had murmured an apology about pasta and gelati. Yeah, Slayer, you look like hell, he had gasped out, between mouthfuls of her flesh. He hoped she could grasp that he liked her taking care of herself. Not having the weight of the world on her shoulders, that was good for a girl. And it wasn't just that. It was so easy to forget how young she was. She was still growing into a woman's body. And here he'd been sulking half a world away, afraid she wouldn't take him back, letting all that time go by.
In the winter, before the false Doyle showed up at his door, Spike had been passing the time of his pointless existence, cutting a modest swathe through the L.A. Goth scene. Flaky girls with black nail polish who thought they were deep because they could pronounce the names of a few philosophers incorrectly. Most of them were so boring that, just for the sake of variety, he'd fantasized about feeding on them after he shagged them. Sometimes even before.
Of course, I'm not going to do that, he would repeat silently, because it's wrong. He wondered if it was his soul talking. Still, most humans seemed to have souls, and he doubted if they had to go around reminding themselves not to kill people. Often, the warning came out in Buffy's voice, and suggested something completely different, but it was enough to keep him in check. He wondered whether a day would come when he didn't need the voice and, if that ever happened, whether he would be sorry.
"Paging one-track mind." Buffy shook the bowl at him, like you would do for a dog. He rolled his eyes at her and took it, "It'll do." She stuck out her tongue, and then he noticed her eyes wandering to his chest, which was bare and smooth, as he sat up in bed. "Young lady, I see that look in your eyes. I am not a piece of meat." Buffy gave him the finger, and slid in beside him. "Honestly, I'm not sure this is a piece of meat, either." He got his mouth half around it, before he gagged on the pungent taste and spit. "Bloody hell!"
"What?" she asked around the edge of her spoon.
He pointed at his mouth. "Feeding me garlic now?"
"Oh." She frowned. "You always said that was an old wives' tale."
"Well, I'd sort of like you to kiss this mouth some time tonight. I don't know what old wives say about that."
"They say, 'Like it's any worse than his nasty cigarettes.'"
Spike rolled his head back, looked at the ceiling, and said to no one in particular, "All the nights I snorted Eau de Doublemeat Palace off her knickers, and here she goes, claiming the olfactory high ground."
Buffy gagged and almost shot ice cream out of her nose, cackling, "Doublemeat Palace." It was fucking amazing, with all the miserable shit in the world, those few incredible times when you really could look back on it and laugh. Spike lay back in the bed, let her shaking body vibrate against him, the echo of a laugh rippling through her thigh. For the moment, he wasn't going bloody anywhere.
"Don't stare at me like that." Buffy shook her hair away from her neck and pressed hands to her reddening cheeks. "I look hate the way I look when I laugh."
"Yeah," Spike raised an eyebrow in disbelief. "I hear Grace Kelly had the same problem. She used to wear a bag over her head."
"God." Buffy stretched out her long neck and raised her eyes to the ceiling. "When I used to have imaginary conversations with you, you weren't always such an asshole."
"That was a compliment!" He tilted his head and put velvet in his voice, a touch of "Masterpiece Theatre." "Oh, darling, you look lovely when you laugh." And throwing as much of the wrong side of London as he could into the next three words. "That better, then?"
"No," she sulked, and went back to her ice cream, taking it in slowly so he had no choice but to stare at her mouth. Oh, this one knew what she was doing, and. . . wait a second, something she'd said. "You had imaginary conversations with me?"
"Only when you were dead. Don't make a thing of it." She shook her head to dismiss the subject, and he knew for the moment there was no point in digging.
She scraped the last of the ice cream from the dish, and he realized how starving he was. Still, it served him right. The Wolfram & Hart jet was well-supplied with sacrificial blood that, despite Angel's protests, had a suspiciously biped bouquet to it. Spike had left all that tasty hemoglobin goodness on board, making no plans for provisions in Rome. Of course not, because he hadn't allowed himself to hold out any real hope for the reunion. "Say, just for curiosity, I noticed a lot of stray cats in the alleys around here. Do you know if anybody picks them up?"
Buffy smacked the back of his head.
"What?"
Around the last mouthful of gelati, she said, "You are not going to eat a cat."
"Well, I don't mean here in the apartment. All's I'm saying is, if we were back in the States, someone would be picking up these vagrants and putting 'em out of their misery, so to speak, and if I was in a position to provide a comparable service --"
She smacked him again. "Quit while you're ahead. Assuming you're ever ahead, which I don't really recall you ever being. If you stick around, I'll go to the butcher in the morning and get you some pig's blood."
"Right." He looked at the ceiling, anywhere but at her. "And whose choice would that be?"
"The butcher's, I guess." She licked her spoon and stuck it to the end of her nose. "Is
there really any difference between pig's blood and pig's blood?"
