Fic: Burn all the maps (BtVS; Buffy/Spike)
Title: Burn all the maps
Fandom/pairing: Buffy the Vampire Slayer; Buffy/Spike
Rating: R
Words: 9,459
Summary: Buffy and Spike take a road trip to Vegas. Takes place in season 9, sometime after Freefall #4.
*
According to Willow, the key to restoring the Seed of Wonder belongs to an ancient warlock living in Las Vegas.
“Vegas?” Buffy asks. It’s just that the whole Las Vegas thing seems more for bachelor parties and ill-advised elopements than it does for warlocks holding the key to what might be the universe’s most recent slayer-instigated disaster. “Really? Like with the showgirls and the fake Elvises and the gambling?”
“That’s the one,” Willow says with a nod. “Apparently centuries-old, super-powerful mages like the slots.”
They’re out on Mission Street, doing a kind-of patrol, but mostly just talking and enjoying the walk, while Spike skulks fifty-feet behind them, being his generally annoying self.
“And this amulet thing is going to help you get the magic back?” she asks. Behind them, Spike sighs, loud enough for them to hear. Like this whole conversation is just incredibly exhausting for him to have to eavesdrop on.
“That’s the plan,” Willow says, sounding chipper as she studiously ignores Spike. “Get the amulet, try some mojo, and presto-change-o, all is right with the world. Or, at least, that’s what I hope will happen.”
Buffy's still not exactly sure how she feels about Willow's constant desperation to have her fix the seed, but Vegas does seem pretty cool -- gambling and alcohol and no snooping homicide detectives or freaky energy sucking-guys trying to kill her. Probably.
“Anyway, I was thinking maybe Spike could go,” Willow says, dropping her voice to a low whisper and nodding her head slightly in Spike’s direction. “I know he’s got some contacts in Vegas and I figured it might get him out of your hair for a while.”
Wait -- Spike? Buffy thought she was going to go. Why does Spike get to have all the fun? She’s about to ask Willow that very question when Spike jogs up next to them, taking his distant-stalker routine and making it up close and personal.
“Vegas, eh?” he says, grinning and slinging an arm around Buffy’s shoulders. She knows she should shrug him away, but instead she just glares at him and ignores the way that his sudden closeness makes her stomach do this weird flipping thing. “Sounds good. When do we leave?”
*
Buffy’s got Thursday and Friday off, so she and Spike plan to leave Wednesday, just after sundown. According to Spike, that will give them enough to time to get to Vegas, steal the amulet, and be back in town before her breakfast shift at the Pick Me Up on Saturday morning. Which is fine by Buffy. She figures three days alone with Spike is pretty much her limit anyway.
Dawn calls when she’s packing, to ask if Buffy wants to do a margaritas-and-movie girls' night thing on Thursday.
“Sorry, Dawnie,” she says, throwing a pair of jeans into her bag. “No can do.”
“Why not?” Dawn demands.
“I’m going to Vegas with Spike,” she says, distractedly. Willow told her she needed to bring at least one nice dress, so Buffy’s trying to find this red halter thing Dawn helped her pick out last year for a blind date that never was.
“Buffy!” Dawn gasps. “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me you guys were back together. Give me all the details. Was it that night at your place? The housewarming party? Because you guys seemed kind of all over each other for a while there and -“
“What?!” Buffy says. She still isn’t totally sure what happened that night, but she’s pretty sure it wasn’t sex with Spike. Mostly because she woke up the next day just feeling tired and weird and not at all satisfied, and, geez, maybe she shouldn’t gauge her still-unknown sexual encounters by satisfaction level? Ugh, what has happened to her life?
“It’s okay, Buff,” Dawn says, breaking Buffy out of her shame spiral. “It was bound to happen sooner or later.”
“What?” Buffy says again. “No, that’s not -- No. We’re not back together. And nothing happened with Spike that night,” she says firmly, ninety-five percent sure she’s telling the truth.
“Oh,” Dawn says, sounding strangely disappointed. “So what’s with the road-tripping to Sin City, then?”
Buffy sighs and grabs a handful of underwear from her top drawer, shoving it into the bag. “Slayer business. Willow needs some amulet, and Spike needs some back-up, and I some vacation, so. I figure a couple hours in a car with Spike is a small price to pay for a few days off.”
Dawn’s silent for just long enough to make Buffy nervous. “You do know how long it takes to get to Vegas from here, right?” she finally asks.
“A couple of hours.” Buffy shrugs and rustles through her closet, finally finding the dress crammed onto a hanger near the back.
“Try, like, ten,” Dawn says, and it sounds like she’s trying not to laugh.
“Oh,” Buffy says, stopping what she’s doing with her one fancy dress clutched in one hand as she contemplates twenty hours stuck in a car with Spike, probably forced to listen to some horrible punk band from forty years ago and lectures about the new big bad and how Buffy needs to focus less on coffee-serving and more on demon-slaying.
Well, whatever. She’s going. They’ll probably just drive at night anyway, so. She can catch up on her sleep at least. She shrugs and tosses the dress into her bag, zipping it closed decisively.
*
Spike pulls up to her apartment right after sundown, in a bizarrely normal-looking black Ford sedan. It’s got four doors and cloth seats, the type of car dads drive, not badass vampires out to save the world.
“Where’d you get this thing?” Buffy asks, pulling open the passenger door and slinging her bag in the backseat.
“Stole it after I drained the owner dry,” Spike says casually, shrugging back against the sensible tan upholstery. He’s wearing his standard leather duster-t-shirt-jeans combo, a half-smoked cigarette perched in the corner of his mouth. His skin looks luminescent in the lights of the dashboard, lit up with just a touch of green.
Buffy scoffs. “Yeah right,” she says, settling in beside him and fastening her seatbelt as he pulls away from the curb. The interior of the car smells strange, this mix of new-car smell and Spike-smell -- leather and tobacco and ash.
For some reason, Spike doesn’t have any music on, so it’s bizarrely quiet in the car, just the sound of the air conditioner running and the low, quiet hum of the engine.
The silence gets to her after just a couple of seconds, so Buffy starts fiddling with the air conditioner, turning it so that the vents only half-blow on her. That takes about three seconds, so she starts messing with the radio next, turning it on and scanning through the stations until she finds a Kelly Clarkson song that she likes. As soon as she moves her hand away from the radio, Spike reaches out and presses button for the CD player. Loud, horrible, thirty year-old punk music blasts from the speakers.
“Ugh. What the hell, Spike?” she asks, reaching for the radio again. Spike’s too quick though, and he grabs her wrist before she can press any of the buttons.
“I’m not listening to insipid girly pop for the next ten hours,” he tells her. His skin is cold, and it sends an involuntary shiver throughout her body.
“Well, I’m not listening to the Sex Guns or whatever for the next ten hours,” Buffy snaps back, tugging at her arm so he’ll let her go. Instead of easing up, he tightens his fingers on her wrist.
They stay like that for a few beats, neither one of them moving. Spike breaks first, loosening his grip on her and turning back to focus on the road.
“Fine,” he says, and Buffy feels a brief surge of victory as he sets her arm back down in her lap. But then he reaches back into the backseat, rustling around blindly until he finally pulls out a beat-up looking CD book. “Pick something from here.”
Buffy sighs as she takes the binder. She doubts she’s going to find anything in there that she wants to listen to, but she flips through it anyway, just so that she has something to do other than argue with Spike about which one of them has worse taste in music.
The book’s basically filled cover to cover, but all of the CDs are burned copies with either no labels at all or hand-written labels scribbled in Sharpie in Spike’s impossible to read Victorian-era script.
“What does this one say?” she asks, holding up one of the labeled ones. It looks like it says The…Phanrad (maybe?), but it’s hard to tell because the writing on it is completely illegible. But the CD itself looks new-ish -- or, at least, not nearly as wrecked as most of the others.
Spike looks over at her and squints at the writing, trying to make it out in the dim light. “The Damned? Or, wait,” he leans even closer, squinting at the disc and taking his eyes off the road long enough that Buffy’s sure they’re going to die in a fiery crash. “The…Clash, maybe?”
“Great,” Buffy mutters, shaking her head. Neither one of those bands sounds particularly appealing, so she slips the disc back in its slot. She sighs and flips through a couple more pages, not finding anything that looks remotely listenable.She makes it all the way through the book, and comes up empty.
“All of these suck,” she tells him, closing the binder with a snap and tossing it into the back seat.
“They do not!” Spike says, sounding legitimately offended.
“They do too,” Buffy says. Ugh, this road trip is terrible; they’re only thirty minutes in and they can’t even agree on the freaking music.
Spike sighs and reaches for the radio, flipping around until he lands on something that sounds vaguely familiar to Buffy, the kind of music her parents used to listen to when she was a kid.
“You’re going with the oldies channel?” she demands, reaching out for the radio again.
Spike swats her hand away lightly. “Leave it,” he says. “Or we’re going back to the CDs.”
“Fine,” Buffy sighs, but then a Beach Boys song comes on and she feels herself smile, tapping her foot to the beat of the song, the music cheerful and comforting and full of nostalgia.
*
The route Spike chooses is actually pretty cool, all winding mountain roads and scenic, nature-filled vistas. Even though it’s dark out and she can’t actually see much of the scenery, the stars are really pretty, bright and everywhere above them, twinkling away in the night sky.
“Why aren’t we taking the freeway?” she asks after an hour of twisting roads and tiny, one-stoplight towns.
“Traffic,” Spike says, which seems like it might be a lie because it’s eleven o’clock on a Wednesday night, but Buffy doesn’t call him on it. Mostly because the drive is kind of nice, soothing and star-filled and not filled with the angry, crazy drivers that do seem to be on the I-5 pretty much any time of day.
“So,” Spike says, after a few minutes. “How’s Richie Rich? Still trying to kill you and steal all your power?”
Buffy just shrugs. She’s not really in the mood to talk to Spike about Severin right now. Or ever, actually.
“Why haven’t you taken care of him yet?” Spike continues, apparently not satisfied with Buffy’s let’s-not-talk-about-it approach. “You know, give ‘em the old stake to the heart?”
Buffy takes a breath and counts silently to ten. “Because he’s human and that would be wrong,” she says in her calmest, most polite, best dealing-with-Spike voice. “Besides, I tried that and it didn’t work, remember?”
“Not sure what you saw in him anyway.” Spike sounds petulant, and like he’s been waiting to bring this up for a while. Fabulous.
“I don’t know,” Buffy shrugs. “He seemed nice.”
“Nice,” Spike snorts.
Buffy does the silent counting thing again. She definitely isn’t in the mood for this, but she figures it’s got to happen at some point, so it may as well be now. “Yeah, well. All of my old friends currently hate me, and even Dawn and Xander aren’t so much with the helping these days, and Severin was into the whole slaying thing. Plus, he actually seemed to like me, so," she shrugs.
“I like you,” Spike says, sounding legitimately offended.
“I know. I just…” she trails off, not knowing how to explain it to him. That hanging out with someone who got the slaying thing, but who didn’t seem to know about all of her stupid, terrible decisions was just easier. Of course, deciding to hang out with him turned out to be just another one of her stupid, terrible decisions, but still.
Spike’s driving fast enough that she has brace her hand against the door, and she's holding onto the armrest so tightly that she’s worried she’s going to crack the plastic.
