FIC: Seraph (18/24?)
Jun. 30th, 2009 12:52 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.
~~~~~
The liberation of ill-gotten blood was doubtless a thrilling venture for certain people that weren’t Spike. Buffy and Riley, for example, who were this very minute likely beating the sticky cerulean snot out of those Greknol security demons. Or the witches, getting their mojo on and riding the adrenaline -- it’d be a lively night at Tara’s afterwards, he’d wager. Even Xander was lugging whole cases of blood about, which sounded downright tolerable as menial labor went.
Spike, on the other hand, sat straddling a dining chair in the Summers kitchen watching Dawn make something she claimed were mini-pizzas. He was skeptical; in his wide and varied travels he’d never met a pizza that involved peanut butter.
“This is how Ted made them,” she explained, slicing the pickle to put on top.
“That is not how Ted made them,” Joyce said, taking a Tupperware container from the back of the fridge and peering suspiciously inside. She handed it to Spike, who held his breath and tossed it into the sink. “Ted’s were... very good, actually.”
“That was just because of the special Stepford dust.”
Joyce pushed aside the last, nearly-empty canister of pigs’ blood and Spike held his hand out. “I’ll take that.”
She handed it to him and said, “The Stepford dust had nothing to do with the fact that there were no pickles on his mini-pizzas.”
“Ted?” said Spike.
“A man I dated for a while,” Joyce said. “It ended badly.”
“He was a robot who tried to kidnap her and lock her up in his scary time capsule basement,” Dawn explained.
“Ah ha,” Spike said, waiting for a correction from Joyce -- but she was nodding in chagrined agreement.
“But he was a really good cook,” Dawn added. “And he gave me the first Harry Potter book, which is, like, my favorite series ever now.”
Faintly, a horn beep from the front of the house. “Janice!” Dawn balled up her creation in a paper towel. “You sure you’ll be okay, Spike?”
“Terrifying though she is, I think I can handle one evening alone with your mum,” Spike said. “Scram.”
While Joyce followed Dawn out into the hallway to see her off, Spike warmed the very last of the pigs’ blood. He’d meant to wait until the Buffy team got back with the good stuff, but there was no way he was lasting that long. “S’no wonder I’m starting to look like a mare in foal,” he told his girl. “Bloody demanding appetite you’ve got.” The steady Summers-funded supply was helping, though not as much as he’d expected. He could take a quart and a half at once -- and had, a couple of times, just to see -- and even with his back teeth floating, hollowness gnawed faintly at him.
Just how much had the Initiative screwed with him? Was it the pigs’ blood diet fouling him up, or his own mishandled innards? Until Stacey’s nutritional advice, he’d never expected a chance to find out. It was another reason to keep glancing at the wall clock, waiting for Buffy and co. to bust in that door with their precious load.
“Well,” said Joyce as she walked back in the kitchen, “seeing as that was Janice’s mother driving the car, and since Dawn’s favorite reason for sneaking out and lying about where she’s going is sitting in my kitchen--” She gave Spike a pointed glance. “--maybe she will actually be at Janice’s house when I call in an hour to check.”
“Don’t think she meant to worry you.”
“Oh, she just didn’t think.” Joyce shook her head. “Consider this your insider’s preview of raising a teenager.”
The words took a moment to sink in. “Bloody hell,” he said softly.
She must have read the bewilderment in his eyes. “They do grow up, you know.”
In those six words lurked a horde of anxieties waiting to ambush, and with a deep breath and a long-familiar trick of mental detour, Spike left them there to wait. He could do them battle later, when such fraught disciplines as diaper-changing and bath-giving were mastered.
“Why did you ask me here?” he said suddenly. “Not saying I’m not grateful--” which was really the closest he’d come to saying thank you “--but what do you want with a vampire and a little one that’s not yours?”
“Now you ask?” she said, lips curved in amusement.
“Didn’t really dare, until I got moved in. Didn’t want you rescinding the offer.”