"Buffy," He drew in a deep breath and let it out. "I can't have a serious conversation when you have silverware stuck to your face."
"Just flatware," she said. "Not real silver. And for someone who doesn't actually need to breathe," Buffy said, dropping the spoon into the bowl, "You do that dramatic sigh thing really well." She leaned over him to put the empty dish on the nightstand, and he gasped at the warmth of her arm. Their eyes met, and instead of pulling away, Buffy kneaded his shoulder, and leaned in to kiss his cheek. "I would say that staying or not is your choice. Except, we have to think about Dawn."
"So the sun comes up, I get stuck here." He raised one scarred eyebrow. "I can't imagine what we'll do all day."
"Dawn my sister Dawn."
Spike nodded. "I know. Bad joke." He swallowed. "How is the Little Bit?"
"Not so little anymore." Buffy bit her lip and looked at him.
"Might be nice to see her but . . ." He gauged Buffy's look. "I'm guessing not."
"I'm just thinking that Hey look, Uncle Spike spent the night! wouldn't go on the first page of Buffy's Guide to Responsible Parenting."
"Right," he said, trying not to think about what this told him about the status of Buffy's bed over the past year, regretting the months he'd wasted and every one of the poser Goth girls, and poor hot stupid bloody Harmony. "So it's not particularly me."
"Well, the fact that you are supposed to be dead does factor into the 'disruption of Dawn's stable home environment' equation."
"Because I'm thinking she wasn't really in the Spike fan club there at the end."
"Spike," Buffy sighed. "You'd be amazed what going down in a blaze of glory can do. You know you had a memorial ceremony. Andrew wrote a song about you." A whisper of mischief crept into her grin. "In elvish."
"Well, there are perks of being dead," he said. "By which I mean, missing that."
"Oh, it was lovely. The part I understood. There was a lot about Spock and the Prime Directive, Obi-Wan giving himself up so he could guide Luke, and um, James Gandolfini? No, wait --"
"Gandalf the White, in the pit of the Balrog," Spike guessed, remembering Andrew's words on their recent reunion.
"Yeah!" Her eyes widened. "How'd you --?"
"Old joke," he said hastily, holding up a pair of crossed fingers. "Me and Andy. Like that. You know how we both loved those -- short hairy men and the homoerotic Wagner ripoff. Look, it was a long motorcycle ride, we had to talk about something." He wasn't ready for Buffy to be thinking too hard about when he might have talked to Andrew, so he cast around for a change of subject. "Speaking of bikes --"
"I think it's kind of gone. Along with the garage and the house."
"No, I was going to say. Have you been on a Vespa yet? I always thought those things were bloody cool in the Fellini films. We could rent one of those, ride around. Be all, 'La Dolce Vita.' Or," he frowned, "'La Dolce Morte,' as the case may be." Now where the hell did that come from? Spike wondered. There was babbling to shift away from a tricky subject, and then there was just babbling. He wouldn't be caught alive on one of those damn motor scooters, and he doubted he'd even seen a movie in Italian, unless it was dirty. The hundred-plus years of cultural detritus crashing around in his brain sometimes amazed even him.
And Buffy wasn't listening anyway. Her gaze showed that she had gone somewhere else. He reached over and took a soft handful of her hair. He couldn't believe it was there to touch, wasn't sure, once he had done it, if it would be all right. But her eyes came back to him. "The memorial was nice really, you would have liked it. We were in England, at -- this place Giles knows. There was a breeze blowing and the sun was out."
"Oh, definitely, my kind of scene."
"Well, we wouldn't have had it in the day if --" A smile spread on her face and she smacked his arm. "Stupid."
"Ouch," he muttered, grasping the beginnings of a Slayer-strength bruise, the latest of so many.
Her eyes widened. "Sorry."
Spike looked at the ceiling again. "April 7, 2004. Aussie sensation Russell Crowe turns
forty, and Buffy Summers apologizes for hitting me."
"Really? Russell Crowe is forty?"
"Saw it on CNN-Europe."
Buffy rolled her eyes. "I am so over him."
"And I am so over people being over Russell Crowe. It's suddenly all the thing to be I-never-thought-he-was-so-great. Well, 'Master and Commander'? Bloody brilliant."
"I never saw it." She swallowed. "Xander was even sad, I think."
"Well." Spike hesitated. "I'm sure he can rent it."
"At the memorial," she said. "Of course, it was hard to tell, poor Xander, he was so broken up about Anya."
