CHAPTER THREE
The minute Spike and Buffy open the door to their apartment, there is a flash of lightning white hair and tears that they recognize as their son, flying towards them. He wraps his arms around both of them, crying harder than either of them has ever seen him cry, even when he was a newborn and his tears couldn't be explained.
"Moomy…d-addy…don't want you to leave me ever," Daniel sobs against them.
"I am so sorry," Candyce tells them, tucking her bottom lip under her teeth. "Matthew here told Daniel that his father was dead and things kind of escalated from there." She is holding her own son by the shoulders, presenting him for interrogation.
But there is no interrogation for Matthew. Only for Mommy and Daddy.
"Matthew said you're gonna die!" Daniel says, his chin trembling in that heart-wrenching way that make Buffy and Spike want to go out again and kill everything evil in the world, if such an action would just make things all right for Daniel.
"Oh, sweetie," Buffy says, hoisting her son into her arms. He lays his head on her shoulder and as his forehead rests against her chin, she can feel how heated his skin is from crying.
"Matthew, say you're sorry," Candyce urges her son with a slight nudge.
"I'm sorry," the child mumbles, eyes cast downward, hands deep in his pockets.
"We're OK," Buffy says, stroking the springy curls on her son's head. "Thanks for looking after him tonight."
"I'm just so sorry," Candyce says. "Matthew should have never---
"It's OK," Buffy assures her. "It was about time for a mortality speech anyway. Here, Daddy. Suit up Daniel for bed. I'll be in in a minute."
Spike takes his son into his arms and the boy clings to him automatically as though he were magnetically charged to his father. Daniel spews a splat of mucus from his nose onto Spike's shoulder and his father just holds him closer.
Daniel is choking on sobs all the way to his bedroom as Spike jiggles him up and down, as he did when he was a baby. That action didn't do any good then and it's not doing any good now.
"Don't you worry a bit about Daddy going away from you," Spike tells his son in a delicate whisper against his temple as he imprints a kiss there. "I'm not going anywhere."
"But Matthew said---
"It doesn't matter what Matthew said." Spike deposits his son on the floor of his room as he searches for clean pajamas in the top drawer. Finding the dinosaur thermals Daniel loves so much, he shuts the drawer with a quick shove of his elbow. "It doesn't apply to me."
Once dressed in his pajamas, and once he makes a dozen or so passes against his teeth with his toothbrush, Daniel is ready for bed. His sleepy-eyed appearance is dueling with his innate inquisitiveness as Spike pulls down the covers of Daniel's bed and the boy gets in.
"You're not going to die?" Daniel asks. His eyes are still engorged with tears and when Spike sees those bright blue eyes in standing water, he does want to die.
But Daniel never wants him to die.
Buffy and Spike have often discussed when and where they will bring up the discussion about Spike's immortality. Daniel isn't ready for a full-throttle retrospect on the unlife of William the Bloody. Buffy and Spike have figured that the revelation of Spike-as-monster will come about around the time of the birds and the bees talk. They hope anyway.
Spike lowers himself onto his son's bed, resting against Daniel. The boy's body conforms neatly against Spike's and still there are the shakes of leftover sobs from the early terror that one day Daniel might lose his father.
"Don't you worry," Spike says, kissing his son once more. "I'm here for a reason. And so are you. You see, at one time your Daddy didn't know why he was here. Why he had ever been born. What place he had in the universe."
"What's the universe?" Daniel asks, still suppressing sobs.
"Where we live, Daniel. Where all of us live," Spike says, not wanting to get all Carl Sagan on his son.
"Oh," Daniel says.
Spike is relieved that no other question follows. "I knew why I was here when I fell in love with your Mummy," Spike says, his countenance lifted by the remembrance of his wife dancing in the daring light blue halter-top she was wearing when he first saw her. "I'm here to love and protect your Mummy." He is reliving the tender memory of when Daniel was still in his mother's stomach, when he was yet to be unveiled to the world. There was so much mystery, so much longing. And when Buffy rested her stomach against him while they were in bed, and the baby that would be Daniel kicked during the night, he felt life and everything precious and sacred about it. "And then when you were born, I had a second purpose. To love and protect you. And I'm going to do that forever. Because I'm not like other fathers. I do have forever. I'm not going to die." I already have, Spike wants to say. But he doesn't.
"What about Mommy?" Daniel has to ask.
This past February, Buffy turned twenty-six, something no other Slayer has ever done. When she blew out the candles on her birthday cake, she thanked Xander, Willow and Giles for making that milestone possible, but she also gave kudos to her husband, quipping that marrying her mortal enemy had been the best decision of her life.
