FIC: Seraph (23/26)
Oct. 11th, 2009 08:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snick_backupStory begins here. All parts may be found here.
This chapter beautified by my fabulous betas,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
hello_spikey, phoenixofborg, and penny_lane_42. Thank you, ladies!
A/N: Three more chapters to go! I'm maybe a third of the way through drafting the last chapter, and when that's done all three will go to the betas. Hooray!
Also, this would be the poemfic chapter of the mpreg. 'Cuz, you know, no crackfic would be complete without a poemfic chapter...
~~~~~
There were only so many housebound nights a vamp could take. One night when Spike’s patience was ready to snap as quick and sudden as a rubber band, Xander dropped by with Anya, looking for Buffy. Barely were they in the door when Anya began exclaiming over the hideous fertility statues Joyce had just brought home from the gallery; apparently she’d once done a series of vengeances for the entire tribe from which it’d come. Joyce got that brilliant connoisseur’s gleam in her eye and guided Anya to the couch.
“Oh, I’m sorry, Xander,” Joyce said, glancing to where he stood squinting warily at a piece. “Buffy’s out with Willow tonight.”
Xander eyed them, already turned back to fervent artistic conversation, and slumped. In sudden decision, Spike pushed out of the couch and gripped Xander’s arm. “I’m commandeering your honey,” he called to Anya.
“What?” She glanced between them. “What do you want him for?”
“Manly pursuits,” Spike said. “Not that I’m sure you qualify,” he added, looking Xander up and down critically.
“Look who’s talking, Mr. Mom!”
“So,” Anya said, “you’re going to get very drunk and compare the length of one another’s penises?”
“Um,” said Xander.
“You’re going to yell frequently while watching men run around after leather balls.”
“Manly pursuits,” Spike repeated firmly, and dragged Xander towards the door -- or tugged, rather, since anything firmer would only get him a headache.
“Don’t break him,” Anya called.
Spike pushed Xander ahead and shoved the door shut behind them, and then guided him none too gently down the sidewalk. At the car he let go and was contemplating the low drop into the passenger seat when Xander said over the sun roof, “Hold up. Wait. Why am I taking you anywhere?”
“Because,” Spike said flatly, “if I don’t get out of that house for a few hours my entire wardrobe is going to spontaneously turn pink.” These last few weeks, even the mystifying shopping expeditions had ceased; it seemed the basement might finally be at least minimally prepared for a new arrival. Not to mention that Spike was well into the ‘bloody conspicuous’ stage now.
With Xander eyeing him suspiciously, Spike was sure he’d turn him down, which was likely going to lead to Spike doing something destructive -- to the shrubbery, maybe -- that he’d have to be sorry for later. But maybe a bit more desperation had slipped into his voice than he meant; after regarding him a moment more, Xander shrugged. “Fine. Okay. But I’m not taking you anywhere looking like that.”
“Like?” Spike glanced down at his t-shirt pulled taut over his belly, broad and round and unmistakably pregnant. He reached to begin buttoning his duster, only to realize that he’d left it in the house in his hurry -- and not one step back was he going, in case someone decided no less than the Slayer herself was fit to escort him anywhere anymore. “Oh, all right,” he said, crossing his arms. “I’ll just take a deep breath and suck my gut in.”
Xander shook his head. He ducked into the back seat and came back up with a spattered gray sweatshirt that he tossed to Spike. “Here.”
“The height of Harris fashion,” Spike said. He sighed as he pulled the bulky knit cotton over his head. It would have been a bit oversized on Xander, which meant it had just enough room for him: snug but not stretched.
“Great,” Xander said. “Now you look less, less...”
“Less like I’m due in three weeks and more like I’ve spent the last fifteen years at a kegger,” Spike finished.
“Definite improvement,” Xander said. “Now, just don’t go… touching it, and we’ll be okay.”
“You mean like this?” Smirking, he cradled his stomach and slipped down into the car while Xander was still making gagging noises.
Doors shut and keys hanging in the ignition, Xander said, “Okay, where are we going?”
Spike gave him an address, and for a few moments it was peaceful: no feminine hovering. No advice. No concerned inquiries about his physical well-being -- he was a vampire, for bloody sake; health didn’t even come into it.
“So, going a little stir-crazy?”
“You had better not be trying to sympathize,” Spike said. “Else I’d have to eat you.”
Xander snorted. “That’s pretty funny, Fangless.” But the rebuff apparently dampened the fellow-feeling somewhat. He didn’t say any more until they came to the deserted lot, the DeSoto’s grill peeking out from the shed. “Oh, man. Spike...”
