FIC: Seraph (16/23?)
May. 17th, 2009 03:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snick_backupStory begins here. All parts may be found here.
As usual, muchas gracias to my lovely betas,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
hello_spikey and phoenixofborg.
A/N: We have a target estimate now - yay! It's looking like it should end up around 23 chapters, ~55k words. So now you know. *g*
~~~~~
Three days after the doctor’s visit, Spike opened his crypt door right around sunset to Willow and Tara, all grins, with Xander hanging moodily behind.
“We found you a bed,” Willow said.
“More of a futon, actually,” Tara added. “O-one of the RA’s in my building was going to l-leave it by the dumpster.”
“But we caught him! We’re going to go tie it on top of Xander’s car -- that’s why he’s here.”
Xander lifted his head in a nod that approximated a greeting.
“And we figured you’d want to come, so you could see it.”
“ ‘We,’ ” Spike said, warily.
“Well, Tara and I figured.”
“I said mooches can’t be choosers,” Xander said.
He eyed them all -- Willow, pleased as punch to be pulling a bed out of her hat even if it had technically been her lovely assistant who’d found the hat; said lovely assistant brightened by that shy smile; Xander with his uneasy half-glower -- and shrugged. “Yeah, all right.”
They filed out, Spike pulling the outer door shut behind him. Tara fell back to walk at his side. “So, h-how’s the baby?”
He cast a wry glance downward. “Growing.”
The smile widened. “And how are you?”
“Um.” He tried to think when in the last very long while he’d needed an answer to that question, and what the answer had been. He couldn’t remember. “Not panicking?”
“Good,” she said, nodding approval.
Willow pulled Tara into the back seat before Spike had time to state a preference. He stretched out in the front passenger seat and caught Xander’s eye on him. Pulling a feral grin, he laid a hand very deliberately over his stomach. Xander’s convulsive shudder was perhaps a bit more theatrical than called for.
“I really don’t like this idea,” he said.
“Xander,” said Willow warningly.
“Now, now.” Spike said. “A man’s allowed his prejudices in home furnishings. I’m opposed to Barcaloungers, personally.”
“I mean this whole you living with Buffy thing.”
“Yeah, what with her being so helpless and all, and me with, what, my deadly glare? My rapier wit? Mortal peril, she’s in.”
“But you could, like, burn the house down.”
“With me in it?”
“Well, you’d do it from outside.”
“Yeah, having forgone the pleasure umpteen times in the last two and a half years, I’m going to torch the place when I actually live there.” Which last statement still sounded surreal.
“It’s no good.” He patted Xander’s shoulder and heaved a sigh. “I know you miss me, sweetheart, but I just can’t bear to come back to you.”
“Gah!”
Behind them, Willow snickered.
“So, so not dignifying that with a response. At all. Ever.”
“Ooh, Xander, you’d better not tell Anya,” Willow said. “She’d wish your insides onto your outsides -- or else she’d do something really icky.”
“Really not an issue, Will.”
“Y-you’re not implying anything about gay people, are you?” said Tara. “Because I m-might have to be offended.”
“And I am now not speaking to anyone in this car.” Xander shot Spike a glare. “Your. Fault.”
Smirking, Spike turned to watch Sunnydale suburbia roll past the window. So this was what not panicking felt like. God, it felt good.
At the dorm, he decided to let the thinner, less pregnant members of the party do the talking. He hung back by the car until Willow called him over, and together he and Xander hauled the bed on top of the vehicle and tied it down. While the girls finished chatting up the fellow -- about the unexpected deaths of psychology tutors, from the sound of it -- Spike lit a cigarette.
“I’m serious,” Xander said, sidling next to him. “You hurt Buffy, or any of them--”
“--and I'm an asthma attack waiting to happen. I’ve heard it before.”
“There won’t be enough left of you to give anyone asthma.”
“Noted.”
“And the not hurting thing? That also goes for, for--” Xander contrived to gesture towards Spike’s middle without actually looking at it. “Her, whoever she is.”
Spike cocked his head. “Much obliged, you concerning yourself with her welfare.”
Xander scowled at the tarmac. “She doesn’t deserve it -- being stuck with you for a dad.”
Spike regarded him, this flop-haired puppy of a boy not yet grown into his feet, and felt an alien and entirely undesirable pang of sympathy. “And you shouldn’t have gotten that scar on your ear.”
