Trick For Your Treats: A Maypole Dance Around Spike

October 31st, 1997

Part 8: Want. Take. Have.

19-1/2

Joyce: Buffy! Oh, I didn't see you there! This is my friend, William. I got stranded on the way home from the gallery with a flat tire and William helped me fix it.

Buffy: Hi.

Spike: 'ello.

Awkward silence.

Buffy fumed over both the impertinent smirk upon "William's" lips. Annoying jerk. He is really starting to annoy her. She wants to stake him for daring to look so damn smug.

Also, Buffy couldn't believe her mother's audacity. What's with the sudden June Cleaver act anyway? Just seconds ago Joyce was giggling hysterically at Spike's raunchy story. Hello? Hypocrite much!

It has to be a lie. Because…Angel? Doing those things? Speaking with that brogue? Using the word titties…

Angel…?

Her head feels like a crash test dummy that's hit the wall doing 80.

Her Angel?

Titties?

To make matters worse, Buffy is Wiggin on a whole new level cause her mother has unwittingly invited yet another vampire into the house. Following the Meat Fork Incident with Darla, Buffy has worried that it might happen again, and here it has. Thank goodness that Spike is relatively benign. A cocoa-sipping, tire-changing vampire with a soul…

Which is the reason that Buffy won't be attempting to wipe that smirk off his face with either fist or stake… That, and the fact that she's already tried and failed.

The memory of being smashed facedown into the pavement with his fangs against her throat is recent and vivid, springing immediately to the front of her thoughts. Buffy shuddered, and her face contorted with revulsion. She'd come so close to dying at his hands.

Spike flinched as if physically hit. "Time for me to be going," he announced. He gently set the empty mug on the counter next to the sink. "Thanks for the cocoa, Joyce."

Joyce appeared disappointed, but nodded and smiled. "Will I see you at book club this week, William?"

An odd expression crossed Spike's face. Like he hated the thought, but he'd attend anyway. "Count on it."

The door shut behind Spike with a subdued click.

Buffy looked at her mother. Joyce sucked in a deep breath and her lips parted as she prepared to launch into a "mother-daughter" talk. No doubt concerning the trauma of post-divorce dating, and how Buffy won't be expected to call Spike "Daddy".

It fills her head with Polaroid photos: all of them very wrong. Spike and Joyce at their wedding, which must be held at night and nowhere near a church, so the groom doesn't become flambé vampire. A honeymoon more likely held where they have six-month nights instead of Hawaii. A cute bouncy infant with a bad case of albinism, and the cutest widdle fangs you can ever imagine…

Isn't it enough that Buffy must deal with her own unending angst as she confronts the paradoxical nature of her relationship with Angel? MUST her mother do this to her?

"Buffy," Joyce began with that soothing mommy tone, half-patronizing, half-concerned.

Buffy's slayer reflexes kicked into overdrive.

"Oh Boy! Am I tired! Tuckered out! Pooped! Big yawn!" Buffy pretended to stifle one, and darted in to plant a quick kiss on her mother's cheek.

"Off to bed with me! Early to bed, early to rise! Happy, wealthy, and wise!" Buffy recited as she darted up the staircase.

"Good night, Buffy," Joyce called, sounding wry.

"Night!" Buffy gave a final chirpy parting, and closed her bedroom door. She listened to be sure that footsteps weren't following her, and then shut off the light. The slayer darted across the room and out the open window.

She gives chase and this time he is expecting her. Spike whirls and assumes a defensive stance, fists coming up to protect his face. He hates having his nose broken. She's already registered that tidbit from their first clash, filing it away in her slayer database, should she ever need it again.

"No sick pervy goings on with your mum, slayer, so turn around and trot your dirty-minded self on home!" he snapped.

Buffy blushed. Hard. Two bright red blossoms appeared on her cheeks. "I'm not here to fight."

"Good."

"I want-" she began, but he cut her off.