She huffed a laugh to the fridge door. “Buffy told me about you, about how much you wanted to keep the baby, and the way you were living in that crypt -- cold and dirty and damp. I just couldn’t stand to think of a child living like that, no matter how much she was loved.” She turned and laid a hand on his arm. “Any child.”
“Oh,” he said blankly. He’d supposed it was something like that, and not long ago he’d have been amused by the frail human compassion. Now he couldn’t find anything funny about it.
“Besides, this way I get a grandbaby, almost, without worrying about either of my babies having sex -- no, don’t disillusion me,” she said, a hand raised against his half-formed correction. “Unless it’s Dawn,” she added sharply. Then, with a smirk bordering on impish, she said, “I have to say, though, of all Buffy’s friends that I worried might turn up pregnant one day, you weren’t even on the list.”
“Glad to hear it.”
~*~*~
Dawn got back just after ten, and once Joyce had gone to bed Dawn and Spike settled on the sofa and channel surfed in comfortable darkness lit only by the screen. Eventually, Spike convinced Dawn -- or possibly Dawn convinced Spike; the flow of the argument was a bit nonlinear -- that My Fair Lady was the best thing on. Spike scoffed at Audrey Hepburn’s impression of a London gutter accent, disowned Dawn for saying the ‘romance stuff’ was boring -- “You can’t disown me! You’re already dead!” -- and simply played deaf to her insistence that he liked the singing parts best.
Henry Higgins was having a semi-musical epiphany about becoming accustomed to things and Dawn was snoring lightly on Spike’s arm when he heard steps coming up the walk. Spike eased away from her, swung the front door open, and stuck his head out over the threshold. “Slayer?”
“Spike.” Buffy thrust a crate into his hands. Blood. He could smell it wafting out from the wrapping... not to mention the damp spot on the one corner. He set it down just inside the door. Riley strode up the porch steps, boots thumping in the dark, and Spike stepped aside for him and then followed Buffy back out to... Riley’s jeep? He thought Xander had picked her up.
“Everything as planned?” he asked.
She handed him a third crate. “They chewed on Xander some. Another guard, we didn’t see him until...”
“Until he jumped the boy,” Spike finished.
“Yeah.” She pulled the last crate out of the back seat and slammed the door shut.
“But he’ll pull through.” Life as a Summers houseguest would be suddenly much more difficult, otherwise.
“It wasn’t end-of-the-Xander type woundage. It was just... more damage than I ever thought he’d have to take for you.”
“Oh,” he said blankly. His habitual Xander-contempt seemed have failed him, leaving him with nothing to say.
He and Buffy caught up to Riley on the sidewalk. After one threatening grimace from Riley, Spike slipped past while they were busy giving sloppy goodbyes. He found Dawn in the kitchen, emptying the first crate into the now-mostly-cleared fridge. About one and a half would fit there, he thought, and another half in his mini-fridge in the basement; the others would go next door, where the Florences had said they’d be delighted to house Dawn’s biology project in their extra outdoor freezer/fridge.
“So this is it, huh?” Dawn said when he came back up from the basement. “The real thing. The jalapeño ice cream.”
“That it is.”
“Where do you think it came from?”
The blood was in pouches like hospital bags, and he wondered if they’d just taken Anya’s blood bank suggestion via an indirect route. He picked one up, inspected it, let his nostrils flare over what trace of scent had escaped the vinyl. “People, I expect. One way or the other.”
“Yeesh, thanks for the news flash.” She closed the fridge door and turned to him, blue eyes wide and watchful. “So you’re going to drink that, right?”
He knifed the pouch open and poured it into one of the mugs designated his after Buffy had refused to drink after him no matter how many times the mugs had gone through the dishwasher. Even cold, the smell of the stuff set his throat tingling as no perfectly heated pigs’ blood ever did. He watched impatiently as the mug spun round and round in the microwave, fighting the fangs just itching to drop. He could feel Dawn’s gaze boring into his shoulder blade.