Xander turned on Spike, right fist drawn back and ready for the blow. “That was an accident,” he said thickly, and then he gave a startled glance over his shoulder to the girls, chatting far beyond earshot.
“Sure, the bottle bein’ broken was an accident. He hit you on purpose.”
“Just that once. Dad never--” Xander gave a frustrated huff and lowered his hand. “That was years ago. How do you even know this?”
“Doesn’t take a vampire to hear your mum and dad trading old blames. You just don’t notice it anymore.” Spike took a last drag off his cigarette. “And my little one didn’t deserve getting cooked up in some military experiment, either. Way of the world.”
“But you don’t even have a soul. You like to kill people! How are you going to be any good for her?”
Tara was waving a farewell to the fellow, Willow already headed back.
“Well.” Spike flicked the butt to the ground. “Maybe I won’t. But I’m going to bloody try.” He stared Xander in the eye until Xander looked away, and then he ducked down into the car.
~*~*~
They already had the futon’s iron frame halfway up the walk when Spike heard Buffy’s adamant protests overlying Giles’ cultured rumble.
“What’s the holdup?” said Xander.
“Nothing,” Spike said, and started backing towards the door again. “Just a wanker I didn’t want to see,” he added under his breath. It had to happen sometime, but he’d had this pleasant image of Giles already taken firmly in hand by the time Spike had to face him again.
Nearer the door, in frustrated British tones, “The Council--”
“The Council kidnapped my mother, tied her up, and left her for a vampire to eat.” Well, that was interesting. “Don’t talk to me about the Council. I trust Spike with her way before I’d trust them.”
Spike felt behind him for the doorknob and shoved the door open.
“They just want someone they can shoot at demons with. At least he -- Spike!”
“Don’t mind us,” he told them as Xander stumped in at the futon’s other end. “We’re just the help. Carry on.”
“It’s your bed,” grumbled Xander. “I’m the help.”
“At least you’ve found your proper place in life,” Spike said, fumbling the basement door open.
“Buffy,” Giles began again, “It’s a very noble sentiment, but...”
Fortunately the basement’s concrete walls muffled things a little. “Here, I guess,” said Spike, easing his end of the futon to the floor while Xander did the same. Spike glanced around. It didn’t look like Joyce had gotten to moving any of those extra boxes yet. There’d definitely be some tidying needed, and maybe a few more shelves for putting away some of the detritus of three human existences.
“Here are the cushions!” said Willow, hidden beneath the largest of them. Tara trooped down behind her with two more.
“S’pose those should go on the bed,” Spike said.
“I bet Buffy’s mom’ll give you some sheets,” Willow said. “And a pillow.”
“Probably,” Spike agreed, distracted.
“So, I’m gonna go now,” Xander said, a half-question inflected in his tone. “Anya’ll be around any minute.”
“Yeah. Yeah. Guess that’s all to be done for now.” He rubbed at the back of his neck with one hand. Eyeing a ceiling beam, he said, “Um. Obliged for the help.”
“No problem,” Willow said brightly.
“Of course it wasn’t,” Xander grumbled as he followed her up the stairs. “You didn’t have to carry that thing. Or use any gas. Or...”
Tara still stood at his elbow. “You’re welcome,” she said.
“Yeah,” Spike said awkwardly. “Thanks.” She gave him one of those soft smiles that, now that he thought about it, reminded him of Joyce. Probably she’d be a good mother, this girl. Kind to a fault.
And she’d caught him staring off into space again. “A-are you okay?”
He dug his hands into his duster pockets. “S’just...not what I figured, you know?”
“The basement?”
“No. The...all of it.” His gesture encompassed the room and the house above -- strident argument still murmuring distantly from it -- and the whole world beyond. “Not complaining, mind you. Wouldn’t trade it -- wouldn’t trade her for anything. Even Dru.”
She hummed questioningly.
“Old girlfriend,” he said.
“W-were you together a long time?”
A snort. “Could say that. Still miss her.” Had she known about what she'd sent him to? He shrugged the thought away. “But this...” He glanced down, running his hand lightly over his stomach. “Never saw this coming. Or this,” he added, gaze roving the unfinished ceiling.