"We're working on Mummy," Spike says, the enormousness of his responsibility to his wife taking a brutal hold of him, so much so that he cannot speak for a few minutes. I've got to keep her alive. I've got to keep her alive, he repeats to himself, the prime directive of his existence. Because if she dies, he doesn't know what will become of him.
He will love her through the rest of her twenties, when youth is still taking hold of her and she is solid and sinewy and a bit too thin for his liking. There will be the thirties when she's beginning to give way to gravity, late thirties, probably. She will still be stunning, he assures himself. In middle age, she will be huggable in her fleshy spread that she will try to defeat in training and training others. She will be a striking fifty-year old, silver of hair and foxy as when he found her dancing in that halter-top. She will wear that for him in her sixties and seventies, when her boobs no longer fill the front of it and she wonders if she still looks good. She will still be alive. She will still look good to him as long as she's alive.
"Pooh, Daddy," Daniel says.
Spike at first thinks this evening's trauma has forced his son back into the scatological time in his life when he was obsessed with poo, specifically if it were in the toilet where it should be and not in his diaper. Daniel has to say it several times before Spike realizes what he's talking about.
"Oh, Pooh! The House at Pooh Corner!" Spike reaches for the slim paperback on Daniel's nightstand. "Of course. Where were we? Chapter seven, is it?" Spike lifts the bookmark and begins reading. "'Half way between Pooh's house and Piglet's house was a Thoughtful Spot where they met sometimes when they had decided to go and see each other, and as it was warm and out of the wind they would sit down there for a little and wonder what they would do now that they had seen each other.'"
Suddenly the text seems to be not so much about Pooh and Piglet and everything about Buffy. Spike remembers the days when he and Buffy had their own Thoughtful Spots where they would meet, if they knew Dawn would be home or if they just needed to add a little excitement to their sex life. Sometimes it would be in his musty crypt, or at a construction site, or in a house where nobody lived anymore. The best times were in her bed, the one place he had been exiled from for so long. How many nights he pined to lie in those vanilla scented sheets. It didn't matter if they were having sex or not. Just to be there, with her, with her not staring stakes at him, with her just looking at him as though he were the only person she had ever taken to this bed and had loved so thoroughly and completely.
He still loves waking up next to her in that bed. The novelty has not worn off, not as long as the smell of her is there.
Just as he is thinking of her, she appears at the door. She has changed into her nightgown and has scrubbed the make-up from her face. Even flushed from exfoliating, and her hair damp and clinging to her face, she is so gorgeous to him. She mouths the words, "Everything OK?" and he nods as he continues to read.
Spike finally enters their bedroom an hour later. Tonight merited more than just a single chapter. Spike read two chapters, voicing each character with equivocal passion and verve, giving his best performance to date, he thought. He is tired tonight and is languid in the removal of his clothes. Buffy is already in bed, reading her own book, Vampyre, Version 1506 with a CD ROM which she will run as soon as Dawn comes home and shows her how to run it.
Once he is undressed, Spike collapses beside her. He rests the back of his left hand against his forehead as he wonders aloud, "What are we going to do?"
"Honey, I've been thinking about this," Buffy says, inserting a bookmark into her book and placing it on the bedside table. She lies down on her stomach and begins to play with the little transparent hairs under Spike's navel. "If you can get a job, even a part time job, and if I ask for a raise at the Y---
"That's not what I'm talking about," Spike says darkly, jerking her hand away from her endeavors to raise his arousal. He holds her hand and delicately places it against his lips. "We're going to have to tell him sooner or later about me."
"Oh," she says, sitting upright, ultimately throwing her back against the cushion of pillows separating her from the wrought iron of the headboard. "Yeah. We have to do that."
"Have you ever thought about how we're going to do that?" Spike asks.
Buffy sighs. "Just about every day since he was born," she says, folding her arms.
Spike places a kiss on his wife's bare shoulder, swirls a finger in that spot and kisses her there again. "He needs to hear the truth from us. And we need to tell him before the kids in his class start getting suspicious. Halloween is coming up and there will be much talk about ghouls and beasties in his class. And that Matthew would be none too good to tell him one day that I'm a vampire. He has to hear the truth from us."
Buffy knows this. She still hates herself for not telling Dawn about her existence as they Key before she found out about it from books and papers, and not from the people who loved her.
Buffy cups her husband's chin and kisses him lightly on the lips. She kisses him again, embracing the coldness of his lips and the unnatural position of him in her bed, under her sheets, worrying about a child they have together in the next room.
"I don't want him to know everything," Spike says, suddenly shy, his chin dropping to his chest. "If he knew everything, he might not love me anymore."
"I don't think you have to worry about that, honey," Buffy says sweetly. "When the time comes, I think he'll understand that you were a different person before, living under different circumstances. I mean, the rugby players from Uruguay had to tell their children about eating their teammates after their plane crashed in the Andes."
