Spike approached the craftsman Revello Drive porch with quick snap of his boots. He told himself that he wasn't checking on her. Merely paying a formal "are you dead or alive, Slayer?" visit. All verbal spurs and barbs he was bound to suffer aside, it was a right proper custom between arch-rivals. He took in sight of the house. He scanned for pitfalls, traps, weakened entry points. The Doug fir overhanging the sloping roof provided perfect access to the Slayer's bedroom window. Break her neck in her sleep, he could. Or he could knock on the door and ask: excuse me Joyce. Sorry for not dropping in for tea this year. You must have been terribly put out by your one and only heading off to college with nothing but stakes and fists. Is your eldest still amongst the living?
He didn't need to. Two shrill voices pierced the quiet. One was ostensibly the Slayer, the other totally unfamiliar. Sounds of her shouting at—maybe someone new in the house?
The image of a gawky long-haired teen, all angles and indignation, formed in his mind at that instant. But he shook the mental picture off and smiled like a predator. That right buggering ponce Dracula must have learned the true stuff of Slayers. Like frills on a steel trap, this one.
The door slamming open on its hinges took him by surprise. He instictively pressed back into the deeper shadows of the Doug fir. For reasons he cared not to examine, his unnecessary breath quickened to large but ragged intervals. The smallish girl heard him. She hitched a foot on a crack in the cement and stumbled right beside his clever hiding spot.
"Who's there?" the young girl squeaked, inching backward on her hands and knees to the porch steps. "I know something's there."
His long-buried Victorian sensibilities surfaced for a moment. A niggling patience in the base of his skull cut the desire to say something right scary to the little one. Daily he suspected that those army blokes had installed more than the all-work-and-no-play chip when they were carving into his brainpan. Muck about the importance of first impressions paraded through his head, as though—hello, vampire?—he didn't already know the value of the slo-mo dramatic sweep. His fingers groped for smokes in his back pockets. He patted down his jeans for his cherished Zippo.
"Whatever's out there—if you touch me, my sister is so going to kill you." Hands fell away from pockets, and he looked up at the young little thing, now on her feet, shivering in the light, hands circling her waist. Go on then, call for her nibblet. Let her explain to you that this Big Bad's not interested in some off-the-street bint.
Strong shocks, like hands reaching into his head to rearrange his synapses to align just so, fired. He knew this girl. He knew this girl. She had a name, and he knew it. Dawn. Buggerit.
He ghosted into the dimmed light of the porch.
The bit pulled her hands away from her waist. She seemed to nonchalantly drop her eyes to take account of the number of leaves on the nearest hedge. "Oh," she said (Crestfallen?). "Hi Spike."
Cig in hand. Now lit. He dragged on the end, sucking the smoke down. He had a comeback. It died on his lips after each drag.
"Want me to call her?" she asked after a long pause.
He gave her a look. He didn't quite know what it communicated, but he was fairly confident it was a cross between sheer annoyance and simple cool. Not the sheepish grin of having been caught with a fat hand in the cookie jar, or the guiltynervous blood-lust that sang Slayer, I could kill you every night and feel your death not near enough. No, not hardly.
"Are you here to get your face beat in by Buffy, or are you just here to gloat about her spiffy new marks ala the Prince of Sexy Darkness?" Her voice turned wickedly smug. "Cause that would drive her through the roof."
He choked on an accidental drag of smoke. He covered the sound with a derisive growl. "New Marks?"
The thought of Dracula's teeth in the Slayer's throat set him on fire. Suddenly he was on the balls of his toes, pacing back and forth between the twin firs like a caged cat. He knew it, back in the crypt sucking on a bottle of Jack that Dracula would sink in to the Slayer before Captain America found his posh digs, but he should have known it.
"That ponce. That right buggering ponce." He gestured fiercely at the palms, the hedge, Dawn, the Slayer's window as he ranted. "Not as though the Slayer needs a guard dog, but you don't go Cowboy-and-Indians for the Prince of Sodding Transylvania. You circle the wagons, kiddies, set up perimeters, lookouts. You don't leave the—"
He approached the porch. Dawn scrambled to her feet. The light glinted off his eyes and threw crazy highlights into his sharp blonde hair. It bothered him more than words. The Superfriends had foiled every damn plan during his short reign as Master Vamp of Sunnydale-way. So what, vamp royalty comes to town and they're suddenly star struck? Let the Slayer get bit on? The Scooby patrol laid down for Dracula. The rage nearly bowled him over.
"Seriously Spike, you look so much like Giles right now, it's creepy." Dawn snorted. Her tone became more conversational at that point. She slumped down onto the front steps, and leaned her elbows against the night-cooled cement. "Dracula's dust now, so that's a plus. What's it to you, anyways?"
"Me and Drac, we go way back. Old foes, we are. " He couldn't finish. He had no idea what he would say.
"What?" She quirked an eyebrow at him, as though he weren't speaking the same language.
It didn't fit on him right, having to ask the bit for help. But that showy gypsy magic of his made him impossible to track. Oh, that wanker flew. As though walkin' was just too pedestrian, fit for below-me types, vamps and humans alike. "Drac's estate. Who went? It's important," he said through gritted teeth.
She seemed to give no thought to the important of him asking her for help, as though standing on the porch of the Slayer's twentieth-century stoop-covered Craftsman bungalow with a stray smoking cursing vampire, dreaming up the names of the latest vampire assault crew was the most natural thing in the world for a teenage girl to do on a cool September night.
"Riley. Oh!" she squealed. "Check this--he's over at Lowell house tonight because Buffy totally kicked him to the curb." Dawn giggled. "Wish I coulda seen his face." Spike demonstrated how much he didn't care with an un-subtle rolling of his eyes.
Dawn's eyes unfocused and scrunched up her lip as she plucked the narrative thread. "Giles."
"Did Anya go, or was she locked up in a closet?" Dawn mused. Times like these, he thought to himself, the bit acted nothing like her sister. Suffered his presence with much less manifest suffering. It felt almost like he was—he wasn't sure. It was simply different.
"What would you bet?" Spike retorted.
"I bet she was in the closet." She paused. "Xander."
Xander. The name perked him right up. If there was one person he could count on to push the kill-crush-destroy vampire buttons at any time of night, it was the carpenter.
"Were you watching Buffy?" The right-angle conversational segue did the trick of yanking him out of his head. Spike was suddenly very aware of his heavy hands on her shoulders, white hands with threads of blue-veins on the Slayer's little sis—a stakeable offense he was sure—and he let them drop, jerkily and not without (he was sure of it) a loss of face. The night air was on his cheek like a warm blanket. His Docs chafed against skin as he shifted his weight from leg to leg. "You're so obvious sometimes." She mimicked Spike's eye-roll expertly.
A beetling sense of horror crawled up his spine. He about-faced. Jaw and mind set solely on the confrontation with Harris. The duster flared out as he bounded down the walkway of the Revello Drive bungalow.
Her voice, high and thin with increasing distance, called after him, "Dracula's dust, remember?" A pause and a little louder, to make up for the intervening space he'd created between them. "What could be so important?"
Twenty-five year old doc martens worn thin on the heels. Dirt caked on the toes and soles. Underneath, cracks veining the slender cement walkway. The details all seemed so important at the moment, taken in part or in whole. He couldn't bring himself to look back at the girl.
"Blighter owes me eleven quid."