“If they’d known how hard I’d be to get rid of, think they might’ve just have staked me as soon as I came knocking that first time. Or,” he added wryly, “maybe I’d have saved them the trouble.”
“But you w-wouldn’t now,” she said, tone sharp with uncertain alarm.
“Nah.” He grinned reassuringly. “Got too nice a set-up now. Got things to live for.” It was as close as he’d ever come to mentioning that one ghastly, desperate, Hawaiian-printed afternoon. He’d have fallen in a howl of dust and never even known about the other life he was ending.
He must have shuddered, or made a sound, because Tara’s hand was on his arm and she was smiling sweet encouragement up at him.
And the sight of her face seemed to be the last ingredient to a thought that’d been brewing for he couldn’t guess how long. “That’s what the dream was about, wasn’t it?”
“The-- oh! D-did you figure it out?”
He grimaced as it sunk in. “Bloody Hallmark bollocks.”
“Oh?” A laugh twitched at the corner of her mouth, fighting to get out.
Now he was sorry he’d said anything, but the glint in Tara’s eye suggested she might tease it out of him if he tried to beg off. “She’s my heartbeat, isn’t she?” He felt it again, the shudder of something long dead convulsing to life in his chest. “My sodding ‘higher purpose’ in life.” He looked sharply in Tara’s face, daring her to laugh now, but all he saw was her usual grave interest.
“Well,” he said. “Enough maundering, yeah? Think Joyce said something about there bein’ one more pouch of blood in that fridge.”
But the voices overhead sharpened as they climbed the stairs, and Spike was already bored of it all by the time he reached the first floor. Buffy and Giles were still the featured combatants, but accompanied by occasional sparring among all the other parties -- Willow and Xander, and Anya had arrived by the smell of it. Dawn’s scent was drifting down from the top of the upper staircase, and he was mildly surprised that she hadn’t jumped to his defense by now.
Slip out the back door? Or endure the tedious wrath of Scoobies splitting moral hairs?
Even as he dithered, Riley Finn pushed the front door open.
“Bugger,” Spike said dismally.
“Riley!” Buffy bounded out of the living room and into those hay-baling Midwestern arms. “How was Iowa?”
“Good. Peaceful.” He peered first into the living room, where the assembled mass was no doubt scowling at each other energetically, and then shook his head and grinned down at her. “Very peaceful. You’d have been bored out of your mind.”
“Nothing to slay?”
“Even the mosquitoes were undersized this year.” Finally his glance traveled back to Spike, and caught. “Buffy...”
She dropped to her feet, peered around to see what Riley was looking at, and frowned a ferocious Slayer frown -- not so much at Spike, he didn’t think, but at the universe at large. “Yeah, there’s sort of been some stuff happening while you were gone.” She drew Riley towards the living room, favoring Spike with a scowl that clearly said, ‘Stay.’
“S-should we go sit down?” Tara said.
“Do you want to?” Spike asked, skeptical.
“Not really. I’m n-not very good with conflict.”
Riley’s disbelieving baritone had joined the chorus, and suddenly Spike had had quite enough. He stalked down the hall and around the corner, and pulled up before the crowd -- rather too many, really, to fit comfortably in the Summers’ living room.
His abrupt appearance was enough to win him a moment’s silence. He looked them all over: Giles grimacing, Joyce standing tall and thin-lipped, Riley staring at him, looking vaguely sickened. Then he laid his hands deliberately over his stomach and said, “She’s mine. She didn’t start out that way, but she is now. She’s my daughter--” oh, how sweet that word was “--and I’m going to take care of her, and I don’t really care what you lot think about it.” Which was a bluff, a declaration of war without a single weapon to back it except his sometime-ally, Miss Army of One.
But now the faces were turning to each other, half in confusion and half in chagrin -- except for Anya, who was reading a magazine -- and even Giles looked mildly chastened. What, had this all been some dry ethical exercise before? Bloody humans.
Disgusted, he spun to go before anyone had a chance to aim their objections at him, and nearly ran into Tara. She sidestepped the same direction he did, fluster rising in her face as she tried to get out of his way.
“Spike!” Willow, come to mend things. Of course.
Sighing, he turned and fixed her with a glare. “What?”
“It’s okay. Right, guys?” She glanced back to the assemblage with a glare of her own.