“If I was going to run off, I’d have done it months ago when I looked” -- and felt -- “less like a hippopotamus. I just need to get something out of the boot.” Spike opened the door, got one leg out, and-- “Oh, bloody hell.” Damn Xander for his puddle-jumper, its bucket seats, and its miniscule eight-inch clearance. Spike wrapped a hand over the top edge of the door and shoved against the seat with the other, but the angle was all wrong and there was just too much baby in the way to get himself up.
Feeling Xander lasering holes in his skull, he contemplated the pavement for a moment, and then leaned back against the headrest and closed his eyes. “Never mind,” he said, defeated. “Just--” he flicked his hand. “Just take me home.”
“Hello, I am not your chauffeur.” Xander got out and slammed his door. In a moment, there was a warm-blooded human skin not too far from Spike’s nose. He opened his eyes, stared at Xander’s impassive face for a moment, and then gripped the proffered hand. After a joint effort, he was out and standing upright.
“Right. Well.” He stalked into the shed, lifted the DeSoto’s back gate, and began rummaging.
“You know, we on the winning side of the Revolutionary War call that a ‘trunk’,” Xander called from just outside the shed.
“Yeah.” He’d forgotten he had so much junk stashed here. “You realize, they didn’t have telly when I was turned. And it’s not like I’ve spent the last hundred-odd in Merry Olde.” Oh, look, that axe with the nicked blade he thought he’d left behind in Rio. “So why d’ya suppose I call it that, and not ‘TV’ like you Yanks?” And that pair of novelty knives Dru’d been so dazzled with... hel-lo.
“Um... Sheer perversity?”
Spike slipped one out of its sheath and lifted it to what passed for the light. He slid his thumb along the grain of the blunt wooden blade. And the point... Still sharp, even after bumping around in there so long. That whiff of preservative mysticism he’d been promised must have held true. He licked the drop of blood welling from his finger.
Belatedly, he heard what Xander had said. He chuckled. “Close enough. Figure, if I don’t keep being where I’m from, I won’t be from anywhere at all.” He stuck the knives in his... nope, he wasn’t wearing his duster. He slid around the side of the car and handed the knives to Xander: one sheathed, one not. “Hold these.”
“What are... ouch!”
Chuckling again, Spike returned to shoving odds and ends out of the way. Had to move the whole lot of it aside to find the... there it was, the square of loose carpet. A little tug, and he had his last, most secret stash of bills beneath his fingers. The shed was too dark to tell the colors, so he fisted the entire stack in one hand and slammed the gate down with the other.
“How much is that?” Xander asked as he stared, his tone half-suspicious and half-awed.
“Not so much as you’d think. Here, these blokes have been out of business for years.” He handed Xander a Soviet ruble. “Wonder if the deutschmarks are still good, what with the euro and all? God, I’ve been stuck in this bleeding hemisphere so long.”
Most of it was still in reais from that Brazilian jaunt, with a few pesos and Honduran lempiras thrown in for good measure. But when the green Uncle Sams were all sorted, he had enough, he thought, to finance most of the few luxuries he had in mind. He laid the money atop the knives cautiously cradled in Xander’s hands and stuffed the rest back under the DeSoto’s carpet. Then, having rescued both the dollars and the knives, he said, “Shall we be off, then?”
“Yeah, okay,” Xander said. “Where are we going, again?”
But Spike was leaning on the open passenger door, considering the stained, threadbare passenger seat.
“You’re not going to make a scene every time I help you up, are you?”
Spike glanced up and eyed him carefully, but though the boy looked mildly amused -- as well as mildly irritated -- any inclination to laugh was manfully held in. “No,” Spike said finally. The knives tossed in the back and the money in his jeans pocket, he dropped down in.
“So, destination,” Xander said as they pulled onto the street. “Exactly what sort of stag night did you have in mind?” He folded his laced fingers out backwards and cracked his knuckles. “We’ve got your billiards, we’ve got your televised prize fights--”
“You know that bookstore on Main, by the magic shop?”
“Yes?” How this was relevant to the discussion, Xander clearly refused to imagine.
“Shouldn’t be closed yet -- they like to catch the arty crowd, and it’s open mic night over at the coffee place.”
Xander draped his arms over the steering wheel and stared. “You dragged me out of the house to go shopping?”
“Yeah,” Spike said in his best impression of Dawn’s duh-voice.
A moment for Xander to examine his face and conclude that yes, Spike really was serious. He heaved a sigh. “All righty then. Main it is.”
Spike had only been in the shop once or twice before. Thus he didn’t know the proprietors, which meant they couldn’t whisper to each other about how he’d let himself go; and he’d never lifted anything, which meant he’d feel slightly less ridiculous about paying for something now.
