Butterfly kisses
" The Cost of Butterfly Kisses." The title is an allusion to THIS song, which will totally ruin the surprise for you if you haven't read the first chapter.
The Cost of Butterfly Kisses, Part Five
Fandom/Pairing: BtVS, Spike/Xander
Rated: TEEN (we're still in the manipulation stages here)
Summary: There's nothing Xander wouldn't do for family.
Yep, we are back to the prompt table, this time with "Jingle Bowels"
( Chapter One... ) ( Chapter Two... ) ( Chapter Three... ) ( Chapter Four... )
"Jingle bells, Batman smells, Robin laid an egg. Batmobile lost a wheel and the Joker got away, hey!" Xander sang as he pulled the heavy duct tape off the box of Christmas decorations. Bonnie laughed and reached out to pull on a plastic pine needle sticking out the corner of the box.
"Jingle bowels, jingle bowels, Daddy lost a..." she stopped.
"Peg," Xander sang. Bonnie giggled. "And you have been spending too much time with Spike. You are too young for bowel jokes."
"I'm not a baby," Bonnie said. She pulled on the needle, and it broke off. "I'm a growing girl."
"You are growing, but you're still a little girl," Xander disagreed. Sometimes it bothered him just how fast she was growing up. He'd looked up kwaini demons not long after he'd found out that his night of primal wildness was going to have some long-term consequences, and according the book, Bonnie was going to grow up fast... faster than a human, anyway. Xander had never had a chance to really talk to K'wana about it because any discussion seemed to come back to the family's despair that Bonnie was turning out more human than demon. Xander reached out and caught one of Bonnie's dark curls, and she smiled at him. Sadly, he didn't remember much about his night with K'wana. It was a long night stained with lust and fleeting memories of sweating flesh and sharp teeth. The last of the tape ripped away and the box came open, surprising Xander.
"I declare victory!" Xander said as artificial tree limbs popped up. His Christmases always sucked, but now that Bonnie was in a mostly human home, he was determined to give her some happy memories of the holiday.
"You're silly. The box isn't dangerous enough to defeat," Bonnie told him seriously.
"Oh yeah? Wait until you see how hard this is to put together," Xander pointed out. He pulled a branch out. "Every branch has a little bit of color on the end. We have to put up the big pole in the center and then match all the colors, and if we're wrong, we're going to have the ugliest Christmas tree in the whole world."
Bonnie pulled the first branch out, and then she froze, her eyes darting to the front door. Xander twisted around, watching the yellow streetlight shine in through the narrow slot window set into the door for a second before the lock turned and Spike came thumping in the room. It was early for him to be home.
"Hey, Spike," Xander said cautiously. If he was being honest, Spike was pretty easy to live with... easier than Anya anyway, but every time the vampire walked into the house, Xander could feel his guts knotting inside him. Bonnie was here, so damn vulnerable because her demon blood made it possible for Spike to hurt her, and Xander was intensely aware of the fact that he wasn't fast enough or strong enough to protect his daughter-not from Spike and not from all the other nasties that went bump in the night.
"Pet," Spike said, an endearment Xander was quickly growing to hate. It wasn't even that he hated the name itself. Anya's pet names for him tended to be on the therapy-inducing side. But Xander wasn't sure if Spike was showing some sort of weird, twisted sort of affection where he appreciated that Xander kept him in beer and smokes or if Spike was calling him a lower life form. And even worse, Xander couldn't do a damn thing to stop him.
Spike collapsed into the recliner looking absolutely exhausted. There weren't any big bads on the horizon, just some random harassing from the idiot triplets, so Xander wasn't quite sure what had left Spike looking like he'd just got beat on by his bookie friend again. Xander never would have guessed that a few Siamese kittens would have cost so much, but that was still less than one of Anya's spa days.
"Anything wrong?" Xander asked. He pushed himself up and moved to the center of the room.
Spike looked up. "Yeah, I don't see you getting me a fucking beer."
Xander flinched. He had always insisted that he was not going to grow up to be his father. So instead, he grew up to be his mother. Xander glanced at Bonnie, worried, but she was just sorting branches with the same intensity she used for everything. Rather than risk a fight in front of Bonnie, Xander headed for the kitchen.