All but Anya turned to Giles, and he surveyed them all and sighed. “I cannot approve,” he said slowly. “But... but I understand that it is not my decision.”
As Spike watched, Buffy turned to each spectator in turn. Joyce lifted an eyebrow and glanced towards Giles with open scorn. Xander shrugged grudging acceptance. Leaning against the sofa with arms crossed, Riley’s shrug conveyed less acceptance and more a delay in judgment. Last Buffy lingered on Giles, and what passed between them before Giles cleared his throat and removed his glasses for polishing, Spike couldn’t begin to guess.
Buffy turned back to Spike with a gaze of impenetrable hazel, and said, “He stays. And so does the baby.”
It felt as though the whole house sighed, in varying degrees of frustration and relief.
“Okay, so, so you’re moving in,” Willow said to him, managing to convey an impressive amount of uncertainty in that observation. “And now you have a bed. So, we should go get the rest of your stuff, shouldn’t we?”
“And by ‘we’ you mean us,” Xander said, “and by ‘go get,’ you mean additional unpaid mileage in the Xandermobile. In which Anya and I are supposed to be riding to the movie in--” He glowered at his watch. “--negative five minutes.”
“You should help Spike,” Anya said, looking up from her magazine at last. “It’s what friends and neighbors do. And later,” she added with a gleam, “you can make it up to me. That’ll probably be even better than the movie.”
Spike waited for Xander to explain with some heat that Spike was neither a neighbor nor a friend. It wasn’t as though Spike couldn’t use the DeSoto at his convenience. But after a moment Xander shrugged and said, “So, do you wanna get the rest of your stuff?”
It didn’t take long; after a lingering glance over the crypt, Spike decided that of his few possessions only the mini-fridge and a few odds-and-ends -- razor, spare t-shirts -- were worthy of life in an actual house. He also swiped Dawn’s knives and the throwing target, and made sure he’d collected, again, all the books she’d brought him. That was it: not even one carload and Spike was moved out of his crypt again. A less dramatic exit this time, but a more permanent one, he hoped.
And later that night, when the Summers were all tucked tight in the dark, he sat on his freshly made, newly acquired bed, soothed his wakeful little girl with his hands, and told her all about it.
next part
As usual, muchas gracias to my lovely betas,
hello_spikey and phoenixofborg.A/N: We have a target estimate now - yay! It's looking like it should end up around 23 chapters, ~55k words. So now you know. *g*
~~~~~
Three days after the doctor’s visit, Spike opened his crypt door right around sunset to Willow and Tara, all grins, with Xander hanging moodily behind.
“We found you a bed,” Willow said.
“More of a futon, actually,” Tara added. “O-one of the RA’s in my building was going to l-leave it by the dumpster.”
“But we caught him! We’re going to go tie it on top of Xander’s car -- that’s why he’s here.”
Xander lifted his head in a nod that approximated a greeting.
“And we figured you’d want to come, so you could see it.”
“ ‘We,’ ” Spike said, warily.
“Well, Tara and I figured.”
“I said mooches can’t be choosers,” Xander said.
He eyed them all -- Willow, pleased as punch to be pulling a bed out of her hat even if it had technically been her lovely assistant who’d found the hat; said lovely assistant brightened by that shy smile; Xander with his uneasy half-glower -- and shrugged. “Yeah, all right.”
They filed out, Spike pulling the outer door shut behind him. Tara fell back to walk at his side. “So, h-how’s the baby?”
He cast a wry glance downward. “Growing.”
The smile widened. “And how are you?”
“Um.” He tried to think when in the last very long while he’d needed an answer to that question, and what the answer had been. He couldn’t remember. “Not panicking?”
“Good,” she said, nodding approval.
Willow pulled Tara into the back seat before Spike had time to state a preference. He stretched out in the front passenger seat and caught Xander’s eye on him. Pulling a feral grin, he laid a hand very deliberately over his stomach. Xander’s convulsive shudder was perhaps a bit more theatrical than called for.
“I really don’t like this idea,” he said.
“Xander,” said Willow warningly.
“Now, now.” Spike said. “A man’s allowed his prejudices in home furnishings. I’m opposed to Barcaloungers, personally.”
“I mean this whole you living with Buffy thing.”