"Anya?" Spike repeated. A jolt of unaccustomed pain hit him at the thought of all that beautiful annoying sulky insane energy being gone from the world. He had managed to think of her as a friend from time to time, ever so briefly as a lover. It wasn't that he should have known, but he at least should have wondered. Somehow, he had thought of his own sacrifice clearing the way for the others, hadn't given himself room to consider casualties, and of course Andrew was too much of a berk to mention it. Still, it seemed so hard to believe. "I thought Anya was --"
"Mortal. Almost everybody else got out," she said quickly. "Some of the potentials who I guess -- you didn't really know. Honestly, I didn't know a lot of them. Until later. I've memorized all the names now, of course, but -- that day in England was a good day. It was a time to heal. A time to understand some things, the way we had lost each other. Me and Giles, Xander and Willow."
"So to translate, 'It's just as bloody well, you weren't there, Spike, to get everything in a muddle."
"No! No muddle but --" She put a hand to her forehead. "Maybe a little muddly. Right this minute. They were all very nice about you."
"Easy enough," he said. "Dead and all. Not such the fan club when I was walking dead."
He leveled a finger at Buffy. "I'm not saying I give a rat's bum, mind you, what people think about me but." He swallowed. "I guess I gave 'em reason. Time to time."
Buffy rubbed a hand over his arm. "It wasn't you."
"Well, that's the thing, love. A lot of it was. You know as well as anybody how this soul thing works. A vampire's a nasty shotgun marriage of a man and a demon. Without the soul, the demon's in charge. There's nothing to stop him from going after what he wants, but -- there's things he wants because he's a demon and there's things he wants because he's a man."
She turned her head. "I don't know that I like where this is going."
"No," he said, firmly. "Hurting you, Buffy, that's never something that I want."
"I don't think I understand what you're saying, then."
"Vampire or man, I'm not somebody that a lot of people are going to like. And why that is, is because, in the case of the large percentage of humans or demons or what have you, I don't really care if they like me. And I can't say that I really think much of them. I've never needed a lot of people to like me. Much less love me."
"Just the ones you love."
"Ones?"
She lowered her eyes. "But you don't believe that I do."
"Oh," he winced and lowered his head. "That. You've been thinking on what I said that day."
"Only, you know, since it happened." She sighed. "Come on, Spike, everybody knows the next line. 'Empire Strikes Back'. Han's going to the carbon freezing chamber, and Leia finally says 'I love you,' and Han says --"
Spike nodded. "I know. I mean, he really says --"
"I know."
"That's a better line? Oh come on, Buffy. Harrison Ford is an all-out wanker." He stabbed a finger at her, "And you are much prettier than that Fisher bird. Please forgive me. I was sacrificing my un-life to save the world, I didn't realize you were playing movie quotes."
"I don't mean that I was thinking of the movie," she said. "But everything we went through, the place that it took us at the end. You were so sure all along, and it took me so long to get there, but Spike -- I got there. I meant it, I wasn't throwing you a bone."
"You meant it," he said, "Fine, and I'm just a dumb git who doesn't have any better excuse besides that he was dying to save the world."
"Remember who you're talking to," said Buffy. "I've kind of been there. But before I died, I managed to say something to my sister that wasn't shitty."
He felt the closeness of the evening slipping away from him, remembered once again the pain of having her body so close, while everything that was her floated out of reach. "Any chance I can plead poor improv skills," he said, "and get out of here in time to eat a cat?"
"No! I am not trying to get rid of you, but that's the last thing you can plead. You've as much as admitted to me, tonight, that you put a little rehearsal into your big moments."
"Uh-oh." Spike closed his eyes. "Here it comes. Of course, Buffy, I didn't know I was going to -- or that you would say --"
"And there's no way you anticipated? Dare I say, fantasized?"
"All right." Spike sighed. "I admit that I might have imagined a hypothetical situation, some time in advance, in which you would tell me -- and I would say --"
"Say how far in advance?"
"Well," he paused. "It might actually be more instructive to count forward, from the time, a good -- bloody hell, was it only four years ago? -- when I realized I had the misfortune to be in love with you. From that point, I'd estimate -- about fifteen minutes."
"You asshole!" said Buffy, though Spike could barely make it out through her laughter.
"Actually, since you brought it up -- "Empire" was what? 1980? I saw that in Sydney with Dru, and we were walking out and I told her, you know what would have been a better line, is if Han said to Leia -- that is, if he weren't such a wanker -- 'No you don't, but thanks for saying it.' Of course, by that point, she was chowing down on an usher and -- Buffy, can you start to grasp, that maybe if I thought you did love me, it wouldn't be any compliment to you?"
"Sorry, you lost me somewhere around Sydney. You think I love you, or you don't?"
"OK, I worked out a way to explain this part too. Help me out here. My heart --" He took her hand and clenched the fingers into a fist. Buffy didn't resist as he pressed it to his chest.
"I know how to find the heart on a vampire, Spike."
