Fic: The feeling of being in motion again (BtVS; Buffy/Spike)
Title: the feeling of being in motion again
Fandom/Pairing: Buffy the Vampire Slayer; Buffy/Spike
Rating: R
Words: 9,710
Summary: Spike shakes his head and sighs, and Buffy swirls her fork through the pools of syrup on her plate, vaguely wondering how she got here, house hunting with a vampire at a rundown Denny’s and enjoying pretty much every minute of it.
A/N: This is takes place post-S8, so knowledge of the comics would be good. If you're not familiar with them, all that really matters for this fic is that Buffy’s had a rough year, she’s living in San Francisco with Xander and Dawn, and Spike’s there, too.
*
The thing about living with Xander and Dawn is that it kind of sucks.
On the one hand, it’s a free place to live with people who love her, which is totally great. But on the other hand, it’s also kind of awkward and cramped and, more often than not, just serves to remind Buffy about how crappy her own life is. Something that's made abundantly clear during the first weekend in June, when Dawn throws a little end-of-the-semester party, inviting a bunch of her new friends from school and telling Buffy that she has to be there.
It should be fun, Buffy knows that -- beer, pizza, music, and normal, human people who don’t know that she almost destroyed the world and that all of her friends hate her.
But it’s not. It’s boring and weird and she doesn’t want to be sitting on the arm of the sofa that she sleeps on every night, listening to a conversation that she thinks might be about feminism or socialism or Mark-ism? She didn’t quite get that one. Whatever, it’s some other -ism that she doesn’t want to sit here hearing about. What she wants to be is out killing things.
But then one of Dawn’s friends -- Matt or Max or something like that, Buffy’s not really paying attention -- sits down next to her and starts asking her about how she’s liking San Francisco and if she’s made it out to Coit Tower yet, and she figures she might as well try to embrace the whole being a normal girl thing. Plus, he’s nice and kind of cute, wearing skinny jeans and a button down shirt and even a tie. Normal ironic college kid clothes, right down to the black framed glasses and Jonas Brothers hair.
He’s not really Buffy’s type (he’s a little too heartbeat-having for that, after all), but from the other side of the room, Xander gives her a thumbs up and Dawn grins, so Buffy stays right where she is.
An hour later, she’s staring blankly out the window, listening to Matt talk about some band she’s never heard of, when a pair of scuffed-up leather boots appear on the fire escape, and Buffy smiles for what she thinks might be the first time that night.
*
“Didn’t mean to crash your party, pet.” Spike’s leaning against the metal rail of the fire escape, an unlit cigarette tucked behind his ear and a Spikey smirk on his face.
Buffy rolls her eyes as she steps out the window, her feet clanging dully on the metal grating. “Oh yeah. You totally ruined my night.”
“Looks like you were making a new friend,” he says, looking past her into the apartment.
Buffy glances behind her and sees Matt, sitting on the couch and staring out at her and Spike.
“I guess,” she shrugs. She should maybe try to sound more enthusiastic, but being all social, happy Buffy has taken a lot out of her already and, let’s be honest, Spike would just see through all her lies anyway. Stupid, perceptive vampire.
“I like his little tie,” Spike tells her, taking the cigarette from behind his ear and tapping it lightly against his lips in contemplation. “Very…Future Accountants of America.”
“Yeah, well,” she says, her mouth curving up into a half-smile as she looks at him. He’s wearing a pair of faded black jeans and a tight red t-shirt under the ever-present leather duster. “Not everyone can pull off the whole Punk Rock Forever look.”
Spike laughs at that, ducking his head, and looking up at her shyly. His eyes are very blue and his lashes are dark against the pale skin of his face and Buffy starts to get that warm feeling, deep in her belly, the one she always gets whenever she’s around Spike for more than thirty seconds.
“So,” he says, after a couple of seconds, shaking his head. Buffy blinks and it’s enough to break whatever Spike-spell she’s in. “Want to go kill something?”
Buffy sighs in relief. “God, yes.”
He smiles at that, a real smile, the kind that makes his eyes crinkle up at the corners, making him look innocent and human and normal. Which isn’t fair, Buffy knows, because he’s none of those things, but that look still makes her stomach flip a little.
When he starts down the metal steps, Buffy follows him without even thinking. In the apartment behind her, Xander and Dawn are laughing and the stereo starts playing a song she’s never heard, something upbeat and poppy, the type of music she hasn’t listened to in years.
*
They wander around the city for a while, mostly in silence, Spike smoking a cigarette all the way down to the filter and twirling a stake one hand. Every couple of steps, their arms brush against each other and Buffy starts keeping track of the number of times they touch, vaguely wondering how annoyed Dawn and Xander are going to be that she skipped out on the party.
Over near Pacific Heights, they catch a couple of vamps, old ones, by the looks of them. It’s a good fight -- fists and fangs, Spike calls it with a grin -- both of the vampires pretty skilled with the hand-to-hand. But they’re not much of a match for her and Spike, and the fight doesn’t last nearly as long as she’d like, even though she puts off the actual staking about as long as she can.
Still, by the time it’s over, Buffy’s feeling good, her heart racing and her skin kind of warm and tingly. She tells herself that it's just the high from a good fight -- that hyper-alive post-slaying feeling -- but she can't stop looking at Spike, at the way his shirt clings to the muscles of his chest, and she hopes like hell they can find something else to kill soon before she does something incredibly stupid.
They spend another hour patrolling, walking up and down the old alleys and streets, but nothing even remotely evil shows. They finally head into the cemetery, but neither one of them are expecting much, since no new bodies have been buried there in at least a century. Still, though, sometimes she gets lucky in these historic graveyards, finding a couple of old timers hanging around the mausoleums. Not tonight though, when things are about as quiet as she’s ever seen them. Stupid non-Hellmouth, with its annoying lack of demons.
She and Spike wander around for a while longer before they finally come to a stop near the a couple of crypts near the back.
“So, Slayer,” Spike says, leaning back against a tree and fishing a crumpled pack of Marlboros out of his pocket. “What now?”
“Ugh, I don’t know,” she says, hopping up on a tombstone. The marble’s cold and damp, the chill seeping through her jeans. “I’m bored and there’s nothing to kill.”
“Story of my unlife,” Spike says, nodding his head in sympathy. The two of them stand like that for a few minutes, not talking. A couple of times she thinks Spike might be watching her, but whenever she darts a glance in his direction, he’s got his eyes trained on the ground.
“I’m thinking of getting my own place,” Buffy finally says, just to say something.
Spike raises his eyebrows and lights a cigarette, the snick of the Zippo loud in the still night air. “Is that right?”
“Yep,” she says emphatically. “Going to try the whole independent Buffy thing." She feels like if she says it out loud to someone it might be more likely to happen. Spike nods and that makes her feel better, somehow. Like he believes she’s actually going to do it.
“I see,” he says, looking at her appraisingly. “And what’s brought on this little she’s-gonna-make-it-after-all moment?”
“I don’t know.” Buffy shrugs and kicks her heels against the gravestone. “It’s just…sleeping on my kid sister’s couch is getting pretty depressing, you know?”
Spike nods, but doesn’t say anything. Just takes a long drag on his cigarette and watches her. Even in the dark, his eyes are very, very blue.
“Plus, it’s sort of weird, what with Dawn and Xander in the room right next to me. I mean, they’re not, uh, you know, loud or anything…it’s just that it’s, I don’t know…” Buffy hesitates for a second, trying to find the right word. “Creepy.”
Spike laughs softly, smoke puffing out of his mouth. “That it is, pet.”
The silence stretches out between them again and Buffy wracks her brain to come up with something else to break it. She already played her “new place” card, and now she’s drawing a blank. They just got some new lemon scones at the Pick Me Up and she’s on the verge of telling him about those, just to say something. After all, what vampire doesn’t want to hear about citrusy baked goods, right?
“You know,” Spike says, after a couple of seconds, saving Buffy from taking the conversation in a pastry-filled direction. “I’ve been was thinking I should start looking for a place of my own as well.”
“You want to move off the ship?” she asks, confused. “Why? Being Lord of the Bugs not your scene anymore?”
“Molting season,” he shrugs. “Sodding bug shells crunching everywhere underfoot. It’s bloody disgusting.”
Buffy grimaces. “Ew.”
“Exactly,” he says. He takes another drag on his cigarette and Buffy tries really hard not to focus on how comforting the smell of secondhand smoke is, how much she’s missed it over the past year and a half. “So I’ve been thinking of maybe finding a place here in town, somewhere to staying during the molting and mating seasons. Give all the bug commandos their space during all those special moments times.”
“Huh,” Buffy says, trying to figure out how she feels about that. About Spike getting a place here, staying in San Francisco in what sounds like a semi-permanent way, in a normal place, not a crypt or a crazy steampunk bug-ship. “Spike with an apartment.”
“And what’s so strange about that?” he demands. “I’ve had an apartment before, you know. I’m not just one for crypts and basements and burned out factories and the like.”
Buffy looks at him appraisingly, trying to picture him in a normal apartment. One with a kitchen and running water and, like, curtains and some table lamps. She can’t quite do it. But he’s standing there, looking sincere, and a little offended by her disbelief, so she figures she should say something.
“Spike with an apartment,” she says again. The cemetery’s quiet except for the thudding of her boots on the gravestone and Spike’s occasional drag on his cigarette. “Huh.”
*
Once they give up trying to find anything else to kill, they trek over to the Denny’s on Mission Street, mostly because Buffy’s starving and craving pancakes, and she doesn’t feel like going back home just yet, when the party’s still probably in full swing.
“Just a mo’,” Spike says, stopping at the bank of newspaper machines right outside the diner. He digs into his pocket and comes up with a handful of change, carefully feeding quarters into one of the machines and then grabbing a paper.
“What’s that for?” she asks, trailing him up the sidewalk towards the restaurant.
“It’s for reading,” he deadpans, holding open the metal and glass door and gesturing her into the brightly lit diner. “I know you’ve been out of school for a while, Slayer, but I’d think you’d remember that much at least.”
“Shut up, Spike,” she says, trying hard not to smile.
He smirks and she punches him lightly in the chest on her way inside. He winces and holds a hand to his heart in mock pain. Buffy rolls her eyes and slides past him into the diner.
The restaurant’s pretty packed, tables filled with laughing groups of high schoolers and half-wasted club kids. Buffy and Spike find a spot as far away from everyone else as they can, trying to get away from the smells of sweat and beer and teenage desperation. Their booth in the back mostly smells like burnt coffee and fried dough, which is at least an improvement over hormones and sweaty teenagers.
“Right, then,” Spike says, sliding into the booth and flipping open the paper. He finds the classifieds and tosses a page marked Apartments for Rent in her direction. “What’s your price point, pet?”
“Uh,” Buffy says, looking down at the ads and trying to get her bearings. Of all the ways she thought her night would end, exactly none of them involved apartment hunting with Spike at Denny’s. But she does need to find a new place and this seems like as good a time as any to start looking, so.
Spike’s looking at her expectantly, and she tries to think about how much of her crappy barista salary she can spend on rent every month. Not much, she knows, but as for an actual figure...
“Cheap?” she finally says, because that’s about as far as she’s gotten, budget-wise.
Spike smiles at her, his eyes doing that crinkling thing again, and Buffy feels something in her chest get tight.
“That,” he says. “We can do.”
*
Okay, so finding a cheap place in San Francisco? Is not as easy as it sounds.
Everything in Buffy’s price range sounds either super-sketchy or is way out in Oakland, which would suck because of her job and her lack of driving and everything. Luckily, Spike’s kind of weirdly good at sniffing out deals, and by the time she finishes her short stack and Spike’s drank what must be three pots of coffee, they’ve got a list of five places that might work.
Buffy’s not exactly jumping for joy about any of them, but they might not be completely terrible. Plus, all of them are within the city limits and pretty close to the Pick Me Up, so she figures that’s about as good as she’s going to get.