“Yeah, what with her being so helpless and all, and me with, what, my deadly glare? My rapier wit? Mortal peril, she’s in.”
“But you could, like, burn the house down.”
“With me in it?”
“Well, you’d do it from outside.”
“Yeah, having forgone the pleasure umpteen times in the last two and a half years, I’m going to torch the place when I actually live there.” Which last statement still sounded surreal.
“It’s no good.” He patted Xander’s shoulder and heaved a sigh. “I know you miss me, sweetheart, but I just can’t bear to come back to you.”
“Gah!”
Behind them, Willow snickered.
“So, so not dignifying that with a response. At all. Ever.”
“Ooh, Xander, you’d better not tell Anya,” Willow said. “She’d wish your insides onto your outsides -- or else she’d do something really icky.”
“Really not an issue, Will.”
“Y-you’re not implying anything about gay people, are you?” said Tara. “Because I m-might have to be offended.”
“And I am now not speaking to anyone in this car.” Xander shot Spike a glare. “Your. Fault.”
Smirking, Spike turned to watch Sunnydale suburbia roll past the window. So this was what not panicking felt like. God, it felt good.
At the dorm, he decided to let the thinner, less pregnant members of the party do the talking. He hung back by the car until Willow called him over, and together he and Xander hauled the bed on top of the vehicle and tied it down. While the girls finished chatting up the fellow -- about the unexpected deaths of psychology tutors, from the sound of it -- Spike lit a cigarette.
“I’m serious,” Xander said, sidling next to him. “You hurt Buffy, or any of them--”
“--and I'm an asthma attack waiting to happen. I’ve heard it before.”
“There won’t be enough left of you to give anyone asthma.”
“Noted.”
“And the not hurting thing? That also goes for, for--” Xander contrived to gesture towards Spike’s middle without actually looking at it. “Her, whoever she is.”
Spike cocked his head. “Much obliged, you concerning yourself with her welfare.”
Xander scowled at the tarmac. “She doesn’t deserve it -- being stuck with you for a dad.”
Spike regarded him, this flop-haired puppy of a boy not yet grown into his feet, and felt an alien and entirely undesirable pang of sympathy. “And you shouldn’t have gotten that scar on your ear.”
Xander turned on Spike, right fist drawn back and ready for the blow. “That was an accident,” he said thickly, and then he gave a startled glance over his shoulder to the girls, chatting far beyond earshot.
“Sure, the bottle bein’ broken was an accident. He hit you on purpose.”
“Just that once. Dad never--” Xander gave a frustrated huff and lowered his hand. “That was years ago. How do you even know this?”
“Doesn’t take a vampire to hear your mum and dad trading old blames. You just don’t notice it anymore.” Spike took a last drag off his cigarette. “And my little one didn’t deserve getting cooked up in some military experiment, either. Way of the world.”
“But you don’t even have a soul. You like to kill people! How are you going to be any good for her?”
Tara was waving a farewell to the fellow, Willow already headed back.
“Well.” Spike flicked the butt to the ground. “Maybe I won’t. But I’m going to bloody try.” He stared Xander in the eye until Xander looked away, and then he ducked down into the car.
They already had the futon’s iron frame halfway up the walk when Spike heard Buffy’s adamant protests overlying Giles’ cultured rumble.
“What’s the holdup?” said Xander.
“Nothing,” Spike said, and started backing towards the door again. “Just a wanker I didn’t want to see,” he added under his breath. It had to happen sometime, but he’d had this pleasant image of Giles already taken firmly in hand by the time Spike had to face him again.
Nearer the door, in frustrated British tones, “The Council--”
“The Council kidnapped my mother, tied her up, and left her for a vampire to eat.” Well, that was interesting. “Don’t talk to me about the Council. I trust Spike with her way before I’d trust them.”
Spike felt behind him for the doorknob and shoved the door open.
“They just want someone they can shoot at demons with. At least he -- Spike!”
“Don’t mind us,” he told them as Xander stumped in at the futon’s other end. “We’re just the help. Carry on.”
“It’s your bed,” grumbled Xander. “I’m the help.”
“At least you’ve found your proper place in life,” Spike said, fumbling the basement door open.
“Buffy,” Giles began again, “It’s a very noble sentiment, but...”
