Blood Price, Chapter 9
Blood Price
by Nan Dibble
Chapter 9: Cold (in progress: 9 a)
As Buffy descended the stairs the next morning, toweling her hair after a long, luxurious shower and thinking about all the things she had to get done for the party on Friday, she halted, hearing Dawn and Spike talking in the front room.
He hadn’t come back at all last night. He’d turned his phone off. Still sulking, she’d concluded.
She hadn’t decided how she should feel about that, which meant she felt annoyed and off-balance.
Dawn was explaining, “--a bargain we made. He doesn’t come here when, well, he’s eaten somebody.”
“That what it was, then.” Buffy could hear the shrug in Spike’s voice. “Just as well, then, I suppose. Ow! Leave off, Bit--”
“Sorry, but it’s your own fault. Hold still.”
“Not like it won’t mend on its own, day or so, doesn’t need tending--”
Having adjusted the belt of her robe to a dependable tightness, Buffy sauntered the rest of the way down, flying casual.
From the conversation, she’d expected to see Dawn tending the usual aftermath of a fight: skinned knuckles and the like. Instead, Dawn was kneeling on the couch next to Spike, intently slathering white cream on his very, very sunburned face that he turned in one direction, then another, irritably trying to avoid her attentions without actually stopping her, or leaving.
He has no defenses, Buffy found herself thinking. From Dawn, anyway, he’d put up with just about anything…which was more than he’d do for Buffy, she thought rancorously.
First, she laughed: he was red as a beet. Then that was overwhelmed by a rush of concern because the conspicuous damage could have been so much worse. Stupid vampire!
Leaning against the door arch, Buffy commented, “Overdid a little, did we?”
Spike’s head whipped around, streaked with cream and bright as a tomato: belatedly noticing her. His eyebrows were singed off, and the front of his hair had burned away, too. As his face began to change, he retorted, “Think this is funny, do you?”
“Quit that,” Dawn directed, laying two stiff, greasy fingers on the bridge of his nose, where the flesh was sliding into the corrugations of the vampire mask. “You’re only making it worse.”
“It itches,” Spike grumbled, turning away from them both, now in full sullen game-face.
Persisting, Dawn fingered up more cream from an indigo jar. “Spike, you got to quit doing this. First, explosions and smoke, and now this--”
As Dawn’s hand reached toward his throat, his patience broke and he bolted--into the hall and then up the stairs, three at a bound.
The sisters traded a look of accord that commented on stupid, stubborn vampires that forgot they were flammable. On the floor above, a door slammed. As Buffy swung around to the stairs in slower but relentless pursuit, Dawn called, “Don’t let Angel see.”
Or Spike would never hear the end of it: Buffy nodded understanding, still trying to decide what to feel toward her wayward vampire.
The shower was running. Buffy eased through the bathroom door. Although she shut it quietly behind her, he heard, smelled, knew, the way he nearly always did, and snarled from behind the undulant shower curtain, “Let me be. Took me by surprise, didn’t it? But not the first time I got singed and likely not the last neither. Nothing to get your knickers in a bunch about. Expect it looks worse than it is, Bit just goes all bossy--”
“You get hurt,” Buffy interrupted calmly, unbelting the robe and letting it fall, stepping over the mound of his discarded clothes, “and I inspect the damage. It’s how we do, remember?”
She pushed aside the curtain, got into the shower, and immediately regretted it: the water was frigid.
“Somebody used up all the hot,” Spike commented pointedly, his back to her, hands braced against the wall and his head bent against the tiles under the full of the spray.
His clothes had provided an instant’s protection: long enough for him to dive away from the full sunlight. But his back was mottled with burns, too--from shoulders to shins. It had, Buffy realized, been a near thing.
She touched the back of his neck and felt him flinch. “You know what will help that.” Actually, she was surprised he hadn’t gone for her the second she came into the bathroom.
“No. No need. I’m fed up well enough, don’t need that.”