They go around a tight curve, and Spike jerks the wheel hard to the left. Even in the dim light of the car, Buffy can see the tension in his face, the muscles in his jaw twitching. “I mean, I know I’m not some rich trust fund git with a destructive magic streak, but I figured that might be worth something.”
“Oh my god,” she says. “Is that what this is about? You’re jealous?”
“Excuse me?”
“You’re jealous? Of Severin? Are you insane?” God, why does he always have to do this? Why can’t they just have a normal conversation, without Spike being all weirdo, possessive stalker on her? She thought they got over this part of their relationship about a million years ago.
“Don’t flatter yourself, Slayer,” Spike says, and his voice has taken on a dangerous edge, one she knows far too well. “Although I am a bit concerned that your new boyfriend could have destroyed both of us in a flash -- literally, might I add -- and you seem hardly bothered about it. Have you even tried to find him since that night in the warehouse?”
“God, Spike, shut up,” she snaps. Jesus Christ, she forgot how holier-than-thou he could get about everything. And, okay, yeah, maybe she should be looking more for Severin, but she still has no idea what he is or how much power she still has, and she did almost die the last time she faced off with him, so it's not like she's got no reason to take some time with this thing. “Your possess-o vamp routine got old about five years ago. And don’t even pretend this about anything other than your weird territorialism. Severin’s vanished, the vamps are feral, and I’ve got about a million other things to worry about between the cops, and the loan-collecting demons, and trying to figure out this seed thing. You know I’d never let him hurt you.”
Spike looks at her then, his head titled just a bit and his eyes serious, like he’s trying to decide if he believes her.
“You sure about that, Slayer?” he finally asks. His voice is quiet again and Buffy gets a sick feeling in her stomach, imagining what would happen if she’s wrong.
“Of course,” she says, but she doesn’t sound so sure, not even to herself. She tries as hard as she can not to think about that night in the warehouse, the look on Spike's face when Severin was draining him, the way her world felt like it had stopped in those horrible few seconds before Dowling showed up, how powerless she was to do anything but watch as Spike's life was being siphoned away.
Buffy stares blankly out the window, willing herself not to think about it, and Spike doesn't say anything else. He's still driving way too fast, but the road has leveled out at least. Outside the car, the little town has given way to forest, nothing but a dark black blur of trees rushing past, as far as the eye can see.
*
“I think something’s wrong with Xander,” Buffy says, forty-five minutes later. They’ve passed back into civilization, but neither one of them has said anything since their fight about Severin, and Buffy can’t stand another second of awkward silence.
Spike glances at her sidelong, looking a little wary. “And you’re just figuring this out now?”
“Ha ha,” she deadpans. “I’m serious. He and Dawn are acting all weird and, like, troubled.”
“So?” Spike shrugs. “Maybe they are troubled.”
“I don’t want them to be!” Buffy says, a little shriller than she means to. Spike looks at her out of the corner of his eye and she turns to stare out the window, avoiding his gaze. “They just seemed so happy, you know? And,” she shrugs. “I don’t know. It was nice. Thinking that at least someone could actually be happy, maybe even forever.”
“No one’s happy forever, Slayer,” Spike says, sounding old and very, very tired.
Buffy just looks out the window. She can make out vague shapes that she thinks might be houses, the buildings barely visible in the thin moonlight. On the radio, a new song starts up, Elvis singing about how he can’t help falling in love.
“Besides,” Spike adds a few seconds later, sounding flippant and more like himself. “Their whole thing is a bit creepy, innit?”
“What? No it’s not!”
“Oh, come on,” he says, rolling down the window and lighting a cigarette. “Harris used to babysit the Niblet, and now he’s shagging her? It’s right disturbing.”
“Ew, Spike,” she says, covering up her ears with her hands and willing herself not to think about Xander and Dawn doing…anything, basically. “Gross.”
“See?” he laughs and shakes his head. “Creepy.”
They both lapse into silence again, and Buffy tries really, really hard not to think about Xander and Dawn and any kind of shagging-type activities. Cool mountain air streams in through the half-open window and Buffy stares out into the darkness, vaguely wondering why nothing in her life ever seems to make sense.
*
By the time they stop for gas a couple of hours later, Buffy’s left leg has fallen completely asleep. It feels like pins and needles no matter how much she tries to wake it up, so she heads inside to stretch her legs while Spike fills up the tank.
When she gets in the store, she grabs a Diet Coke from the cooler in the back and then heads over to look at magazines. She picks up a copy of Cosmo, flipping through it as she stomps her feet, trying to get the feeling back in her legs.
She’s completely engrossed in one of those stupid love quizzes, when Spike suddenly appears in the aisle beside her, sidling silently up next to her and making her jump. Good thing her Slayer senses are so honed and sharp these days.
“Are You Obsessed With Your Ex?” he reads over her shoulder. Buffy can actually hear the smirk in his voice.
“What are you doing?” she asks, somehow managing to keep her voice steady. His breath is distractingly cool against her skin.
“Seeing if one of the questions is about tagging along with your ex on a road trip,” Spike says seriously, squinting down at the magazine.
Ugh, he is the worst. Buffy snaps the magazine closed and slaps him with it, the thwack as it connects with the side of his head sounding satisfyingly loud in the empty store.
He laughs and holds up one hand in surrender. He’s got a six-pack of beer in the other. “No need for violence, pet.”
“Shut up, Spike,” she says, but he’s already walking away, striding up to the counter, his stupid leather coat swirling ridiculously under the flickering fluorescent lighs. Buffy sighs and follows him to the front of the store.
“You’re not planning on drinking those on the drive, are you?” she demands, putting her magazine and soda down on the counter so that they’re rung up with the gas and the beer.
The clerk raises her eyebrows but doesn’t say anything as Spike hands her a twenty.
“No Summers,” Spike says, in this voice like it’s using every ounce of patience he has to interact politely with her. “Although if you keep yammering at me, I might not be able to resist taking a nip or two.” He sounds annoyed, but he bumps his shoulder against hers and gives her a half-smile.
Buffy rolls her eyes, but she’s smiling for some reason as she bumps him back. The clerk smirks at them as she hands Spike his change.
*
The road they take in to Vegas is full of bright lights and big hotels and laughing tourists, people looking like they're having fun even at six in the morning.
As she watches all the glitz and glamour zooming by, Buffy can't help but hope that Willow managed to finagle them a spot at some super-luxe hotel, one of the places with giant fountains or roller coasters or fake Eiffel Towers. A couple of days in a posh hotel is just what she needs.
So of course she and Spike end up pulling over at some sketched-out rattrap motel a couple of blocks off the strip.
The place looks like one of those motels from the old horror movies she used to watch as a kid, the kind where serial killers live with their dead mothers and stab unsuspecting blonde women in the shower. The parking lot is packed, mostly with giant semis and rusted out station wagons, but Spike finds a spot close to the front office. He makes a quick dash inside while Buffy busies herself getting their bags out of the car.
She’s waiting on the sidewalk next to the office when Spike comes out a few minutes later, and he sticks close to the wall as she follows him to their room. The dawn light’s gone from gray to orange, a few errant beams of sunlight peeking over the horizon.
The room’s small, and the green shag carpeting looks dingy and ancient. The whole place smells gross and damp, like mildew and cigarette smoke, and there’s only one bed. Of course. Because Buffy’s life isn’t complicated enough.
“Um,” she says, still standing outside the room in the ever-brightening morning light. Her heart feels like it’s beating way too fast for some reason. “Where’s the other bed?”
“Mind the sunlight, would you Slayer?” Spike says instead of answering, edging away from the stray light that’s started creeping into the room. He sounds about as tired as she feels, and Buffy suddenly feels ridiculous for making such a big deal out of this. So it’s just one bed. Big deal. She and Spike can sleep in the same bed without it being some big thing, right? Yeah. Right. Definitely.
But then, once they’re both inside, the bed looks even smaller, and the room is actually really tiny, and Buffy starts to feel claustrophobic and panicky.
Spike, of course, seems totally fine with the situation, sitting on the far side of the bed and kicking his boots off. He’s not paying any attention to her, so she grabs her bag and makes a beeline for the bathroom.
Once she’s in there, she feels a lot less freaked out, her heart slowing down to something like its normal speed. The bathroom is incredibly small and grungy, chipped tiles and mildew on the shower curtain, but there’s running water and what look like clean towels, so Buffy figures she shouldn’t complain too much.
She showers until the hot water runs out and her skin is pink and raw. When she steps out of the tub and turns off the water, she can still hear Spike moving around in the other room, the low murmur of the television coming clearly through the cheap motel door.
Thinking about going out there makes her heart do the racing thing again, so she busies herself searching through her bag for pajamas. For some reason, she decided to pack just a pair of skimpy pink Eeyore pajama shorts and a thin white tank top to wear to bed. Great.
She finishes drying off and then gets dressed, surveying the damage in the fogged up mirror. Ugh, she feels like a slutty twelve-year-old.
Buffy closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. Okay, she’s just a little punchy and over-tired. She looks neither slutty nor like a twelve-year-old, right? Right. She looks like a totally normal adult person about to go to sleep. In the same bed as her still super-hot, super-annoying ex-boyfriend. Who, if she remembers right, really likes to sleep naked. Which. Whatever. She’s not going to think about that right now. She scrubs the towel across her face again and then rustles through her bag for her toothbrush.
By the time she makes it out of the bathroom, Spike’s pulled the curtains closed and is sitting on the far side bed. He’s taken his boots off and his feet are very, very pale, white and strong against the tacky paisley bedspread.
The room is dark except for the flickering blue light of the television, and the shadows make the sharp lines of his face look even harsher than normal. He’s got a beer in one hand, and the rest of the six-pack is sitting on the little bedside table next to him.
Buffy stands in the open doorway to the bathroom, letting her eyes adjust to the dark and trying to figure out the quickest, easiest way to get into the bed. There aren’t many options, so she finally just sucks it up and slides into bed next to Spike, being careful to avoid any unnecessary contact. She ends up laying on the covers next to him and, to his credit, he only smirks when he sees what she’s wearing. Which for Spike is practically Olympian-level restraint.
“Fancy a drink, love?” he asks, holding out the bottle to her once she settles in next to him. He sounds amused, like he knows exactly how disconcerting this whole situation is for her, and it’s completely hilarious to him.
She’s going to say no, but she’s feeling a little keyed up, and maybe a drink wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, so: “Okay, yeah.”
He raises his eyebrows and looks surprised, but passes her the bottle without comment.
“Thanks,” she says, and takes a long pull from the bottle. The beer is dark and bitter and warm, not at all what she would normally drink. Still, though, it’s sort of comforting somehow, and it gives her something to do with her hands.
Spike’s watching an old sitcom with a laugh track, something with two girls and a guy who looks weirdly like that robot her mom dated a million years ago. There are misunderstandings and bell-bottoms, and Buffy gets confused with the storyline after about five minutes, the beer making her feel dizzy and out of sorts.
By the time she helps Spike finish off another beer, she can barely keep her eyes open. She puts the empty bottle on the rickety bedside table next to her and then pushes the bedspread back so that she can slide down under the covers.
“Want me to turn this off?” Spike asks, nodding at the TV, his voice low and quiet. Even though he doesn’t have any body heat, Buffy’s skin feels warm in all the places it’s close to his. Like the air is different when he’s there, this warm buzz, the crackle of static and electricity she can feel all throughout in her body.