The microwave beeped shrilly and he pulled the blood out. It was too much, that scent like condensed ecstasy promising him eternity and untold power and bliss. He lifted the mug, leaned back, and gulped long breathless mouthfuls, warming and electrifying. Too soon it was gone, and only then, as he maneuvered around his fangs to lick at the rim, did he realize he’d shifted faces.
“So?” said Buffy from behind him.
He shook the fangs away and turned around to face her, standing next to Dawn. “It’ll do,” he said, trying to hold his voice steady.
“I’m sure Xander will be glad to hear that.”
He huffed. “Look, line of fire, wasn’t it? For an innocent in need of assistance. What’re you sniping at me for?”
A deep breath, lips pressed thin; then she let the breath go and nodded, looking somewhere that wasn’t him. “I know. I just... This better be worth it.”
“She’s worth it,” he said softly, as though he’d had any thought of her at all a moment ago while he swallowed that life’s nectar down.
“Yeah.” Another long breath. “Yeah, I know.”
Dawn’s voice broke through that solemn instant of silence. “This is like the first human blood you’ve had in a long time, right?”
Spike broke his gaze from Buffy to glance at Dawn, who was frowning hard at the flattened pouch. Blood pooled in pockets near the seams and a single drop had splashed onto the counter. “Like I told the doc, there’s been a little now and then.”
She gave a one-shoulder shrug. “So who was the last person you ate?”
“Dawn!” snapped Buffy, pinning Spike with a don’t-you-dare glance.
Which was not, perhaps, the best way to keep him quiet. “Was a man,” he said.
Dawn’s gaze was intent on her finger, dipping into the spilt blood. “Yeah?”
Buffy glared, nostrils flaring, but she didn’t move in for a jab to the nose and he took that for permission. “I’d just come off a royal three-week pisser of a binge, after losing that sodding sunshine ring.” And wouldn’t he love to have that back now, a trinket that could share his little girl’s daylight with him. “I figured on coming back to Sunnydale and giving a few certain folks a good killing.”
A glance to Buffy, but she just looked back, unfazed. After all, it wasn’t as though this was news to her.
“I was in a hurry, hell bent to get here and give my grand speech and get myself zapped with glorified cattle prods. I didn’t want to bother hunting when I got into town, so I thought I’d grab a snack on the road.”
Dawn was listening. Oh, was she listening -- with her ears and her hunched shoulders and her eyes that didn’t look his way.
“There was a bloke walking along the highway. Holes patched in his jeans with even the patches wearing through. Bedroll on his back. Full beard, blotchy gray like he’d drizzled old motor oil through it.
“And he stunk.”
That caught Dawn finally. She fixed him with a flat, relentless gaze, and he wished she hadn’t. He’d wished a lot of things to do with this story, back when he’d first begun to grasp what reduced toothless predator he’d become. He wished his last kill had had some glory to it, someone pretty or who’d led him a good chase or who’d put up their fists and made him work for that triumphant moment of fangs in flesh. Or sometimes he wished that it’d been someone he’d taken while he was still beyond pissed, a lost memory that he could tell to himself any way he liked.
But now, Dawn’s stark blue looking back at him, he just wished he could mumble something about not remembering and have had it be the truth.
“So,” he said, “I pulled over and I pushed the passenger door open, and soon’s he leaned in I grabbed him and broke his neck and shoved him back out. Because he was all sour, like I said, sweat and auto fumes mixed in with the sweat. Didn’t want him smelling up the car.
“His blood was sweet as any, though. Went ‘round and drained him, and left him all comfortable, snuggled in the ditch. The end.”
“Oh,” Dawn said. A long moment passed of him just waiting, feeling bone-deep for those human pulses he could almost hear, nestled behind the girls’ twin heartbeats. Then Dawn dropped her crossed arms. “I’m going to bed.” Eyeing him carefully with her lips pressed white, she walked past him and out.