"Yes, but they weren't evil. They were just hungry."
She knows a lot about what he did before he loved her and it's enough to make her sick. She is comforted time and again by the knowledge that he is not the man he was before. And he is sorry about what he has done in the past. Every time he embraces his son, she knows he detests his past actions and she realizes that everyone, even a cold-blooded killer, deserves a second chance. She has given him numerous second chances all in the name of love.
Buffy kisses Spike's lips, remembering how such an action was once so repulsive to her. Now she just dives in for more. And he is receptive. So much so, she knows she doesn't need her nightgown anymore.
Positioned on top of him, with Spike inside of her, his hands around her waist, she doesn't have a care in her head. When he twirls a thumb against the knot of nerves between her legs and kneads it in a circular motion, she cries out in pleasure and pain.
She falls against him, her chin hitting the sharp protrusion of his collarbone. He rubs his hand down her spine, ultimately cupping her tight butt in his hand.
"We have to tell him," Spike says as his wife rests on top of him.
"I know," Buffy says, ears alert to any evidence that Daniel might be awake and aware of his parents' activities. "When the time comes, we'll know. We'll know. Just like when we fell in love. We knew when the time was right then. We'll know when the time is right to tell him the truth."
His wife lies sleepily against him, seemingly ready for a night's rest. But as he thinks she's about ready to drop off, she reaches down to the floor for her gown and puts it back on. She still lets him hold her, her head resting against his broad chest. As he looks down at her as she nods off, the same old fear grips him once again; this is short-lived, this is ephemeral, this is something that won't last because something this good couldn't be for all eternity.
It's what wakes him with a start some nights when he is restless in his dreams and it's what follows him through the day when he is comfortable in his position as house husband, he who wields the dust buster and can blot out a grape juice stain on the carpet with just a rag and a little club soda.
To think that it all could be gone with a careless whisper, that something murmured between classmates could end it all. He already knows the boys in the apartment complex talk about him. He's heard them speculating behind their closed front door and has heard their discourses on the fifth floor landing when he is able to sneak up on them, his footfalls unheard until he is right up on them, smirking over a bag of groceries, smoking, and wondering which one will be brave enough to say, "Wassup?" this time.
It's such a fine line he treads, between humanity and depravity. He has been excellent in his costume thus far, chucking the black of villainy for blues and indigos, but never red. Red reminds Buffy too much of when he snarled that she would die on a Saturday. He is beyond wearing the red. He likes to think so anyway. He has a life, more than any life he had when he was actually alive. A wife, a child, a place in society…
A dark secret.
He watches Sesame Street almost every day with Daniel and Daniel loves The Count. Daniel doesn't know that the Count is a vampire. He doesn't know that the bats in the background, the thunder sound effects, and the Count's "ah ah ah's" are all sort of safe Gothic allusions that kids will be safe with, since, to Spike's speculation, the Count must have a chip also which keeps him from snacking on Kermit.
There are so many things he never wants revealed. But one day the question will arise, "What is a vampire, Daddy?" and he will have to answer, "A vampire is a creature who has to kill for blood. I am one, but I am not a killer anymore. I was. I killed. I killed thousands. Some as young as you, Daniel. Some younger. I killed because I had to live. I needed blood to stay alive. I still do."
How much longer will he have to hide? How much longer will the cow's blood in the pitcher in the fridge be unquestioned? Daniel just knows that pitcher is Daddy's special Kool Aid and he can't have it, because it is just for Daddy. He wonders how much longer Daniel will love his old man after he tells him…
But it doesn't have to be everything all at once as he tries to settle into sleep. Spike slips down into the covers, briefly toying with the idea of going out on the stoop for a cig. As he changes positions, he hears Buffy murmur, "Unconditional."
Spike freezes, not wanting to wake her. But then she mumbles, "Mmmmm…" and snuggles up against him.
"Unconditional?" he asks, placing a kiss on the part of her hair.
"Hmmm hmmmm," she replies in her drowse. "Doesn't matter."
Spike doesn't know what to think of her unconscious ramblings. It seems she is answering all his eternal questions.
"What are you saying, love?" he asks, kissing her again.
She smiles sweetly in her sleep and kneads the skin of his chest like a kitten seeking sustenance. "There's cheese? Where?"
He chuckles lightly. She is dreaming and he lives for these moments when she is soft and lost in the never land of sleep.
He is gleaning some truth from her loose-lipped talk. Perhaps in this land of cheese she finds herself in while sleeping, there is a little boy who isn't afraid of his father now and won't be afraid of him when he knows the truth.
He snuggles down next to her, kissing her several times as she continues to audibly dream about cheese and, after the last kiss, of fondue and how yummy that is.
"My love," he says, holding her close.
"Hmmm…drippy cheese," is her response.