Xander came around to Spike’s door and wordlessly helped him up. Inside, Spike left him stammering a question about where they kept their comics -- good luck with that -- and wound through the labyrinth of ceiling-high shelves to a particularly unloved-looking corner in the back. For a college town bookstore, the selection was shoddy: mostly these insipid modern Poet Laureates that wouldn’t know a decent meter if it bit them in the jugular.
And Plath -- well, the Lady Lazarus, she was always good for a laugh. That one July in Reykjavik, when Dru was off prancing about with that Shiraka and twilight didn’t come until midnight, Plath had kept him in good company.
Spike leafed through, recalling fondly, ‘One year in every ten...’ Then further back, and... oh.
I’m a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house…
He snapped it shut, cast one self-conscious glance to the empty aisle behind him, and then slid the book back onto the shelf.
But here was a volume of Keats, too -- he’d rather fancied himself as Keats, the young tragic genius, at least until the miserable day he’d begun to realize how little Keats’ words and his had in common. Later it’d been Byron, of course, all dark heroes with vengeful purposes and a taste for violence. And later still he’d had Poetry herself squirming under him and whispering in his ear, and he hadn’t needed the words at all. Until now.
“Spike?”
He shut the book. “Find your Frivolous Four, did you?”
Xander shook his head. “She gave me this look, and then she showed me the ‘graphic novels’ ----- which, seriously? If you don’t have Alan Moore, you don’t have graphic novels.
“So whadja find?” He peered over Spike’s shoulder. “Romance poetry?” He stared at the book, as aghast as if Spike had just betrayed his entire gender.
“The Romantics, you moronic sod.” No light dawned. “Literary movement. All about passion and forces of nature, and an orgy now and then. None of which you know anything about.”
“Poetry.” Xander regarded him with a sort of awed disbelief. “Your ‘manly pursuit’ is poetry.”
“As opposed to what, your kiddie picture books? That’s the height of masculine maturity, right there.”
“Hey!”
Spike left him sputtering to go pay for his Portable Romantic Poets.
After the bookstore came the combination music and video store two streets east of the UC-Sunnydale campus. It was the video rentals -- especially the ones behind the back curtain -- that kept the place open this late, but it was the music Spike had come for tonight. He nodded to Del, whose clientele had died less frequently once Spike discovered his fine taste in punk, and went to flip through the racks. He snagged the necessities: Sid, the Ramones, The Scream.
He paid, frustrated anew at how quickly money spent when the two-fanged discount wasn’t an option. But he now he had his music -- or at least the bare beginnings thereof -- and in the car were Keats and Byron both, and that was worth the depletion of the emergency stash. Emergencies were relative things.
“Where next?” asked Xander in the car, hands on the wheel and apparently resigned to chauffer duties after all.
“That’s it,” Spike said. “Got what I came for. Take me home, and then you and Demon Girl can put some more work into killing that mattress of yours properly dead.”
“Are you serious?” Xander said. “That’s it? No man-time in front of the TV, no unhealthy snack foods?”
“Blood diet, remember?” Spike said. Speaking of which, he was hungry again, despite having basically no capacity anymore. Also, his back was pleading for a Slayer-strength massage. “Home.”
After Xander pulled in at the Summers’s curb, he said, “So, I’ve gotten all the gratitude I’m going to get, haven’t I? ‘All’ meaning ‘none.’”
“What, you expect the evil creature of the night to say thank you?”
Xander snorted and reached for the handle.
“How’s your arm?” Spike said.
“My... oh.” Xander started rolling up his sleeve -- which was, it occurred to Spike, a bit long to be worn in the middle of August. He squinted in the near-dark to better see the half-dozen blood-purple crescent moons spotting Xander’s arm.
“Soloveno demon,” he said. “Slayer didn’t say it was one of those. Stung a bit, those bites?”
Xander’s harsh half-chuckle said enough. “I’m still working on a story for them. You know, a saga of heroism for the impressing of people. Especially girl-type people.”
“A different saga than the one where you fought off the hordes of hell to keep a little girl fed.”
Xander snorted. “Yeah, I was gonna push the credibility angle a bit more than that.”
“Well.” Spike took a breath. “Give it a few years and you can tell the truth, yeah? Tell that one little girl how you didn’t let her go hungry.”
Xander regarded his arm a moment longer, and turned the gaze on Spike a moment before he nodded. “Yeah, okay.”
He got out and came around to Spike’s side. “So what happened to all the super strength?” Xander asked, pulling him up. “Why the need for a helping hand?” Again, not laughter, exactly, although Spike suspected he was saving some for later. Mostly he just sounded curious.