"It's not much bigger than this," he said, squeezing her hand shut. "A tiny, hungry little thing that doesn't even do any work anymore. Just sits there waiting for some stake to find it. My heart's got teeth, Buffy. Like -- OK, see this is the part I had trouble with. Like some animal that finds something it wants, grabs on, and it won't let go. What's an animal like that?"
"Badger?"
"Smaller."
"Chipmunk."
"No," he shook his head, "I don't think, chipmunk."
"Weasel?" she said, with a thin-patience grin.
"Let's go with chipmunk. I've got this tough little chipmunk heart that finds the one thing it wants. And digs in. And holds on. And shakes until it's worried the life out of the thing. Never sees anything else, never hears. Never tastes anything, it's so busy with it's mouth around this -- what was it?"
"A nut of some kind?"
"Whatever chipmunks eat. And for years now, that -- chipmunk food -- has been you. Before that, it was Dru, and before that --" He shook his head. "I liked some girls when I was alive. Not worth thinking about, they never liked me."
"I would have liked you."
"You would not. I was a poncey wanker." He pointed a finger at her. "Take it back!"
"I would have seen beneath the poncey surface and discovered the inner badass."
"No," he said. "I had no inner badass. You would not have liked me. If it turns out you would have liked me, then I can no longer like you."
"Yes," said Buffy. "Because that's gonna happen. Tell me more about the chipmunk heart."
"That --" He sighed. "That is what love is to me, Buffy. The thing this little chipmunk heart grabs and won't let go."
"From where I'm standing, Spike? That doesn't sound too bad."
"Oh, but wait. I have to do you. Just lie down and --" He made a circle of his fingers and rested them on her breastbone. "I promise you that this is not -- just -- an opportunity to cop a feel."
"You're unbelievable," she said, but stayed in place, her eyes wandering down to watch his hands.
"This is your heart. It has to be big enough for everyone in your life. Friends, family. The people you work with, the people you protect."
"Because I'm the slayer?" she asked, and quickly corrected. "A slayer?"
"Slayer, schmayer. You think every one of these beady-eyed girls has a heart like this?"
He bent down to kiss her forehead. "Because you're Buffy. Now come on." He spread his fingers as wide as they would go. "Big open Buffy heart."
She understood and slid her fist into the gap in his hands. "Gnawing little chipmunk heart."
"Now, Buffy? How is that little heart of mine ever going to fill up this great big heart of yours? But if it doesn't, if it never can, then what you mean when you say you love me. It isn't -- it can't ever be -- "
"The same thing you mean," she said quietly. "But Spike, that's not fair."
"No," he said, and rolled abruptly away from her. "No, love, it damn well ain't."
"But maybe, Spike." She lay beside him and reached down to clasp her small, strong fingers through his long ones. "Maybe that's not what I want. I don't want to have to think of everyone, everything, the whole world, all the time. Maybe I want more of the chipmunk heart."
He sat up. "Well, you work on that, love. And I'll work on the other."
"Really?" She frowned.
"Say I have something in my heart besides you, Buffy. And I don't mean another woman, because forget it. I mean anything besides blooming onions and the telly and the Sex Pistols. A mission. A life's work."
"That would be -- well, depending on what it was. That could be wonderful."
"And it would hurt you a little."
She swallowed. "Yes. Yes, I guess it would."
"There you go." He rubbed the back of his hand softly against her cheek. "There's your little bit of chipmunk. Now you've got something to work up from. But I could be in this world a long time. A heart's always hungry when there's only one thing in it. Before, what I was, that was what I had. Violence and death and -- still like a good spot of those, OK? Don't start to think old Spike's going soft on you. But for a long time, Buffy, there was nothing in my heart but you. At first I thought it was hate, but -- I'll tell you a nasty little thing about the chipmunk heart. Sometimes what you with your big heart call hating a bloke and using him, ain't a lot different from what the chipmunk heart means by love."
"So," Buffy frowned. "You're doing something, now, that's going to help you -- I'm sorry, I've completely lost the metaphor. I'm better at these when there's some sort of baking involved."
"I have some work, Buffy. I'll be honest, it's difficult for me to tell you about. I wasn't sure if I would, but you've a right to know."
"Look," she said, "Whatever it is you're mixed up with, I can't imagine it would piss me off more than the things I'm hearing about Angel's new business partners."
"Well, love. It's a bit of a funny story --"
End Ch. 5
Spike
"I am happy to report," Buffy said, pushing the bedroom door closed with one hip. "That the house still appears to be standing."
Spike shook his head. "We'll have to do better next time."
Buffy lowered her chin as she walked toward him. "Easy, stamina boy. I have to renew my resources." She tilted one bowl at him. "In the form of ice cream. You --" She shoved the other at him apologetically. "There's a little - meat juice or something, do you think that'll hold you?"
