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Spike stretched his body out long and lean across the bed, his feet on the rumpled pillows and his head at the far end. He pressed the pages of his book quickly through his fingers, searching the grooves in the spine and the well-loved dog ears of the pages for the words he was looking for. The sun in the evening was soft and liquid, warm gold like a dying fire and just cool enough to touch the dip of his back and thighs without burning. Buffy lay tangled in the sheets to his side, propped up on one arm, still breathing a little heavy and smiling, smiling like someone who is safe and has nowhere to be. She got back from dropping Dawn at Xander and Anya’s and found the washing up all done, the counters clean, and music that hated the government playing soft. Now a few hours later she could stretch out on the bed and feel her neck unknot, her muscles warm, her hair a state, and no one needed anything from her til morning.
“Can’t find the bloody page,” Spike said, and Buffy paid no attention because she was watching the evening light gather in the sweat on his shoulders.
“You can read me anything. I don’t mind.”
“No, it’s gotta be the right one.”
“For a college dropout like me?”
“Buffy,” his voice was low and wounded, “Never say that. You can’t ever say that.”
“I’m joking, sort of. I just don’t know a lot of poetry I guess. I know a lot of water bills and a lot of things to do with nunchucks.”
Spike dropped the book on the floor off the foot of the bed and turned to look her full in the face with the expression he wore when he thought about her dying, or when he caught her sighing over the pictures of Joyce in the living room. “We’re gonna get you those papers to re-enroll. No ifs or buts, we can make it work with the gas bill and the beasties in the graveyards. But you don’t need a degree from that place, or any place, to know you deserve better than that. You’re incredible, Buffy. I love your mind, and you ran rings around everyone in high school with your exam grades even when they got a full night’s sleep and you were fighting-”
“You, dummy. I was fighting you. Maybe I’d speak French now if you hadn’t wasted so much of my time.”
He took her by the waist and rolled her over towards him so suddenly that she gave a loud squeak. “I’ll teach you French too if you like, love. If you let me keep wasting your time.”
“Where’s my poem, William? I only like cute boys when they have poems to read me.”
He let her go and scooped the book back up off the floor. It was bent and marked from being kept in a coat pocket, attacked with pencil, knocked about in fights, for years and years. Annotations crept between the print on every page and the inside of both covers, annotations he still wouldn’t let Buffy read. He was still tender about the games of cat and mouse they had played, the long time he watched Angel watch her, or watched Riley watch her. He never read his own writing to her, or he hadn’t yet, and she wondered how many times she would have to tell him she loved him before he would.
“Here it is,” he said. His voice changed a little and she felt him settle into a version of himself who had read poetry out loud in public before, or in semi-public. There was something longing and poignant in his voice, and it became possible to imagine how long he had spent finding meanings within meanings within meanings in writing like this, asking himself why he couldn’t have written it, wondering what the vampires would think if they knew how much it meant to him. Poetry was the thing he had instead of a soul, poetry and her, and neat bottles of nail polish lined up in the bathroom, and the pancakes he made for Dawn. Buffy liked the poems fine, she liked them a lot, but when she asked him to read it was so she could see the version of himself that read them. When she couldn’t sleep, or when she wandered alone in graveyards, she remembered the words so she could reconstruct his face in her mind as he read them. She wanted to be covered in the writing and wear it like a cardigan. It was the thing that kept her warmest.
“Dawn is dim on the dark soft water,
Soft and passionate, dark and sweet.
Love's own self was the deep sea's daughter,
Fair and flawless…”
His eyes found her and he started to smile as he repeated those few words and then finished
the line,
“Fair and flawless from face,” he pulled her in and kissed her forehead and the curve at the tip of her nose, “to feet,” and he lunged to the other end of the bed to grab at her ankles and make her giggle.
“I’m ticklish! Spike, stop. You know I’m ticklish.” He stopped.
“Hailed of all when the world was golden,
Loved of lovers whose names beholden
Thrill men's eyes as with light of olden
Days more glad than their flight was fleet.”
It was an odd thing to think of the world that existed when Spike first read those words, before the word Spike meant anything to him, when he imagined a different life with a different woman. When you live surrounded by monsters, the depth and strangeness of the world struck you sometimes like looking at the sky and realising how far up the stars go. He kept reading, and Buffy rolled onto her back and closed her eyes. When she sighed it felt like a little exorcism, expelling the day she had had and welcoming the night where she would be safe. His voice continued to wash cleanly over her, fixing any lingering bruises from last night’s patrol. She felt like water being stirred by a calm wind. She felt like a woman who could stretch out and relax in her bedroom with no alarm set. If she woke in the night because a dream told her she needed to save the world, he would save it with her. If she woke because a dream reminded her of the people she had lost or the times she had been forced to make choices no one as young as her should have had to make, he would read to her again. When her back hurt from being on her feet at work he ran baths, and when Dawn didn’t understand calculating terminal velocity he, well, he didn’t understand calculating terminal velocity but he stared at it all the same.
“So they sang: but for men that love her,
Souls that hear not her word in vain,
Earth beside her and heaven above her
Seem but shadows that wax and wane.
Softer than sleep's are the sea's caresses,
Kinder than love's that betrays and blesses,
Blither than spring's when her flowerful tresses
Shake forth sunlight and shine with rain.”
It was obvious in the most raw and tender way that whoever this poem had been about once, it was now about her. Slowly over the years between seeing her in the alleyway behind the Bronze and sharing the house her mother had bought, all poems had become about her. She would be loved when the last of the light faded. There was something wonderful about accepting that kind of devotion when you were so tired, and Buffy was always tired. She would be loved at dawn. She would be loved on the drive to work, during the college paperwork, when dinner was in the oven, when she returned from the graveyard with bruises, evening and morning, and when the world was ending. She knew she could fall asleep like this and he would keep reading. He’d keep reading even though he knew from the tone of her breathing that she was asleep, because they both knew well how powerful slayers’ dream worlds were. If she dreamed about his voice and the dawn that was dim on the soft dark water, then she would be safe, and she would be okay.