He hunched over the kitchen island, elbows to the countertop, and bowed his head.
“Why would you tell her that?” Buffy asked, voice sharp and bewildered. “I thought you were playing some creepy older brother thing for her. She’ll probably have nightmares now.”
“She already has nightmares.” Also thanks to him. “Thought you’d approve, really. Wouldn’t want your sis to get the idea vampires are fluffy little house pets.”
“She’s just thirteen!”
He lifted his head to look at her. “So now I’m in trouble for being honest with a minor, is that it?”
They looked each other in the eye, she still suspicious, he tired and aching a little bit with a sort of aimless regret. Mostly he was just tired. He supposed that answered his question about the effects of diet versus experimental internal meddling; usually after that much human blood he’d be burning for a shag or a scrap or both. Now all he wanted was to sprawl across his rescued futon and close his eyes.
Buffy frowned at him for a moment more and then shook her head. “Um, listen. While we were out tonight, I staked this random vamp who was wandering around asking for a vampire ‘in appearance male, but ripe with child.’” She made a face.
“Bugger,” Spike said wearily.
“You know who I’m talking about, I’m guessing.”
“Vamp cult. Looking to kill me and the little one both, seeing as we’re such an offense to undead family values.” A pause, while he considered the relative merits and risks of his next words. “They’re what got after me and Dawn a few months ago.”
“Oh. Oh.” A soft huff, and then the beginnings of a predatory grin. “Well, won’t it be exciting when they come looking for you in my town? They’ll see what happens to vamps who snack on the Slayer’s sister. Do they know you’re here, or were they guessing? Maybe I should send out flyers.”
“Slayer!”
She paused mid-gesture. “What?”
“I’m not putting me and my girl out as bait just so you can get your revenge on.”
“Oh,” she said, giving his stomach a hard glance. It was an expression worn a lot around him lately: that puzzled irritation usually reserved for impossible solutions to otherwise simple equations. Buffy sighed. “Okay. Yeah. I mean, if it were just you...”
“Very funny.” Except if it were just him, he’d probably have been willing to play; good hearty brawls were too few anymore.
“Okay, so, I see ‘em, I stake ‘em, but if they find you and I’m not around...”
“What do you suggest, then?”
She squared her shoulders and said, “I think it’d probably be good if you just stuck around the house. Unless there’s someone to go with you, I mean.”
“Bugger that. I’m not twiddling my thumbs on house arrest for the next two months.”
“What, do you think I want you breathing chilly air down my neck every time I turn around? Believe me, I don’t. But that’s not the point, is it?” She crossed her arms and looked up, every angle in her stance a challenge.
“I can take care of myself! And her. Both of us.”
A flash of motion, and then her knuckles were pressing into his belly. He stumbled back and she caught his arm, steadying him. “One punch,” she said. “One good stab in the wrong place.”
The vision of it came over him like a convulsion: a gleaming blade tearing into him, slicing through soft bone and fragile skin thin as vellum. Blood, hers and his, spilling out and staining the pavement. Finally just him alone, his belly and arms both as empty as though she’d never been.
Fighting the tremble in his hands, he took a moment to assure himself of that precious flutter. With a shuddering breath he opened his eyes. Hoarsely, “All right.”
“Okay,” Buffy said.
A moment, while the residual terror ebbed. Then, “I’m not much for sitting still.”
She groaned. “I know. Do you think we can get this baby born without one of us going insane?”
He managed a thin smirk. “Well, I’ve always said there were a few bats flitting around your belfry.”
Two months. He felt inclined to a groan or two himself. It’d be two months of nothing but these few walls to stare at and no one but Summers and Scoobies for company -- not that he’d seen much of any other kind lately.
Laughable deadly vamp cultists with too much time on their hands. Two months indoors, except when he could cajole and/or browbeat someone to accompany him. Dawn, peering intently at him with that white bleakness.