"I'll survive. So to speak." He pretended to look at the bowl, instead sneaking a glance of her breasts inside the loose kimono. He hadn't thought it possible, but her body was better than he remembered. She'd filled out since he last saw her; lost that wan look. It suited her. There was a new roundness in her hips, and she had murmured an apology about pasta and gelati. Yeah, Slayer, you look like hell, he had gasped out, between mouthfuls of her flesh. He hoped she could grasp that he liked her taking care of herself. Not having the weight of the world on her shoulders, that was good for a girl. And it wasn't just that. It was so easy to forget how young she was. She was still growing into a woman's body. And here he'd been sulking half a world away, afraid she wouldn't take him back, letting all that time go by.
In the winter, before the false Doyle showed up at his door, Spike had been passing the time of his pointless existence, cutting a modest swathe through the L.A. Goth scene. Flaky girls with black nail polish who thought they were deep because they could pronounce the names of a few philosophers incorrectly. Most of them were so boring that, just for the sake of variety, he'd fantasized about feeding on them after he shagged them. Sometimes even before.
Of course, I'm not going to do that, he would repeat silently, because it's wrong. He wondered if it was his soul talking. Still, most humans seemed to have souls, and he doubted if they had to go around reminding themselves not to kill people. Often, the warning came out in Buffy's voice, and suggested something completely different, but it was enough to keep him in check. He wondered whether a day would come when he didn't need the voice and, if that ever happened, whether he would be sorry.
"Paging one-track mind." Buffy shook the bowl at him, like you would do for a dog. He rolled his eyes at her and took it, "It'll do." She stuck out her tongue, and then he noticed her eyes wandering to his chest, which was bare and smooth, as he sat up in bed. "Young lady, I see that look in your eyes. I am not a piece of meat." Buffy gave him the finger, and slid in beside him. "Honestly, I'm not sure this is a piece of meat, either." He got his mouth half around it, before he gagged on the pungent taste and spit. "Bloody hell!"
"What?" she asked around the edge of her spoon.
He pointed at his mouth. "Feeding me garlic now?"
"Oh." She frowned. "You always said that was an old wives' tale."
"Well, I'd sort of like you to kiss this mouth some time tonight. I don't know what old wives say about that."
"They say, 'Like it's any worse than his nasty cigarettes.'"
Spike rolled his head back, looked at the ceiling, and said to no one in particular, "All the nights I snorted Eau de Doublemeat Palace off her knickers, and here she goes, claiming the olfactory high ground."
Buffy gagged and almost shot ice cream out of her nose, cackling, "Doublemeat Palace." It was fucking amazing, with all the miserable shit in the world, those few incredible times when you really could look back on it and laugh. Spike lay back in the bed, let her shaking body vibrate against him, the echo of a laugh rippling through her thigh. For the moment, he wasn't going bloody anywhere.
"Don't stare at me like that." Buffy shook her hair away from her neck and pressed hands to her reddening cheeks. "I look hate the way I look when I laugh."
"Yeah," Spike raised an eyebrow in disbelief. "I hear Grace Kelly had the same problem. She used to wear a bag over her head."
"God." Buffy stretched out her long neck and raised her eyes to the ceiling. "When I used to have imaginary conversations with you, you weren't always such an asshole."
"That was a compliment!" He tilted his head and put velvet in his voice, a touch of "Masterpiece Theatre." "Oh, darling, you look lovely when you laugh." And throwing as much of the wrong side of London as he could into the next three words. "That better, then?"
"No," she sulked, and went back to her ice cream, taking it in slowly so he had no choice but to stare at her mouth. Oh, this one knew what she was doing, and. . . wait a second, something she'd said. "You had imaginary conversations with me?"
"Only when you were dead. Don't make a thing of it." She shook her head to dismiss the subject, and he knew for the moment there was no point in digging.
She scraped the last of the ice cream from the dish, and he realized how starving he was. Still, it served him right. The Wolfram & Hart jet was well-supplied with sacrificial blood that, despite Angel's protests, had a suspiciously biped bouquet to it. Spike had left all that tasty hemoglobin goodness on board, making no plans for provisions in Rome. Of course not, because he hadn't allowed himself to hold out any real hope for the reunion. "Say, just for curiosity, I noticed a lot of stray cats in the alleys around here. Do you know if anybody picks them up?"
Buffy smacked the back of his head.
"What?"
Around the last mouthful of gelati, she said, "You are not going to eat a cat."
"Well, I don't mean here in the apartment. All's I'm saying is, if we were back in the States, someone would be picking up these vagrants and putting 'em out of their misery, so to speak, and if I was in a position to provide a comparable service --"
She smacked him again. "Quit while you're ahead. Assuming you're ever ahead, which I don't really recall you ever being. If you stick around, I'll go to the butcher in the morning and get you some pig's blood."
