snick_backup | FIC: Seraph (20/?)

Story begins here. All parts may be found here.

This chapter beta'd by the fabulous

hello_spikey.

~~~~~

“Knives?” Spike said.

Dawn startled; she hadn’t even known he was there until his voice had come just behind her shoulder. She turned around to see him holding the weapons out to her in offer. “Yep, that’s what they are.”

He let out a deep, aggravated sigh. “I thought I’d get in a little practice, seeing as I’m not much for short-range work anymore.” He glanced down ruefully. “And I thought you might like a turn. I’ve got the target set up in the basement.”

She grimaced. “Mom--”

“--said it was all right. I asked.”

He watched her expectantly, waiting for... what? Approval? An all’s-well signal?

“Fine,” she said shortly. “Let’s go.”

Downstairs, she took a knife and warmed it in her palm, remembering the weight of it and how it had felt last time, which had been an awfully long time ago. Well, a month, anyway. She looked across the room to the depthless, shadowless outline of a man, drew back her elbow like Spike had taught her, and launched the knife.

She must have remembered okay; it struck the board point-first and stuck, though outside the target. “So is this supposed to be a peace offering, or something?”

Spike tossed his knife, which landed with a solid thwack in the blank where a nose would have been. He squinted at it a moment before turning to her. “A what?”

She collected her knife. “You know, to make it okay that you kill people.”

He looked at her, eyebrow lifted. “Does it?”

“No.”

He shrugged. “Didn’t figure it would.”

“So...” She threw the knife.

Another shrug. “S’just, some violence takes the edge off sometimes. Say, when you’re housebound and couldn’t risk a proper scrap even if one offered.”

She snorted. “What is that, like a vampire thing?”

Instead of throwing his knife, he slammed it onto his bed. Turning to her, he said, “Yeah, all right, it’s a vampire thing. In fact, I’m a vampire. I kill people. I enjoy killing people, and I miss doing it.

“But, so happens I’m not doing it right now, am I?” His voice had pitched higher. “Instead of doing my bit for population control, I’m growing a human of my bloody own. I’m living in the Slayer’s bloody basement, and, oh yeah, I’m standing here taking attitude from the Slayer’s brat sister who can’t make up her bloody mind whether or not she’s speaking to me.”

“Killing people isn’t okay,” she said. It was the only thread that she’d managed to hang onto out of the barrage.

“It’s what I do,” he said.

“Did.”

A bitter snort. “Did,” he agreed, picking up the knife again. Once past her, he stepped back, lifted, and let go, all in a graceful, fluid motion that left the knife sticking in the outline’s face. “Well, bugger,” he said, frowning.

“What’s wrong?” Dawn asked. “You hit him.”

“Yeah, I took out his chin. Brilliant.” Before Dawn could move in and take her turn, he snatched the weapon from the wood, strode back across the room, and threw again. This time the knife buried itself smack between the collarbones.

He snorted and laid his hand against his stomach. “It’s all your fault,” he said, looking down. “Now you just nudge my center of gravity back to where it’s bloody well supposed to be.”

His gaze was soft, almost but not quite a smile, and it wasn’t fair because Spike had eaten people, lots of people, drained them dead, and someone who did that didn’t get to be all sweet and cute afterwards. Not even Spike.

“I looked up that guy you talked about,” she said.

“Yeah?” He glanced up, his expression melting from affectionate to uncertain in a half-second flat.

But now that she’d brought it up, what was there to say? “He was just some guy. Who died.”

He’d turned blank, all softness gone as he fingered his t-shirt hem and watched her with those brittle blue eyes. “They tend to do that, round about the time I kill ‘em.”

“Do... do you want me to hate you?” She could feel her voice starting to break.

“Want you to see how it is. Not gonna apologize for bein’ a vamp. You don’t like it, shove off.”

“What about the baby?” said Dawn before she even thought.

His fidgety restlessness fell suddenly, silently away. “What about her?”

Now he’d see. “Maybe she won’t want a killer vampire dad.”

The blankness shattered, leaving an expression so tight and full of angles it hurt to look at it. “Well, she won’t have much choice, then, will she?” he said softly. “She’s stuck with me. Not like there’s much of a queue for the job.”

“Spike...” This wasn’t what Dawn had wanted, or maybe it was except she didn’t anymore.

“There’s just me, doing my miserable vamp best to keep her safe and feed her proper and make her feel like there’s somebody in this whole bloody dimension who cares she’s alive. Too bad if she bloody hates me, isn’t it?”

His eyes narrowed on Dawn. “So there it is. Daft one-time vamp and would-be father. What’s the verdict? Doomed to failure?”

I’m sorry, she wanted to say. I didn’t mean it. “Well, why do you even care what I think if I’m just somebody’s brat sister?” Because sometimes brat sisters were stupid and even mean bad vampires shouldn’t listen to them.

He scowled at her, mouth working like he was chewing his answer instead of saying it. Finally he said, “Well, I don’t, then.” He blew his breath out, hard, and then he grabbed a packet of cigarettes from the combination crate/night table next to his bed and stalked up the stairs.

She stood there for a few moments, rigid, with tears pricking at the corners of her eyes. Eventually she picked up Spike’s knife from the bed and hers from the target-board and started practicing again. Sometimes the handle instead of the tip banged into the wood, and once she missed the board all the way and winced at the dull chink of the point hitting the cement wall. Spike was right, though. Throwing things did help. A little.

She should just go to bed. If she stayed in the basement too long, Spike would come back, unless he slept somewhere else instead. And see, now she knew just why she hadn’t really talked to him for over a week.

But she’d really missed him.

Half an hour after Spike had gone, Dawn laid the knives on a shelf and went upstairs. She was pretty sure she knew where to find him, considering he couldn’t go far from the house anymore. She tiptoed through the kitchen and peered out the window. There he was, hunched against the porch railing, a cigarette wisping in one hand and the other hand laid against the baby.