“No,” she says softly, closing her eyes and snuggling down into the cheap, scratchy sheets. Her bare foot is touching Spike’s leg and she flexes her toes against the soft, cool skin of his ankle. “You can leave it on.”
*
When Buffy wakes up, she’s pressed up close against Spike, his arm slung around her waist and his hand tucked under her hip. The air conditioner in the corner is whirring away and all the non-covered parts of her body are freezing.
She just lays there for a few seconds, her eyes closed as she relishes the feel of him against her.
She feels discombobulated, not sure if it’s day or night, if she's been asleep for ten minutes or ten hours, so she takes a few minutes to get her bearings. There’s some light coming from underneath the curtains on the other side of the room, orange and rosy, which doesn’t really tell her anything. The alarm clock is on the other side of the bed -- Spike’s side -- so she tries to move as quietly as she can to see it. It’s blocked by Spike’s giant head though, so she sighs and pushes herself up to see it, using his chest as leverage.
His body is still under her hand, no breathing in and out, something that should probably creep her out, but instead it’s kind of comforting for some reason. Their legs are still tangled together and, by the time the clock’s in view, Buffy is practically laying on top of him, his body hard underneath hers. Whatever pajama pants he’s wearing must be pretty thin because she can feel everything -- everything -- and she pauses right where she is, feeling him against her. Even though it’s freezing in the room and Spike’s skin is like ice, Buffy suddenly feels hot all over. It takes her a second before she can force herself to relax, trying to concentrate on something other than Spike’s body against hers.
Once she feels like she’s got herself under control, she leans over enough to see the clock. It’s only four-thirty, which means she can probably sleep for a few more hours if she wants. But when she starts to lie back down, glancing down at Spike as she does, he’s awake, blinking up at her in the dim light of the room.
“Hey,” he says, lifting his head and sounding groggy. He’s bare-chested and sleepy-eyed, his hair is sticking up every which way. He looks vulnerable and innocent and strangely human, and something in her chest tightens.
“Hi,” she says. Her voice comes out as a whisper, and Spike’s chest starts moving under her hand, up and down with unnecessary breaths. “I, um, I just wanted to see what time it was.” She’s still lying on top of him, and he shifts underneath her, their bodies moving together under the covers. She presses her hips against his without really thinking about it, trying to prolong the contact, and he closes his eyes, biting his lower lip.
“Buffy,” he says, quiet enough so that she can barely even hear him. Her heart is racing away, and she can’t bring herself to move away from him. After a couple of seconds, she slides her hand up his chest, trailing her fingers over his collarbone and up his neck. When she brushes her thumb across the corner of his mouth, he gives her what might be a kiss -- just a quick movement of his lips against her skin.
And, god, she just suddenly wants him so much, wants to press her body even closer against his, to get that feeling he always makes her feel, like they’re the only two people in the world, like nothing else matters.
It’s not until she kisses him that Buffy realizes what she’s doing, what all of this might mean, and then she’s practically leaping out of the bed, standing up fast enough so that she gets dizzy. “Um,” she says. Her is heart still skipping in her chest, and her fingers feel cool from his skin. “I should go.”
Spike he sits up, and the covers fall around his waist. He looks confused and hurt, and his chest is smooth and white and perfect-looking, and oh god, oh god, she needs to get out of there right now.
“Slayer?” he says, but she doesn’t respond, just grabs her bag and shuts herself in the bathroom, her whole body feeling tingly and hot.
In the mirror over the sink, she looks like a mess, her tank top all twisted and dark purple circles under her eyes. Once she runs a brush through her hair, throws on some jeans and a t-shirt, and does the face-washing-teeth-brushing thing, she looks somewhat presentable, not at all like someone who just jumped her ex and then freaked out on him.
The room’s still dark when she comes out of the bathroom, but she sees can see Spike sitting up, his pale white skin bright in the darkness. He looks upset and confused. “Buffy, I --”
“We should eat,” she says, cutting him off and looking anywhere other than at him. “I mean, you look kind of extra-pale and I’m starving and there’s probably a deli or a butcher nearby, right?” She grabs her boots and stumbles around the room, trying to put them on without sitting on the bed again. Distance from Spike and the bed is definitely of the good right now. “I’ll be back.”
*
Outside, it’s late afternoon, the sun blazing orange over the horizon, making the blackness of the asphalt shimmer with heat. Buffy has no idea where she’s going, but she sets off in the direction of all the neon, and she finds a deli just a block from their hotel. It’s kind of small and sketchy, but there’s a butcher counter in the back and they don’t even blink when she orders a quart of pig’s blood to go with her BLT.
When she gets back to the motel just after sunset, Spike is up and dressed in his normal clothes, sitting on top of the covers while he watches what looks like an episode of Dawson’s Creek. His hair is wet and a little curly, and the room smells like shampoo and cheap motel soap.
He doesn’t say anything when he sees her, just glances at her sidelong, looking wary.
Buffy sits on the bed next to him, careful to keep as much distance between them as possible, and hands him his blood. When their fingers brush, Buffy makes sure to look anywhere but at him, ignoring the way her skin hums at the contact. She and Spike watch the episode of Dawson's Creek while he drinks his blood and she eats her sandwich.
“It’s kind of sad that they didn’t end up together, don’t you think?” Buffy says after a couple of minutes, nodding at the screen where Dawson and Joey are talking, both of them looking sad and lost.
“Oh, don’t tell me you’re a Dawson girl,” Spike groans, shaking his head like he’s disappointed in her, like this is the worse thing he can imagine. He's finished his blood and his color's better, his skin looking brighter and more alive.
“No,” she says defensively. “I’m not a Dawson girl. It’s just…it’s sort of sweet, don’t you think? How fiercely he believes that he and Joey will be together, someday.” The truth is, Dawson reminds her of being sixteen, when her life wasn’t a complete disaster and soul mates seemed like more than just a teen-drama cliché.
Spike scoffs. “He’s a wanker.”
“It’s not like Pacey’s all that much better,” she says, staring hard at the TV and trying not to feel self-conscious. “He’s as big as a romantic as anyone. Just because he’s all witty and charming doesn’t make him so much better.”
Spike shakes his head. “You’re a lost cause, Summers,” he says, but he sounds like he’s teasing her. Onscreen, Pacey’s just bought Joey a wall, and, out of the corner of her eye, Buffy can see Spike watching her with a soft smile.
*
They watch two more episodes of the show, Spike keeping up a steady stream of commentary the whole time, before they realize they should probably get ready if they’re going to do what they’re actually in town to do.
Buffy ducks into the bathroom with her bag, hoping that her dress isn’t too horribly wrinkled after an entire day stuffed into a duffle bag. It’s kind of a mess, but she leaves it hanging while she takes a shower so the steam helps smooth out the worst of the wrinkles.
She does the blow-dry, make-up thing, and then puts on the dress. It’s not too wrecked looking, and it actually fits better than she remembered -- clingy and sexy but not in a skanky way -- but she can’t get the dress zipped all the way no matter how hard she tries.
When Buffy comes out of the bathroom, Spike’s sitting on the edge of the bed. He’s dressed in a slim-fitting black suit, with a black dress shirt underneath, and he looks…well. He looks really, really nice.
He stands up when she comes in the room, and, wow, the whole suit thing looks even nicer when he's on his feet. “You look beautiful,” he tells her, and he sounds almost absurdly sincere.
“Um,” she says, and her face feels like it’s on fire. “Thanks. Do you think you could…” she turns around and gestures at the unzipped dress.
Spike steps close to her, ghosting his hands over her shoulderblades and down to her back, and she can feel his unnecessary breath on her neck. It makes her break out in goosebumps. He tugs the zipper up slowly, his fingers trailing against her skin in this way that makes her catch her breath.
“Thanks,” she says once he’s finished, turning around to face him. She's pretty sure she’s blushing all over, and Spike is still standing incredibly close to her. With her heels on, they’re exactly the same height. She can feel the coolness of his breath against her lips.
“My turn,” Spike says, stepping even closer to her. Buffy feels her eyes go wide, and she’s not really sure what he’s suggesting, but his voice has taken on this dirty-innuendo tone and…um. It takes her a few seconds for her to realize that he’s holding a red silk tie -- one that's practically the same color as her dress -- in his hand. “Help a fellow out, would you, Slayer.”
Buffy blinks and shakes her head, trying to get her bearings. “Uh. Okay. Yeah.”
Buffy takes the tie from Spike and loops it gently around his neck, pulling up his collar so that she can get the tie to lay flat. It takes her a few tries before she remembers exactly how to loop and knot the fabric in the right direction, but Spike stays quiet and still the whole time she’s working. Her knuckles keep brushing up against the bare skin on his neck, and he does this quick inhaling thing every time she makes contact. He smells nice, like soap and something a little stronger, and almost spicy -- cologne, she realizes.
Once she gets the tie situated, she smoothes it against his shirt, running her hand gently down his chest. His breath hitches in his throat and Buffy looks him in the eye. His pupils are dilated, so much that his eyes look almost black, and Buffy kisses him before she can stop herself, just a quick press of her lips against his. After just a second, Spike pulls back, stepping back so that there’s a least a foot of space between them.
“Buffy,” he says, and something in his voice makes her chest ache. “You don’t have to…”
And, just like, that she’s gone from wanting him to wanting to punch him. Ugh, why does he always have to make things so difficult?
“I know I don’t have to,” she snaps. “I want to.”
Spike gives her a strange look, like he feels sorry for her, like he’s trying to figure out what to say, and, oh. “You don’t want to,” she says, and it’s not a question. Oh god, oh god, what the hell is she doing?
“Slayer --”
“No, I’m just...” She gets up off the bed, and she can’t bring herself to look at him. God, she is such an idiot. “Let’s go steal an amulet.”
*
They end up at the Bellagio, which is about six million times nicer than their crappy little motel. Even the lobby is once of the fanciest room she’s ever been in.
“Why couldn’t we stay at this hotel?” she asks, staring up at this super-gorgeous glass sculpture mounted on the ceiling above them.
Spike laughs low, under his breath. “Maybe next time, love.”
Buffy’s never actually been in a casino before and the whole thing is kind of overwhelming. The floor is packed with people and tables and slot machines and it’s noisy and bright, bells clanging and lights flashing, and they’re only there for about five seconds before a waitress appears beside them with a couple of glasses of champagne.
Buffy takes one of the glasses and drinks it fast, trying not to feel self-conscious. It’s just that there are a lot of people and bright neon lights, and it’s sensory overload. Plus, it feels a little like she’s on a date with Spike, and he looks really nice and smells amazing.
It’s weird being with him like this, especially after the whole kissing-and-then-not thing at the motel, but Spike doesn’t seem bothered by it, so Buffy forces herself to get over it. They need to find the amulet and get out; mooning over Spike and whatever weird, crazy issues they have isn’t going to help.
Willow gave them a picture of the amulet guy before they left, but Buffy doesn’t see him anywhere in the crushing mass of people around her, so she loops her arm through Spike’s, letting him take the lead as they search the casino.
Waitresses keep taking her empty glasses and handing her new ones and, by the time she and Spike make it through all the slot machines and the roulette tables and over to where people are playing cards, Buffy’s feeling pretty drunk, but in this really great way. Like, all of the neon is sort of pretty, and the sound of people winning things is exhilarating, and she can't seem to stop touching Spike. Even through the fabric of his suit, his muscles feel hard and smooth, and the rejection from earlier is already hazy, the alcohol and the lights making everything seem sort of soft and distant.