Besides, she reasons, anything’s got to be better than sleeping on a scratchy, second-hand sofa, terrified you’re going to hear your kid sister and your best friend having sex, right?
Spike writes them all down, copying phone numbers down in his neat, antiquated handwriting with a plastic pen he managed to charm out of their waitress while Buffy was in the ladies’ room.
Once he finishes, scratching out the last phone number on the back of a crumpled old receipt, he pushes the paper across the table.
“Call tomorrow,” he tells her, picking up his mug and finishing off the rest of his coffee. “Schedule showings for after sundown.”
She scoffs. “I can look at apartments by myself, you know. I don’t need a chaperone.”
“Don’t flatter yourself, Slayer,” he says, sounding more like his old self than he has in months. Kind of pissed off and cranky and like talking to her is completely and utterly exhausting. “This is for me, too. I need a place away from the bugs, yeah?”
“Fine.” She rolls her eyes, but slips the paper with the numbers into her pocket anyway.
Spike shakes his head and sighs, and Buffy swirls her fork through the pools of syrup on her plate, vaguely wondering how she got here, house hunting with a vampire at a rundown Denny’s and enjoying pretty much every minute of it.
*
When she makes it back to the apartment that night, the place is dark and quiet, empty beer bottles and pizza boxes covering basically every flat surface. The door to Dawn and Xander’s bedroom is closed and there’s no light coming from under their door, which Buffy's grateful for. She's just not sure she's up for explaining why she's incapable of interacting with normal human people right now, is the thing.
As she starts making her bed, smoothing the thin pink sheets against the scratchy brown fabric of the couch, she hears Spike’s ship take off, the rocket boosters or whatever they are firing away.
The noise fades into nothing as she lays down and she idly wonders if the bugs are good company or if he just spends most of his time like she does, quiet and alone.
The image of Spike alone in his room makes her inexplicably sad, and she scrubs a hand across her face. God, what is wrong with her? Who cares how Spike spends his nights? She totally doesn’t. Besides, Spike is never actually quiet, so she’s sure his nights are nothing like hers. He probably has loud, drunken parties with the bugs or something else annoyingly Spike-like.
Whatever he does, she tells herself as she lays alone in the dark, she definitely doesn't care.
*
The next day, she starts on the apartment search, calling all five numbers that Spike copied down. Only three of them end up panning out, but she makes appointments for her and Spike to check them out.
The first one seems like it might be promising -- it’s only two blocks from the Pick Me Up and Buffy seems to remember something about location being a big thing in real estate -- but when she and Spike get there, she realizes it’s one of the buildings on her way to work that she’s always just assumed was abandoned.
Inside it’s not any better; the place smells like old shoes and mildew and something she really hopes isn’t urine. The apartment is a nothing little studio with a busted radiator and stained carpets and just being inside makes her want to cry. Luckily, she’s got an annoying vampire escort to crack jokes and it’s not quite so terrible with him there, somehow.
The next place is only marginally better, but it’s still basically in a tenement, and she and Spike are only there for about thirty seconds before Buffy hears what she’s pretty sure is a gunshot come from the second floor.
The last place sucks, too. It’s a basement apartment -- a studio, actually, just one big room with a tiny bathroom -- and it’s small and dark and has cockroaches lurking in pretty much every corner.
“This place is depressing,” Buffy announces, once the landlord steps outside so she and Spike can talk about their options or whatever.
She stares at the stained gray walls and scuffs the toe of her shoe against the scratched wood floor. Some of the finish on the wood flakes up and crumbles against her boot, leaving little yellowish flakes against the rich, tan leather. Gross.
“’S not so bad,” Spike says, looking around appraisingly.
“Not so bad?” she repeats. “Are you kidding me? It’s like two hundred square feet, the bathroom doesn’t have a door, and I have seen at least eight roaches in the five minutes we’ve been here! Plus, it’s a freaking basement.”
Spike shrugs. “Basements aren’t so terrible. And those bugs were right miniature, compared to the ones I live with.”
Buffy just stares at him in disbelief. He is literally the worst apartment-hunting buddy in the world. Every place they’ve been to has been a sketched-out rat trap, but he’s got something nice to say about all of them. It’s annoying as hell.
“What is wrong with you?” she demands, trying hard not to actually stomp her foot and sound like a four-year-old throwing a tantrum.
“What’s wrong with me?” Spike asks, incredulous. “I’m not the one throwin’ a temper tantrum over a few measly bugs.”
“A few measly bugs?” she repeats. “It’s like freakin’ cockroach central in here!”
Spike blinks at her. Behind him, a roach scurries across the dingy white baseboard, gross little antennae just twitching away. Ugh. Why does her life suck so much?
“You were supposed to help me find someplace to live! Someplace nice and normal and cheap! But you’ve just dragged me to one hell hole after another and now you’re lecturing me about bug sizes? God, shut up, Spike!”
She’s yelling, she knows that. And, yeah, maybe it’s irrational and insane, but whatever. Tonight was supposed to be about new beginnings and awesome apartments and instead it’s all cockroaches and basements and one reminder after another about how much her life sucks.
And now Spike’s just standing there, staring at her and looking hurt and, damn it, this was not how tonight was supposed to turn out. Buffy takes a breath and steels herself to apologize to him, but then the landlord’s back and Spike starts talking to him about rent and utilities, so Buffy just bites her lip and doesn’t say anything at all.
*
The next weekend she helps Spike move, because it’s not like she’s got anything else to do. Plus she has superpowers and is apparently really good at carrying stuff, so. That’s something. Whatever, it’s just nice to feel good at something these days.
They start at sundown and by the time they’re done it’s not even ten o’clock. Spike doesn’t have very much stuff, which Buffy finds both depressing and also sort of reassuring, somehow. Most of the stuff he does have is just second-hand furniture and about six million pillar candles, the sight of which make Buffy roll her eyes. His fascination with the weirdo goth scene so cliché that she can hardly stand it.
Even so, once he’s actually got his stuff in there, it doesn’t look too bad. Maybe sort of dingy and she’s spotted three roaches already, but it’s not too bad. Kind of comfy, actually.
He’s got a worn blue couch, one that’s just a step below the one she’s been sleeping on the for the past few months, and an ancient second-hand TV that he plugs in and turns on almost immediately, the sounds of an old Friends rerun filling the basement apartment.
By the time they're done arranging the furniture and unpacking Spike's exciting wardrobe of black jeans and black t-shirts, neither one of them feel up to patrolling. They end up ordering a pizza from the little Italian place on the corner and the two of them sit on the couch, eating pizza and drinking beer and watching reruns of Friends on Spike’s crappy old TV. He keeps talking back to the characters in this way that she remembers him doing, all those years ago, when she’d be pretending to be asleep in his crypt, and he’d sneak out of bed to watch Dawson’s Creek, spending an hour smoking and mumbling insults about Dawson and Joey’s relationship while Buffy laid quietly on his tacky silk sheets, hating herself for every second she stayed there.
Apparently, he’s shifted his ire to Ross and Rachel these days, which Buffy finds bizarrely amusing.
“So you don’t think they’re going to work out?” Buffy asks during a commercial.
“Are you kidding me? Those two have been doomed from the start.”
“I don’t know,” Buffy says, shrugging. “I think they’ll be okay.”
“Of course you do.” Spike shakes his head and sighs. “Doomed young love always was your scene.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“Nothin’,” he shrugs, taking a long pull on his beer.
“Well, if it means nothing, why did you say something?”
On the TV, Ross is wearing a too small t-shirt and yelling at Rachel about how he doesn’t care if she broke his heart. The audience laughs.
“Are you barmy?” Spike asks, looking at her sidelong.
“No, I’m not ‘barmy’,” she says. “And, god, how long have you even been in this country? I think it’s time to drop the ridiculous British slang.”
“What the hell is wrong with you?”
“Nothing’s wrong with me! I’m just trying to watch the show, but an annoying vampire won’t shut the hell up about it. And, you know what? So what if I want Ross and Rachel to be together? That doesn’t mean anything. Why do you want everything to mean something?”
Spike shakes his head. “Bloody hell, woman,” he says. “It was just a question about a sodding sitcom.”
She looks over at him, expecting to see the cold smirk that's basically his trademark, but he’s giving her this soft half-smile, the kind he used to give her back in Sunnydale, before everything between them went to hell, and all of a sudden Buffy feels like her heart's not beating right, like it's stuttering in her chest.
“Have I mentioned lately that you’re incredibly weird these days?” he finally asks, still smiling that soft, sweet smile.
“Shut up, Spike,” she says, but she’s smiling a little too now, even if she’s not entirely sure why.
*
The weeks go by and Buffy gives up on her apartment search, mostly because she ends up spending most of her time at Spike's place anyway, only going back to Dawn and Xander's to sleep. It's just that Spike's place is a lot quieter and it's closer to work and, besides, it's really not all that bad once you get used to it.
Spike seems to like it just as much as she does, since he stays on the ship less and less, until it gets to the point where Buffy practically forgets he has anywhere else to be other than right there next to her.
*
The last week in August, they’re patrolling out near the wharf when they stumble across a nest of some kind of demon, all purpley goop and slime.
The two of them dive right in, Buffy with a sword and Spike with an axe, and they’ve slayed all of them but one when Spike takes a giant demon claw to the chest. He crumples the ground and Buffy shoves her weapon into the damn thing’s third eye, dodging past the slowly dissolving gelatinous mass to get to Spike.
By the time she does get over to him, he’s kneeling on the street, his black button down shirt ripped to shreds. There’s dark red blood trickling slowly down his chest and his left eye is turning puffy and blue. Buffy helps him to his feet and the two of them shuffle the three blocks to his apartment.
Once they get inside, Buffy steers Spike towards the bathroom. He hitches himself up on the counter while she rustles through the medicine cabinet, finding gauze and bandages and surgical tape.
Spike takes his shirt off, sliding it gingerly down his shoulders and, wow.
It’s not like Buffy forgot what he looked like without his shirt on, it’s just. It’s been a while since she’s seen it. Him. Without his shirt on. He’s like a freaking marble statue, all smooth white skin and hard lines, and looking at him makes Buffy’s stomach flip.
He’s got his eyes closed and the black eye he's sporting makes his cheekbones even more pronounced, somehow. It's incredibly distracting.
Buffy takes a deep breath and presses a damp washcloth gently against his chest, trying to clean up the blood so she can actually see how bad the damage is.
When her knuckles brush against his skin, Spike opens his eyes and looks straight at her and Buffy feels her breath hitch in her chest.
“Tell us how it looks, would you,” he says, voice low. He’s still staring right at her, the blue of his eyes looking brighter than she ever remembers it being.
“Um,” Buffy says, eloquent as always. “Uh, it, um…” She chances a quick glance down at his chest, breaking eye contact long enough so that she can get her bearings. But then she’s just staring at the smooth, white planes of his chest and that’s not making it any easier to concentrate. “Good. It looks good.”
When she glances up, Spike’s giving her a strange look, his head tilted to the side like he’s trying to figure something out.
“My giant, sucking chest wound looks good, then, does it?”
“Oh, or, um, not good good, but not bad either, you know? I mean, it’s clearly not good, since you’ve got a giant chunk taken out of your chest, but the chunk isn’t actually that bad. More like a really bad scrape, kind of long and, and deep and…” She clears her throat and focuses on the task at hand, willing herself to stop with the rambling.
It really isn’t that bad of an injury and she’s able to bandage and tape it up pretty easily. It probably doesn’t even need anything on it, vampire healing being what it is, but this gives her something to do with her hands, so.
As she works on fixing him up, she starts to feel mostly normal again and can almost believe that the feel of Spike’s cool, smooth skin isn’t affecting her at all. Except for how her heart feels like it might beat right out of her chest and how she thinks there might be a butterfly colony setting up shop in her stomach.