Fortunately the basement’s concrete walls muffled things a little. “Here, I guess,” said Spike, easing his end of the futon to the floor while Xander did the same. Spike glanced around. It didn’t look like Joyce had gotten to moving any of those extra boxes yet. There’d definitely be some tidying needed, and maybe a few more shelves for putting away some of the detritus of three human existences.
“Here are the cushions!” said Willow, hidden beneath the largest of them. Tara trooped down behind her with two more.
“S’pose those should go on the bed,” Spike said.
“I bet Buffy’s mom’ll give you some sheets,” Willow said. “And a pillow.”
“Probably,” Spike agreed, distracted.
“So, I’m gonna go now,” Xander said, a half-question inflected in his tone. “Anya’ll be around any minute.”
“Yeah. Yeah. Guess that’s all to be done for now.” He rubbed at the back of his neck with one hand. Eyeing a ceiling beam, he said, “Um. Obliged for the help.”
“No problem,” Willow said brightly.
“Of course it wasn’t,” Xander grumbled as he followed her up the stairs. “You didn’t have to carry that thing. Or use any gas. Or...”
Tara still stood at his elbow. “You’re welcome,” she said.
“Yeah,” Spike said awkwardly. “Thanks.” She gave him one of those soft smiles that, now that he thought about it, reminded him of Joyce. Probably she’d be a good mother, this girl. Kind to a fault.
And she’d caught him staring off into space again. “A-are you okay?”
He dug his hands into his duster pockets. “S’just...not what I figured, you know?”
“The basement?”
“No. The...all of it.” His gesture encompassed the room and the house above -- strident argument still murmuring distantly from it -- and the whole world beyond. “Not complaining, mind you. Wouldn’t trade it -- wouldn’t trade her for anything. Even Dru.”
She hummed questioningly.
“Old girlfriend,” he said.
“W-were you together a long time?”
A snort. “Could say that. Still miss her.” Had she known about what she'd sent him to? He shrugged the thought away. “But this...” He glanced down, running his hand lightly over his stomach. “Never saw this coming. Or this,” he added, gaze roving the unfinished ceiling.
“If they’d known how hard I’d be to get rid of, think they might’ve just have staked me as soon as I came knocking that first time. Or,” he added wryly, “maybe I’d have saved them the trouble.”
“But you w-wouldn’t now,” she said, tone sharp with uncertain alarm.
“Nah.” He grinned reassuringly. “Got too nice a set-up now. Got things to live for.” It was as close as he’d ever come to mentioning that one ghastly, desperate, Hawaiian-printed afternoon. He’d have fallen in a howl of dust and never even known about the other life he was ending.
He must have shuddered, or made a sound, because Tara’s hand was on his arm and she was smiling sweet encouragement up at him.
And the sight of her face seemed to be the last ingredient to a thought that’d been brewing for he couldn’t guess how long. “That’s what the dream was about, wasn’t it?”
“The-- oh! D-did you figure it out?”
He grimaced as it sunk in. “Bloody Hallmark bollocks.”
“Oh?” A laugh twitched at the corner of her mouth, fighting to get out.
Now he was sorry he’d said anything, but the glint in Tara’s eye suggested she might tease it out of him if he tried to beg off. “She’s my heartbeat, isn’t she?” He felt it again, the shudder of something long dead convulsing to life in his chest. “My sodding ‘higher purpose’ in life.” He looked sharply in Tara’s face, daring her to laugh now, but all he saw was her usual grave interest.
“Well,” he said. “Enough maundering, yeah? Think Joyce said something about there bein’ one more pouch of blood in that fridge.”
But the voices overhead sharpened as they climbed the stairs, and Spike was already bored of it all by the time he reached the first floor. Buffy and Giles were still the featured combatants, but accompanied by occasional sparring among all the other parties -- Willow and Xander, and Anya had arrived by the smell of it. Dawn’s scent was drifting down from the top of the upper staircase, and he was mildly surprised that she hadn’t jumped to his defense by now.
Slip out the back door? Or endure the tedious wrath of Scoobies splitting moral hairs?
Even as he dithered, Riley Finn pushed the front door open.
“Bugger,” Spike said dismally.
“Riley!” Buffy bounded out of the living room and into those hay-baling Midwestern arms. “How was Iowa?”