For his part, Spike drinks just as much champagne as she does, but he seems to be completely sober, not at all distracted by the craziness around them, which is totally unfair. Stupid vampires.
They finally spot their guy at one of the blackjack tables. He’s dressed in a shiny, too tight suit, his hair in a slicked-back mullet, and they just watch him from afar. He’s got what looks like the right amulet around his neck and he keeps smacking waitresses on the ass and hitting on anything with breasts. Gross.
She and Spike just hang back and try to blend in, watching the mage gamble and accost unsuspecting women, which happens pretty much anytime a waitress gets within five feet of him. Ugh, why are the bad guys always such skeeves?
“Okay, Slayer,” Spike says after a couple of minutes, nudging her in the guy’s direction. “Go do your thing.”
“What? What thing? What am I supposed to do?” she asks, digging in her heels and turning back towards Spike. “Kick his ass?”
“No, don’t kick his ass,” Spike says, in this voice like she’s a complete moron. “We’re supposed to be subtle, yeah? Distract him.”
“Distract him?” she repeats incredulously. Between the lights and the sounds of the slots and the champagne, everything feels kind of confusing and unreal, and she’s not sure she’s up for much in the way of sneakiness or stealth right now. “How?”
“I dunno,” he shrugs. “Flirt with him a bit.”
“Ew, gross,” Buffy says, smacking him on the arm. “No way. You flirt with him.”
“Think you’re more his type, love,” Spike says. Across the room, the creepy mage slaps another blonde waitress on the ass. Yuck.
“Ugh. Fine.” She knocks back the last of her champagne and then hands Spike the empty glass. “But you better have my back.”
“Always, Slayer,” Spike says, and then gives her a little shove in the direction of their guy.
She goes and sidles up next to him, trying to figure out how she's going to get the amulet without causing a scene. He keeps staring at her breasts and he puts his gross, slimy hand on her arm, and she tries to look in his eyes and not at the amulet that’s glinting around his neck. She’s not sure where Spike is, but she knows he’s out there on the floor somewhere, which makes her feel better.
The mage laughs in her ear, his breath hot and sticky and disgusting, and she has to keep reminding herself that she needs to do this if Willow is ever going to forgive her for real.
Finally, she’s had about as much as she can take, so she gives the guy a suggestive look and trails her fingers down his arm, moving off towards one of the hallways off the main floor. They’re in a deserted part of the hallway when the mage puts his hand on her ass, and low profile or not, Buffy grabs his arm and slams him to the ground, his body hitting the floor with a loud enough thud that she’s pretty sure people on the floor could hear it. Luckily, the mage is pretty weak for someone who’s supposed to be so powerful, because he’s out by the time he hits the floor. One of the upsides to no magic, she guesses: ancient evil warlocks tend to get reduced to nothing more than weak, creepy old men without their mojo to back them up.
Buffy’s got the amulet in her hands by the time Spike shows up. She tosses him the necklace, and he slips it into his pocket, somehow still managing to look casual and cool despite the fact that they're standing over a unconscious body.
“Christ, Slayer. We were supposed to keep a low profile,” he says.
A crowd is starting to gather not too far from them, burly security looking guys pushing their way towards her and Spike.
“He tried to grope me!” she says, giving the guy a kick for good measure.
Spike rolls his eyes, but he’s smiling at her, looking impressed.
The security guards are talking into their earpieces, moving faster towards them, so Spike grabs her hand and pulls her down a deserted hallway.
Buffy has no idea where they’re going, but she follows Spike down a few more hallways, and then they’re suddenly at a door, and then they’re in the parking lot, just a few rows away from Spike’s weird dad car.
The lot is quiet, no cops or angry security guys or anything, but Buffy keeps her hand in his as they make their way to the car under the bright neon lights of the city.
*
They make it just past the California border before the sun starts to peek over the mountains, and Spike pulls over at the first roadside motel he sees.
The place they end up in is even worse than the one in Vegas, but it’s the only thing for miles, and it’s already bright enough that Spike has to make a mad dash across the parking lot so that he doesn’t go up in flames.
Buffy does the luggage thing again and then meets Spike right outside the office, taking the key from him so that he can focus on keeping himself non-dusty.
The room has two beds, which makes Buffy feel a completely inappropriate surge of disappointment. After all, it’s not like their last sharing a bed experience did anything but freak both of them out, and she’s got about a million other things she should be worrying about, including how likely it is that this ridiculously ugly amulet is going to do what it’s supposed to, and whether Severin or any other the other baddies after her are going to try to kill her again any time soon. Sleeping arrangements should be the least of her concerns.
“You okay?” Spike asks, looking worried. Buffy realizes she’s just standing in the middle of the room, staring off into nothingness.
“What if it doesn’t work?” she finally says, and she’s surprised by how her voice comes out, small and lost.
“What if what doesn’t work?” Spike says, kicking off his shoes and loosening his tie.
“The amulet.” She holds the necklace tight in her fist, hard enough that the edges of the stone feel like they’re cutting into her palm. “What if it doesn’t work and Willow doesn’t stop hating me?”
“Then she’s an idiot.”
“Big help.” Buffy rolls her eyes. “I’m serious.”
Spike shrugs, looking unconcerned. “You’ll fix the sodding seed or you won’t. Either way, Red’ll get over it eventually.”
“And what if she doesn’t?” Buffy sits down on one of the beds, dropping the amulet next to her, and covering her face with her hands. Why is her life always such a mess?
“Hey,” Spike says, sitting next to her, close enough so that his hip bumps up against hers. “It’s gonna be okay, pet. Even if the amulet’s a bust, we’ll figure something else out, right?"
Buffy just shrugs and looks down at her hands.
“Besides,” he says, bumping his shoulder against hers and smiling a little. “You and me have a pretty good track record when it comes to ugly, magical baubles, yeah? Seem to recall the two of us fixing things right up back in old Sunnyhell with something that looked a lot like this, once upon a time.”
Buffy lets out half-laugh, half-sob and leans into him, pressing her cheek against his arm. It’s just that she tries not to think too much about that last time, in the Hellmouth; thinking about it makes her feel kind of giddy and kind of terrible, and it’s just easier not trying to figure it out.
After just a second, Spike moves his arm so that she can lean closer, and Buffy slides over gratefully while he wraps his arm around her. She presses her face against his chest, one hand holding on to one of his lapels. The fabric of his suit is surprisingly soft against her cheek and the cologne he was wearing earlier has worn off a little, so that he smells more like himself.
“Do you think I’m a screw-up?” she finally asks. She hates the she sounds, sad and needy and pathetic.
He huffs out a laugh, just a puff of cool breath against the top of her hair, and then leans down so that he can see her face. “No, pet,” he says, and he sounds so sincere that Buffy feels like she might cry. “I think you’re amazing.”
She kisses him then, one hand still holding on to the amulet, the other hand clutching one of his lapels. And she waits for him to pull back like he did before, but he doesn’t and she doesn’t, so she traces his lips with her tongue, nipping at his lower lip until he opens his mouth. The room around them is quiet and dark, and Buffy lets go of the amulet, moving so that she straddles his lap, her knees pressing against the sharp bones of his hips. He’s hard underneath her, and she slides the jacket off his shoulders, running her fingers over the soft, silky fabric of his shirt.
Spike's touching her in this way that's almost hesitant -- like he's waiting for her to stop him at any moment -- but it's still completely amazing, and Buffy wishes the two of them could just stay like this forever, touching each other in the dark in a nameless motel in the middle of nowhere.
He’s got his hand under the hem of her dress, trailing his clever fingers up her thighs, when Buffy pulls back just a little. It’s not that she wants to stop -- she definitely, definitely doesn’t want to stop -- but she also doesn’t want this to be just about pity or weakness or one of the million other horrible things it could be about.
“Are you sure about this?” she asks, not sure if she can handle it if he says no. It’s just that her life these past few months has just been a string of one disappointment after another, and she needs to be prepared if her heart's going to be broken again. For a few beats he doesn't say anything, just watches her, his eyes staring hard into hers, and Buffy's stomach flips, this horrible feeling like maybe she waited too long, like maybe he's not willing to do this again. But then the corner of his mouth turns up in a half-smile and he reaches up to brush a strand of stray hair out of her face.
“Always, Slayer,” he finally says, and he kisses her again, cool and insistent.
Buffy smiles against his mouth, and starts to unbutton his shirt, relishing the feel of his cool skin against hers. It’s familiar and perfect, and it’s everything she’s been wanting since he showed up in that absurd bug ship of his all those months ago, alive and as annoying as ever.
*
They both manage to get a couple of hours of sleep, but by the time sunset rolls around they’re awake again, lying together in the pale light of the motel room.
When Buffy wakes up, Spike is behind her, tracing indecipherable shapes on her skin, his fingers trailing over her breasts and her belly, her skin humming with the contact. She pushes back against him, pressing as close to him as she can. He’s hard against the small of her back, and she arches against him as he drags his fingers lower and lower, making her gasp.
She shifts slightly so that he can push into her, and she gasps when he slides into her, fairly easy even at the awkward angle. He’s still touching her, slow and lazy, his arm resting on her hip.
They’re moving together, unhurried and gentle, and Buffy closes her eyes as Spike presses soft kisses on her shoulder blades, his tongue tracing indelible patterns on her skin, and whispering words she can’t quite make out. He starts moving faster, shifting so that he’s hitting her just right, and then he drags his teeth across her neck, right at her pulse point, and shuddering and arching back into him. He wraps his arm around her tighter, and bucks into her, groaning and gasping, his arm pressing against her hip so hard that Buffy thinks it might leave a bruise.
After a few seconds he rests his forehead against the back of her neck. She can feel him smiling against her, and it sucks that they ever have to go back to the real world.
“I missed that,” he says, still breathing hard in that strangely human way of his.
“Yeah,” she says. “Me too.” The room’s dark, all traces of sunlight gone, and Spike pushes himself up, resting on one elbow as he nods towards the window.
“You about ready to go, pet?”
Buffy sighs and rolls over so that she’s on her back, looking up at him in the dark light of the room. His hair’s a mess, sleep-mussed and standing up every which way. She can see the amulet on the table next to the bed. It looks ordinary and like it’s not going to fix anything at all.
“No,” she says, and he gives her a sleepy half-smile. "Do you think this will work? Really?" she asks quietly. It’s just…she’s pinning a lot on this. Like if this stupid amulet thing works out, maybe last year wasn’t as big of a disaster as she thought.
Spike shrugs. "Don’t see why not," he says, which isn't particularly comforting.
Buffy doesn't respond, just reaches out to run her fingers across the smooth stone of the necklace on the nightstand, and Spike watches her quietly.
“C’mon,” he finally says, pressing a cool kiss against her lips, and then reaching down to take her hand, pulling her up with him as he gets out of the bed.
They get dressed, neither one of them saying anything, but the silence is comforting somehow, not like it was before, awkward and fraught and full of tension.
When they get in the car, Spike loops the amulet around the rearview mirror, giving Buffy a half-smile as they leave the parking lot, and coming to a stop before he pulls on to the highway.
“Ready, pet?” he asks again. Ahead of them, the highway is dark and empty, and it seems to stretch out forever.
Buffy takes a breath and looks at the amulet. It catches the hard fluorescent lights of the parking lot, the light bouncing off it, making it look magical and unreal. “Yeah,” she says, giving him a smile and then looking out at the open road ahead of them. “Let’s go.”