“It’s not just strength,” Spike grumbled. “It’s a problem of leverage.”
“Oh?”
“I haven’t got any.” He bent as best he could and collected the night’s prizes. “Besides, your rattletrap’s a failure at accessibility for pregnant persons. Ought to be a law.” He slammed the door, and something under the hood rattled from the impact. “Not to mention, think your paper clips and duct tape are about to give out on you.”
“What did you think all the dead-end jobs were for? Wait, don’t answer that.” Xander patted the frame with rough affection, and then wrinkled his nose at the rust that came away on his fingers. “Another month and you’ll see a new and improved Xandermobile.”
Three more weeks, Spike reflected, and he and his DeSoto could start getting reacquainted.
Inside, the ladies were still on the sofa, though the fervor of the conversation had eased. From the ice tea glasses on the coffee table, forgotten and glistening with condensation, Spike guessed the topic had moved on as well. It occurred to him that a proper friendship with someone like Joyce might go a long way in ushering Demon Girl into that humanity she’d been groping towards. Not that he cared.
That Joyce might do the same for him wasn’t something he was willing to consider just yet. Might as well hang onto the Big Bad illusion as long as he could, until that day it finally slipped like fog through his fingers.
“Spike! You’re okay!” Dawn bounded down the stairs.
“Ye-e-es,” he said, as she wrapped her arms around him -- quite the feat these days -- and squeezed. “Something afoot?”
“You went out without me or Buffy,” she said, and given her tone he marveled she wasn’t actually wagging her finger at him. “Those vampires could have caught you, and there’d be nobody to protect you, and--”
“Hey, now!” he said, extricating himself. “Also a vamp, in case you’d forgotten. Still not entirely incompetent at the life and limb game.” Entirely being the operative word. “ ‘Sides, I had the human mop along for the guarding of my person. Persons.”
“Xander?” she whispered doubtfully, wrinkling her nose. “Whatever.” Louder, “What are you wearing?”
A glance down reminded him. He stripped off the sweatshirt and tossed it at Xander’s head. “Suppose you don’t want your present, then?” he asked Dawn, and held back a smirk as all concern vanished, a soap bubble burst by a water hose.
“Present? What is it? You got me a present? Gimme, gimme, please?”
He glanced at the faces behind him, starting to turn interest in his direction. “Basement,” he said. He flicked a hand in farewell to the others. “Ta,” he told Xander, comfortably certain that the boy wouldn’t actually know what that meant, and then he followed Dawn down.
“So what is it?” she said, when he reached the bottom of the steps.
He handed her the shopping bag from the bookshop, its contents now exchanged. “Careful,” he said as she dumped the bag out on the futon.
“More knives?” she said, looking uncertainly over at him.
“Look at the blades,” he said.
She lifted one to the light and peered at the grain. “It’s pretty,” she said, still doubtful.
“It’s wood,” he said.
She frowned a moment longer, and then squealed. “Staking knives! Or, hey, stake knives.” She paused to giggle. “And now I can kill vampires--”
“If your aim’s good enough,” he said, just as he was wrapped in another hug.
“Thank you, thank you thank you!”
“Have to be gentle with them, now,” he said to the top of her head. “The blades have some protective mojo on them to save the points, but they’re still fragile. We’ll find you a softer target to practice with.”
“You’re my best friend ever,” she said, pulling away to look at the knife again, eyes shining. She snatched the other off the bed and scrambled up the stairs. “I have to show these to Mom!”
When she was gone, he realized he’d forgotten to ask if Buffy was back. Well, maybe someone would wander down later and he could ask after that back rub. He considered the merits of warmed blood vs. not having to climb the stairs again, and eventually settled for a cold plastic bag from the mini fridge.
That drunk, he found a position among the futon’s pillows that’d likely stay comfortable for at least twenty minutes and he opened up Portable Romantic Poets. “The musical education’ll have to wait for another day, when I get hold of a player from someone,” he explained softly. “Might could beg the Niblet’s Walkman away from her, yeah? But for tonight it’s words.” He didn’t immediately get a kick in the spleen, which he took for assent.
He leafed through the volume, getting caught by old favorites. Finally, in the Keats section, he began to chuckle. Might as well start her off with something appropriate to the situation. In his reading voice, which Mother had always said was particularly pleasant, he began,
“Seasons of mist and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun...”
next part
-------------------
More A/Ns:
1. The line "One year in every ten" is from Plath's poem Lady Lazarus. Neither the peom nor the poet are generally considered to be terribly funny.