And the best he could do about any of it was nothing.
next part
As usual, muchas gracias to my lovely betas,
hello_spikey and phoenixofborg.~~~~~
The liberation of ill-gotten blood was doubtless a thrilling venture for certain people that weren’t Spike. Buffy and Riley, for example, who were this very minute likely beating the sticky cerulean snot out of those Greknol security demons. Or the witches, getting their mojo on and riding the adrenaline -- it’d be a lively night at Tara’s afterwards, he’d wager. Even Xander was lugging whole cases of blood about, which sounded downright tolerable as menial labor went.
Spike, on the other hand, sat straddling a dining chair in the Summers kitchen watching Dawn make something she claimed were mini-pizzas. He was skeptical; in his wide and varied travels he’d never met a pizza that involved peanut butter.
“This is how Ted made them,” she explained, slicing the pickle to put on top.
“That is not how Ted made them,” Joyce said, taking a Tupperware container from the back of the fridge and peering suspiciously inside. She handed it to Spike, who held his breath and tossed it into the sink. “Ted’s were... very good, actually.”
“That was just because of the special Stepford dust.”
Joyce pushed aside the last, nearly-empty canister of pigs’ blood and Spike held his hand out. “I’ll take that.”
She handed it to him and said, “The Stepford dust had nothing to do with the fact that there were no pickles on his mini-pizzas.”
“Ted?” said Spike.
“A man I dated for a while,” Joyce said. “It ended badly.”
“He was a robot who tried to kidnap her and lock her up in his scary time capsule basement,” Dawn explained.
“Ah ha,” Spike said, waiting for a correction from Joyce -- but she was nodding in chagrined agreement.
“But he was a really good cook,” Dawn added. “And he gave me the first Harry Potter book, which is, like, my favorite series ever now.”
Faintly, a horn beep from the front of the house. “Janice!” Dawn balled up her creation in a paper towel. “You sure you’ll be okay, Spike?”
“Terrifying though she is, I think I can handle one evening alone with your mum,” Spike said. “Scram.”
While Joyce followed Dawn out into the hallway to see her off, Spike warmed the very last of the pigs’ blood. He’d meant to wait until the Buffy team got back with the good stuff, but there was no way he was lasting that long. “S’no wonder I’m starting to look like a mare in foal,” he told his girl. “Bloody demanding appetite you’ve got.” The steady Summers-funded supply was helping, though not as much as he’d expected. He could take a quart and a half at once -- and had, a couple of times, just to see -- and even with his back teeth floating, hollowness gnawed faintly at him.
Just how much had the Initiative screwed with him? Was it the pigs’ blood diet fouling him up, or his own mishandled innards? Until Stacey’s nutritional advice, he’d never expected a chance to find out. It was another reason to keep glancing at the wall clock, waiting for Buffy and co. to bust in that door with their precious load.
“Well,” said Joyce as she walked back in the kitchen, “seeing as that was Janice’s mother driving the car, and since Dawn’s favorite reason for sneaking out and lying about where she’s going is sitting in my kitchen--” She gave Spike a pointed glance. “--maybe she will actually be at Janice’s house when I call in an hour to check.”
“Don’t think she meant to worry you.”
“Oh, she just didn’t think.” Joyce shook her head. “Consider this your insider’s preview of raising a teenager.”
The words took a moment to sink in. “Bloody hell,” he said softly.
She must have read the bewilderment in his eyes. “They do grow up, you know.”
In those six words lurked a horde of anxieties waiting to ambush, and with a deep breath and a long-familiar trick of mental detour, Spike left them there to wait. He could do them battle later, when such fraught disciplines as diaper-changing and bath-giving were mastered.
“Why did you ask me here?” he said suddenly. “Not saying I’m not grateful--” which was really the closest he’d come to saying thank you “--but what do you want with a vampire and a little one that’s not yours?”
“Now you ask?” she said, lips curved in amusement.
“Didn’t really dare, until I got moved in. Didn’t want you rescinding the offer.”