*
end
Fandom/pairing: Buffy the Vampire Slayer; Buffy/Spike
Rating: R
Words: 9,459
Summary: Buffy and Spike take a road trip to Vegas. Takes place in season 9, sometime after Freefall #4.
*
According to Willow, the key to restoring the Seed of Wonder belongs to an ancient warlock living in Las Vegas.
“Vegas?” Buffy asks. It’s just that the whole Las Vegas thing seems more for bachelor parties and ill-advised elopements than it does for warlocks holding the key to what might be the universe’s most recent slayer-instigated disaster. “Really? Like with the showgirls and the fake Elvises and the gambling?”
“That’s the one,” Willow says with a nod. “Apparently centuries-old, super-powerful mages like the slots.”
They’re out on Mission Street, doing a kind-of patrol, but mostly just talking and enjoying the walk, while Spike skulks fifty-feet behind them, being his generally annoying self.
“And this amulet thing is going to help you get the magic back?” she asks. Behind them, Spike sighs, loud enough for them to hear. Like this whole conversation is just incredibly exhausting for him to have to eavesdrop on.
“That’s the plan,” Willow says, sounding chipper as she studiously ignores Spike. “Get the amulet, try some mojo, and presto-change-o, all is right with the world. Or, at least, that’s what I hope will happen.”
Buffy's still not exactly sure how she feels about Willow's constant desperation to have her fix the seed, but Vegas does seem pretty cool -- gambling and alcohol and no snooping homicide detectives or freaky energy sucking-guys trying to kill her. Probably.
“Anyway, I was thinking maybe Spike could go,” Willow says, dropping her voice to a low whisper and nodding her head slightly in Spike’s direction. “I know he’s got some contacts in Vegas and I figured it might get him out of your hair for a while.”
Wait -- Spike? Buffy thought she was going to go. Why does Spike get to have all the fun? She’s about to ask Willow that very question when Spike jogs up next to them, taking his distant-stalker routine and making it up close and personal.
“Vegas, eh?” he says, grinning and slinging an arm around Buffy’s shoulders. She knows she should shrug him away, but instead she just glares at him and ignores the way that his sudden closeness makes her stomach do this weird flipping thing. “Sounds good. When do we leave?”
*
Buffy’s got Thursday and Friday off, so she and Spike plan to leave Wednesday, just after sundown. According to Spike, that will give them enough to time to get to Vegas, steal the amulet, and be back in town before her breakfast shift at the Pick Me Up on Saturday morning. Which is fine by Buffy. She figures three days alone with Spike is pretty much her limit anyway.
Dawn calls when she’s packing, to ask if Buffy wants to do a margaritas-and-movie girls' night thing on Thursday.
“Sorry, Dawnie,” she says, throwing a pair of jeans into her bag. “No can do.”
“Why not?” Dawn demands.
“I’m going to Vegas with Spike,” she says, distractedly. Willow told her she needed to bring at least one nice dress, so Buffy’s trying to find this red halter thing Dawn helped her pick out last year for a blind date that never was.
“Buffy!” Dawn gasps. “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me you guys were back together. Give me all the details. Was it that night at your place? The housewarming party? Because you guys seemed kind of all over each other for a while there and -“
“What?!” Buffy says. She still isn’t totally sure what happened that night, but she’s pretty sure it wasn’t sex with Spike. Mostly because she woke up the next day just feeling tired and weird and not at all satisfied, and, geez, maybe she shouldn’t gauge her still-unknown sexual encounters by satisfaction level? Ugh, what has happened to her life?
“It’s okay, Buff,” Dawn says, breaking Buffy out of her shame spiral. “It was bound to happen sooner or later.”
“What?” Buffy says again. “No, that’s not -- No. We’re not back together. And nothing happened with Spike that night,” she says firmly, ninety-five percent sure she’s telling the truth.
“Oh,” Dawn says, sounding strangely disappointed. “So what’s with the road-tripping to Sin City, then?”
Buffy sighs and grabs a handful of underwear from her top drawer, shoving it into the bag. “Slayer business. Willow needs some amulet, and Spike needs some back-up, and I some vacation, so. I figure a couple hours in a car with Spike is a small price to pay for a few days off.”
Dawn’s silent for just long enough to make Buffy nervous. “You do know how long it takes to get to Vegas from here, right?” she finally asks.
“A couple of hours.” Buffy shrugs and rustles through her closet, finally finding the dress crammed onto a hanger near the back.
“Try, like, ten,” Dawn says, and it sounds like she’s trying not to laugh.
“Oh,” Buffy says, stopping what she’s doing with her one fancy dress clutched in one hand as she contemplates twenty hours stuck in a car with Spike, probably forced to listen to some horrible punk band from forty years ago and lectures about the new big bad and how Buffy needs to focus less on coffee-serving and more on demon-slaying.
Well, whatever. She’s going. They’ll probably just drive at night anyway, so. She can catch up on her sleep at least. She shrugs and tosses the dress into her bag, zipping it closed decisively.
*
Spike pulls up to her apartment right after sundown, in a bizarrely normal-looking black Ford sedan. It’s got four doors and cloth seats, the type of car dads drive, not badass vampires out to save the world.
“Where’d you get this thing?” Buffy asks, pulling open the passenger door and slinging her bag in the backseat.
“Stole it after I drained the owner dry,” Spike says casually, shrugging back against the sensible tan upholstery. He’s wearing his standard leather duster-t-shirt-jeans combo, a half-smoked cigarette perched in the corner of his mouth. His skin looks luminescent in the lights of the dashboard, lit up with just a touch of green.
Buffy scoffs. “Yeah right,” she says, settling in beside him and fastening her seatbelt as he pulls away from the curb. The interior of the car smells strange, this mix of new-car smell and Spike-smell -- leather and tobacco and ash.
For some reason, Spike doesn’t have any music on, so it’s bizarrely quiet in the car, just the sound of the air conditioner running and the low, quiet hum of the engine.
The silence gets to her after just a couple of seconds, so Buffy starts fiddling with the air conditioner, turning it so that the vents only half-blow on her. That takes about three seconds, so she starts messing with the radio next, turning it on and scanning through the stations until she finds a Kelly Clarkson song that she likes. As soon as she moves her hand away from the radio, Spike reaches out and presses button for the CD player. Loud, horrible, thirty year-old punk music blasts from the speakers.
“Ugh. What the hell, Spike?” she asks, reaching for the radio again. Spike’s too quick though, and he grabs her wrist before she can press any of the buttons.
“I’m not listening to insipid girly pop for the next ten hours,” he tells her. His skin is cold, and it sends an involuntary shiver throughout her body.
“Well, I’m not listening to the Sex Guns or whatever for the next ten hours,” Buffy snaps back, tugging at her arm so he’ll let her go. Instead of easing up, he tightens his fingers on her wrist.
They stay like that for a few beats, neither one of them moving. Spike breaks first, loosening his grip on her and turning back to focus on the road.
“Fine,” he says, and Buffy feels a brief surge of victory as he sets her arm back down in her lap. But then he reaches back into the backseat, rustling around blindly until he finally pulls out a beat-up looking CD book. “Pick something from here.”
Buffy sighs as she takes the binder. She doubts she’s going to find anything in there that she wants to listen to, but she flips through it anyway, just so that she has something to do other than argue with Spike about which one of them has worse taste in music.
The book’s basically filled cover to cover, but all of the CDs are burned copies with either no labels at all or hand-written labels scribbled in Sharpie in Spike’s impossible to read Victorian-era script.
“What does this one say?” she asks, holding up one of the labeled ones. It looks like it says The…Phanrad (maybe?), but it’s hard to tell because the writing on it is completely illegible. But the CD itself looks new-ish -- or, at least, not nearly as wrecked as most of the others.
Spike looks over at her and squints at the writing, trying to make it out in the dim light. “The Damned? Or, wait,” he leans even closer, squinting at the disc and taking his eyes off the road long enough that Buffy’s sure they’re going to die in a fiery crash. “The…Clash, maybe?”
“Great,” Buffy mutters, shaking her head. Neither one of those bands sounds particularly appealing, so she slips the disc back in its slot. She sighs and flips through a couple more pages, not finding anything that looks remotely listenable.She makes it all the way through the book, and comes up empty.
“All of these suck,” she tells him, closing the binder with a snap and tossing it into the back seat.
“They do not!” Spike says, sounding legitimately offended.
“They do too,” Buffy says. Ugh, this road trip is terrible; they’re only thirty minutes in and they can’t even agree on the freaking music.
Spike sighs and reaches for the radio, flipping around until he lands on something that sounds vaguely familiar to Buffy, the kind of music her parents used to listen to when she was a kid.
“You’re going with the oldies channel?” she demands, reaching out for the radio again.
Spike swats her hand away lightly. “Leave it,” he says. “Or we’re going back to the CDs.”
“Fine,” Buffy sighs, but then a Beach Boys song comes on and she feels herself smile, tapping her foot to the beat of the song, the music cheerful and comforting and full of nostalgia.
*
The route Spike chooses is actually pretty cool, all winding mountain roads and scenic, nature-filled vistas. Even though it’s dark out and she can’t actually see much of the scenery, the stars are really pretty, bright and everywhere above them, twinkling away in the night sky.
“Why aren’t we taking the freeway?” she asks after an hour of twisting roads and tiny, one-stoplight towns.
“Traffic,” Spike says, which seems like it might be a lie because it’s eleven o’clock on a Wednesday night, but Buffy doesn’t call him on it. Mostly because the drive is kind of nice, soothing and star-filled and not filled with the angry, crazy drivers that do seem to be on the I-5 pretty much any time of day.
“So,” Spike says, after a few minutes. “How’s Richie Rich? Still trying to kill you and steal all your power?”
Buffy just shrugs. She’s not really in the mood to talk to Spike about Severin right now. Or ever, actually.
“Why haven’t you taken care of him yet?” Spike continues, apparently not satisfied with Buffy’s let’s-not-talk-about-it approach. “You know, give ‘em the old stake to the heart?”
Buffy takes a breath and counts silently to ten. “Because he’s human and that would be wrong,” she says in her calmest, most polite, best dealing-with-Spike voice. “Besides, I tried that and it didn’t work, remember?”
“Not sure what you saw in him anyway.” Spike sounds petulant, and like he’s been waiting to bring this up for a while. Fabulous.
“I don’t know,” Buffy shrugs. “He seemed nice.”
“Nice,” Spike snorts.
Buffy does the silent counting thing again. She definitely isn’t in the mood for this, but she figures it’s got to happen at some point, so it may as well be now. “Yeah, well. All of my old friends currently hate me, and even Dawn and Xander aren’t so much with the helping these days, and Severin was into the whole slaying thing. Plus, he actually seemed to like me, so," she shrugs.
“I like you,” Spike says, sounding legitimately offended.
“I know. I just…” she trails off, not knowing how to explain it to him. That hanging out with someone who got the slaying thing, but who didn’t seem to know about all of her stupid, terrible decisions was just easier. Of course, deciding to hang out with him turned out to be just another one of her stupid, terrible decisions, but still.
Spike’s driving fast enough that she has brace her hand against the door, and she's holding onto the armrest so tightly that she’s worried she’s going to crack the plastic.
They go around a tight curve, and Spike jerks the wheel hard to the left. Even in the dim light of the car, Buffy can see the tension in his face, the muscles in his jaw twitching. “I mean, I know I’m not some rich trust fund git with a destructive magic streak, but I figured that might be worth something.”