2. The Plath poem Spike stumbles across, beginning "I'm a riddle in nine syllables," is Metaphors.
3. The Keats at the end is Ode to Autumn, which may be my single favorite seasonal poem in all of literature.
This chapter beautified by my fabulous betas,
hello_spikey, phoenixofborg, and penny_lane_42. Thank you, ladies!A/N: Three more chapters to go! I'm maybe a third of the way through drafting the last chapter, and when that's done all three will go to the betas. Hooray!
Also, this would be the poemfic chapter of the mpreg. 'Cuz, you know, no crackfic would be complete without a poemfic chapter...
~~~~~
There were only so many housebound nights a vamp could take. One night when Spike’s patience was ready to snap as quick and sudden as a rubber band, Xander dropped by with Anya, looking for Buffy. Barely were they in the door when Anya began exclaiming over the hideous fertility statues Joyce had just brought home from the gallery; apparently she’d once done a series of vengeances for the entire tribe from which it’d come. Joyce got that brilliant connoisseur’s gleam in her eye and guided Anya to the couch.
“Oh, I’m sorry, Xander,” Joyce said, glancing to where he stood squinting warily at a piece. “Buffy’s out with Willow tonight.”
Xander eyed them, already turned back to fervent artistic conversation, and slumped. In sudden decision, Spike pushed out of the couch and gripped Xander’s arm. “I’m commandeering your honey,” he called to Anya.
“What?” She glanced between them. “What do you want him for?”
“Manly pursuits,” Spike said. “Not that I’m sure you qualify,” he added, looking Xander up and down critically.
“Look who’s talking, Mr. Mom!”
“So,” Anya said, “you’re going to get very drunk and compare the length of one another’s penises?”
“Um,” said Xander.
“You’re going to yell frequently while watching men run around after leather balls.”
“Manly pursuits,” Spike repeated firmly, and dragged Xander towards the door -- or tugged, rather, since anything firmer would only get him a headache.
“Don’t break him,” Anya called.
Spike pushed Xander ahead and shoved the door shut behind them, and then guided him none too gently down the sidewalk. At the car he let go and was contemplating the low drop into the passenger seat when Xander said over the sun roof, “Hold up. Wait. Why am I taking you anywhere?”
“Because,” Spike said flatly, “if I don’t get out of that house for a few hours my entire wardrobe is going to spontaneously turn pink.” These last few weeks, even the mystifying shopping expeditions had ceased; it seemed the basement might finally be at least minimally prepared for a new arrival. Not to mention that Spike was well into the ‘bloody conspicuous’ stage now.
With Xander eyeing him suspiciously, Spike was sure he’d turn him down, which was likely going to lead to Spike doing something destructive -- to the shrubbery, maybe -- that he’d have to be sorry for later. But maybe a bit more desperation had slipped into his voice than he meant; after regarding him a moment more, Xander shrugged. “Fine. Okay. But I’m not taking you anywhere looking like that.”
“Like?” Spike glanced down at his t-shirt pulled taut over his belly, broad and round and unmistakably pregnant. He reached to begin buttoning his duster, only to realize that he’d left it in the house in his hurry -- and not one step back was he going, in case someone decided no less than the Slayer herself was fit to escort him anywhere anymore. “Oh, all right,” he said, crossing his arms. “I’ll just take a deep breath and suck my gut in.”
Xander shook his head. He ducked into the back seat and came back up with a spattered gray sweatshirt that he tossed to Spike. “Here.”
“The height of Harris fashion,” Spike said. He sighed as he pulled the bulky knit cotton over his head. It would have been a bit oversized on Xander, which meant it had just enough room for him: snug but not stretched.
“Great,” Xander said. “Now you look less, less...”
“Less like I’m due in three weeks and more like I’ve spent the last fifteen years at a kegger,” Spike finished.
“Definite improvement,” Xander said. “Now, just don’t go… touching it, and we’ll be okay.”
“You mean like this?” Smirking, he cradled his stomach and slipped down into the car while Xander was still making gagging noises.
Doors shut and keys hanging in the ignition, Xander said, “Okay, where are we going?”
Spike gave him an address, and for a few moments it was peaceful: no feminine hovering. No advice. No concerned inquiries about his physical well-being -- he was a vampire, for bloody sake; health didn’t even come into it.
“So, going a little stir-crazy?”
“You had better not be trying to sympathize,” Spike said. “Else I’d have to eat you.”
Xander snorted. “That’s pretty funny, Fangless.” But the rebuff apparently dampened the fellow-feeling somewhat. He didn’t say any more until they came to the deserted lot, the DeSoto’s grill peeking out from the shed. “Oh, man. Spike...”