She huffed a laugh to the fridge door. “Buffy told me about you, about how much you wanted to keep the baby, and the way you were living in that crypt -- cold and dirty and damp. I just couldn’t stand to think of a child living like that, no matter how much she was loved.” She turned and laid a hand on his arm. “Any child.”
“Oh,” he said blankly. He’d supposed it was something like that, and not long ago he’d have been amused by the frail human compassion. Now he couldn’t find anything funny about it.
“Besides, this way I get a grandbaby, almost, without worrying about either of my babies having sex -- no, don’t disillusion me,” she said, a hand raised against his half-formed correction. “Unless it’s Dawn,” she added sharply. Then, with a smirk bordering on impish, she said, “I have to say, though, of all Buffy’s friends that I worried might turn up pregnant one day, you weren’t even on the list.”
“Glad to hear it.”
Dawn got back just after ten, and once Joyce had gone to bed Dawn and Spike settled on the sofa and channel surfed in comfortable darkness lit only by the screen. Eventually, Spike convinced Dawn -- or possibly Dawn convinced Spike; the flow of the argument was a bit nonlinear -- that My Fair Lady was the best thing on. Spike scoffed at Audrey Hepburn’s impression of a London gutter accent, disowned Dawn for saying the ‘romance stuff’ was boring -- “You can’t disown me! You’re already dead!” -- and simply played deaf to her insistence that he liked the singing parts best.
Henry Higgins was having a semi-musical epiphany about becoming accustomed to things and Dawn was snoring lightly on Spike’s arm when he heard steps coming up the walk. Spike eased away from her, swung the front door open, and stuck his head out over the threshold. “Slayer?”
“Spike.” Buffy thrust a crate into his hands. Blood. He could smell it wafting out from the wrapping... not to mention the damp spot on the one corner. He set it down just inside the door. Riley strode up the porch steps, boots thumping in the dark, and Spike stepped aside for him and then followed Buffy back out to... Riley’s jeep? He thought Xander had picked her up.
“Everything as planned?” he asked.
She handed him a third crate. “They chewed on Xander some. Another guard, we didn’t see him until...”
“Until he jumped the boy,” Spike finished.
“Yeah.” She pulled the last crate out of the back seat and slammed the door shut.
“But he’ll pull through.” Life as a Summers houseguest would be suddenly much more difficult, otherwise.
“It wasn’t end-of-the-Xander type woundage. It was just... more damage than I ever thought he’d have to take for you.”
“Oh,” he said blankly. His habitual Xander-contempt seemed have failed him, leaving him with nothing to say.
He and Buffy caught up to Riley on the sidewalk. After one threatening grimace from Riley, Spike slipped past while they were busy giving sloppy goodbyes. He found Dawn in the kitchen, emptying the first crate into the now-mostly-cleared fridge. About one and a half would fit there, he thought, and another half in his mini-fridge in the basement; the others would go next door, where the Florences had said they’d be delighted to house Dawn’s biology project in their extra outdoor freezer/fridge.
“So this is it, huh?” Dawn said when he came back up from the basement. “The real thing. The jalapeño ice cream.”
“That it is.”
“Where do you think it came from?”
The blood was in pouches like hospital bags, and he wondered if they’d just taken Anya’s blood bank suggestion via an indirect route. He picked one up, inspected it, let his nostrils flare over what trace of scent had escaped the vinyl. “People, I expect. One way or the other.”
“Yeesh, thanks for the news flash.” She closed the fridge door and turned to him, blue eyes wide and watchful. “So you’re going to drink that, right?”
He knifed the pouch open and poured it into one of the mugs designated his after Buffy had refused to drink after him no matter how many times the mugs had gone through the dishwasher. Even cold, the smell of the stuff set his throat tingling as no perfectly heated pigs’ blood ever did. He watched impatiently as the mug spun round and round in the microwave, fighting the fangs just itching to drop. He could feel Dawn’s gaze boring into his shoulder blade.