“Oh my god,” she says. “Is that what this is about? You’re jealous?”
“Excuse me?”
“You’re jealous? Of Severin? Are you insane?” God, why does he always have to do this? Why can’t they just have a normal conversation, without Spike being all weirdo, possessive stalker on her? She thought they got over this part of their relationship about a million years ago.
“Don’t flatter yourself, Slayer,” Spike says, and his voice has taken on a dangerous edge, one she knows far too well. “Although I am a bit concerned that your new boyfriend could have destroyed both of us in a flash -- literally, might I add -- and you seem hardly bothered about it. Have you even tried to find him since that night in the warehouse?”
“God, Spike, shut up,” she snaps. Jesus Christ, she forgot how holier-than-thou he could get about everything. And, okay, yeah, maybe she should be looking more for Severin, but she still has no idea what he is or how much power she still has, and she did almost die the last time she faced off with him, so it's not like she's got no reason to take some time with this thing. “Your possess-o vamp routine got old about five years ago. And don’t even pretend this about anything other than your weird territorialism. Severin’s vanished, the vamps are feral, and I’ve got about a million other things to worry about between the cops, and the loan-collecting demons, and trying to figure out this seed thing. You know I’d never let him hurt you.”
Spike looks at her then, his head titled just a bit and his eyes serious, like he’s trying to decide if he believes her.
“You sure about that, Slayer?” he finally asks. His voice is quiet again and Buffy gets a sick feeling in her stomach, imagining what would happen if she’s wrong.
“Of course,” she says, but she doesn’t sound so sure, not even to herself. She tries as hard as she can not to think about that night in the warehouse, the look on Spike's face when Severin was draining him, the way her world felt like it had stopped in those horrible few seconds before Dowling showed up, how powerless she was to do anything but watch as Spike's life was being siphoned away.
Buffy stares blankly out the window, willing herself not to think about it, and Spike doesn't say anything else. He's still driving way too fast, but the road has leveled out at least. Outside the car, the little town has given way to forest, nothing but a dark black blur of trees rushing past, as far as the eye can see.
*
“I think something’s wrong with Xander,” Buffy says, forty-five minutes later. They’ve passed back into civilization, but neither one of them has said anything since their fight about Severin, and Buffy can’t stand another second of awkward silence.
Spike glances at her sidelong, looking a little wary. “And you’re just figuring this out now?”
“Ha ha,” she deadpans. “I’m serious. He and Dawn are acting all weird and, like, troubled.”
“So?” Spike shrugs. “Maybe they are troubled.”
“I don’t want them to be!” Buffy says, a little shriller than she means to. Spike looks at her out of the corner of his eye and she turns to stare out the window, avoiding his gaze. “They just seemed so happy, you know? And,” she shrugs. “I don’t know. It was nice. Thinking that at least someone could actually be happy, maybe even forever.”
“No one’s happy forever, Slayer,” Spike says, sounding old and very, very tired.
Buffy just looks out the window. She can make out vague shapes that she thinks might be houses, the buildings barely visible in the thin moonlight. On the radio, a new song starts up, Elvis singing about how he can’t help falling in love.
“Besides,” Spike adds a few seconds later, sounding flippant and more like himself. “Their whole thing is a bit creepy, innit?”
“What? No it’s not!”
“Oh, come on,” he says, rolling down the window and lighting a cigarette. “Harris used to babysit the Niblet, and now he’s shagging her? It’s right disturbing.”
“Ew, Spike,” she says, covering up her ears with her hands and willing herself not to think about Xander and Dawn doing…anything, basically. “Gross.”
“See?” he laughs and shakes his head. “Creepy.”
They both lapse into silence again, and Buffy tries really, really hard not to think about Xander and Dawn and any kind of shagging-type activities. Cool mountain air streams in through the half-open window and Buffy stares out into the darkness, vaguely wondering why nothing in her life ever seems to make sense.
*
By the time they stop for gas a couple of hours later, Buffy’s left leg has fallen completely asleep. It feels like pins and needles no matter how much she tries to wake it up, so she heads inside to stretch her legs while Spike fills up the tank.
When she gets in the store, she grabs a Diet Coke from the cooler in the back and then heads over to look at magazines. She picks up a copy of Cosmo, flipping through it as she stomps her feet, trying to get the feeling back in her legs.
She’s completely engrossed in one of those stupid love quizzes, when Spike suddenly appears in the aisle beside her, sidling silently up next to her and making her jump. Good thing her Slayer senses are so honed and sharp these days.
“Are You Obsessed With Your Ex?” he reads over her shoulder. Buffy can actually hear the smirk in his voice.
“What are you doing?” she asks, somehow managing to keep her voice steady. His breath is distractingly cool against her skin.
“Seeing if one of the questions is about tagging along with your ex on a road trip,” Spike says seriously, squinting down at the magazine.
Ugh, he is the worst. Buffy snaps the magazine closed and slaps him with it, the thwack as it connects with the side of his head sounding satisfyingly loud in the empty store.
He laughs and holds up one hand in surrender. He’s got a six-pack of beer in the other. “No need for violence, pet.”
“Shut up, Spike,” she says, but he’s already walking away, striding up to the counter, his stupid leather coat swirling ridiculously under the flickering fluorescent lighs. Buffy sighs and follows him to the front of the store.
“You’re not planning on drinking those on the drive, are you?” she demands, putting her magazine and soda down on the counter so that they’re rung up with the gas and the beer.
The clerk raises her eyebrows but doesn’t say anything as Spike hands her a twenty.
“No Summers,” Spike says, in this voice like it’s using every ounce of patience he has to interact politely with her. “Although if you keep yammering at me, I might not be able to resist taking a nip or two.” He sounds annoyed, but he bumps his shoulder against hers and gives her a half-smile.
Buffy rolls her eyes, but she’s smiling for some reason as she bumps him back. The clerk smirks at them as she hands Spike his change.
*
The road they take in to Vegas is full of bright lights and big hotels and laughing tourists, people looking like they're having fun even at six in the morning.
As she watches all the glitz and glamour zooming by, Buffy can't help but hope that Willow managed to finagle them a spot at some super-luxe hotel, one of the places with giant fountains or roller coasters or fake Eiffel Towers. A couple of days in a posh hotel is just what she needs.
So of course she and Spike end up pulling over at some sketched-out rattrap motel a couple of blocks off the strip.
The place looks like one of those motels from the old horror movies she used to watch as a kid, the kind where serial killers live with their dead mothers and stab unsuspecting blonde women in the shower. The parking lot is packed, mostly with giant semis and rusted out station wagons, but Spike finds a spot close to the front office. He makes a quick dash inside while Buffy busies herself getting their bags out of the car.
She’s waiting on the sidewalk next to the office when Spike comes out a few minutes later, and he sticks close to the wall as she follows him to their room. The dawn light’s gone from gray to orange, a few errant beams of sunlight peeking over the horizon.
The room’s small, and the green shag carpeting looks dingy and ancient. The whole place smells gross and damp, like mildew and cigarette smoke, and there’s only one bed. Of course. Because Buffy’s life isn’t complicated enough.
“Um,” she says, still standing outside the room in the ever-brightening morning light. Her heart feels like it’s beating way too fast for some reason. “Where’s the other bed?”
“Mind the sunlight, would you Slayer?” Spike says instead of answering, edging away from the stray light that’s started creeping into the room. He sounds about as tired as she feels, and Buffy suddenly feels ridiculous for making such a big deal out of this. So it’s just one bed. Big deal. She and Spike can sleep in the same bed without it being some big thing, right? Yeah. Right. Definitely.
But then, once they’re both inside, the bed looks even smaller, and the room is actually really tiny, and Buffy starts to feel claustrophobic and panicky.
Spike, of course, seems totally fine with the situation, sitting on the far side of the bed and kicking his boots off. He’s not paying any attention to her, so she grabs her bag and makes a beeline for the bathroom.
Once she’s in there, she feels a lot less freaked out, her heart slowing down to something like its normal speed. The bathroom is incredibly small and grungy, chipped tiles and mildew on the shower curtain, but there’s running water and what look like clean towels, so Buffy figures she shouldn’t complain too much.
She showers until the hot water runs out and her skin is pink and raw. When she steps out of the tub and turns off the water, she can still hear Spike moving around in the other room, the low murmur of the television coming clearly through the cheap motel door.
Thinking about going out there makes her heart do the racing thing again, so she busies herself searching through her bag for pajamas. For some reason, she decided to pack just a pair of skimpy pink Eeyore pajama shorts and a thin white tank top to wear to bed. Great.
She finishes drying off and then gets dressed, surveying the damage in the fogged up mirror. Ugh, she feels like a slutty twelve-year-old.
Buffy closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. Okay, she’s just a little punchy and over-tired. She looks neither slutty nor like a twelve-year-old, right? Right. She looks like a totally normal adult person about to go to sleep. In the same bed as her still super-hot, super-annoying ex-boyfriend. Who, if she remembers right, really likes to sleep naked. Which. Whatever. She’s not going to think about that right now. She scrubs the towel across her face again and then rustles through her bag for her toothbrush.
By the time she makes it out of the bathroom, Spike’s pulled the curtains closed and is sitting on the far side bed. He’s taken his boots off and his feet are very, very pale, white and strong against the tacky paisley bedspread.
The room is dark except for the flickering blue light of the television, and the shadows make the sharp lines of his face look even harsher than normal. He’s got a beer in one hand, and the rest of the six-pack is sitting on the little bedside table next to him.
Buffy stands in the open doorway to the bathroom, letting her eyes adjust to the dark and trying to figure out the quickest, easiest way to get into the bed. There aren’t many options, so she finally just sucks it up and slides into bed next to Spike, being careful to avoid any unnecessary contact. She ends up laying on the covers next to him and, to his credit, he only smirks when he sees what she’s wearing. Which for Spike is practically Olympian-level restraint.
“Fancy a drink, love?” he asks, holding out the bottle to her once she settles in next to him. He sounds amused, like he knows exactly how disconcerting this whole situation is for her, and it’s completely hilarious to him.
She’s going to say no, but she’s feeling a little keyed up, and maybe a drink wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, so: “Okay, yeah.”
He raises his eyebrows and looks surprised, but passes her the bottle without comment.
“Thanks,” she says, and takes a long pull from the bottle. The beer is dark and bitter and warm, not at all what she would normally drink. Still, though, it’s sort of comforting somehow, and it gives her something to do with her hands.
Spike’s watching an old sitcom with a laugh track, something with two girls and a guy who looks weirdly like that robot her mom dated a million years ago. There are misunderstandings and bell-bottoms, and Buffy gets confused with the storyline after about five minutes, the beer making her feel dizzy and out of sorts.
By the time she helps Spike finish off another beer, she can barely keep her eyes open. She puts the empty bottle on the rickety bedside table next to her and then pushes the bedspread back so that she can slide down under the covers.
“Want me to turn this off?” Spike asks, nodding at the TV, his voice low and quiet. Even though he doesn’t have any body heat, Buffy’s skin feels warm in all the places it’s close to his. Like the air is different when he’s there, this warm buzz, the crackle of static and electricity she can feel all throughout in her body.
“No,” she says softly, closing her eyes and snuggling down into the cheap, scratchy sheets. Her bare foot is touching Spike’s leg and she flexes her toes against the soft, cool skin of his ankle. “You can leave it on.”