Chest wounds are not sexy, she reminds herself, pressing the gauze against him and securing it with neat strips of medical tape. She ignores the butterflies and heart pounding and focuses on being as clinical as possible.
Spike sits quietly while she fixes him up. The whole time she’s working and touching him and standing extremely close to him, he doesn’t make a sound. Not a gasp of pain or an inappropriate joke or anything. It’s incredibly unnerving.
“All done,” she says once she's finished. She means for it to sound professional, but it comes out low and breathy, not at all like she means for it to. She presses the final piece of surgical tape against his chest and smoothes her fingers out over his skin in a way that is probably totally inappropriate, but that she can’t quite bring herself to stop.
“Thanks, love,” Spike says, his voice matching hers, quiet and rough. Somewhere above them, a door slams and a woman laughs, high pitched and hysterical.
Buffy's heart still feels like it's beating way too fast and Spike’s watching her in this way that makes her feel like he knows everything inside of her, just by looking, like he can hear her heart just racing away in her chest.
When she leans down and kisses him, she’s barely even disappointed in herself. His cool skin is so unbelievably comforting against hers and she idly wonders what’s taken her so long to do this again.
Spike kisses her back, of course. If one of them’s going to have any self control at all, Buffy knows that it needs to be her, but then she’s sliding her tongue into his mouth and that’s pretty much the end of that.
She runs her hands down his chest, and when she presses against the rough cotton of the bandage, Spike gasps into her mouth.
“Sorry,” she murmurs, running her tongue along his lower lip and keeping her hand right where it is.
In response, Spike just makes a noise deep in his throat and kisses her harder, pressing up against her hand, moaning softly. He tastes like tobacco and ash, just like he always has, and his mouth is still cool and clever against hers.
Buffy knows she should probably stop this, but she can't and they just kiss like that for a few minutes, making out like a couple of teenagers.
She doesn't think they've kissed this much since those first couple of times, when Buffy tried as hard as she could to convince herself that it was nothing, and that she didn't care about him at all. It's different, now. Softer and sweeter and Buffy wishes that it could have always been like this, that she didn't have to always make things so complicated.
After a while, Spike slides one hand up under her shirt, ghosting his fingertips across her ribs, tickling her just a bit and making her giggle. It’s enough to make her stop, to pull back just enough to look at him.
His hair’s a mess, sticking up in about a million different directions, and he’s breathing hard, panting in that strange way of his, the way that makes him seem so painfully human. He slides his hands further up under her shirt, and the coolness of his skin against her makes her shiver just a little.
Spike shifts his legs so that she can stand between them and Buffy gets as close as she can, pressing up against his smooth, hard body.
If she's going to stop this, now's her chance. Spike's looking at her in that worshipful way that she used to hate, but that right now just sort of makes her want to cry and hold on to him forever.
“Buffy,” he says, and her stomach flips at how much he sounds like he did, back in those last days in Sunnydale. He keeps saying her name like that as he kisses her, repeating it like prayer, just chanting it over and over again, until she feels like she can’t take it anymore.
His hand moves up her body, leaving cold ripples of gooseflesh in its wake, and Buffy arches against him. When he slides his thumb over her nipple she bites down on his lip, hard enough to draw blood, and her hips surge up against him.
He’s hard against her, and Buffy knows this is a bad idea. He’s hurt and no good ever comes from her having sex, but she’s missed him more than she can stand and now he’s here and his skin is so cool and smooth against hers, and nothing else really matters.
After a couple of seconds, Spike stands and lifts her up in one smooth movement. Buffy wraps her legs around his waist and bucks against him as he starts pressing kisses against her throat, nipping at her with blunt, human teeth.
Some small part of Buffy’s mind is telling her to slow down, don’t rush, but god, she has missed this so much. His hand’s still under her shirt as he carries her over to the couch and she tugs at the button on his jeans, trying to get more and more, to get as close to him as she can. He reaches down and slides her skirt up over her hips and she can't believe that she's lived without this -- without him -- for so long.
When he finally pushes inside of her, Buffy gasps, her whole body thrumming, and she feels more alive than she has in years, since so long she can’t remember, since that last night in Sunnydale, when the world was ending and Spike was the only person who could make her feel like things would be okay.
It’s kind of like that again now. That peaceful things-will-be-okay feeling washes over her, and as Spike moves inside of her, Buffy closes her eyes and holds him as close as she possibly can.
*
When she wakes up in the morning, Spike’s pressed close up against her, his body fitting tightly against hers. She has a brief moment of complete and utter panic, her brain racing in that way it always used to when she’d drift off and wake up with Spike all naked and sweet against her. It’s only a couple of seconds, but she freezes up, and she feels Spike tense behind her.
Buffy forces herself to relax, but Spike’s already up, heading towards the small kitchenette area across the room. He still hasn’t said anything to her. His chest doesn't look too bad, a few spots of dried blood staining the bandage, but nothing too horrible.
He stands at the refrigerator, his back to her, and Buffy tries to think of what she's supposed to say. Finally: “You okay?”
“Fine,” he says. He opens the fridge and pulls out a blood bag, ripping open a corner and draining it into a mug.
“O-kaaay,” Buffy says, not sure exactly what’s going on. She’s still naked, covered in just a thin sheet, and her whole body feels kind of sticky and gross. “Do you mind if I use your shower?”
Spike shrugs and stares at a spot somewhere above her head, sipping the blood. “Help yourself.”
By the time she’s out and dressed in yesterday’s clothes, Spike’s sitting on the couch, fully dressed and staring blankly ahead of him.
“We should talk about last night,” Buffy says, very carefully. “I didn’t mean for…” she trails off, not quite sure what she wants to say.
Spike looks right at her then, for the first time since they woke up together. His left eye is a mess, puffy and purple. “What’s there to talk about?”
“Uh,” Buffy says, “a lot of stuff?”
“Such as?”
Damn him, he’s going to make her spell this whole thing out for him. “Such as last night and you and me and the whole…sex…thing.”
“Was nothing, right?” he shrugs. “Old habits die hard and all that rot.”
“Spike, come on. That’s not what it was.”
“Is that right?” he says, his voice is low and dangerous and Buffy’s not sure when this took the turn it did. Things were supposed to be different this time, better. “And what was it, then?”
“It was,” Buffy says, at a loss. "It was..." She wants to tell him it was love. She does. But all she can see is the two of them down in the Hellmouth, Spike dismissing her, telling her that she didn’t love him. Believing that she couldn’t, while the world collapsed around them and their hands burned, bright and alive.
“Forget it,” Spike says dismissively. He grabs the pack of cigarettes off the side table and lights up. “Feel free to stop by next time you fancy a shag though, yeah? Figure it’ll be at least another couple of years before you’re up to being with the great, heroic Angelus again and you’ll need something to keep you occupied.”
Buffy flinches. “That’s not what it was,” she says again. It sounds lame and unconvincing, even to her, and she hates herself just a little more, which is surprising. She thought she’d reached her self-loathing limit, but apparently she’s still got a ways to go. Awesome.
“Oh no?” he says, his mouth curling up into a cruel smirk. “Just another scrap of pity for the pathetic cellar-dweller. Not quite as good as a last second declaration of love, but I figure it’ll do for now.”
“Excuse me?” she says. “You thought that this and that was just pity?”
He laughs at that, cruel and mocking. “Must have been so easy, once you figured I was going to die and you wouldn’t actually have to do anything more than say the words. ‘S too bad I showed up again, innit?”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“How I messed up your perfect little life," Spike says. "Everything was going so brilliant for you, shagging Angel and creating world-destroying universes and all. Best you and me could do was take down a house; I can see how you’d want to move on to something a bit more impressive.”
Buffy feels like she can’t breathe, like she’s been punched in the chest. After the last couple of months -- after last night -- she thought things would be different, somehow. Better, more gentle. God, she is such an idiot. And Spike’s just standing there, smirking at her and, all of the sudden, the fight just goes right out of her. It’s not like it matters, anyway. “You know what, Spike?” she finally says. “Fuck you.”
“Oh-ho,” he laughs. “Such ugly language for such a pretty girl.”
There’s about a million things she wants to say to him right now -- things about how she does love him and how she knows she’s made more mistakes than she can count and how what came before shouldn't matter anymore -- but he’s just standing there, a bitter smile still on his face and all that comes out is: “Fuck you, Spike.”
Buffy doesn’t even care about how sad she might sound, how lost, or if he has anything else to say to her. She just spins on her heel and walks away.
Spike doesn’t try to stop her, just stands there and watches her go.
*
After that, Spike pretty much vanishes.
By the next weekend, Buffy still hasn't heard from him, but she decides that she doesn't care. Besides, she finally has a Saturday night off and Xander's at his weekly poker game, so she and Dawn decide to do the girls’ night/sisterly-bonding thing, just the two of them sitting crosslegged on the floor of the living room, drinking margaritas and having a romantic comedy marathon.
They’re about halfway through their second pitcher of drinks and are right in the middle of Buffy’s favorite scene in You’ve Got Mail when Dawn mutes the movie.
“Hey!” Buffy complains as Meg Ryan shuffles around her cute little Manhattan apartment, wearing pajamas and looking adorable even though she’s supposed to be sick. “This is the best part.”
“So,” Dawn says, ignoring Buffy's movie-outrage. “Are you and Spike back together now or what?”
“What? No! No way!” Buffy sputters, coughing as the tequila burns the back of her throat. Onscreen, Tom Hanks is holding a bouquet of daisies, which is so sweetly, unrealistically perfect that Buffy almost can’t stand it.
“Okaaaay,” Dawn says, drawing it out in that annoying know-it-all kid sister way as she takes another long drink.
“Why would you even say that?” Buffy demands. "Also, you aren’t even old enough to be drinking. I think you should stop.”
Dawn just laughs and pours more drinks. “Geez, calm down, Buff. No need to go all mom-ish on me.”
“I’m not going ‘mom-ish,'” Buffy argues, even though she totally is. The mom thing has proven much less effective since Dawn’s turned eighteen, which completely sucks since it was pretty much the only weapon in Buffy's authority arsenal. “Why would you think that anyway?”
“Uh, I don’t know. Maybe because you guys spend like every waking moment together and whenever you see him you’re all smiling, flirty Buffy, except for how this week you’ve been all sulky Buffy. And, not coincidentally, Spike seems to have disappeared off the face of the planet. No more fire escape visits, no more post-Dancing with the Stars phone rants, no more nightly patrolling dates."
Damn it, when did Dawn get so observant? Plus, she’s still got the annoying little know-it-all-sister voice going, which Buffy totally hates, especially because it makes her want to tell her everything for some reason.
“We had sex,” Buffy admits, because she knows that resistance is futile in the face of Dawn-questioning.
Dawn laughs at that, because apparently she is the worst. “So that’s why he left?”
“No, he left because he’s an immature, idiot vampire guy who is not nearly as smart or cool as he thinks.”
“Uh-huh.” Dawn takes a long drink and then: “Soooo, what happened?”
“I don’t know!” Buffy says. “We were out patrolling and Spike got swiped by this goopy monster thing and we went back to his place to patch it up and he was so sweet and with the no shirt and the black eye and then there was kissing and, and other…things…and now he’s gone.”
When she looks up, Dawn’s looking at her with something like pity and Buffy’s face feels hot and her vision goes blurry. Ugh, stupid alcohol.
“So why is he gone now, exactly?” Dawn asks softly. On the TV, Tom and Meg are strolling through an open-air market together, both of them smiling and happy in the sunlight.
“Because,” Buffy says, blinking back her tears and steeling her resolve. There will be no crying over Spike, not tonight, not ever. “It’s a terrible idea and Spike sucks.”
“Why?”
“Why does Spike suck?” Buffy asks lightly. “Because he’s a bloodsucking fiend.”
Dawn looks unimpressed at her attempt at humor, just arches an eyebrow and gives Buffy her patented you-know-what-I-mean look.