“Good. Peaceful.” He peered first into the living room, where the assembled mass was no doubt scowling at each other energetically, and then shook his head and grinned down at her. “Very peaceful. You’d have been bored out of your mind.”
“Nothing to slay?”
“Even the mosquitoes were undersized this year.” Finally his glance traveled back to Spike, and caught. “Buffy...”
She dropped to her feet, peered around to see what Riley was looking at, and frowned a ferocious Slayer frown -- not so much at Spike, he didn’t think, but at the universe at large. “Yeah, there’s sort of been some stuff happening while you were gone.” She drew Riley towards the living room, favoring Spike with a scowl that clearly said, ‘Stay.’
“S-should we go sit down?” Tara said.
“Do you want to?” Spike asked, skeptical.
“Not really. I’m n-not very good with conflict.”
Riley’s disbelieving baritone had joined the chorus, and suddenly Spike had had quite enough. He stalked down the hall and around the corner, and pulled up before the crowd -- rather too many, really, to fit comfortably in the Summers’ living room.
His abrupt appearance was enough to win him a moment’s silence. He looked them all over: Giles grimacing, Joyce standing tall and thin-lipped, Riley staring at him, looking vaguely sickened. Then he laid his hands deliberately over his stomach and said, “She’s mine. She didn’t start out that way, but she is now. She’s my daughter--” oh, how sweet that word was “--and I’m going to take care of her, and I don’t really care what you lot think about it.” Which was a bluff, a declaration of war without a single weapon to back it except his sometime-ally, Miss Army of One.
But now the faces were turning to each other, half in confusion and half in chagrin -- except for Anya, who was reading a magazine -- and even Giles looked mildly chastened. What, had this all been some dry ethical exercise before? Bloody humans.
Disgusted, he spun to go before anyone had a chance to aim their objections at him, and nearly ran into Tara. She sidestepped the same direction he did, fluster rising in her face as she tried to get out of his way.
“Spike!” Willow, come to mend things. Of course.
Sighing, he turned and fixed her with a glare. “What?”
“It’s okay. Right, guys?” She glanced back to the assemblage with a glare of her own.
All but Anya turned to Giles, and he surveyed them all and sighed. “I cannot approve,” he said slowly. “But... but I understand that it is not my decision.”
As Spike watched, Buffy turned to each spectator in turn. Joyce lifted an eyebrow and glanced towards Giles with open scorn. Xander shrugged grudging acceptance. Leaning against the sofa with arms crossed, Riley’s shrug conveyed less acceptance and more a delay in judgment. Last Buffy lingered on Giles, and what passed between them before Giles cleared his throat and removed his glasses for polishing, Spike couldn’t begin to guess.
Buffy turned back to Spike with a gaze of impenetrable hazel, and said, “He stays. And so does the baby.”
It felt as though the whole house sighed, in varying degrees of frustration and relief.
“Okay, so, so you’re moving in,” Willow said to him, managing to convey an impressive amount of uncertainty in that observation. “And now you have a bed. So, we should go get the rest of your stuff, shouldn’t we?”
“And by ‘we’ you mean us,” Xander said, “and by ‘go get,’ you mean additional unpaid mileage in the Xandermobile. In which Anya and I are supposed to be riding to the movie in--” He glowered at his watch. “--negative five minutes.”
“You should help Spike,” Anya said, looking up from her magazine at last. “It’s what friends and neighbors do. And later,” she added with a gleam, “you can make it up to me. That’ll probably be even better than the movie.”
Spike waited for Xander to explain with some heat that Spike was neither a neighbor nor a friend. It wasn’t as though Spike couldn’t use the DeSoto at his convenience. But after a moment Xander shrugged and said, “So, do you wanna get the rest of your stuff?”
It didn’t take long; after a lingering glance over the crypt, Spike decided that of his few possessions only the mini-fridge and a few odds-and-ends -- razor, spare t-shirts -- were worthy of life in an actual house. He also swiped Dawn’s knives and the throwing target, and made sure he’d collected, again, all the books she’d brought him. That was it: not even one carload and Spike was moved out of his crypt again. A less dramatic exit this time, but a more permanent one, he hoped.
And later that night, when the Summers were all tucked tight in the dark, he sat on his freshly made, newly acquired bed, soothed his wakeful little girl with his hands, and told her all about it.
next part