The microwave beeped shrilly and he pulled the blood out. It was too much, that scent like condensed ecstasy promising him eternity and untold power and bliss. He lifted the mug, leaned back, and gulped long breathless mouthfuls, warming and electrifying. Too soon it was gone, and only then, as he maneuvered around his fangs to lick at the rim, did he realize he’d shifted faces.
“So?” said Buffy from behind him.
He shook the fangs away and turned around to face her, standing next to Dawn. “It’ll do,” he said, trying to hold his voice steady.
“I’m sure Xander will be glad to hear that.”
He huffed. “Look, line of fire, wasn’t it? For an innocent in need of assistance. What’re you sniping at me for?”
A deep breath, lips pressed thin; then she let the breath go and nodded, looking somewhere that wasn’t him. “I know. I just... This better be worth it.”
“She’s worth it,” he said softly, as though he’d had any thought of her at all a moment ago while he swallowed that life’s nectar down.
“Yeah.” Another long breath. “Yeah, I know.”
Dawn’s voice broke through that solemn instant of silence. “This is like the first human blood you’ve had in a long time, right?”
Spike broke his gaze from Buffy to glance at Dawn, who was frowning hard at the flattened pouch. Blood pooled in pockets near the seams and a single drop had splashed onto the counter. “Like I told the doc, there’s been a little now and then.”
She gave a one-shoulder shrug. “So who was the last person you ate?”
“Dawn!” snapped Buffy, pinning Spike with a don’t-you-dare glance.
Which was not, perhaps, the best way to keep him quiet. “Was a man,” he said.
Dawn’s gaze was intent on her finger, dipping into the spilt blood. “Yeah?”
Buffy glared, nostrils flaring, but she didn’t move in for a jab to the nose and he took that for permission. “I’d just come off a royal three-week pisser of a binge, after losing that sodding sunshine ring.” And wouldn’t he love to have that back now, a trinket that could share his little girl’s daylight with him. “I figured on coming back to Sunnydale and giving a few certain folks a good killing.”
A glance to Buffy, but she just looked back, unfazed. After all, it wasn’t as though this was news to her.
“I was in a hurry, hell bent to get here and give my grand speech and get myself zapped with glorified cattle prods. I didn’t want to bother hunting when I got into town, so I thought I’d grab a snack on the road.”
Dawn was listening. Oh, was she listening -- with her ears and her hunched shoulders and her eyes that didn’t look his way.
“There was a bloke walking along the highway. Holes patched in his jeans with even the patches wearing through. Bedroll on his back. Full beard, blotchy gray like he’d drizzled old motor oil through it.
“And he stunk.”
That caught Dawn finally. She fixed him with a flat, relentless gaze, and he wished she hadn’t. He’d wished a lot of things to do with this story, back when he’d first begun to grasp what reduced toothless predator he’d become. He wished his last kill had had some glory to it, someone pretty or who’d led him a good chase or who’d put up their fists and made him work for that triumphant moment of fangs in flesh. Or sometimes he wished that it’d been someone he’d taken while he was still beyond pissed, a lost memory that he could tell to himself any way he liked.
But now, Dawn’s stark blue looking back at him, he just wished he could mumble something about not remembering and have had it be the truth.
“So,” he said, “I pulled over and I pushed the passenger door open, and soon’s he leaned in I grabbed him and broke his neck and shoved him back out. Because he was all sour, like I said, sweat and auto fumes mixed in with the sweat. Didn’t want him smelling up the car.
“His blood was sweet as any, though. Went ‘round and drained him, and left him all comfortable, snuggled in the ditch. The end.”
“Oh,” Dawn said. A long moment passed of him just waiting, feeling bone-deep for those human pulses he could almost hear, nestled behind the girls’ twin heartbeats. Then Dawn dropped her crossed arms. “I’m going to bed.” Eyeing him carefully with her lips pressed white, she walked past him and out.