She took a sharp breath and twisted the doorknob.

By the time she stepped outside, he’d dropped his hand from his stomach. She blinked back the new ache in her eyes. He’d never minded about the baby before, not with her.

She sat down, tucking her skirt under her legs, and darted a glance at him. He was looking off into the shrubbery like he hadn’t even heard her, which, duh.

Her nail polish was starting to chip. Maybe she could sneak some of that new red stuff Buffy’d just gotten. Although, even though red was totally an adult color, Dawn wasn’t entirely sure it actually looked good on nails. It might be neater to ask Willow about that apple-green polish she put on her toenails sometimes. Willow was cool about sharing.

Spike grunted. When Dawn looked, he’d pressed his hand to his side and was rolling his shoulders. As soon as he caught her looking at him, he froze, watching her and doing that not-breathing trick.

Then he grimaced and pushed more firmly at his side. “Bloody...”

Alarm trumped everything. “Are you okay? Do you need...something? I can get Mom.”

“M’all right.” He snuck a quick glance at her, like trying to catch the headlines from someone else’s newspaper. “Think she’s got herself wedged up under my ribcage, is all.”

Dawn thought about that and then wrapped her arms around herself. “I am never, ever having kids.”

He looked over at her skeptically. “Thought you liked them, all ‘cute and cuddly.’”

“Yeah, but you’re having one, so I can just cuddle her instead.”

“Oh, that’s how it is, then?” A smirk simmered on his lips. “You just remember that the next time some git starts battin’ his lashes at you.”

“Geez, I didn’t say I wasn’t going to have sex.”

“Oh?”

She wrinkled her nose at his scowl. “You know, someday. When I’m old. Haven’t you ever heard of birth control?”

He cast a significant glance downward. “Clearly not.”

She couldn’t help the giggle that snuck out, but then he chuckled, too, and gave her a bit of one of his old grins before it melted away again to that wary blankness.

She missed him. A lot.

“I do hate you,” she said softly. She kept her eyes off his face; she didn’t want to watch it break. “I hate you, because...” Sniffle. Crap, why was she always crying in front of him? “Because you killed that guy and you don’t even care, and you killed all those other people, too. Like... thousands of them?”

“Close enough,” he said.

“And you don’t care about them, either, and you’re evil, just like everyone says, and...” She scowled with hot, stinging eyes out at the lawn. “And you’re still my best friend.”

Silence. That probably meant he thought best friending was stupid, and and how was it possible that she still cared what he thought? She squeezed her eyes shut against the tears and sniffed a couple of times, hard.

A touch pressed ever so lightly at her shoulder for a breath’s length, and then lifted.

Finally, he said, “So I ousted the Janice bird, did I?”

She turned to see the hint of a grin lurking again. “You did what?”

“You and Janice. Thought you two were best mates.”

“Janice...” It was hard to explain Janice. “You know how sometimes, your friends pick you? Janice is kind of like that. She was the first person who ever talked to me when I moved here, and we hang out a lot and stuff. But...”

“But sometimes you pick your friends,” he said softly. “And... I’m it?”

“Yeah.” She gave him a thin, watery smile. “Even when I hate you.”

“Well.” He looked off towards the rooftops and took a deep breath. “That’s all right, then.”

Dawn considered her nails again. Somewhere down the street, a garage door ground open.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “What I said. About you and the baby? I didn’t...” She wasn’t sure how to finish.

“True, wasn’t it?” He sucked a breath from his cigarette. “Vampire. Nothing to be done about it.” He looked... not sad exactly. Resigned. It was in his slumped shoulders as much as his eyes or the downturn of his mouth.

“But you like being a vampire.”

“Mostly,” he said. “But sometimes it’s not the most convenient thing, is it?”

She didn’t have an argument for that. She wished she did; sometime in the last hour all the cold, uncertain anger at her spine had melted and dripped away.

“Killing people isn’t okay,” she said again, as much to remind herself as him.

He stilled. “So I’m told.”

“I wish you didn’t.” Somehow she needed to say it, obvious as it must have been by now. She needed the words spoken. “Before, I mean.”

For a moment she didn’t think he’d answer at all. Finally, carefully, he said, “I wish you didn’t have such bloody awful taste in music.”

Suddenly she was just tired, of Spike and thinking and trying to explain. “That’s not the same,” she said. Did he really, really not get it?

“It’s all I’ve got.” He gave her a sideways glance, looking as though he’d just stuck his foot out and was waiting to see if she’d stomp on his toes.

She’d just figured out that she didn’t really want to stomp on his toes.

“I wish you’d hurry up and quit smoking,” she said slowly, following a cue she wasn’t sure she understood. “It’s total yuck.”

The corner of his mouth lifted, and she thought maybe she’d gotten it right. “You’re too short,” he said. Then, with a thoughtful frown, he added, “And too human.”

“Well, you have cheesy hair.”

“Do not!” He ran a hand over his bleach-fried head. “And anyway, you have the fashion sense of a pink-bowed Pekinese.”

“So says Goth Boy.”

His mouth gapped open, shut, open, shut, twice before he ground out, “I. Am not. Goth.” He pinned her with a glare and held it so long she wondered if blinking was another one of those optional things for vamps. But the thought made her giggle, and after one more tightening of the eyebrows he sat back, shaking his head.

She stood. “I bet we could find something on TV, and you could tell me how stupid it is and how the old series was so much better.”

He contemplated his cigarette a moment and then shoved himself to his feet. “Yeah, all right,” he said, and if his expression had been on anyone less cool than him, she’d have called it a grin.

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