*
When Buffy wakes up, she’s pressed up close against Spike, his arm slung around her waist and his hand tucked under her hip. The air conditioner in the corner is whirring away and all the non-covered parts of her body are freezing.
She just lays there for a few seconds, her eyes closed as she relishes the feel of him against her.
She feels discombobulated, not sure if it’s day or night, if she's been asleep for ten minutes or ten hours, so she takes a few minutes to get her bearings. There’s some light coming from underneath the curtains on the other side of the room, orange and rosy, which doesn’t really tell her anything. The alarm clock is on the other side of the bed -- Spike’s side -- so she tries to move as quietly as she can to see it. It’s blocked by Spike’s giant head though, so she sighs and pushes herself up to see it, using his chest as leverage.
His body is still under her hand, no breathing in and out, something that should probably creep her out, but instead it’s kind of comforting for some reason. Their legs are still tangled together and, by the time the clock’s in view, Buffy is practically laying on top of him, his body hard underneath hers. Whatever pajama pants he’s wearing must be pretty thin because she can feel everything -- everything -- and she pauses right where she is, feeling him against her. Even though it’s freezing in the room and Spike’s skin is like ice, Buffy suddenly feels hot all over. It takes her a second before she can force herself to relax, trying to concentrate on something other than Spike’s body against hers.
Once she feels like she’s got herself under control, she leans over enough to see the clock. It’s only four-thirty, which means she can probably sleep for a few more hours if she wants. But when she starts to lie back down, glancing down at Spike as she does, he’s awake, blinking up at her in the dim light of the room.
“Hey,” he says, lifting his head and sounding groggy. He’s bare-chested and sleepy-eyed, his hair is sticking up every which way. He looks vulnerable and innocent and strangely human, and something in her chest tightens.
“Hi,” she says. Her voice comes out as a whisper, and Spike’s chest starts moving under her hand, up and down with unnecessary breaths. “I, um, I just wanted to see what time it was.” She’s still lying on top of him, and he shifts underneath her, their bodies moving together under the covers. She presses her hips against his without really thinking about it, trying to prolong the contact, and he closes his eyes, biting his lower lip.
“Buffy,” he says, quiet enough so that she can barely even hear him. Her heart is racing away, and she can’t bring herself to move away from him. After a couple of seconds, she slides her hand up his chest, trailing her fingers over his collarbone and up his neck. When she brushes her thumb across the corner of his mouth, he gives her what might be a kiss -- just a quick movement of his lips against her skin.
And, god, she just suddenly wants him so much, wants to press her body even closer against his, to get that feeling he always makes her feel, like they’re the only two people in the world, like nothing else matters.
It’s not until she kisses him that Buffy realizes what she’s doing, what all of this might mean, and then she’s practically leaping out of the bed, standing up fast enough so that she gets dizzy. “Um,” she says. Her is heart still skipping in her chest, and her fingers feel cool from his skin. “I should go.”
Spike he sits up, and the covers fall around his waist. He looks confused and hurt, and his chest is smooth and white and perfect-looking, and oh god, oh god, she needs to get out of there right now.
“Slayer?” he says, but she doesn’t respond, just grabs her bag and shuts herself in the bathroom, her whole body feeling tingly and hot.
In the mirror over the sink, she looks like a mess, her tank top all twisted and dark purple circles under her eyes. Once she runs a brush through her hair, throws on some jeans and a t-shirt, and does the face-washing-teeth-brushing thing, she looks somewhat presentable, not at all like someone who just jumped her ex and then freaked out on him.
The room’s still dark when she comes out of the bathroom, but she sees can see Spike sitting up, his pale white skin bright in the darkness. He looks upset and confused. “Buffy, I --”
“We should eat,” she says, cutting him off and looking anywhere other than at him. “I mean, you look kind of extra-pale and I’m starving and there’s probably a deli or a butcher nearby, right?” She grabs her boots and stumbles around the room, trying to put them on without sitting on the bed again. Distance from Spike and the bed is definitely of the good right now. “I’ll be back.”
*
Outside, it’s late afternoon, the sun blazing orange over the horizon, making the blackness of the asphalt shimmer with heat. Buffy has no idea where she’s going, but she sets off in the direction of all the neon, and she finds a deli just a block from their hotel. It’s kind of small and sketchy, but there’s a butcher counter in the back and they don’t even blink when she orders a quart of pig’s blood to go with her BLT.
When she gets back to the motel just after sunset, Spike is up and dressed in his normal clothes, sitting on top of the covers while he watches what looks like an episode of Dawson’s Creek. His hair is wet and a little curly, and the room smells like shampoo and cheap motel soap.
He doesn’t say anything when he sees her, just glances at her sidelong, looking wary.
Buffy sits on the bed next to him, careful to keep as much distance between them as possible, and hands him his blood. When their fingers brush, Buffy makes sure to look anywhere but at him, ignoring the way her skin hums at the contact. She and Spike watch the episode of Dawson's Creek while he drinks his blood and she eats her sandwich.
“It’s kind of sad that they didn’t end up together, don’t you think?” Buffy says after a couple of minutes, nodding at the screen where Dawson and Joey are talking, both of them looking sad and lost.
“Oh, don’t tell me you’re a Dawson girl,” Spike groans, shaking his head like he’s disappointed in her, like this is the worse thing he can imagine. He's finished his blood and his color's better, his skin looking brighter and more alive.
“No,” she says defensively. “I’m not a Dawson girl. It’s just…it’s sort of sweet, don’t you think? How fiercely he believes that he and Joey will be together, someday.” The truth is, Dawson reminds her of being sixteen, when her life wasn’t a complete disaster and soul mates seemed like more than just a teen-drama cliché.
Spike scoffs. “He’s a wanker.”
“It’s not like Pacey’s all that much better,” she says, staring hard at the TV and trying not to feel self-conscious. “He’s as big as a romantic as anyone. Just because he’s all witty and charming doesn’t make him so much better.”
Spike shakes his head. “You’re a lost cause, Summers,” he says, but he sounds like he’s teasing her. Onscreen, Pacey’s just bought Joey a wall, and, out of the corner of her eye, Buffy can see Spike watching her with a soft smile.
*
They watch two more episodes of the show, Spike keeping up a steady stream of commentary the whole time, before they realize they should probably get ready if they’re going to do what they’re actually in town to do.
Buffy ducks into the bathroom with her bag, hoping that her dress isn’t too horribly wrinkled after an entire day stuffed into a duffle bag. It’s kind of a mess, but she leaves it hanging while she takes a shower so the steam helps smooth out the worst of the wrinkles.
She does the blow-dry, make-up thing, and then puts on the dress. It’s not too wrecked looking, and it actually fits better than she remembered -- clingy and sexy but not in a skanky way -- but she can’t get the dress zipped all the way no matter how hard she tries.
When Buffy comes out of the bathroom, Spike’s sitting on the edge of the bed. He’s dressed in a slim-fitting black suit, with a black dress shirt underneath, and he looks…well. He looks really, really nice.
He stands up when she comes in the room, and, wow, the whole suit thing looks even nicer when he's on his feet. “You look beautiful,” he tells her, and he sounds almost absurdly sincere.
“Um,” she says, and her face feels like it’s on fire. “Thanks. Do you think you could…” she turns around and gestures at the unzipped dress.
Spike steps close to her, ghosting his hands over her shoulderblades and down to her back, and she can feel his unnecessary breath on her neck. It makes her break out in goosebumps. He tugs the zipper up slowly, his fingers trailing against her skin in this way that makes her catch her breath.
“Thanks,” she says once he’s finished, turning around to face him. She's pretty sure she’s blushing all over, and Spike is still standing incredibly close to her. With her heels on, they’re exactly the same height. She can feel the coolness of his breath against her lips.
“My turn,” Spike says, stepping even closer to her. Buffy feels her eyes go wide, and she’s not really sure what he’s suggesting, but his voice has taken on this dirty-innuendo tone and…um. It takes her a few seconds for her to realize that he’s holding a red silk tie -- one that's practically the same color as her dress -- in his hand. “Help a fellow out, would you, Slayer.”
Buffy blinks and shakes her head, trying to get her bearings. “Uh. Okay. Yeah.”
Buffy takes the tie from Spike and loops it gently around his neck, pulling up his collar so that she can get the tie to lay flat. It takes her a few tries before she remembers exactly how to loop and knot the fabric in the right direction, but Spike stays quiet and still the whole time she’s working. Her knuckles keep brushing up against the bare skin on his neck, and he does this quick inhaling thing every time she makes contact. He smells nice, like soap and something a little stronger, and almost spicy -- cologne, she realizes.
Once she gets the tie situated, she smoothes it against his shirt, running her hand gently down his chest. His breath hitches in his throat and Buffy looks him in the eye. His pupils are dilated, so much that his eyes look almost black, and Buffy kisses him before she can stop herself, just a quick press of her lips against his. After just a second, Spike pulls back, stepping back so that there’s a least a foot of space between them.
“Buffy,” he says, and something in his voice makes her chest ache. “You don’t have to…”
And, just like, that she’s gone from wanting him to wanting to punch him. Ugh, why does he always have to make things so difficult?
“I know I don’t have to,” she snaps. “I want to.”
Spike gives her a strange look, like he feels sorry for her, like he’s trying to figure out what to say, and, oh. “You don’t want to,” she says, and it’s not a question. Oh god, oh god, what the hell is she doing?
“Slayer --”
“No, I’m just...” She gets up off the bed, and she can’t bring herself to look at him. God, she is such an idiot. “Let’s go steal an amulet.”
*
They end up at the Bellagio, which is about six million times nicer than their crappy little motel. Even the lobby is once of the fanciest room she’s ever been in.
“Why couldn’t we stay at this hotel?” she asks, staring up at this super-gorgeous glass sculpture mounted on the ceiling above them.
Spike laughs low, under his breath. “Maybe next time, love.”
Buffy’s never actually been in a casino before and the whole thing is kind of overwhelming. The floor is packed with people and tables and slot machines and it’s noisy and bright, bells clanging and lights flashing, and they’re only there for about five seconds before a waitress appears beside them with a couple of glasses of champagne.
Buffy takes one of the glasses and drinks it fast, trying not to feel self-conscious. It’s just that there are a lot of people and bright neon lights, and it’s sensory overload. Plus, it feels a little like she’s on a date with Spike, and he looks really nice and smells amazing.
It’s weird being with him like this, especially after the whole kissing-and-then-not thing at the motel, but Spike doesn’t seem bothered by it, so Buffy forces herself to get over it. They need to find the amulet and get out; mooning over Spike and whatever weird, crazy issues they have isn’t going to help.
Willow gave them a picture of the amulet guy before they left, but Buffy doesn’t see him anywhere in the crushing mass of people around her, so she loops her arm through Spike’s, letting him take the lead as they search the casino.
Waitresses keep taking her empty glasses and handing her new ones and, by the time she and Spike make it through all the slot machines and the roulette tables and over to where people are playing cards, Buffy’s feeling pretty drunk, but in this really great way. Like, all of the neon is sort of pretty, and the sound of people winning things is exhilarating, and she can't seem to stop touching Spike. Even through the fabric of his suit, his muscles feel hard and smooth, and the rejection from earlier is already hazy, the alcohol and the lights making everything seem sort of soft and distant.