“If I was going to run off, I’d have done it months ago when I looked” -- and felt -- “less like a hippopotamus. I just need to get something out of the boot.” Spike opened the door, got one leg out, and-- “Oh, bloody hell.” Damn Xander for his puddle-jumper, its bucket seats, and its miniscule eight-inch clearance. Spike wrapped a hand over the top edge of the door and shoved against the seat with the other, but the angle was all wrong and there was just too much baby in the way to get himself up.
Feeling Xander lasering holes in his skull, he contemplated the pavement for a moment, and then leaned back against the headrest and closed his eyes. “Never mind,” he said, defeated. “Just--” he flicked his hand. “Just take me home.”
“Hello, I am not your chauffeur.” Xander got out and slammed his door. In a moment, there was a warm-blooded human skin not too far from Spike’s nose. He opened his eyes, stared at Xander’s impassive face for a moment, and then gripped the proffered hand. After a joint effort, he was out and standing upright.
“Right. Well.” He stalked into the shed, lifted the DeSoto’s back gate, and began rummaging.
“You know, we on the winning side of the Revolutionary War call that a ‘trunk’,” Xander called from just outside the shed.
“Yeah.” He’d forgotten he had so much junk stashed here. “You realize, they didn’t have telly when I was turned. And it’s not like I’ve spent the last hundred-odd in Merry Olde.” Oh, look, that axe with the nicked blade he thought he’d left behind in Rio. “So why d’ya suppose I call it that, and not ‘TV’ like you Yanks?” And that pair of novelty knives Dru’d been so dazzled with... hel-lo.
“Um... Sheer perversity?”
Spike slipped one out of its sheath and lifted it to what passed for the light. He slid his thumb along the grain of the blunt wooden blade. And the point... Still sharp, even after bumping around in there so long. That whiff of preservative mysticism he’d been promised must have held true. He licked the drop of blood welling from his finger.
Belatedly, he heard what Xander had said. He chuckled. “Close enough. Figure, if I don’t keep being where I’m from, I won’t be from anywhere at all.” He stuck the knives in his... nope, he wasn’t wearing his duster. He slid around the side of the car and handed the knives to Xander: one sheathed, one not. “Hold these.”
“What are... ouch!”
Chuckling again, Spike returned to shoving odds and ends out of the way. Had to move the whole lot of it aside to find the... there it was, the square of loose carpet. A little tug, and he had his last, most secret stash of bills beneath his fingers. The shed was too dark to tell the colors, so he fisted the entire stack in one hand and slammed the gate down with the other.
“How much is that?” Xander asked as he stared, his tone half-suspicious and half-awed.
“Not so much as you’d think. Here, these blokes have been out of business for years.” He handed Xander a Soviet ruble. “Wonder if the deutschmarks are still good, what with the euro and all? God, I’ve been stuck in this bleeding hemisphere so long.”
Most of it was still in reais from that Brazilian jaunt, with a few pesos and Honduran lempiras thrown in for good measure. But when the green Uncle Sams were all sorted, he had enough, he thought, to finance most of the few luxuries he had in mind. He laid the money atop the knives cautiously cradled in Xander’s hands and stuffed the rest back under the DeSoto’s carpet. Then, having rescued both the dollars and the knives, he said, “Shall we be off, then?”
“Yeah, okay,” Xander said. “Where are we going, again?”
But Spike was leaning on the open passenger door, considering the stained, threadbare passenger seat.
“You’re not going to make a scene every time I help you up, are you?”
Spike glanced up and eyed him carefully, but though the boy looked mildly amused -- as well as mildly irritated -- any inclination to laugh was manfully held in. “No,” Spike said finally. The knives tossed in the back and the money in his jeans pocket, he dropped down in.
“So, destination,” Xander said as they pulled onto the street. “Exactly what sort of stag night did you have in mind?” He folded his laced fingers out backwards and cracked his knuckles. “We’ve got your billiards, we’ve got your televised prize fights--”
“You know that bookstore on Main, by the magic shop?”
“Yes?” How this was relevant to the discussion, Xander clearly refused to imagine.
“Shouldn’t be closed yet -- they like to catch the arty crowd, and it’s open mic night over at the coffee place.”
Xander draped his arms over the steering wheel and stared. “You dragged me out of the house to go shopping?”
“Yeah,” Spike said in his best impression of Dawn’s duh-voice.
A moment for Xander to examine his face and conclude that yes, Spike really was serious. He heaved a sigh. “All righty then. Main it is.”
Spike had only been in the shop once or twice before. Thus he didn’t know the proprietors, which meant they couldn’t whisper to each other about how he’d let himself go; and he’d never lifted anything, which meant he’d feel slightly less ridiculous about paying for something now.
