BtVS Ficlet: Dangerous Company
Title: Dangerous Company
Fandom: BtVS
Author: badly_knitted
Characters: Spike, Buffy, Scoobies
Rating: PG
Spoilers: Early Season 6, before Once More With Feeling.
Summary: Spike muses on the reasons he’s spending so much time with Buffy.
Word Count: 340
Written For: juliet316’s prompt ‘BtVS, Buffy/Spike, Dangerous company,’ at
fic_promptly.
Disclaimer: I don’t own BTVS, or the characters. They belong to Joss Whedon.
When Spike thinks about it - which he seldom does because thinking leads to brooding and seriously, he’s not going there, he still has some pride - both of them are keeping rather dangerous company. He’s a vampire, she’s the slayer, and her friends are in the demon-hunting business. By all the rules of the game, they should be the deadliest of enemies, and in the past they have been, but… Been there, done that, bought the t-shirt. Time to try something new.
So, now they hang out together. Among other things.
It’s not love, but it’s not hate these days either. At least, not on his part. He’s not always sure about Buffy; sometimes he thinks she hates both him and herself equally, that she’s punishing herself by being with him. Sometimes he thinks she’s just trying to feel something, anything, no matter how self-destructive it might be. She seems broken somehow, and that disturbs him more than it should.
Why should he care? They’ve tried to kill each other often enough, but now when he looks at her, he wants to hold her, protect her, help her, and okay, maybe for him it is a kind of love. He’s not sure if he likes it. It’ll probably be the death of him, but he can’t walk away. He’s not that strong.
Maybe he just needs to be needed. Dru used to need him, but now she’s strong again, and still nutty as a fruitcake, and whatever they used to have is gone. He doesn’t know where or how or when, but he suspects Buffy may have something to do with why.
Buffy needs him now, for reasons he doesn’t yet understand but he’ll get the truth out of her somehow. Well, when she’s ready to tell him anyway. No one makes Buffy do something she doesn’t want to do, least of all him.
So he’ll be there for her, whatever it takes, and he’ll even hang out with her friends. Dangerous company is better than no company at all.
The End