For his part, Spike drinks just as much champagne as she does, but he seems to be completely sober, not at all distracted by the craziness around them, which is totally unfair. Stupid vampires.
They finally spot their guy at one of the blackjack tables. He’s dressed in a shiny, too tight suit, his hair in a slicked-back mullet, and they just watch him from afar. He’s got what looks like the right amulet around his neck and he keeps smacking waitresses on the ass and hitting on anything with breasts. Gross.
She and Spike just hang back and try to blend in, watching the mage gamble and accost unsuspecting women, which happens pretty much anytime a waitress gets within five feet of him. Ugh, why are the bad guys always such skeeves?
“Okay, Slayer,” Spike says after a couple of minutes, nudging her in the guy’s direction. “Go do your thing.”
“What? What thing? What am I supposed to do?” she asks, digging in her heels and turning back towards Spike. “Kick his ass?”
“No, don’t kick his ass,” Spike says, in this voice like she’s a complete moron. “We’re supposed to be subtle, yeah? Distract him.”
“Distract him?” she repeats incredulously. Between the lights and the sounds of the slots and the champagne, everything feels kind of confusing and unreal, and she’s not sure she’s up for much in the way of sneakiness or stealth right now. “How?”
“I dunno,” he shrugs. “Flirt with him a bit.”
“Ew, gross,” Buffy says, smacking him on the arm. “No way. You flirt with him.”
“Think you’re more his type, love,” Spike says. Across the room, the creepy mage slaps another blonde waitress on the ass. Yuck.
“Ugh. Fine.” She knocks back the last of her champagne and then hands Spike the empty glass. “But you better have my back.”
“Always, Slayer,” Spike says, and then gives her a little shove in the direction of their guy.
She goes and sidles up next to him, trying to figure out how she's going to get the amulet without causing a scene. He keeps staring at her breasts and he puts his gross, slimy hand on her arm, and she tries to look in his eyes and not at the amulet that’s glinting around his neck. She’s not sure where Spike is, but she knows he’s out there on the floor somewhere, which makes her feel better.
The mage laughs in her ear, his breath hot and sticky and disgusting, and she has to keep reminding herself that she needs to do this if Willow is ever going to forgive her for real.
Finally, she’s had about as much as she can take, so she gives the guy a suggestive look and trails her fingers down his arm, moving off towards one of the hallways off the main floor. They’re in a deserted part of the hallway when the mage puts his hand on her ass, and low profile or not, Buffy grabs his arm and slams him to the ground, his body hitting the floor with a loud enough thud that she’s pretty sure people on the floor could hear it. Luckily, the mage is pretty weak for someone who’s supposed to be so powerful, because he’s out by the time he hits the floor. One of the upsides to no magic, she guesses: ancient evil warlocks tend to get reduced to nothing more than weak, creepy old men without their mojo to back them up.
Buffy’s got the amulet in her hands by the time Spike shows up. She tosses him the necklace, and he slips it into his pocket, somehow still managing to look casual and cool despite the fact that they're standing over a unconscious body.
“Christ, Slayer. We were supposed to keep a low profile,” he says.
A crowd is starting to gather not too far from them, burly security looking guys pushing their way towards her and Spike.
“He tried to grope me!” she says, giving the guy a kick for good measure.
Spike rolls his eyes, but he’s smiling at her, looking impressed.
The security guards are talking into their earpieces, moving faster towards them, so Spike grabs her hand and pulls her down a deserted hallway.
Buffy has no idea where they’re going, but she follows Spike down a few more hallways, and then they’re suddenly at a door, and then they’re in the parking lot, just a few rows away from Spike’s weird dad car.
The lot is quiet, no cops or angry security guys or anything, but Buffy keeps her hand in his as they make their way to the car under the bright neon lights of the city.
*
They make it just past the California border before the sun starts to peek over the mountains, and Spike pulls over at the first roadside motel he sees.
The place they end up in is even worse than the one in Vegas, but it’s the only thing for miles, and it’s already bright enough that Spike has to make a mad dash across the parking lot so that he doesn’t go up in flames.
Buffy does the luggage thing again and then meets Spike right outside the office, taking the key from him so that he can focus on keeping himself non-dusty.
The room has two beds, which makes Buffy feel a completely inappropriate surge of disappointment. After all, it’s not like their last sharing a bed experience did anything but freak both of them out, and she’s got about a million other things she should be worrying about, including how likely it is that this ridiculously ugly amulet is going to do what it’s supposed to, and whether Severin or any other the other baddies after her are going to try to kill her again any time soon. Sleeping arrangements should be the least of her concerns.
“You okay?” Spike asks, looking worried. Buffy realizes she’s just standing in the middle of the room, staring off into nothingness.
“What if it doesn’t work?” she finally says, and she’s surprised by how her voice comes out, small and lost.
“What if what doesn’t work?” Spike says, kicking off his shoes and loosening his tie.
“The amulet.” She holds the necklace tight in her fist, hard enough that the edges of the stone feel like they’re cutting into her palm. “What if it doesn’t work and Willow doesn’t stop hating me?”
“Then she’s an idiot.”
“Big help.” Buffy rolls her eyes. “I’m serious.”
Spike shrugs, looking unconcerned. “You’ll fix the sodding seed or you won’t. Either way, Red’ll get over it eventually.”
“And what if she doesn’t?” Buffy sits down on one of the beds, dropping the amulet next to her, and covering her face with her hands. Why is her life always such a mess?
“Hey,” Spike says, sitting next to her, close enough so that his hip bumps up against hers. “It’s gonna be okay, pet. Even if the amulet’s a bust, we’ll figure something else out, right?"
Buffy just shrugs and looks down at her hands.
“Besides,” he says, bumping his shoulder against hers and smiling a little. “You and me have a pretty good track record when it comes to ugly, magical baubles, yeah? Seem to recall the two of us fixing things right up back in old Sunnyhell with something that looked a lot like this, once upon a time.”
Buffy lets out half-laugh, half-sob and leans into him, pressing her cheek against his arm. It’s just that she tries not to think too much about that last time, in the Hellmouth; thinking about it makes her feel kind of giddy and kind of terrible, and it’s just easier not trying to figure it out.
After just a second, Spike moves his arm so that she can lean closer, and Buffy slides over gratefully while he wraps his arm around her. She presses her face against his chest, one hand holding on to one of his lapels. The fabric of his suit is surprisingly soft against her cheek and the cologne he was wearing earlier has worn off a little, so that he smells more like himself.
“Do you think I’m a screw-up?” she finally asks. She hates the she sounds, sad and needy and pathetic.
He huffs out a laugh, just a puff of cool breath against the top of her hair, and then leans down so that he can see her face. “No, pet,” he says, and he sounds so sincere that Buffy feels like she might cry. “I think you’re amazing.”
She kisses him then, one hand still holding on to the amulet, the other hand clutching one of his lapels. And she waits for him to pull back like he did before, but he doesn’t and she doesn’t, so she traces his lips with her tongue, nipping at his lower lip until he opens his mouth. The room around them is quiet and dark, and Buffy lets go of the amulet, moving so that she straddles his lap, her knees pressing against the sharp bones of his hips. He’s hard underneath her, and she slides the jacket off his shoulders, running her fingers over the soft, silky fabric of his shirt.
Spike's touching her in this way that's almost hesitant -- like he's waiting for her to stop him at any moment -- but it's still completely amazing, and Buffy wishes the two of them could just stay like this forever, touching each other in the dark in a nameless motel in the middle of nowhere.
He’s got his hand under the hem of her dress, trailing his clever fingers up her thighs, when Buffy pulls back just a little. It’s not that she wants to stop -- she definitely, definitely doesn’t want to stop -- but she also doesn’t want this to be just about pity or weakness or one of the million other horrible things it could be about.
“Are you sure about this?” she asks, not sure if she can handle it if he says no. It’s just that her life these past few months has just been a string of one disappointment after another, and she needs to be prepared if her heart's going to be broken again. For a few beats he doesn't say anything, just watches her, his eyes staring hard into hers, and Buffy's stomach flips, this horrible feeling like maybe she waited too long, like maybe he's not willing to do this again. But then the corner of his mouth turns up in a half-smile and he reaches up to brush a strand of stray hair out of her face.
“Always, Slayer,” he finally says, and he kisses her again, cool and insistent.
Buffy smiles against his mouth, and starts to unbutton his shirt, relishing the feel of his cool skin against hers. It’s familiar and perfect, and it’s everything she’s been wanting since he showed up in that absurd bug ship of his all those months ago, alive and as annoying as ever.
*
They both manage to get a couple of hours of sleep, but by the time sunset rolls around they’re awake again, lying together in the pale light of the motel room.
When Buffy wakes up, Spike is behind her, tracing indecipherable shapes on her skin, his fingers trailing over her breasts and her belly, her skin humming with the contact. She pushes back against him, pressing as close to him as she can. He’s hard against the small of her back, and she arches against him as he drags his fingers lower and lower, making her gasp.
She shifts slightly so that he can push into her, and she gasps when he slides into her, fairly easy even at the awkward angle. He’s still touching her, slow and lazy, his arm resting on her hip.
They’re moving together, unhurried and gentle, and Buffy closes her eyes as Spike presses soft kisses on her shoulder blades, his tongue tracing indelible patterns on her skin, and whispering words she can’t quite make out. He starts moving faster, shifting so that he’s hitting her just right, and then he drags his teeth across her neck, right at her pulse point, and shuddering and arching back into him. He wraps his arm around her tighter, and bucks into her, groaning and gasping, his arm pressing against her hip so hard that Buffy thinks it might leave a bruise.
After a few seconds he rests his forehead against the back of her neck. She can feel him smiling against her, and it sucks that they ever have to go back to the real world.
“I missed that,” he says, still breathing hard in that strangely human way of his.
“Yeah,” she says. “Me too.” The room’s dark, all traces of sunlight gone, and Spike pushes himself up, resting on one elbow as he nods towards the window.
“You about ready to go, pet?”
Buffy sighs and rolls over so that she’s on her back, looking up at him in the dark light of the room. His hair’s a mess, sleep-mussed and standing up every which way. She can see the amulet on the table next to the bed. It looks ordinary and like it’s not going to fix anything at all.
“No,” she says, and he gives her a sleepy half-smile. "Do you think this will work? Really?" she asks quietly. It’s just…she’s pinning a lot on this. Like if this stupid amulet thing works out, maybe last year wasn’t as big of a disaster as she thought.
Spike shrugs. "Don’t see why not," he says, which isn't particularly comforting.
Buffy doesn't respond, just reaches out to run her fingers across the smooth stone of the necklace on the nightstand, and Spike watches her quietly.
“C’mon,” he finally says, pressing a cool kiss against her lips, and then reaching down to take her hand, pulling her up with him as he gets out of the bed.
They get dressed, neither one of them saying anything, but the silence is comforting somehow, not like it was before, awkward and fraught and full of tension.
When they get in the car, Spike loops the amulet around the rearview mirror, giving Buffy a half-smile as they leave the parking lot, and coming to a stop before he pulls on to the highway.
“Ready, pet?” he asks again. Ahead of them, the highway is dark and empty, and it seems to stretch out forever.
Buffy takes a breath and looks at the amulet. It catches the hard fluorescent lights of the parking lot, the light bouncing off it, making it look magical and unreal. “Yeah,” she says, giving him a smile and then looking out at the open road ahead of them. “Let’s go.”
*
end