"Right." He looked at the ceiling, anywhere but at her. "And whose choice would that be?"
"The butcher's, I guess." She licked her spoon and stuck it to the end of her nose. "Is
there really any difference between pig's blood and pig's blood?"
"Buffy," He drew in a deep breath and let it out. "I can't have a serious conversation when you have silverware stuck to your face."
"Just flatware," she said. "Not real silver. And for someone who doesn't actually need to breathe," Buffy said, dropping the spoon into the bowl, "You do that dramatic sigh thing really well." She leaned over him to put the empty dish on the nightstand, and he gasped at the warmth of her arm. Their eyes met, and instead of pulling away, Buffy kneaded his shoulder, and leaned in to kiss his cheek. "I would say that staying or not is your choice. Except, we have to think about Dawn."
"So the sun comes up, I get stuck here." He raised one scarred eyebrow. "I can't imagine what we'll do all day."
"Dawn my sister Dawn."
Spike nodded. "I know. Bad joke." He swallowed. "How is the Little Bit?"
"Not so little anymore." Buffy bit her lip and looked at him.
"Might be nice to see her but . . ." He gauged Buffy's look. "I'm guessing not."
"I'm just thinking that Hey look, Uncle Spike spent the night! wouldn't go on the first page of Buffy's Guide to Responsible Parenting."
"Right," he said, trying not to think about what this told him about the status of Buffy's bed over the past year, regretting the months he'd wasted and every one of the poser Goth girls, and poor hot stupid bloody Harmony. "So it's not particularly me."
"Well, the fact that you are supposed to be dead does factor into the 'disruption of Dawn's stable home environment' equation."
"Because I'm thinking she wasn't really in the Spike fan club there at the end."
"Spike," Buffy sighed. "You'd be amazed what going down in a blaze of glory can do. You know you had a memorial ceremony. Andrew wrote a song about you." A whisper of mischief crept into her grin. "In elvish."
"Well, there are perks of being dead," he said. "By which I mean, missing that."
"Oh, it was lovely. The part I understood. There was a lot about Spock and the Prime Directive, Obi-Wan giving himself up so he could guide Luke, and um, James Gandolfini? No, wait --"
"Gandalf the White, in the pit of the Balrog," Spike guessed, remembering Andrew's words on their recent reunion.
"Yeah!" Her eyes widened. "How'd you --?"
"Old joke," he said hastily, holding up a pair of crossed fingers. "Me and Andy. Like that. You know how we both loved those -- short hairy men and the homoerotic Wagner ripoff. Look, it was a long motorcycle ride, we had to talk about something." He wasn't ready for Buffy to be thinking too hard about when he might have talked to Andrew, so he cast around for a change of subject. "Speaking of bikes --"
"I think it's kind of gone. Along with the garage and the house."
"No, I was going to say. Have you been on a Vespa yet? I always thought those things were bloody cool in the Fellini films. We could rent one of those, ride around. Be all, 'La Dolce Vita.' Or," he frowned, "'La Dolce Morte,' as the case may be." Now where the hell did that come from? Spike wondered. There was babbling to shift away from a tricky subject, and then there was just babbling. He wouldn't be caught alive on one of those damn motor scooters, and he doubted he'd even seen a movie in Italian, unless it was dirty. The hundred-plus years of cultural detritus crashing around in his brain sometimes amazed even him.
And Buffy wasn't listening anyway. Her gaze showed that she had gone somewhere else. He reached over and took a soft handful of her hair. He couldn't believe it was there to touch, wasn't sure, once he had done it, if it would be all right. But her eyes came back to him. "The memorial was nice really, you would have liked it. We were in England, at -- this place Giles knows. There was a breeze blowing and the sun was out."
"Oh, definitely, my kind of scene."
"Well, we wouldn't have had it in the day if --" A smile spread on her face and she smacked his arm. "Stupid."
"Ouch," he muttered, grasping the beginnings of a Slayer-strength bruise, the latest of so many.
Her eyes widened. "Sorry."
Spike looked at the ceiling again. "April 7, 2004. Aussie sensation Russell Crowe turns
forty, and Buffy Summers apologizes for hitting me."
"Really? Russell Crowe is forty?"
"Saw it on CNN-Europe."
Buffy rolled her eyes. "I am so over him."
"And I am so over people being over Russell Crowe. It's suddenly all the thing to be I-never-thought-he-was-so-great. Well, 'Master and Commander'? Bloody brilliant."
"I never saw it." She swallowed. "Xander was even sad, I think."
"Well." Spike hesitated. "I'm sure he can rent it."