Buffy sighs. “Because we’re terrible together.”
“No you’re not!”
“How can you say that?” Buffy demands. “Are you forgetting the last time Spike and I were together? That was an entire world of bad.”
“That’s totally not true!”
Buffy looks at her like she’s crazy. “Every time I even try to be with someone, it ends with disaster. The first time with Spike, and the badness. And then he comes back and he dies. And, and then with Angel and…” She can’t even finish that thought, her brain skittering away from all of it. She swallows hard and feels suddenly like she might be sick.
“Spike’s not Angel,” Dawn says softly.
No kidding, Buffy thinks, but what she says is: “It doesn’t matter. Angel. Spike. Any guy I’m with it just ends in badness and Spike badness is as bad as it gets.”
“That’s not true.”
“Oh, right. Because things between me and Spike always work out so well.”
“That was then.” Dawn shrugs. “Besides, the second time, it wasn’t bad. It seemed like you guys were doing well, like you were friends.”
Buffy laughs, low and bitter. “Oh yeah, right up until Spike didn’t believe me when I told him I loved him and then he died. Oh, and then there was the part where he came back from the dead, but didn’t even bother let me know he was no longer a big pile of dust. Yeah, that relationship was a rousing success.”
Dawn’s giving her a funny look, sitting like she's frozen, her glass halfway up to her mouth.
“What?” Buffy asks.
“You told Spike you loved him?”
"Um..." She’s never talked to Dawn about this, and she certainly didn’t plan on doing it tonight, but then the margaritas came out and so did stupid, blabbing Buffy. Ugh, alcohol sucks. “Yeah?”
“And he didn’t believe you?”
“Nope.” Buffy shrugs and takes a long drink so she doesn’t say anything else. The frozen drink goes right to her head, giving her the worst brain freeze she’s ever had. Which, on the plus side, at least distracts her from this conversation, so. Not a terrible trade off.
“That jerk,” Dawn spits.
“I thought you were a newly converted member of the Spike Fanclub!”
“That was before I knew he was a love-denying jerk!”
“Which is why it’s a bad idea,” Buffy says, downing the rest of her drink.
Dawn sighs and nods. She picks up the empty margarita pitcher and heads into the kitchen, leaving Buffy alone to stew in her Spike-based rage. She still can’t believe she slept with him and he was all sweet and then all mean and the whole thing was just so Spike of him, that it pisses her off. She’s so engrossed in reminding herself of all the terrible, Spike-like things that he does that she doesn’t even notice Dawn until she’s suddenly right next to her again, settling down on the floor.
“Okay, yeah, Spike was a jerk and then he died,” Dawn says, like they’re still having this conversation. Buffy’s going to tell her to shut up, but she’s got a full pitcher of margaritas clutched tightly in her left hand and they’ve practically almost missed the whole movie already anyway, so there's really no point in trying to do anything but talk about Buffy's disastrous romantic life. “But, he did come back and he seems to be less of a jerk these days, right?”
“Not hardly,” Buffy grumbles, thinking about Spike’s cruel laugh as she walked out of his apartment on Saturday. She holds out her glass so that Dawn can pour her another drink.
Dawn waves one hand dismissively as she pours with the other. “And he showed up to rescue you, all dashing space captain -- “
“To save us all from another one of my relationships that almost destroyed the world -- “
“And now he’s here, in San Francisco. Living in an apartment, like a normal person. Patrolling with you, hanging with you, being the Spike to your Buffy.”
Buffy snorts. “He’s just bored, you know how he gets.”
“Yeah, how he gets is crazy stupid in love with you.”
“Ugh, Dawn. Let it go. There is currently a Buffy-relationship embargo. Especially for vampires. Especially for vampires named Spike.”
“Why especially for Spike? What’d he do that was so bad?”
“I’m not even going to touch that one,” Buffy says, taking another long drink. Man, margaritas are delicious, all lime-y and tequila-y. They should drink margaritas all the time.
“Buffy, I’m serious,” Dawn says, apparently more invested in this ridiculous conversation than she is in the alcoholic deliciousness in front of her. “I think you should go for it. More than you already have.”
“You just said he was a jerk!”
“He is,” Dawn confirms, and then shrugs. “But you’re kind of a jerk, too so --“
“Hey!”
Buffy swats at her, but Dawn deftly moves out of reach, a superior kid-sister smirk on her face.
“C’mon, Buffy. Spike’s pretty much the only thing that seems to make you happy these days, and yeah, maybe you’re both fucked-up jerks, but that’s what makes it work. I mean, seriously, at this point who else would want either one of you freaks?”
“Shut up!” She should probably be offended, but she’s pretty sure Dawn’s right, so it's hard to muster much indignation. "Besides, it doesn't matter," Buffy says, trying to sound chipper and awesome and not at all like her heart's broken into a million tiny pieces. "Spike's gone. Disappeared. Took his fancy spaceship and flew far, far away. Adios, vampiros."
"He'll come back," Dawn says. She takes another drink and then sighs, like this whole situation is just completely exhausting for her to have to put up with. "He's Spike. That's what he does."
Buffy shrugs; she's not getting her hopes up. “When’d you get so wise anyway?” she asks, feeling yet again like she's falling behind in the whole growing-up race.
“I’ve always been wise,” Dawn says, flipping her hair and sounding smug. “You’ve just been too dense to notice.”
*
It's another month after that before Buffy hears from Spike again.
For the first week, she’s not too upset about it. It’s not like she wants to see him, anyway, after the things he said. Or, well, that’s not completely true. She does want to see him, but only so that she can yell at him. She’s spent most of her week thinking up incredibly well-reasoned arguments about why he’s basically the worst person on the planet, which she’s carefully compiled into a pretty choice rant.
The second week, she decides she doesn't care if he ever comes back. She doesn’t want to see him at all. He doesn’t even deserve to hear her I’m-too-good-for-you speech. The whole rant is way too good for him anyway and Buffy has so many more important things to do, like actually finding her own place and maybe finding a guy with a pulse to date.
The third week, she takes to walking past his apartment building on her way home from work, just in case. Not that she misses him and she definitely still doesn't care if he ever comes back. She’s just perfected her rant so that it’s a thing of complete and utter beauty and she doesn’t want it to go to waste, is all.
By the fourth week, she’s pretty much given up on the whole thing, chalked it up to her amazing ability to drive away every single man that she loves. After all, it's not like she should be surprised. It's pretty much par for the course for her and Spike: she expresses some kind of actual emotion, he gets all pissy and leaves. Besides, he's been gone for over a month so she's decided she's totally and completely over it. Over him. Over their whole insane, ridiculous, non-relationship thing.
So of course he shows up at the Pick Me Up right at the start of her shift that Saturday.
It’s been raining for a week, and Buffy’s pretty sure she can’t even remember what the sun looks like any more. She's in the process of taking an entire order of super-complicated specialty drinks (half-caf and no whip and iced and quad ristretto) when Spike shows up, dripping a puddle of water right inside the freshly-mopped-by-Buffy entrance of the Pick Me Up. He looks just like he always does, all pale white skin and dark black clothes.
“Slayer,” he says when she walks by. He’s soaking wet, his jeans and t-shirt sticking to him like a second skin.
Buffy ignores him and heads towards the counter to make the drinks.
“Buffy,” he tries again on her way back to the table, her tray full of perfectly-made specialty drinks balanced precariously on her right hand. He’s so ridiculous, sitting there all wet and sincere, that Buffy can't help but roll her eyes.
“You look like a drowned rat,” she informs him haughtily. He grins at her like he’s won.
“You look beautiful,” he says, voice soft. Which, ugh. That is so like him, saying something disgustingly charming and trying to distract her from hating him. Whatever. She’s so not charmed.
For the rest of her shift, Buffy ignores him. It’s not hard to do, since they’re insanely busy all day. By the time her shift is over, she’s exhausted and Spike has dried off, his hair doing that curling thing that she reminds herself that she doesn’t find at all sexily adorable.
Still though, Buffy’s feeling a little panicky. Spike’s still waiting patiently at his table near the door and it’s still raining, hard enough so that there’s not even a hint of late afternoon sunlight peaking through the clouds.
She drags out her shift as long as humanly possible, wiping off all the counters twice, refilling the cream and straws and napkins, hoping that Spike will take the hint and -- as he would say, in that annoying British way of his -- sod off. It doesn’t happen though, so she finally gives up and marches towards the door.
She’s expecting some kind of smart remark from Spike, but he doesn’t say anything, just gets up in one smooth movement and follows her outside.
It’s still raining of course, so Buffy pulls her umbrella out of her bag and heads out into the street. Spike follows, getting all wet and soaked, his tight black t-shirt looking even tighter and blacker than normal. He doesn’t say anything, just falls into step beside her. Buffy ends up walking towards his apartment, more out of habit than anything else, and the block before they get to his building, she finally decides she’s had enough. She stops and whirls on him, so that they're standing face to face. He's closer than she realized and there's rain dripping down the sharp lines of his face.
“Stop it,” Buffy says, feeling angrier than she has in weeks.
“Stop what?” Spike asks innocently.
“Stop following me.”
“I’m not following you, Slayer. I’m just heading home.”
“You are not,” she says.
“Are too,” he says.
“Are not.”
“Are too.”
“You are not, Spike.” Buffy sighs, suddenly exhausted. The rain is coming down harder than ever and even with her umbrella, she’s getting soaked. Even though it’s not yet fall, the air is cool and between that and the rain, she’s started to shiver, making everything that she says come out sounding shaky and hesitant. “If you were just going home, you would have left way before, instead of sitting at my work the whole day and following me out like some kind of…of…giant vampire creeper.”
Spike reaches out and puts his hand over hers, so that they’re both holding the umbrella, and her hand stops trembling so much. His hand is cool against hers and Buffy hates how much she’s missed that, the feel of his skin against hers.
“You’re shaking,” he says, which way to state the obvious, Spike. Buffy shrugs and wills herself to be still. It doesn’t work out so well, but at least it gives her something to focus on other than how much her life sucks and how Spike is the worst.
But then Spike’s shrugging out of his jacket in one smooth movement, draping it around her shoulders and rubbing her arms through the thick material like he’s trying to warm her up. He does it without much thought, and it’s basically just Spike being Spike, weirdly chivalrous and romantic and, just like that, Buffy can’t hate him like she wants to.
“I wish you weren’t so nice to me sometimes,” she tells him, leaning into him a little. It comes out kind of sad and lost and Buffy wishes that, just once, things wouldn’t be quite so hard between the two of them.
“And why’s that, pet?” he asks carefully. He’s still running his hands over her arms, trying to keep her warm.
“I don’t know,” she says, and she suddenly feels like she might cry. “Because it makes me feel worse.”
“You ever think that’s why I’m doing it?” he says with a smirk, sounding so much like his old self that it makes Buffy’s chest feel tight.
Buffy closes her eyes then, leaning her head against Spike’s shoulder, solid under her cheek. His t-shirt sticks to her wet skin and the feel of his coat around her shoulders is solid and comforting. He takes a step closer, moving so that his cheek rests against the top of her head. The rain pours down around them, beating hard against the sidewalks, a staccato rhythm that sounds like a heartbeat.
“I missed you,” she says. It’s probably a mistake, bringing up anything like this, talking about things that are real. But she’s just so tired and Spike smells just like he always did, like cigarettes and leather and his own particular earthy Spike-smell.
He doesn’t say anything for a couple of beats and Buffy’s not sure if she can keep doing this, pouring her heart out while he refuses to believe her capable of love. But then he’s reaching down to tilt her chin up, just enough so that he can look her in the eye.
The look on his face makes her breath catch in her throat, and if he says something cutting now, she's not sure she'll ever forgive him.
“I missed you, too, Slayer,” he finally says and kisses her softly, sweetly on the mouth.
Buffy smiles and kisses him back, the two of them still standing in the middle of the street, cold summer rain falling all around them.