Xander came around to Spike’s door and wordlessly helped him up. Inside, Spike left him stammering a question about where they kept their comics -- good luck with that -- and wound through the labyrinth of ceiling-high shelves to a particularly unloved-looking corner in the back. For a college town bookstore, the selection was shoddy: mostly these insipid modern Poet Laureates that wouldn’t know a decent meter if it bit them in the jugular.
And Plath -- well, the Lady Lazarus, she was always good for a laugh. That one July in Reykjavik, when Dru was off prancing about with that Shiraka and twilight didn’t come until midnight, Plath had kept him in good company.
Spike leafed through, recalling fondly, ‘One year in every ten...’ Then further back, and... oh.
I’m a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house…
He snapped it shut, cast one self-conscious glance to the empty aisle behind him, and then slid the book back onto the shelf.
But here was a volume of Keats, too -- he’d rather fancied himself as Keats, the young tragic genius, at least until the miserable day he’d begun to realize how little Keats’ words and his had in common. Later it’d been Byron, of course, all dark heroes with vengeful purposes and a taste for violence. And later still he’d had Poetry herself squirming under him and whispering in his ear, and he hadn’t needed the words at all. Until now.
“Spike?”
He shut the book. “Find your Frivolous Four, did you?”
Xander shook his head. “She gave me this look, and then she showed me the ‘graphic novels’ ----- which, seriously? If you don’t have Alan Moore, you don’t have graphic novels.
“So whadja find?” He peered over Spike’s shoulder. “Romance poetry?” He stared at the book, as aghast as if Spike had just betrayed his entire gender.
“The Romantics, you moronic sod.” No light dawned. “Literary movement. All about passion and forces of nature, and an orgy now and then. None of which you know anything about.”
“Poetry.” Xander regarded him with a sort of awed disbelief. “Your ‘manly pursuit’ is poetry.”
“As opposed to what, your kiddie picture books? That’s the height of masculine maturity, right there.”
“Hey!”
Spike left him sputtering to go pay for his Portable Romantic Poets.
After the bookstore came the combination music and video store two streets east of the UC-Sunnydale campus. It was the video rentals -- especially the ones behind the back curtain -- that kept the place open this late, but it was the music Spike had come for tonight. He nodded to Del, whose clientele had died less frequently once Spike discovered his fine taste in punk, and went to flip through the racks. He snagged the necessities: Sid, the Ramones, The Scream.
He paid, frustrated anew at how quickly money spent when the two-fanged discount wasn’t an option. But he now he had his music -- or at least the bare beginnings thereof -- and in the car were Keats and Byron both, and that was worth the depletion of the emergency stash. Emergencies were relative things.
“Where next?” asked Xander in the car, hands on the wheel and apparently resigned to chauffer duties after all.
“That’s it,” Spike said. “Got what I came for. Take me home, and then you and Demon Girl can put some more work into killing that mattress of yours properly dead.”
“Are you serious?” Xander said. “That’s it? No man-time in front of the TV, no unhealthy snack foods?”
“Blood diet, remember?” Spike said. Speaking of which, he was hungry again, despite having basically no capacity anymore. Also, his back was pleading for a Slayer-strength massage. “Home.”
After Xander pulled in at the Summers’s curb, he said, “So, I’ve gotten all the gratitude I’m going to get, haven’t I? ‘All’ meaning ‘none.’”
“What, you expect the evil creature of the night to say thank you?”
Xander snorted and reached for the handle.
“How’s your arm?” Spike said.
“My... oh.” Xander started rolling up his sleeve -- which was, it occurred to Spike, a bit long to be worn in the middle of August. He squinted in the near-dark to better see the half-dozen blood-purple crescent moons spotting Xander’s arm.
“Soloveno demon,” he said. “Slayer didn’t say it was one of those. Stung a bit, those bites?”
Xander’s harsh half-chuckle said enough. “I’m still working on a story for them. You know, a saga of heroism for the impressing of people. Especially girl-type people.”
“A different saga than the one where you fought off the hordes of hell to keep a little girl fed.”
Xander snorted. “Yeah, I was gonna push the credibility angle a bit more than that.”
“Well.” Spike took a breath. “Give it a few years and you can tell the truth, yeah? Tell that one little girl how you didn’t let her go hungry.”
Xander regarded his arm a moment longer, and turned the gaze on Spike a moment before he nodded. “Yeah, okay.”
He got out and came around to Spike’s side. “So what happened to all the super strength?” Xander asked, pulling him up. “Why the need for a helping hand?” Again, not laughter, exactly, although Spike suspected he was saving some for later. Mostly he just sounded curious.
“It’s not just strength,” Spike grumbled. “It’s a problem of leverage.”