He hunched over the kitchen island, elbows to the countertop, and bowed his head.
“Why would you tell her that?” Buffy asked, voice sharp and bewildered. “I thought you were playing some creepy older brother thing for her. She’ll probably have nightmares now.”
“She already has nightmares.” Also thanks to him. “Thought you’d approve, really. Wouldn’t want your sis to get the idea vampires are fluffy little house pets.”
“She’s just thirteen!”
He lifted his head to look at her. “So now I’m in trouble for being honest with a minor, is that it?”
They looked each other in the eye, she still suspicious, he tired and aching a little bit with a sort of aimless regret. Mostly he was just tired. He supposed that answered his question about the effects of diet versus experimental internal meddling; usually after that much human blood he’d be burning for a shag or a scrap or both. Now all he wanted was to sprawl across his rescued futon and close his eyes.
Buffy frowned at him for a moment more and then shook her head. “Um, listen. While we were out tonight, I staked this random vamp who was wandering around asking for a vampire ‘in appearance male, but ripe with child.’” She made a face.
“Bugger,” Spike said wearily.
“You know who I’m talking about, I’m guessing.”
“Vamp cult. Looking to kill me and the little one both, seeing as we’re such an offense to undead family values.” A pause, while he considered the relative merits and risks of his next words. “They’re what got after me and Dawn a few months ago.”
“Oh. Oh.” A soft huff, and then the beginnings of a predatory grin. “Well, won’t it be exciting when they come looking for you in my town? They’ll see what happens to vamps who snack on the Slayer’s sister. Do they know you’re here, or were they guessing? Maybe I should send out flyers.”
“Slayer!”
She paused mid-gesture. “What?”
“I’m not putting me and my girl out as bait just so you can get your revenge on.”
“Oh,” she said, giving his stomach a hard glance. It was an expression worn a lot around him lately: that puzzled irritation usually reserved for impossible solutions to otherwise simple equations. Buffy sighed. “Okay. Yeah. I mean, if it were just you...”
“Very funny.” Except if it were just him, he’d probably have been willing to play; good hearty brawls were too few anymore.
“Okay, so, I see ‘em, I stake ‘em, but if they find you and I’m not around...”
“What do you suggest, then?”
She squared her shoulders and said, “I think it’d probably be good if you just stuck around the house. Unless there’s someone to go with you, I mean.”
“Bugger that. I’m not twiddling my thumbs on house arrest for the next two months.”
“What, do you think I want you breathing chilly air down my neck every time I turn around? Believe me, I don’t. But that’s not the point, is it?” She crossed her arms and looked up, every angle in her stance a challenge.
“I can take care of myself! And her. Both of us.”
A flash of motion, and then her knuckles were pressing into his belly. He stumbled back and she caught his arm, steadying him. “One punch,” she said. “One good stab in the wrong place.”
The vision of it came over him like a convulsion: a gleaming blade tearing into him, slicing through soft bone and fragile skin thin as vellum. Blood, hers and his, spilling out and staining the pavement. Finally just him alone, his belly and arms both as empty as though she’d never been.
Fighting the tremble in his hands, he took a moment to assure himself of that precious flutter. With a shuddering breath he opened his eyes. Hoarsely, “All right.”
“Okay,” Buffy said.
A moment, while the residual terror ebbed. Then, “I’m not much for sitting still.”
She groaned. “I know. Do you think we can get this baby born without one of us going insane?”
He managed a thin smirk. “Well, I’ve always said there were a few bats flitting around your belfry.”
Two months. He felt inclined to a groan or two himself. It’d be two months of nothing but these few walls to stare at and no one but Summers and Scoobies for company -- not that he’d seen much of any other kind lately.
Laughable deadly vamp cultists with too much time on their hands. Two months indoors, except when he could cajole and/or browbeat someone to accompany him. Dawn, peering intently at him with that white bleakness.
And the best he could do about any of it was nothing.
next part