**
end
Fandom/Pairing: Buffy the Vampire Slayer; Buffy/Spike
Rating: R
Words: 9,710
Summary: Spike shakes his head and sighs, and Buffy swirls her fork through the pools of syrup on her plate, vaguely wondering how she got here, house hunting with a vampire at a rundown Denny’s and enjoying pretty much every minute of it.
A/N: This is takes place post-S8, so knowledge of the comics would be good. If you're not familiar with them, all that really matters for this fic is that Buffy’s had a rough year, she’s living in San Francisco with Xander and Dawn, and Spike’s there, too.
*
The thing about living with Xander and Dawn is that it kind of sucks.
On the one hand, it’s a free place to live with people who love her, which is totally great. But on the other hand, it’s also kind of awkward and cramped and, more often than not, just serves to remind Buffy about how crappy her own life is. Something that's made abundantly clear during the first weekend in June, when Dawn throws a little end-of-the-semester party, inviting a bunch of her new friends from school and telling Buffy that she has to be there.
It should be fun, Buffy knows that -- beer, pizza, music, and normal, human people who don’t know that she almost destroyed the world and that all of her friends hate her.
But it’s not. It’s boring and weird and she doesn’t want to be sitting on the arm of the sofa that she sleeps on every night, listening to a conversation that she thinks might be about feminism or socialism or Mark-ism? She didn’t quite get that one. Whatever, it’s some other -ism that she doesn’t want to sit here hearing about. What she wants to be is out killing things.
But then one of Dawn’s friends -- Matt or Max or something like that, Buffy’s not really paying attention -- sits down next to her and starts asking her about how she’s liking San Francisco and if she’s made it out to Coit Tower yet, and she figures she might as well try to embrace the whole being a normal girl thing. Plus, he’s nice and kind of cute, wearing skinny jeans and a button down shirt and even a tie. Normal ironic college kid clothes, right down to the black framed glasses and Jonas Brothers hair.
He’s not really Buffy’s type (he’s a little too heartbeat-having for that, after all), but from the other side of the room, Xander gives her a thumbs up and Dawn grins, so Buffy stays right where she is.
An hour later, she’s staring blankly out the window, listening to Matt talk about some band she’s never heard of, when a pair of scuffed-up leather boots appear on the fire escape, and Buffy smiles for what she thinks might be the first time that night.
*
“Didn’t mean to crash your party, pet.” Spike’s leaning against the metal rail of the fire escape, an unlit cigarette tucked behind his ear and a Spikey smirk on his face.
Buffy rolls her eyes as she steps out the window, her feet clanging dully on the metal grating. “Oh yeah. You totally ruined my night.”
“Looks like you were making a new friend,” he says, looking past her into the apartment.
Buffy glances behind her and sees Matt, sitting on the couch and staring out at her and Spike.
“I guess,” she shrugs. She should maybe try to sound more enthusiastic, but being all social, happy Buffy has taken a lot out of her already and, let’s be honest, Spike would just see through all her lies anyway. Stupid, perceptive vampire.
“I like his little tie,” Spike tells her, taking the cigarette from behind his ear and tapping it lightly against his lips in contemplation. “Very…Future Accountants of America.”
“Yeah, well,” she says, her mouth curving up into a half-smile as she looks at him. He’s wearing a pair of faded black jeans and a tight red t-shirt under the ever-present leather duster. “Not everyone can pull off the whole Punk Rock Forever look.”
Spike laughs at that, ducking his head, and looking up at her shyly. His eyes are very blue and his lashes are dark against the pale skin of his face and Buffy starts to get that warm feeling, deep in her belly, the one she always gets whenever she’s around Spike for more than thirty seconds.
“So,” he says, after a couple of seconds, shaking his head. Buffy blinks and it’s enough to break whatever Spike-spell she’s in. “Want to go kill something?”
Buffy sighs in relief. “God, yes.”
He smiles at that, a real smile, the kind that makes his eyes crinkle up at the corners, making him look innocent and human and normal. Which isn’t fair, Buffy knows, because he’s none of those things, but that look still makes her stomach flip a little.
When he starts down the metal steps, Buffy follows him without even thinking. In the apartment behind her, Xander and Dawn are laughing and the stereo starts playing a song she’s never heard, something upbeat and poppy, the type of music she hasn’t listened to in years.
*
They wander around the city for a while, mostly in silence, Spike smoking a cigarette all the way down to the filter and twirling a stake one hand. Every couple of steps, their arms brush against each other and Buffy starts keeping track of the number of times they touch, vaguely wondering how annoyed Dawn and Xander are going to be that she skipped out on the party.
Over near Pacific Heights, they catch a couple of vamps, old ones, by the looks of them. It’s a good fight -- fists and fangs, Spike calls it with a grin -- both of the vampires pretty skilled with the hand-to-hand. But they’re not much of a match for her and Spike, and the fight doesn’t last nearly as long as she’d like, even though she puts off the actual staking about as long as she can.
Still, by the time it’s over, Buffy’s feeling good, her heart racing and her skin kind of warm and tingly. She tells herself that it's just the high from a good fight -- that hyper-alive post-slaying feeling -- but she can't stop looking at Spike, at the way his shirt clings to the muscles of his chest, and she hopes like hell they can find something else to kill soon before she does something incredibly stupid.
They spend another hour patrolling, walking up and down the old alleys and streets, but nothing even remotely evil shows. They finally head into the cemetery, but neither one of them are expecting much, since no new bodies have been buried there in at least a century. Still, though, sometimes she gets lucky in these historic graveyards, finding a couple of old timers hanging around the mausoleums. Not tonight though, when things are about as quiet as she’s ever seen them. Stupid non-Hellmouth, with its annoying lack of demons.
She and Spike wander around for a while longer before they finally come to a stop near the a couple of crypts near the back.
“So, Slayer,” Spike says, leaning back against a tree and fishing a crumpled pack of Marlboros out of his pocket. “What now?”
“Ugh, I don’t know,” she says, hopping up on a tombstone. The marble’s cold and damp, the chill seeping through her jeans. “I’m bored and there’s nothing to kill.”
“Story of my unlife,” Spike says, nodding his head in sympathy. The two of them stand like that for a few minutes, not talking. A couple of times she thinks Spike might be watching her, but whenever she darts a glance in his direction, he’s got his eyes trained on the ground.
“I’m thinking of getting my own place,” Buffy finally says, just to say something.
Spike raises his eyebrows and lights a cigarette, the snick of the Zippo loud in the still night air. “Is that right?”
“Yep,” she says emphatically. “Going to try the whole independent Buffy thing." She feels like if she says it out loud to someone it might be more likely to happen. Spike nods and that makes her feel better, somehow. Like he believes she’s actually going to do it.
“I see,” he says, looking at her appraisingly. “And what’s brought on this little she’s-gonna-make-it-after-all moment?”
“I don’t know.” Buffy shrugs and kicks her heels against the gravestone. “It’s just…sleeping on my kid sister’s couch is getting pretty depressing, you know?”
Spike nods, but doesn’t say anything. Just takes a long drag on his cigarette and watches her. Even in the dark, his eyes are very, very blue.
“Plus, it’s sort of weird, what with Dawn and Xander in the room right next to me. I mean, they’re not, uh, you know, loud or anything…it’s just that it’s, I don’t know…” Buffy hesitates for a second, trying to find the right word. “Creepy.”
Spike laughs softly, smoke puffing out of his mouth. “That it is, pet.”
The silence stretches out between them again and Buffy wracks her brain to come up with something else to break it. She already played her “new place” card, and now she’s drawing a blank. They just got some new lemon scones at the Pick Me Up and she’s on the verge of telling him about those, just to say something. After all, what vampire doesn’t want to hear about citrusy baked goods, right?
“You know,” Spike says, after a couple of seconds, saving Buffy from taking the conversation in a pastry-filled direction. “I’ve been was thinking I should start looking for a place of my own as well.”
“You want to move off the ship?” she asks, confused. “Why? Being Lord of the Bugs not your scene anymore?”
“Molting season,” he shrugs. “Sodding bug shells crunching everywhere underfoot. It’s bloody disgusting.”
Buffy grimaces. “Ew.”
“Exactly,” he says. He takes another drag on his cigarette and Buffy tries really hard not to focus on how comforting the smell of secondhand smoke is, how much she’s missed it over the past year and a half. “So I’ve been thinking of maybe finding a place here in town, somewhere to staying during the molting and mating seasons. Give all the bug commandos their space during all those special moments times.”
“Huh,” Buffy says, trying to figure out how she feels about that. About Spike getting a place here, staying in San Francisco in what sounds like a semi-permanent way, in a normal place, not a crypt or a crazy steampunk bug-ship. “Spike with an apartment.”
“And what’s so strange about that?” he demands. “I’ve had an apartment before, you know. I’m not just one for crypts and basements and burned out factories and the like.”
Buffy looks at him appraisingly, trying to picture him in a normal apartment. One with a kitchen and running water and, like, curtains and some table lamps. She can’t quite do it. But he’s standing there, looking sincere, and a little offended by her disbelief, so she figures she should say something.
“Spike with an apartment,” she says again. The cemetery’s quiet except for the thudding of her boots on the gravestone and Spike’s occasional drag on his cigarette. “Huh.”
*
Once they give up trying to find anything else to kill, they trek over to the Denny’s on Mission Street, mostly because Buffy’s starving and craving pancakes, and she doesn’t feel like going back home just yet, when the party’s still probably in full swing.
“Just a mo’,” Spike says, stopping at the bank of newspaper machines right outside the diner. He digs into his pocket and comes up with a handful of change, carefully feeding quarters into one of the machines and then grabbing a paper.
“What’s that for?” she asks, trailing him up the sidewalk towards the restaurant.
“It’s for reading,” he deadpans, holding open the metal and glass door and gesturing her into the brightly lit diner. “I know you’ve been out of school for a while, Slayer, but I’d think you’d remember that much at least.”
“Shut up, Spike,” she says, trying hard not to smile.
He smirks and she punches him lightly in the chest on her way inside. He winces and holds a hand to his heart in mock pain. Buffy rolls her eyes and slides past him into the diner.
The restaurant’s pretty packed, tables filled with laughing groups of high schoolers and half-wasted club kids. Buffy and Spike find a spot as far away from everyone else as they can, trying to get away from the smells of sweat and beer and teenage desperation. Their booth in the back mostly smells like burnt coffee and fried dough, which is at least an improvement over hormones and sweaty teenagers.
“Right, then,” Spike says, sliding into the booth and flipping open the paper. He finds the classifieds and tosses a page marked Apartments for Rent in her direction. “What’s your price point, pet?”
“Uh,” Buffy says, looking down at the ads and trying to get her bearings. Of all the ways she thought her night would end, exactly none of them involved apartment hunting with Spike at Denny’s. But she does need to find a new place and this seems like as good a time as any to start looking, so.
Spike’s looking at her expectantly, and she tries to think about how much of her crappy barista salary she can spend on rent every month. Not much, she knows, but as for an actual figure...
“Cheap?” she finally says, because that’s about as far as she’s gotten, budget-wise.
Spike smiles at her, his eyes doing that crinkling thing again, and Buffy feels something in her chest get tight.
“That,” he says. “We can do.”
*
Okay, so finding a cheap place in San Francisco? Is not as easy as it sounds.
Everything in Buffy’s price range sounds either super-sketchy or is way out in Oakland, which would suck because of her job and her lack of driving and everything. Luckily, Spike’s kind of weirdly good at sniffing out deals, and by the time she finishes her short stack and Spike’s drank what must be three pots of coffee, they’ve got a list of five places that might work.
Buffy’s not exactly jumping for joy about any of them, but they might not be completely terrible. Plus, all of them are within the city limits and pretty close to the Pick Me Up, so she figures that’s about as good as she’s going to get.