When Xander had first moved to the house, he'd had nightmares about just what Spike would demand. Instead, Spike was way less with the demanding than Anya had been. If the refrigerator was stocked with human blood and ale and there were Jack Daniels, cigarettes, and Wheatabix in the cupboards, Spike was usually pretty damn content. Clearly not tonight.
Xander hurried through the carved mahogany arch that led into the kitchen. This was the one room that definitely wasn't human designed. Every inch of wall space was covered in carvings and the stove was a heavy iron monster built with wood-burning warmers to use for spell-making. If Willow wasn't already so far gone into the spell-making and if Xander wasn't trying to hide Bonnie from his friends, he'd love to show it off to her. But those medieval touches did look a little strange next to the full-sized modern refrigerator tucked into an inconvenient corner where you couldn't open the door all the way without hitting a stone pillar.
Going over, he pulled out beer and human blood, putting the second into a mug and then heading for the microwave. Spike was generally in a better mood after feeding, so if Xander wanted some happy Christmas memories, he was going to have to get the bloodsucker happy. His mother had always gone for the beer, but Xander figured if he brought Spike too much beer without some blood, they really were going to recreate the Harris household Christmas.
It was weird, sometimes Xander hated Spike, and other times he almost felt something almost sympathetic. He could weirdly understand Spike's frustration. Actually, he remembered the frustration because he'd spent all of sophomore year in a fruitless chase of Buffy. But still. Ick. As a vampire, Spike should be chasing vampires or demons or something. Not Buffy. There was wrong and then there was 'oh this is so going to end with someone's eviscerated guts in a steaming pile at their feet' wrong.
The microwave dinged, and Xander grabbed a box of Crawfords Garibaldi biscuits and stuck it under one arm before grabbing the beer in one hand and the mug of blood in the other. If the beer and the blood didn't cheer Spike up, hopefully the really crappy English cookies would.
Turning the corner, Xander found Bonnie standing at Spike's knee. His first instinct was to grab her away because if Spike was channeling Tony Harris, this was not going to end well. But instead of lashing out, verbally or physically, Spike smiled at whatever she had said and ran a finger over her cheek.
"Killed a Mohra once, poppet. Nasty buggers, those. Face like they just crawled out of their graves, those."
Xander opened his mouth, but then he snapped it shut again. Yeah, he would be happier if Bonnie never, ever heard about another big bad, but with Spike in the house, that wasn't going to happen. Instead he headed over and put the various treats on the table next to Spike's chair. Looking at the blood and the cookies, Spike's scarred eyebrow twitched, but Xander just headed back toward the Christmas tree. Bonnie had started pulling out the branches and organizing them by the color on the end, but she had all the red and and orange-red together. The colors looked the same, but red branches were long things for the bottom of the tree and orange-red were short and stubby.
"Bonnie, Spike looks really tired. Maybe we should leave the living room to him and we could go play with your video game," Xander suggested.
"How did you kill it?" Bonnie asked, crawling up onto his lap. Shit. Whatever he didn't want Bonnie to do, Bonnie pretty much did. Up until a month ago, Xander had really spent a lot of time blaming his parents for being unparental, but at this point, he figured they probably had done the best they could because getting a kid to listen obviously required talents that were not in the Harris gene pool.
Spike leaned forward. "It attacked Dru. It didn't even wait until she was looking, and it took an ax to her. Caught her right above the hip." Spike pointed to Bonnie's side. "She went down caterwauling, and I didn't have anything bigger than a knife on me, so I ripped one of the beams off the side of this shed and started swinging." Spike's got a gleeful look in his eye as he picked up his blood.
Bonnie's eyes got big. "You're strong."
That made Spike smile even more. "Bloody right I am, poppet. And I caught him right in the back of his knee. That's the trick, pet. If you don't know exactly how ta kill 'em, make sure you disable them so they can't come after you."
"Spike, this really isn't child-approved conversation," Xander tried to protest. Spike looked at him and gave him a look that might have been a grin or a sneer, Xander wasn't sure which.
"Not like Bonnie doesn't know about the things that go bump in the night, pet. I figure you lot only survived as long as you did because you bloody educated yourself. We don't want our girl ending up demon kibble because she doesn't know how to handle herself." Spike reached over and opened the cookie box.