"At the memorial," she said. "Of course, it was hard to tell, poor Xander, he was so broken up about Anya."
"Anya?" Spike repeated. A jolt of unaccustomed pain hit him at the thought of all that beautiful annoying sulky insane energy being gone from the world. He had managed to think of her as a friend from time to time, ever so briefly as a lover. It wasn't that he should have known, but he at least should have wondered. Somehow, he had thought of his own sacrifice clearing the way for the others, hadn't given himself room to consider casualties, and of course Andrew was too much of a berk to mention it. Still, it seemed so hard to believe. "I thought Anya was --"
"Mortal. Almost everybody else got out," she said quickly. "Some of the potentials who I guess -- you didn't really know. Honestly, I didn't know a lot of them. Until later. I've memorized all the names now, of course, but -- that day in England was a good day. It was a time to heal. A time to understand some things, the way we had lost each other. Me and Giles, Xander and Willow."
"So to translate, 'It's just as bloody well, you weren't there, Spike, to get everything in a muddle."
"No! No muddle but --" She put a hand to her forehead. "Maybe a little muddly. Right this minute. They were all very nice about you."
"Easy enough," he said. "Dead and all. Not such the fan club when I was walking dead."
He leveled a finger at Buffy. "I'm not saying I give a rat's bum, mind you, what people think about me but." He swallowed. "I guess I gave 'em reason. Time to time."
Buffy rubbed a hand over his arm. "It wasn't you."
"Well, that's the thing, love. A lot of it was. You know as well as anybody how this soul thing works. A vampire's a nasty shotgun marriage of a man and a demon. Without the soul, the demon's in charge. There's nothing to stop him from going after what he wants, but -- there's things he wants because he's a demon and there's things he wants because he's a man."
She turned her head. "I don't know that I like where this is going."
"No," he said, firmly. "Hurting you, Buffy, that's never something that I want."
"I don't think I understand what you're saying, then."
"Vampire or man, I'm not somebody that a lot of people are going to like. And why that is, is because, in the case of the large percentage of humans or demons or what have you, I don't really care if they like me. And I can't say that I really think much of them. I've never needed a lot of people to like me. Much less love me."
"Just the ones you love."
"Ones?"
She lowered her eyes. "But you don't believe that I do."
"Oh," he winced and lowered his head. "That. You've been thinking on what I said that day."
"Only, you know, since it happened." She sighed. "Come on, Spike, everybody knows the next line. 'Empire Strikes Back'. Han's going to the carbon freezing chamber, and Leia finally says 'I love you,' and Han says --"
Spike nodded. "I know. I mean, he really says --"
"I know."
"That's a better line? Oh come on, Buffy. Harrison Ford is an all-out wanker." He stabbed a finger at her, "And you are much prettier than that Fisher bird. Please forgive me. I was sacrificing my un-life to save the world, I didn't realize you were playing movie quotes."
"I don't mean that I was thinking of the movie," she said. "But everything we went through, the place that it took us at the end. You were so sure all along, and it took me so long to get there, but Spike -- I got there. I meant it, I wasn't throwing you a bone."
"You meant it," he said, "Fine, and I'm just a dumb git who doesn't have any better excuse besides that he was dying to save the world."
"Remember who you're talking to," said Buffy. "I've kind of been there. But before I died, I managed to say something to my sister that wasn't shitty."
He felt the closeness of the evening slipping away from him, remembered once again the pain of having her body so close, while everything that was her floated out of reach. "Any chance I can plead poor improv skills," he said, "and get out of here in time to eat a cat?"
"No! I am not trying to get rid of you, but that's the last thing you can plead. You've as much as admitted to me, tonight, that you put a little rehearsal into your big moments."
"Uh-oh." Spike closed his eyes. "Here it comes. Of course, Buffy, I didn't know I was going to -- or that you would say --"
"And there's no way you anticipated? Dare I say, fantasized?"
"All right." Spike sighed. "I admit that I might have imagined a hypothetical situation, some time in advance, in which you would tell me -- and I would say --"
"Say how far in advance?"
"Well," he paused. "It might actually be more instructive to count forward, from the time, a good -- bloody hell, was it only four years ago? -- when I realized I had the misfortune to be in love with you. From that point, I'd estimate -- about fifteen minutes."
"You asshole!" said Buffy, though Spike could barely make it out through her laughter.
"Actually, since you brought it up -- "Empire" was what? 1980? I saw that in Sydney with Dru, and we were walking out and I told her, you know what would have been a better line, is if Han said to Leia -- that is, if he weren't such a wanker -- 'No you don't, but thanks for saying it.' Of course, by that point, she was chowing down on an usher and -- Buffy, can you start to grasp, that maybe if I thought you did love me, it wouldn't be any compliment to you?"