Besides, she reasons, anything’s got to be better than sleeping on a scratchy, second-hand sofa, terrified you’re going to hear your kid sister and your best friend having sex, right?
Spike writes them all down, copying phone numbers down in his neat, antiquated handwriting with a plastic pen he managed to charm out of their waitress while Buffy was in the ladies’ room.
Once he finishes, scratching out the last phone number on the back of a crumpled old receipt, he pushes the paper across the table.
“Call tomorrow,” he tells her, picking up his mug and finishing off the rest of his coffee. “Schedule showings for after sundown.”
She scoffs. “I can look at apartments by myself, you know. I don’t need a chaperone.”
“Don’t flatter yourself, Slayer,” he says, sounding more like his old self than he has in months. Kind of pissed off and cranky and like talking to her is completely and utterly exhausting. “This is for me, too. I need a place away from the bugs, yeah?”
“Fine.” She rolls her eyes, but slips the paper with the numbers into her pocket anyway.
Spike shakes his head and sighs, and Buffy swirls her fork through the pools of syrup on her plate, vaguely wondering how she got here, house hunting with a vampire at a rundown Denny’s and enjoying pretty much every minute of it.
*
When she makes it back to the apartment that night, the place is dark and quiet, empty beer bottles and pizza boxes covering basically every flat surface. The door to Dawn and Xander’s bedroom is closed and there’s no light coming from under their door, which Buffy's grateful for. She's just not sure she's up for explaining why she's incapable of interacting with normal human people right now, is the thing.
As she starts making her bed, smoothing the thin pink sheets against the scratchy brown fabric of the couch, she hears Spike’s ship take off, the rocket boosters or whatever they are firing away.
The noise fades into nothing as she lays down and she idly wonders if the bugs are good company or if he just spends most of his time like she does, quiet and alone.
The image of Spike alone in his room makes her inexplicably sad, and she scrubs a hand across her face. God, what is wrong with her? Who cares how Spike spends his nights? She totally doesn’t. Besides, Spike is never actually quiet, so she’s sure his nights are nothing like hers. He probably has loud, drunken parties with the bugs or something else annoyingly Spike-like.
Whatever he does, she tells herself as she lays alone in the dark, she definitely doesn't care.
*
The next day, she starts on the apartment search, calling all five numbers that Spike copied down. Only three of them end up panning out, but she makes appointments for her and Spike to check them out.
The first one seems like it might be promising -- it’s only two blocks from the Pick Me Up and Buffy seems to remember something about location being a big thing in real estate -- but when she and Spike get there, she realizes it’s one of the buildings on her way to work that she’s always just assumed was abandoned.
Inside it’s not any better; the place smells like old shoes and mildew and something she really hopes isn’t urine. The apartment is a nothing little studio with a busted radiator and stained carpets and just being inside makes her want to cry. Luckily, she’s got an annoying vampire escort to crack jokes and it’s not quite so terrible with him there, somehow.
The next place is only marginally better, but it’s still basically in a tenement, and she and Spike are only there for about thirty seconds before Buffy hears what she’s pretty sure is a gunshot come from the second floor.
The last place sucks, too. It’s a basement apartment -- a studio, actually, just one big room with a tiny bathroom -- and it’s small and dark and has cockroaches lurking in pretty much every corner.
“This place is depressing,” Buffy announces, once the landlord steps outside so she and Spike can talk about their options or whatever.
She stares at the stained gray walls and scuffs the toe of her shoe against the scratched wood floor. Some of the finish on the wood flakes up and crumbles against her boot, leaving little yellowish flakes against the rich, tan leather. Gross.
“’S not so bad,” Spike says, looking around appraisingly.
“Not so bad?” she repeats. “Are you kidding me? It’s like two hundred square feet, the bathroom doesn’t have a door, and I have seen at least eight roaches in the five minutes we’ve been here! Plus, it’s a freaking basement.”
Spike shrugs. “Basements aren’t so terrible. And those bugs were right miniature, compared to the ones I live with.”
Buffy just stares at him in disbelief. He is literally the worst apartment-hunting buddy in the world. Every place they’ve been to has been a sketched-out rat trap, but he’s got something nice to say about all of them. It’s annoying as hell.
“What is wrong with you?” she demands, trying hard not to actually stomp her foot and sound like a four-year-old throwing a tantrum.
“What’s wrong with me?” Spike asks, incredulous. “I’m not the one throwin’ a temper tantrum over a few measly bugs.”
“A few measly bugs?” she repeats. “It’s like freakin’ cockroach central in here!”
Spike blinks at her. Behind him, a roach scurries across the dingy white baseboard, gross little antennae just twitching away. Ugh. Why does her life suck so much?
“You were supposed to help me find someplace to live! Someplace nice and normal and cheap! But you’ve just dragged me to one hell hole after another and now you’re lecturing me about bug sizes? God, shut up, Spike!”
She’s yelling, she knows that. And, yeah, maybe it’s irrational and insane, but whatever. Tonight was supposed to be about new beginnings and awesome apartments and instead it’s all cockroaches and basements and one reminder after another about how much her life sucks.
And now Spike’s just standing there, staring at her and looking hurt and, damn it, this was not how tonight was supposed to turn out. Buffy takes a breath and steels herself to apologize to him, but then the landlord’s back and Spike starts talking to him about rent and utilities, so Buffy just bites her lip and doesn’t say anything at all.
*
The next weekend she helps Spike move, because it’s not like she’s got anything else to do. Plus she has superpowers and is apparently really good at carrying stuff, so. That’s something. Whatever, it’s just nice to feel good at something these days.
They start at sundown and by the time they’re done it’s not even ten o’clock. Spike doesn’t have very much stuff, which Buffy finds both depressing and also sort of reassuring, somehow. Most of the stuff he does have is just second-hand furniture and about six million pillar candles, the sight of which make Buffy roll her eyes. His fascination with the weirdo goth scene so cliché that she can hardly stand it.
Even so, once he’s actually got his stuff in there, it doesn’t look too bad. Maybe sort of dingy and she’s spotted three roaches already, but it’s not too bad. Kind of comfy, actually.
He’s got a worn blue couch, one that’s just a step below the one she’s been sleeping on the for the past few months, and an ancient second-hand TV that he plugs in and turns on almost immediately, the sounds of an old Friends rerun filling the basement apartment.
By the time they're done arranging the furniture and unpacking Spike's exciting wardrobe of black jeans and black t-shirts, neither one of them feel up to patrolling. They end up ordering a pizza from the little Italian place on the corner and the two of them sit on the couch, eating pizza and drinking beer and watching reruns of Friends on Spike’s crappy old TV. He keeps talking back to the characters in this way that she remembers him doing, all those years ago, when she’d be pretending to be asleep in his crypt, and he’d sneak out of bed to watch Dawson’s Creek, spending an hour smoking and mumbling insults about Dawson and Joey’s relationship while Buffy laid quietly on his tacky silk sheets, hating herself for every second she stayed there.
Apparently, he’s shifted his ire to Ross and Rachel these days, which Buffy finds bizarrely amusing.
“So you don’t think they’re going to work out?” Buffy asks during a commercial.
“Are you kidding me? Those two have been doomed from the start.”
“I don’t know,” Buffy says, shrugging. “I think they’ll be okay.”
“Of course you do.” Spike shakes his head and sighs. “Doomed young love always was your scene.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“Nothin’,” he shrugs, taking a long pull on his beer.
“Well, if it means nothing, why did you say something?”
On the TV, Ross is wearing a too small t-shirt and yelling at Rachel about how he doesn’t care if she broke his heart. The audience laughs.
“Are you barmy?” Spike asks, looking at her sidelong.
“No, I’m not ‘barmy’,” she says. “And, god, how long have you even been in this country? I think it’s time to drop the ridiculous British slang.”
“What the hell is wrong with you?”
“Nothing’s wrong with me! I’m just trying to watch the show, but an annoying vampire won’t shut the hell up about it. And, you know what? So what if I want Ross and Rachel to be together? That doesn’t mean anything. Why do you want everything to mean something?”
Spike shakes his head. “Bloody hell, woman,” he says. “It was just a question about a sodding sitcom.”
She looks over at him, expecting to see the cold smirk that's basically his trademark, but he’s giving her this soft half-smile, the kind he used to give her back in Sunnydale, before everything between them went to hell, and all of a sudden Buffy feels like her heart's not beating right, like it's stuttering in her chest.
“Have I mentioned lately that you’re incredibly weird these days?” he finally asks, still smiling that soft, sweet smile.
“Shut up, Spike,” she says, but she’s smiling a little too now, even if she’s not entirely sure why.
*
The weeks go by and Buffy gives up on her apartment search, mostly because she ends up spending most of her time at Spike's place anyway, only going back to Dawn and Xander's to sleep. It's just that Spike's place is a lot quieter and it's closer to work and, besides, it's really not all that bad once you get used to it.
Spike seems to like it just as much as she does, since he stays on the ship less and less, until it gets to the point where Buffy practically forgets he has anywhere else to be other than right there next to her.
*
The last week in August, they’re patrolling out near the wharf when they stumble across a nest of some kind of demon, all purpley goop and slime.
The two of them dive right in, Buffy with a sword and Spike with an axe, and they’ve slayed all of them but one when Spike takes a giant demon claw to the chest. He crumples the ground and Buffy shoves her weapon into the damn thing’s third eye, dodging past the slowly dissolving gelatinous mass to get to Spike.
By the time she does get over to him, he’s kneeling on the street, his black button down shirt ripped to shreds. There’s dark red blood trickling slowly down his chest and his left eye is turning puffy and blue. Buffy helps him to his feet and the two of them shuffle the three blocks to his apartment.
Once they get inside, Buffy steers Spike towards the bathroom. He hitches himself up on the counter while she rustles through the medicine cabinet, finding gauze and bandages and surgical tape.
Spike takes his shirt off, sliding it gingerly down his shoulders and, wow.
It’s not like Buffy forgot what he looked like without his shirt on, it’s just. It’s been a while since she’s seen it. Him. Without his shirt on. He’s like a freaking marble statue, all smooth white skin and hard lines, and looking at him makes Buffy’s stomach flip.
He’s got his eyes closed and the black eye he's sporting makes his cheekbones even more pronounced, somehow. It's incredibly distracting.
Buffy takes a deep breath and presses a damp washcloth gently against his chest, trying to clean up the blood so she can actually see how bad the damage is.
When her knuckles brush against his skin, Spike opens his eyes and looks straight at her and Buffy feels her breath hitch in her chest.
“Tell us how it looks, would you,” he says, voice low. He’s still staring right at her, the blue of his eyes looking brighter than she ever remembers it being.
“Um,” Buffy says, eloquent as always. “Uh, it, um…” She chances a quick glance down at his chest, breaking eye contact long enough so that she can get her bearings. But then she’s just staring at the smooth, white planes of his chest and that’s not making it any easier to concentrate. “Good. It looks good.”
When she glances up, Spike’s giving her a strange look, his head tilted to the side like he’s trying to figure something out.
“My giant, sucking chest wound looks good, then, does it?”
“Oh, or, um, not good good, but not bad either, you know? I mean, it’s clearly not good, since you’ve got a giant chunk taken out of your chest, but the chunk isn’t actually that bad. More like a really bad scrape, kind of long and, and deep and…” She clears her throat and focuses on the task at hand, willing herself to stop with the rambling.
It really isn’t that bad of an injury and she’s able to bandage and tape it up pretty easily. It probably doesn’t even need anything on it, vampire healing being what it is, but this gives her something to do with her hands, so.
As she works on fixing him up, she starts to feel mostly normal again and can almost believe that the feel of Spike’s cool, smooth skin isn’t affecting her at all. Except for how her heart feels like it might beat right out of her chest and how she thinks there might be a butterfly colony setting up shop in her stomach.