“Oh?”
“I haven’t got any.” He bent as best he could and collected the night’s prizes. “Besides, your rattletrap’s a failure at accessibility for pregnant persons. Ought to be a law.” He slammed the door, and something under the hood rattled from the impact. “Not to mention, think your paper clips and duct tape are about to give out on you.”
“What did you think all the dead-end jobs were for? Wait, don’t answer that.” Xander patted the frame with rough affection, and then wrinkled his nose at the rust that came away on his fingers. “Another month and you’ll see a new and improved Xandermobile.”
Three more weeks, Spike reflected, and he and his DeSoto could start getting reacquainted.
Inside, the ladies were still on the sofa, though the fervor of the conversation had eased. From the ice tea glasses on the coffee table, forgotten and glistening with condensation, Spike guessed the topic had moved on as well. It occurred to him that a proper friendship with someone like Joyce might go a long way in ushering Demon Girl into that humanity she’d been groping towards. Not that he cared.
That Joyce might do the same for him wasn’t something he was willing to consider just yet. Might as well hang onto the Big Bad illusion as long as he could, until that day it finally slipped like fog through his fingers.
“Spike! You’re okay!” Dawn bounded down the stairs.
“Ye-e-es,” he said, as she wrapped her arms around him -- quite the feat these days -- and squeezed. “Something afoot?”
“You went out without me or Buffy,” she said, and given her tone he marveled she wasn’t actually wagging her finger at him. “Those vampires could have caught you, and there’d be nobody to protect you, and--”
“Hey, now!” he said, extricating himself. “Also a vamp, in case you’d forgotten. Still not entirely incompetent at the life and limb game.” Entirely being the operative word. “ ‘Sides, I had the human mop along for the guarding of my person. Persons.”
“Xander?” she whispered doubtfully, wrinkling her nose. “Whatever.” Louder, “What are you wearing?”
A glance down reminded him. He stripped off the sweatshirt and tossed it at Xander’s head. “Suppose you don’t want your present, then?” he asked Dawn, and held back a smirk as all concern vanished, a soap bubble burst by a water hose.
“Present? What is it? You got me a present? Gimme, gimme, please?”
He glanced at the faces behind him, starting to turn interest in his direction. “Basement,” he said. He flicked a hand in farewell to the others. “Ta,” he told Xander, comfortably certain that the boy wouldn’t actually know what that meant, and then he followed Dawn down.
“So what is it?” she said, when he reached the bottom of the steps.
He handed her the shopping bag from the bookshop, its contents now exchanged. “Careful,” he said as she dumped the bag out on the futon.
“More knives?” she said, looking uncertainly over at him.
“Look at the blades,” he said.
She lifted one to the light and peered at the grain. “It’s pretty,” she said, still doubtful.
“It’s wood,” he said.
She frowned a moment longer, and then squealed. “Staking knives! Or, hey, stake knives.” She paused to giggle. “And now I can kill vampires--”
“If your aim’s good enough,” he said, just as he was wrapped in another hug.
“Thank you, thank you thank you!”
“Have to be gentle with them, now,” he said to the top of her head. “The blades have some protective mojo on them to save the points, but they’re still fragile. We’ll find you a softer target to practice with.”
“You’re my best friend ever,” she said, pulling away to look at the knife again, eyes shining. She snatched the other off the bed and scrambled up the stairs. “I have to show these to Mom!”
When she was gone, he realized he’d forgotten to ask if Buffy was back. Well, maybe someone would wander down later and he could ask after that back rub. He considered the merits of warmed blood vs. not having to climb the stairs again, and eventually settled for a cold plastic bag from the mini fridge.
That drunk, he found a position among the futon’s pillows that’d likely stay comfortable for at least twenty minutes and he opened up Portable Romantic Poets. “The musical education’ll have to wait for another day, when I get hold of a player from someone,” he explained softly. “Might could beg the Niblet’s Walkman away from her, yeah? But for tonight it’s words.” He didn’t immediately get a kick in the spleen, which he took for assent.
He leafed through the volume, getting caught by old favorites. Finally, in the Keats section, he began to chuckle. Might as well start her off with something appropriate to the situation. In his reading voice, which Mother had always said was particularly pleasant, he began,
“Seasons of mist and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun...”
next part
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More A/Ns:
1. The line "One year in every ten" is from Plath's poem Lady Lazarus. Neither the peom nor the poet are generally considered to be terribly funny.
2. The Plath poem Spike stumbles across, beginning "I'm a riddle in nine syllables," is Metaphors.
3. The Keats at the end is Ode to Autumn, which may be my single favorite seasonal poem in all of literature.