"I'm going to grow up to be as strong as you," Bonnie announced firmly. Xander could feel hot jealousy turn his stomach sour, but then it wasn't like he had a whole lot of strength for her to admire. Bonnie's mother and grandmother had pointed that out often enough, and sometimes Xander could hear echoes of those women in Bonnie's voice. Spike tilted his head.
"Not likely, pet. Kwaini aren't as strong as vampires. But vampires aren't as strong as Mohra, and that big bastard that touched my Dru died, even if he was stronger than me."
"Because you disabled him," she said happily, pronouncing the new word carefully.
Spike laughed. "Didn't even come close, poppet. The wood broke, and there I was with a big, nasty demon with an ax and all I had was a bit of wood. And my sire was still down, crying out that I should rip the wanker's head off, like I hadn't already been trying to do exactly that. I bloody loved Dru, but sometimes she did tend to dwell on the obvious."
Spike offered Bonnie a cookie, and she took it and nibbled on in as she watched Spike. While Spike watched her, his expression softened. For a brief second, he wasn't the big bad.
"What did you do?" Xander asked, curiosity getting the best of him.
Spike let his hand rest on Bonnie's leg as she nibbled on her cookie. "I drove the broken end of the beam right into his stomach."
"Okay, please let's not get into descriptions of guts," Xander begged. Bonnie was eating, and Xander did not need to see any of her dinner or that cookie make a return appearance.
"What's the matter, mate? Weak stomach?"
Xander looked down toward Bonnie. Spike followed Xander's gaze and then rolled his eyes when he realized that Xander was concerned about Bonnie's stomach. Xander had no doubt that Spike cared about Bonnie, but his version of care and nurturing was not exactly child appropriate.
"Wanker," Spike said softly. He gave Bonnie a little slap on the back, and she came over and crawled onto the couch, laying on her stomach with her top half in Xander's lap. He rested a hand on her back.
"I don't mind evisceration stories," she offered, and it Xander really didn't want to even think about the fact that she didn't have to sound that word out. Disabled was a new word, evisceration she'd heard often enough to say comfortably. Sometimes Xander was sorry that he didn't just take Bonnie and run when she was a baby. He could have protected her from all this, but he'd been an idiot and he thought he could be a good father without giving up his life.
"Did that kill the demon?" she asked Spike.
"Ask your da," Spike said. Xander blinked for a second.
"What?"
"You spent the last six years mucking around with the slayer, fighting all the big bads. Did a broken bit of beam in the stomach kill the Mohra?"
Xander thought about that for a second. "Red crystal thingy right here?" Xander asked, tapping his forehead.
"That'd be it."
"You have to break the crystal or they just come back bigger and badder than ever," Xander said. "Not that they're exactly warm, fuzzy kittens the first time you try to kill them."
"True enough." Spike nodded. "Bloody wished someone would have told me that the first time I met it. I killed that git three times before Dru managed to tell me to break the stone. Every time it came after me, I thought the demon's bigger, badder brother was back for revenge."
"Wow." Bonnie's eyes were all big. "But a Mohra isn't going to come back from the dead and come in here, is it?" Bonnie looked at the front door with sudden suspicion. Given her age, the idea of demons breaking into the house should have terrified her, but Xander guessed the rules were different since she was a demon.
"No worries, poppet. No demon is coming through that door without my permission." Spike picked up his beer and took a big drink.
"Maybe we could start putting the tree together," Xander suggested. If Spike's mood was improving, he definitely wanted to be busy doing something other than aggravating him into getting pissed again.
"I bet I can put my half together faster!" Bonnie sang as she darted for the box. "Red, yellow and and blue are on the bottom."
"I guess that leaves me with all the branches at the top," Xander agreed.
"I'm going to beat you, Daddy," Bonnie said joyfully. Xander smiled and grabbed the center pole, setting it in the base so they could start putting the tree together. Yeah, Spike was stronger. Spike had all the cool demon stories that obviously impressed Bonnie's demon instincts, but Spike couldn't put a Christmas tree together with her or be her father or read her a story when he was trying hard not to cry about her mother. Those were Xander's jobs. And this was one job Xander was determined to not screw up.