Chest wounds are not sexy, she reminds herself, pressing the gauze against him and securing it with neat strips of medical tape. She ignores the butterflies and heart pounding and focuses on being as clinical as possible.
Spike sits quietly while she fixes him up. The whole time she’s working and touching him and standing extremely close to him, he doesn’t make a sound. Not a gasp of pain or an inappropriate joke or anything. It’s incredibly unnerving.
“All done,” she says once she's finished. She means for it to sound professional, but it comes out low and breathy, not at all like she means for it to. She presses the final piece of surgical tape against his chest and smoothes her fingers out over his skin in a way that is probably totally inappropriate, but that she can’t quite bring herself to stop.
“Thanks, love,” Spike says, his voice matching hers, quiet and rough. Somewhere above them, a door slams and a woman laughs, high pitched and hysterical.
Buffy's heart still feels like it's beating way too fast and Spike’s watching her in this way that makes her feel like he knows everything inside of her, just by looking, like he can hear her heart just racing away in her chest.
When she leans down and kisses him, she’s barely even disappointed in herself. His cool skin is so unbelievably comforting against hers and she idly wonders what’s taken her so long to do this again.
Spike kisses her back, of course. If one of them’s going to have any self control at all, Buffy knows that it needs to be her, but then she’s sliding her tongue into his mouth and that’s pretty much the end of that.
She runs her hands down his chest, and when she presses against the rough cotton of the bandage, Spike gasps into her mouth.
“Sorry,” she murmurs, running her tongue along his lower lip and keeping her hand right where it is.
In response, Spike just makes a noise deep in his throat and kisses her harder, pressing up against her hand, moaning softly. He tastes like tobacco and ash, just like he always has, and his mouth is still cool and clever against hers.
Buffy knows she should probably stop this, but she can't and they just kiss like that for a few minutes, making out like a couple of teenagers.
She doesn't think they've kissed this much since those first couple of times, when Buffy tried as hard as she could to convince herself that it was nothing, and that she didn't care about him at all. It's different, now. Softer and sweeter and Buffy wishes that it could have always been like this, that she didn't have to always make things so complicated.
After a while, Spike slides one hand up under her shirt, ghosting his fingertips across her ribs, tickling her just a bit and making her giggle. It’s enough to make her stop, to pull back just enough to look at him.
His hair’s a mess, sticking up in about a million different directions, and he’s breathing hard, panting in that strange way of his, the way that makes him seem so painfully human. He slides his hands further up under her shirt, and the coolness of his skin against her makes her shiver just a little.
Spike shifts his legs so that she can stand between them and Buffy gets as close as she can, pressing up against his smooth, hard body.
If she's going to stop this, now's her chance. Spike's looking at her in that worshipful way that she used to hate, but that right now just sort of makes her want to cry and hold on to him forever.
“Buffy,” he says, and her stomach flips at how much he sounds like he did, back in those last days in Sunnydale. He keeps saying her name like that as he kisses her, repeating it like prayer, just chanting it over and over again, until she feels like she can’t take it anymore.
His hand moves up her body, leaving cold ripples of gooseflesh in its wake, and Buffy arches against him. When he slides his thumb over her nipple she bites down on his lip, hard enough to draw blood, and her hips surge up against him.
He’s hard against her, and Buffy knows this is a bad idea. He’s hurt and no good ever comes from her having sex, but she’s missed him more than she can stand and now he’s here and his skin is so cool and smooth against hers, and nothing else really matters.
After a couple of seconds, Spike stands and lifts her up in one smooth movement. Buffy wraps her legs around his waist and bucks against him as he starts pressing kisses against her throat, nipping at her with blunt, human teeth.
Some small part of Buffy’s mind is telling her to slow down, don’t rush, but god, she has missed this so much. His hand’s still under her shirt as he carries her over to the couch and she tugs at the button on his jeans, trying to get more and more, to get as close to him as she can. He reaches down and slides her skirt up over her hips and she can't believe that she's lived without this -- without him -- for so long.
When he finally pushes inside of her, Buffy gasps, her whole body thrumming, and she feels more alive than she has in years, since so long she can’t remember, since that last night in Sunnydale, when the world was ending and Spike was the only person who could make her feel like things would be okay.
It’s kind of like that again now. That peaceful things-will-be-okay feeling washes over her, and as Spike moves inside of her, Buffy closes her eyes and holds him as close as she possibly can.
*
When she wakes up in the morning, Spike’s pressed close up against her, his body fitting tightly against hers. She has a brief moment of complete and utter panic, her brain racing in that way it always used to when she’d drift off and wake up with Spike all naked and sweet against her. It’s only a couple of seconds, but she freezes up, and she feels Spike tense behind her.
Buffy forces herself to relax, but Spike’s already up, heading towards the small kitchenette area across the room. He still hasn’t said anything to her. His chest doesn't look too bad, a few spots of dried blood staining the bandage, but nothing too horrible.
He stands at the refrigerator, his back to her, and Buffy tries to think of what she's supposed to say. Finally: “You okay?”
“Fine,” he says. He opens the fridge and pulls out a blood bag, ripping open a corner and draining it into a mug.
“O-kaaay,” Buffy says, not sure exactly what’s going on. She’s still naked, covered in just a thin sheet, and her whole body feels kind of sticky and gross. “Do you mind if I use your shower?”
Spike shrugs and stares at a spot somewhere above her head, sipping the blood. “Help yourself.”
By the time she’s out and dressed in yesterday’s clothes, Spike’s sitting on the couch, fully dressed and staring blankly ahead of him.
“We should talk about last night,” Buffy says, very carefully. “I didn’t mean for…” she trails off, not quite sure what she wants to say.
Spike looks right at her then, for the first time since they woke up together. His left eye is a mess, puffy and purple. “What’s there to talk about?”
“Uh,” Buffy says, “a lot of stuff?”
“Such as?”
Damn him, he’s going to make her spell this whole thing out for him. “Such as last night and you and me and the whole…sex…thing.”
“Was nothing, right?” he shrugs. “Old habits die hard and all that rot.”
“Spike, come on. That’s not what it was.”
“Is that right?” he says, his voice is low and dangerous and Buffy’s not sure when this took the turn it did. Things were supposed to be different this time, better. “And what was it, then?”
“It was,” Buffy says, at a loss. "It was..." She wants to tell him it was love. She does. But all she can see is the two of them down in the Hellmouth, Spike dismissing her, telling her that she didn’t love him. Believing that she couldn’t, while the world collapsed around them and their hands burned, bright and alive.
“Forget it,” Spike says dismissively. He grabs the pack of cigarettes off the side table and lights up. “Feel free to stop by next time you fancy a shag though, yeah? Figure it’ll be at least another couple of years before you’re up to being with the great, heroic Angelus again and you’ll need something to keep you occupied.”
Buffy flinches. “That’s not what it was,” she says again. It sounds lame and unconvincing, even to her, and she hates herself just a little more, which is surprising. She thought she’d reached her self-loathing limit, but apparently she’s still got a ways to go. Awesome.
“Oh no?” he says, his mouth curling up into a cruel smirk. “Just another scrap of pity for the pathetic cellar-dweller. Not quite as good as a last second declaration of love, but I figure it’ll do for now.”
“Excuse me?” she says. “You thought that this and that was just pity?”
He laughs at that, cruel and mocking. “Must have been so easy, once you figured I was going to die and you wouldn’t actually have to do anything more than say the words. ‘S too bad I showed up again, innit?”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“How I messed up your perfect little life," Spike says. "Everything was going so brilliant for you, shagging Angel and creating world-destroying universes and all. Best you and me could do was take down a house; I can see how you’d want to move on to something a bit more impressive.”
Buffy feels like she can’t breathe, like she’s been punched in the chest. After the last couple of months -- after last night -- she thought things would be different, somehow. Better, more gentle. God, she is such an idiot. And Spike’s just standing there, smirking at her and, all of the sudden, the fight just goes right out of her. It’s not like it matters, anyway. “You know what, Spike?” she finally says. “Fuck you.”
“Oh-ho,” he laughs. “Such ugly language for such a pretty girl.”
There’s about a million things she wants to say to him right now -- things about how she does love him and how she knows she’s made more mistakes than she can count and how what came before shouldn't matter anymore -- but he’s just standing there, a bitter smile still on his face and all that comes out is: “Fuck you, Spike.”
Buffy doesn’t even care about how sad she might sound, how lost, or if he has anything else to say to her. She just spins on her heel and walks away.
Spike doesn’t try to stop her, just stands there and watches her go.
*
After that, Spike pretty much vanishes.
By the next weekend, Buffy still hasn't heard from him, but she decides that she doesn't care. Besides, she finally has a Saturday night off and Xander's at his weekly poker game, so she and Dawn decide to do the girls’ night/sisterly-bonding thing, just the two of them sitting crosslegged on the floor of the living room, drinking margaritas and having a romantic comedy marathon.
They’re about halfway through their second pitcher of drinks and are right in the middle of Buffy’s favorite scene in You’ve Got Mail when Dawn mutes the movie.
“Hey!” Buffy complains as Meg Ryan shuffles around her cute little Manhattan apartment, wearing pajamas and looking adorable even though she’s supposed to be sick. “This is the best part.”
“So,” Dawn says, ignoring Buffy's movie-outrage. “Are you and Spike back together now or what?”
“What? No! No way!” Buffy sputters, coughing as the tequila burns the back of her throat. Onscreen, Tom Hanks is holding a bouquet of daisies, which is so sweetly, unrealistically perfect that Buffy almost can’t stand it.
“Okaaaay,” Dawn says, drawing it out in that annoying know-it-all kid sister way as she takes another long drink.
“Why would you even say that?” Buffy demands. "Also, you aren’t even old enough to be drinking. I think you should stop.”
Dawn just laughs and pours more drinks. “Geez, calm down, Buff. No need to go all mom-ish on me.”
“I’m not going ‘mom-ish,'” Buffy argues, even though she totally is. The mom thing has proven much less effective since Dawn’s turned eighteen, which completely sucks since it was pretty much the only weapon in Buffy's authority arsenal. “Why would you think that anyway?”
“Uh, I don’t know. Maybe because you guys spend like every waking moment together and whenever you see him you’re all smiling, flirty Buffy, except for how this week you’ve been all sulky Buffy. And, not coincidentally, Spike seems to have disappeared off the face of the planet. No more fire escape visits, no more post-Dancing with the Stars phone rants, no more nightly patrolling dates."
Damn it, when did Dawn get so observant? Plus, she’s still got the annoying little know-it-all-sister voice going, which Buffy totally hates, especially because it makes her want to tell her everything for some reason.
“We had sex,” Buffy admits, because she knows that resistance is futile in the face of Dawn-questioning.
Dawn laughs at that, because apparently she is the worst. “So that’s why he left?”
“No, he left because he’s an immature, idiot vampire guy who is not nearly as smart or cool as he thinks.”
“Uh-huh.” Dawn takes a long drink and then: “Soooo, what happened?”
“I don’t know!” Buffy says. “We were out patrolling and Spike got swiped by this goopy monster thing and we went back to his place to patch it up and he was so sweet and with the no shirt and the black eye and then there was kissing and, and other…things…and now he’s gone.”
When she looks up, Dawn’s looking at her with something like pity and Buffy’s face feels hot and her vision goes blurry. Ugh, stupid alcohol.
“So why is he gone now, exactly?” Dawn asks softly. On the TV, Tom and Meg are strolling through an open-air market together, both of them smiling and happy in the sunlight.
“Because,” Buffy says, blinking back her tears and steeling her resolve. There will be no crying over Spike, not tonight, not ever. “It’s a terrible idea and Spike sucks.”
“Why?”
“Why does Spike suck?” Buffy asks lightly. “Because he’s a bloodsucking fiend.”
Dawn looks unimpressed at her attempt at humor, just arches an eyebrow and gives Buffy her patented you-know-what-I-mean look.
Buffy sighs. “Because we’re terrible together.”