"Saw that look, slayer," Spike said. "You want me to stay away from you and your mum. Thing is, Joyce and I are adults and we're well past the age of needing approval. Now if that's settled, I'll be going." His words are not nearly as flippant as he'd like to believe. There is underlying bitterness, and for some reason that Buffy doesn't understand, he obviously cares what she thinks of him.

He walked straight at her, brushed past, giving her a good whiff of smoke and leather, and the whisper of whisky. He took control of the situation and set her neatly off balance, forcing her to follow him if she wanted to talk.

Buffy stopped, refusing to follow, inwardly fuming. She is really starting to hate him! Just who the hell does he think he is?

"That's not what I wanted to say," she protested. What she's about to say sticks in her craw, however, Buffy's sense of right and wrong is mammoth. She cannot allow him to continue to operate under the impression that she thinks he's scum. It just won't do.

"I know you're a nice guy. Thanks for helping my mom out with the flat." The aftermath of their fight has left more than Buffy emotionally devastated. She remembers Spike's hunched shoulders, blue eyes bright with tears, and the agony in his voice.

The both of them walked away with regrets. Dirtier. Wiser. But what's important is that both of them walked away. From there they can move forward. The future's always brighter when someone isn't trying to kill you.

Spike looks back, momentarily surprised, and then puzzled. "I am? And you'd know that how?"

Buffy's brow shot up. "Well, you didn't kill me. Duh. And you fixed my mom's flat. And mom likes you, and she's a pretty spot on judge of character." (Darla aside. And even moms are allowed occasional lapses of judgment.)

Spike looks more skeptical than he should, as if he's expecting her to rain down nothing but insults. Buffy stared at him. "Why? Are you evil pretending to be good, and this is all just some elaborate plot to suck me in?" Vampires sucking. Buffy inwardly groans at her own poor choice of words.

If vampires could blush, Spike would've been bright red. "Even if it were most of my grand plans tend to get all bollixed up."

"Lousy tactician in addition to being a slovenly dresser," Buffy said, nodding her head as if filing away the data for future reference. Who knows, maybe it'd come in handy. Though, really, his black-on-black 'outfit' isn't all that bad. But what is it about vampires and the color black? Their preoccupation with the color is not only morbid, but unoriginal too.

The change in appearance is drastic. He is wearing black denim jeans and a black tee shirt bearing a logo beneath a beat up leather thing that might've been a duster in a previous incarnation. Gone are the pressed trousers, cashmere sweater, and shiny loafers. He looks like a whole 'nother person, and it is weren't for that his distinctive pale beauty and that rough English accent, Buffy might've wondered if he were the same vampire.

"Were the clothes I ruined your only nice ones?" Buffy said, and his mercurial expression morphs to outraged denial, telling her that she's hit the truth on the head. Spot on.

"Got plenty of fancy threads!" Spike glared at her, causing Buffy to smirk. She resisted the urge to openly gloat. Girl gettin' some of her own back. Oh yeah…

Her grin coaxed a smidgen of a smile to his lips. "What then?" His sharp blue eyes contained guarded curiosity. His guard is lowering.

Buffy swallowed, suddenly nervous, once again noticing his sublime masculine beauty. He smells nummy. And he's so hot that he makes her nether regions ache. On a purely instinctual level, her primordial slayer knows the right way of doing things: Want. Take. Have.

As simple as that.

She wants them both.

Oh God, if she wasn't already with Angel… If if if… No, Bad Buffy. She is Angel's girl. End of story.

"What do you want, slayer?" Spike asked, managing to make the question obscene and suggestive, the way his lips wrap around the word. She wishes that he'd call her 'Buffy' even though slayer is precisely the degree of impersonal that they must maintain. Because they are strangers even though he looks at her like a long lost lover.

"I-I-I want you," Buffy stuttered. Straight from the hips, and past the lips…

Spike's eyes got way wide.

End Part 8.