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“Come on,” says Buffy. She stands over him with her arms folded, and he wishes she’d touch him. He’s glad she doesn’t. “You’re not going back to Xander’s tonight.”
“Heard,” says Spike. First thing he’s said since they left the basement, and, in using his voice, he rediscovers a little trace of the Slayer’s blood, caught at his gum line behind his upper teeth. Hardly even a full drop but just the hint of it is about enough to make his stomach growl.
They don’t make anything like Slayer’s blood anywhere else. There isn’t a thing in the world as potent or tantalizing. Something in the animal of it all, primal, the prey feeding on the predator. It’s richer and spicier, somehow a touch of sweet, makes his tongue go tingly. Makes him feel almost alive. And it disgusts him.
Is this what having a soul was always like? Wanting and hating yourself for wanting in equal measure?
All those nights together last year, all that intimacy, and he’s finally beginning to understand her.
“I’ll get you set up,” says Buffy. “You can bring the blanket if you want.”
He hardly needs the blanket. It’s the middle of the night and it’s not exactly keeping him warm, being a vampire and all, but she’d draped it around his shoulders after she’d settled him into the chair and he’d pulled it tight around his shoulders to feel something he knew was solid and real in this world when nothing else seems to stay in place any more.
He stands and lets it puddle in the seat of the chair, follows her into the entryway. “No worries. Think I’m getting the hang of the whole ‘monster in the basement’ act.”
She shakes her head, golden hair bouncing around her shoulders like in all his dreams. “No, I want you where I can keep an eye on you in case you start talking to any more ghosts. You can stay in my room until we figure out how to stop this.”
“What?!” cries Dawn.
Xander’s gone to fetch supplies, fix up the window after whatever did it in, but the girls, now one fewer in number than when he left, have started cleaning up. He keeps his head down, doesn’t look at them, but he hears them behind him, picking through debris, one of them sweeping with a broom.
“No, I can’t,” he protests. Funny to imagine, even just a few months ago, him protesting an invitation up to her room, but now the thought fills him with fear. He can hardly keep anything straight, but he’s hurt her and he knows that perfectly well. He hurt her when he was perfectly in control of himself and he hurt her when he couldn’t make sense of it all. The cut on her arm, her blood in his mouth. He can hear her urging him on and he can hear her begging him to stop. He can’t trust what he’ll do and he can’t trust he’ll remember what he’s done when it’s over.
“This isn’t up for debate,” she says, to him and to the Scoobies. Instead of walking into the dining room, she climbs the first five steps, then looks back down at him.
He’s struck by her.
How’d he end up back here, him at the bottom of the steps, her looking down at him, again?
He remembers this, from before. From just before the end of the world, when he realized she expected more from him, and that that in itself meant something. And from after, on the hundred-forty-eighth day that didn’t count, when he thought he’d never see her again.
He hadn’t thought he’d see her now. He’d been sure that basement was the end of him.
He still thinks it probably should have been.
“Spike.”
He could protest more. He’s sure he should. But he nods and follows, like he always will.
At the top of the stairs, she turns right instead of left, leads him into Willow’s room. He looks it over as she pulls out the chair from the vanity and realizes it’s not Willow’s room anymore. Buffy sets the chair down at the end of the bed.
“I’ll get some rope in a minute,” says Buffy. She locks the door to Dawn’s room, which he appreciates in the theoretical but which is not going to hold up against his strength, even if he had any reason to think that he wouldn’t figure that one out. He was walking and talking and flirting just fine, in those memories he doesn’t quite remember. Seems something like that might very well take another level of enlightenment above just twisting a little knob. “We can keep you tied up for now until we can figure this out.”
“Just like old times.” Spike sits down in the chair obediently.
She gives him a look.
“Oh, that’s not what I meant,” says Spike. He turns his head away. “Just… Thanksgiving dinner and all. That’s all.”
“Mid-season hiatus,” says Buffy. “It’s all reruns.” She sighs. “There’s something about this… I feel like I should know something that I’m forgetting.”
“You and me both,” says Spike, though he’s still wishing he could forget again. He hadn’t realized what he was in for, with this soul. He’d known enough to know he didn’t know enough, to know he’d crossed the line but couldn’t wrap his mind around why there was a line.
He’d been so certain, that if he could just get her craving him again—
He has to stop. Stop thinking about it. Stop wanting to not think about it. He doesn’t even know anymore.
Buffy pulls her sweater up over her head and the sleeve catches on the dried blood on her arm. She clicks her tongue in a little wince as it rips away, pulling skin with it and reopening the wound.
“Sorry,” says Spike. Hard to think about anything else these days. He’s always sorry. And that sorry is never enough.
“It wasn’t you.”
She leaves, steps into the bathroom and runs the tap a minute, then comes back to stand in the doorway, keep an eye on him while she uses a damp cloth to wash away the crusted blood.
He knows from very personal experience just how flexible the Slayer is, but it’s an awkward spot on her arm and he’s not doing anything, just sitting here feeling sorry for himself, so he holds out a hand. “Let me help?”
It takes her by surprise, him offering. She hesitates, and they look at each other for a minute. He doesn’t move from his chair, sits where she asked him to, just waits with his hand out in offering. They’ve patched each other up before, but that was before. He’ll understand if she refuses.
But she grabs the bandages and Betadine and sits on the bed beside him, turned so he can reach when she sets the cloth in his hand.
He’s slow, makes his motions gentle, scrubs only in the small spots to make sure he doesn’t pull the cut open further. It’s not too deep, should seal up quickly enough, and on the Slayer especially it’ll likely be gone in a day or two.
He wonders if he was holding back. It’d be nice to think he was, but he knows himself better than that.
“What you said last night, at Xander’s?” says Buffy.
“I know,” says Spike. “You were right, clearly, to suspect. I shouldn’t have called you jealous. I should’ve trusted you.”
“Not that.” She winces, just a little, as he dabs on the Betadine. Least this time he knew going in that he was going to hurt her. She turns her head and looks at him. “I don’t want you to feel like you can’t talk to me.”
“I don’t know how much sense it’s going to make. Can’t trust most of it. But I’ll tell you everything I know about this thing.”
“More than that.” She pauses. “You know I know how hard it is, feeling like you can’t talk to anyone. It’s miserable. I wanted to die.”
He’s never heard her say it so plainly before, even though he knew. Could see it on her the minute she came down those stairs with her knuckles bloody, could hear it in her voice when they sat out on the back porch, or in the alleyway even before she told him where she had been all those hundred-forty-seven days. But she never said it out loud like these, even in their most naked moments.
He looks up, his hand hovering over the gauze to wrap her arm, and their eyes meet. She holds his gaze and, for once, it’s him who feels flighty about it, who has to struggle to not look away. How many times, last year, did he want her to look him in the eye only to always see her looking anywhere else?
“You aren’t doing this alone,” she says.
It’s stupid of her, all of this. Pulling him off the Hellmouth, tossing away the shovel handle, bringing him up to her bedroom. Hell, even letting him in on that Thanksgiving day, three years ago, when she should have left him to go up in flames in Giles’s courtyard. It’s all incredibly foolish. He’s not just a vampire, not just a very strong vampire with two previous Slayers bagged, he’s also out of his fucking mind. And he’s already hurt her plenty even before that.
The world (and the demons, and him) break her down, wear her out, make her cry, make her want to die, and still. Here she is, after all of it, determined to reach back for him. The monster trying to be a man.
It’s idiotic, is what it is.
It’s why he’s in love with her.
He ties off the bandage. One injury set to right. Just all the other ones left to go.