“No you’re not!”
“How can you say that?” Buffy demands. “Are you forgetting the last time Spike and I were together? That was an entire world of bad.”
“That’s totally not true!”
Buffy looks at her like she’s crazy. “Every time I even try to be with someone, it ends with disaster. The first time with Spike, and the badness. And then he comes back and he dies. And, and then with Angel and…” She can’t even finish that thought, her brain skittering away from all of it. She swallows hard and feels suddenly like she might be sick.
“Spike’s not Angel,” Dawn says softly.
No kidding, Buffy thinks, but what she says is: “It doesn’t matter. Angel. Spike. Any guy I’m with it just ends in badness and Spike badness is as bad as it gets.”
“That’s not true.”
“Oh, right. Because things between me and Spike always work out so well.”
“That was then.” Dawn shrugs. “Besides, the second time, it wasn’t bad. It seemed like you guys were doing well, like you were friends.”
Buffy laughs, low and bitter. “Oh yeah, right up until Spike didn’t believe me when I told him I loved him and then he died. Oh, and then there was the part where he came back from the dead, but didn’t even bother let me know he was no longer a big pile of dust. Yeah, that relationship was a rousing success.”
Dawn’s giving her a funny look, sitting like she's frozen, her glass halfway up to her mouth.
“What?” Buffy asks.
“You told Spike you loved him?”
"Um..." She’s never talked to Dawn about this, and she certainly didn’t plan on doing it tonight, but then the margaritas came out and so did stupid, blabbing Buffy. Ugh, alcohol sucks. “Yeah?”
“And he didn’t believe you?”
“Nope.” Buffy shrugs and takes a long drink so she doesn’t say anything else. The frozen drink goes right to her head, giving her the worst brain freeze she’s ever had. Which, on the plus side, at least distracts her from this conversation, so. Not a terrible trade off.
“That jerk,” Dawn spits.
“I thought you were a newly converted member of the Spike Fanclub!”
“That was before I knew he was a love-denying jerk!”
“Which is why it’s a bad idea,” Buffy says, downing the rest of her drink.
Dawn sighs and nods. She picks up the empty margarita pitcher and heads into the kitchen, leaving Buffy alone to stew in her Spike-based rage. She still can’t believe she slept with him and he was all sweet and then all mean and the whole thing was just so Spike of him, that it pisses her off. She’s so engrossed in reminding herself of all the terrible, Spike-like things that he does that she doesn’t even notice Dawn until she’s suddenly right next to her again, settling down on the floor.
“Okay, yeah, Spike was a jerk and then he died,” Dawn says, like they’re still having this conversation. Buffy’s going to tell her to shut up, but she’s got a full pitcher of margaritas clutched tightly in her left hand and they’ve practically almost missed the whole movie already anyway, so there's really no point in trying to do anything but talk about Buffy's disastrous romantic life. “But, he did come back and he seems to be less of a jerk these days, right?”
“Not hardly,” Buffy grumbles, thinking about Spike’s cruel laugh as she walked out of his apartment on Saturday. She holds out her glass so that Dawn can pour her another drink.
Dawn waves one hand dismissively as she pours with the other. “And he showed up to rescue you, all dashing space captain -- “
“To save us all from another one of my relationships that almost destroyed the world -- “
“And now he’s here, in San Francisco. Living in an apartment, like a normal person. Patrolling with you, hanging with you, being the Spike to your Buffy.”
Buffy snorts. “He’s just bored, you know how he gets.”
“Yeah, how he gets is crazy stupid in love with you.”
“Ugh, Dawn. Let it go. There is currently a Buffy-relationship embargo. Especially for vampires. Especially for vampires named Spike.”
“Why especially for Spike? What’d he do that was so bad?”
“I’m not even going to touch that one,” Buffy says, taking another long drink. Man, margaritas are delicious, all lime-y and tequila-y. They should drink margaritas all the time.
“Buffy, I’m serious,” Dawn says, apparently more invested in this ridiculous conversation than she is in the alcoholic deliciousness in front of her. “I think you should go for it. More than you already have.”
“You just said he was a jerk!”
“He is,” Dawn confirms, and then shrugs. “But you’re kind of a jerk, too so --“
“Hey!”
Buffy swats at her, but Dawn deftly moves out of reach, a superior kid-sister smirk on her face.
“C’mon, Buffy. Spike’s pretty much the only thing that seems to make you happy these days, and yeah, maybe you’re both fucked-up jerks, but that’s what makes it work. I mean, seriously, at this point who else would want either one of you freaks?”
“Shut up!” She should probably be offended, but she’s pretty sure Dawn’s right, so it's hard to muster much indignation. "Besides, it doesn't matter," Buffy says, trying to sound chipper and awesome and not at all like her heart's broken into a million tiny pieces. "Spike's gone. Disappeared. Took his fancy spaceship and flew far, far away. Adios, vampiros."
"He'll come back," Dawn says. She takes another drink and then sighs, like this whole situation is just completely exhausting for her to have to put up with. "He's Spike. That's what he does."
Buffy shrugs; she's not getting her hopes up. “When’d you get so wise anyway?” she asks, feeling yet again like she's falling behind in the whole growing-up race.
“I’ve always been wise,” Dawn says, flipping her hair and sounding smug. “You’ve just been too dense to notice.”
*
It's another month after that before Buffy hears from Spike again.
For the first week, she’s not too upset about it. It’s not like she wants to see him, anyway, after the things he said. Or, well, that’s not completely true. She does want to see him, but only so that she can yell at him. She’s spent most of her week thinking up incredibly well-reasoned arguments about why he’s basically the worst person on the planet, which she’s carefully compiled into a pretty choice rant.
The second week, she decides she doesn't care if he ever comes back. She doesn’t want to see him at all. He doesn’t even deserve to hear her I’m-too-good-for-you speech. The whole rant is way too good for him anyway and Buffy has so many more important things to do, like actually finding her own place and maybe finding a guy with a pulse to date.
The third week, she takes to walking past his apartment building on her way home from work, just in case. Not that she misses him and she definitely still doesn't care if he ever comes back. She’s just perfected her rant so that it’s a thing of complete and utter beauty and she doesn’t want it to go to waste, is all.
By the fourth week, she’s pretty much given up on the whole thing, chalked it up to her amazing ability to drive away every single man that she loves. After all, it's not like she should be surprised. It's pretty much par for the course for her and Spike: she expresses some kind of actual emotion, he gets all pissy and leaves. Besides, he's been gone for over a month so she's decided she's totally and completely over it. Over him. Over their whole insane, ridiculous, non-relationship thing.
So of course he shows up at the Pick Me Up right at the start of her shift that Saturday.
It’s been raining for a week, and Buffy’s pretty sure she can’t even remember what the sun looks like any more. She's in the process of taking an entire order of super-complicated specialty drinks (half-caf and no whip and iced and quad ristretto) when Spike shows up, dripping a puddle of water right inside the freshly-mopped-by-Buffy entrance of the Pick Me Up. He looks just like he always does, all pale white skin and dark black clothes.
“Slayer,” he says when she walks by. He’s soaking wet, his jeans and t-shirt sticking to him like a second skin.
Buffy ignores him and heads towards the counter to make the drinks.
“Buffy,” he tries again on her way back to the table, her tray full of perfectly-made specialty drinks balanced precariously on her right hand. He’s so ridiculous, sitting there all wet and sincere, that Buffy can't help but roll her eyes.
“You look like a drowned rat,” she informs him haughtily. He grins at her like he’s won.
“You look beautiful,” he says, voice soft. Which, ugh. That is so like him, saying something disgustingly charming and trying to distract her from hating him. Whatever. She’s so not charmed.
For the rest of her shift, Buffy ignores him. It’s not hard to do, since they’re insanely busy all day. By the time her shift is over, she’s exhausted and Spike has dried off, his hair doing that curling thing that she reminds herself that she doesn’t find at all sexily adorable.
Still though, Buffy’s feeling a little panicky. Spike’s still waiting patiently at his table near the door and it’s still raining, hard enough so that there’s not even a hint of late afternoon sunlight peaking through the clouds.
She drags out her shift as long as humanly possible, wiping off all the counters twice, refilling the cream and straws and napkins, hoping that Spike will take the hint and -- as he would say, in that annoying British way of his -- sod off. It doesn’t happen though, so she finally gives up and marches towards the door.
She’s expecting some kind of smart remark from Spike, but he doesn’t say anything, just gets up in one smooth movement and follows her outside.
It’s still raining of course, so Buffy pulls her umbrella out of her bag and heads out into the street. Spike follows, getting all wet and soaked, his tight black t-shirt looking even tighter and blacker than normal. He doesn’t say anything, just falls into step beside her. Buffy ends up walking towards his apartment, more out of habit than anything else, and the block before they get to his building, she finally decides she’s had enough. She stops and whirls on him, so that they're standing face to face. He's closer than she realized and there's rain dripping down the sharp lines of his face.
“Stop it,” Buffy says, feeling angrier than she has in weeks.
“Stop what?” Spike asks innocently.
“Stop following me.”
“I’m not following you, Slayer. I’m just heading home.”
“You are not,” she says.
“Are too,” he says.
“Are not.”
“Are too.”
“You are not, Spike.” Buffy sighs, suddenly exhausted. The rain is coming down harder than ever and even with her umbrella, she’s getting soaked. Even though it’s not yet fall, the air is cool and between that and the rain, she’s started to shiver, making everything that she says come out sounding shaky and hesitant. “If you were just going home, you would have left way before, instead of sitting at my work the whole day and following me out like some kind of…of…giant vampire creeper.”
Spike reaches out and puts his hand over hers, so that they’re both holding the umbrella, and her hand stops trembling so much. His hand is cool against hers and Buffy hates how much she’s missed that, the feel of his skin against hers.
“You’re shaking,” he says, which way to state the obvious, Spike. Buffy shrugs and wills herself to be still. It doesn’t work out so well, but at least it gives her something to focus on other than how much her life sucks and how Spike is the worst.
But then Spike’s shrugging out of his jacket in one smooth movement, draping it around her shoulders and rubbing her arms through the thick material like he’s trying to warm her up. He does it without much thought, and it’s basically just Spike being Spike, weirdly chivalrous and romantic and, just like that, Buffy can’t hate him like she wants to.
“I wish you weren’t so nice to me sometimes,” she tells him, leaning into him a little. It comes out kind of sad and lost and Buffy wishes that, just once, things wouldn’t be quite so hard between the two of them.
“And why’s that, pet?” he asks carefully. He’s still running his hands over her arms, trying to keep her warm.
“I don’t know,” she says, and she suddenly feels like she might cry. “Because it makes me feel worse.”
“You ever think that’s why I’m doing it?” he says with a smirk, sounding so much like his old self that it makes Buffy’s chest feel tight.
Buffy closes her eyes then, leaning her head against Spike’s shoulder, solid under her cheek. His t-shirt sticks to her wet skin and the feel of his coat around her shoulders is solid and comforting. He takes a step closer, moving so that his cheek rests against the top of her head. The rain pours down around them, beating hard against the sidewalks, a staccato rhythm that sounds like a heartbeat.
“I missed you,” she says. It’s probably a mistake, bringing up anything like this, talking about things that are real. But she’s just so tired and Spike smells just like he always did, like cigarettes and leather and his own particular earthy Spike-smell.
He doesn’t say anything for a couple of beats and Buffy’s not sure if she can keep doing this, pouring her heart out while he refuses to believe her capable of love. But then he’s reaching down to tilt her chin up, just enough so that he can look her in the eye.
The look on his face makes her breath catch in her throat, and if he says something cutting now, she's not sure she'll ever forgive him.
“I missed you, too, Slayer,” he finally says and kisses her softly, sweetly on the mouth.
Buffy smiles and kisses him back, the two of them still standing in the middle of the street, cold summer rain falling all around them.
**
end