"Sorry, you lost me somewhere around Sydney. You think I love you, or you don't?"
"OK, I worked out a way to explain this part too. Help me out here. My heart --" He took her hand and clenched the fingers into a fist. Buffy didn't resist as he pressed it to his chest.
"I know how to find the heart on a vampire, Spike."
"It's not much bigger than this," he said, squeezing her hand shut. "A tiny, hungry little thing that doesn't even do any work anymore. Just sits there waiting for some stake to find it. My heart's got teeth, Buffy. Like -- OK, see this is the part I had trouble with. Like some animal that finds something it wants, grabs on, and it won't let go. What's an animal like that?"
"Badger?"
"Smaller."
"Chipmunk."
"No," he shook his head, "I don't think, chipmunk."
"Weasel?" she said, with a thin-patience grin.
"Let's go with chipmunk. I've got this tough little chipmunk heart that finds the one thing it wants. And digs in. And holds on. And shakes until it's worried the life out of the thing. Never sees anything else, never hears. Never tastes anything, it's so busy with it's mouth around this -- what was it?"
"A nut of some kind?"
"Whatever chipmunks eat. And for years now, that -- chipmunk food -- has been you. Before that, it was Dru, and before that --" He shook his head. "I liked some girls when I was alive. Not worth thinking about, they never liked me."
"I would have liked you."
"You would not. I was a poncey wanker." He pointed a finger at her. "Take it back!"
"I would have seen beneath the poncey surface and discovered the inner badass."
"No," he said. "I had no inner badass. You would not have liked me. If it turns out you would have liked me, then I can no longer like you."
"Yes," said Buffy. "Because that's gonna happen. Tell me more about the chipmunk heart."
"That --" He sighed. "That is what love is to me, Buffy. The thing this little chipmunk heart grabs and won't let go."
"From where I'm standing, Spike? That doesn't sound too bad."
"Oh, but wait. I have to do you. Just lie down and --" He made a circle of his fingers and rested them on her breastbone. "I promise you that this is not -- just -- an opportunity to cop a feel."
"You're unbelievable," she said, but stayed in place, her eyes wandering down to watch his hands.
"This is your heart. It has to be big enough for everyone in your life. Friends, family. The people you work with, the people you protect."
"Because I'm the slayer?" she asked, and quickly corrected. "A slayer?"
"Slayer, schmayer. You think every one of these beady-eyed girls has a heart like this?"
He bent down to kiss her forehead. "Because you're Buffy. Now come on." He spread his fingers as wide as they would go. "Big open Buffy heart."
She understood and slid her fist into the gap in his hands. "Gnawing little chipmunk heart."
"Now, Buffy? How is that little heart of mine ever going to fill up this great big heart of yours? But if it doesn't, if it never can, then what you mean when you say you love me. It isn't -- it can't ever be -- "
"The same thing you mean," she said quietly. "But Spike, that's not fair."
"No," he said, and rolled abruptly away from her. "No, love, it damn well ain't."
"But maybe, Spike." She lay beside him and reached down to clasp her small, strong fingers through his long ones. "Maybe that's not what I want. I don't want to have to think of everyone, everything, the whole world, all the time. Maybe I want more of the chipmunk heart."
He sat up. "Well, you work on that, love. And I'll work on the other."
"Really?" She frowned.
"Say I have something in my heart besides you, Buffy. And I don't mean another woman, because forget it. I mean anything besides blooming onions and the telly and the Sex Pistols. A mission. A life's work."
"That would be -- well, depending on what it was. That could be wonderful."
"And it would hurt you a little."
She swallowed. "Yes. Yes, I guess it would."
"There you go." He rubbed the back of his hand softly against her cheek. "There's your little bit of chipmunk. Now you've got something to work up from. But I could be in this world a long time. A heart's always hungry when there's only one thing in it. Before, what I was, that was what I had. Violence and death and -- still like a good spot of those, OK? Don't start to think old Spike's going soft on you. But for a long time, Buffy, there was nothing in my heart but you. At first I thought it was hate, but -- I'll tell you a nasty little thing about the chipmunk heart. Sometimes what you with your big heart call hating a bloke and using him, ain't a lot different from what the chipmunk heart means by love."
"So," Buffy frowned. "You're doing something, now, that's going to help you -- I'm sorry, I've completely lost the metaphor. I'm better at these when there's some sort of baking involved."
"I have some work, Buffy. I'll be honest, it's difficult for me to tell you about. I wasn't sure if I would, but you've a right to know."
"Look," she said, "Whatever it is you're mixed up with, I can't imagine it would piss me off more than the things I'm hearing about Angel's new business partners."
"Well, love. It's a bit of a funny story --"
End Ch. 5