“Maybe I do,” she countered, tugging carefully at his shoulder, trying to make him turn. “The bite’s gone numb, Spike. I can’t feel it. I think…I think it’s even healing.” Although she knew Spike loved warmth, he was indifferent to cold. Probably the icy water felt good on the burns. She endured it, shivering. “This is partly my fault. Willow told me, and I didn’t pass the warning along, not that you made it easy to tell you anything. And I got distracted, and forgot. Didn’t think it through, didn’t take it seriously enough. Willow knew you couldn’t channel. Something to do with your aura, I don’t know.” Buffy laid her cheek against his shoulder blade.
“Always knew it,” Spike muttered. “Always knew I’d get accustomed to the light, get careless, get burned. Just in a flash, it was, wasn’t looking for it….”
“It was something. Yesterday, when I wouldn’t…. Willow said you just shut down.”
“Oh,” he said in a tone of puzzled discovery. “Something like, I suppose…. Not your fault, pet. You weren’t to know, and I didn’t know how else to ask, everybody there and watching, not be crying wolf, like you told me once, never to do that again--”
It sank in, like the cold water Buffy didn’t really feel anymore, wasn’t even shivering, too distracted by the realization: yesterday in the kitchen, he’d really, truly needed her, a need as urgent as a mortal wound but too easily taken for an unimportant, untimely whim…and she hadn’t known it. Had flung away the nuisance without a moment’s consideration. Intent on her own concerns, she hadn’t heard him at all, hadn’t listened. Hadn’t cared.
“I need diagrams,” she blurted, shaking against his chest. So he’d turned, was holding her, carefully petting her back, smoothing her soaked hair away from her face. He’d turned the water off, too, she noticed dimly. It didn’t help: the cold had settled inward, turned to ice. “With arrows and large print. I need somebody to whack me and make me pay attention. I should know when things are important, and I don’t. And I do the same dumb things over and over again--!”
“Hush, now. Don’t fret yourself. Things are how they are. Don’t…don’t need you to be hovering, worrying about me--that’s what I have Bit for, innit? Just made me know…some things, is all. Made me stop and consider. An’ that’s good, yeah? Know what I’m doing, like. Know what’s needed and what’s not, the best way I can help now.” Guiding her out of the shower enclosure, enfolding her in a huge dry towel, Spike went on, “Here, you’re chilled to the bone, hothouse flower, you are, need the warm….”
Abruptly she lifted her head, looked him straight in the eyes. It was his human face…yet not. With the cream washed away, his sunburned features seemed one great radiant bruise, the browless, lashless blue eyes wide and surprised-seeming. “I need you to bite me. Right now. For--”
“No, pet. Not a good thing now.”
“For both of us. Do it!”
“You can’t afford--”
“Bite me!” Her fist was pounding against his chest. “What am I, that I can’t get a vampire to bite me?”
“What use,” Spike countered quietly, “is a vampire who won’t bite you?”
He stopped after that, as though it were a real question.
If it was, she couldn’t take it in or make sense of it. Vampires bit people. It’s what they did. What they were. Otherwise, there’d be no need of a Slayer.
She leaned into his embrace, let herself be held. Suddenly, she was exhausted and shuddering, feeling the only thing keeping her from shattering into a million pieces was Spike holding her together. “You’re what: a hundred and twenty-seven years old?”
“Something like that.”
“And I’m not. And right now, I feel that. I don’t understand, Spike. Tell me in simple words what you tried to tell me yesterday. I’ll try really, really hard to listen now.”
“Most of it…doesn’t need saying anymore,” Spike said after a few moment’s silence. They were rocking, just a little, back and forth. “Just how things are. When you go to Quor’toth, love, I’m not coming with you, is all.” As she gazed at him wildly, he went on, “Best if I take care of what I can, here, so you’ll have someplace to come back to.”
“But…but maybe we can never get back!”
“Know that.”
“But you can’t…can’t just abandon me!”
“No. Know you got issues about that, makes you think that way. But no. If I could, I’d stop Fudo, open you a fucking portal to Quor’toth, shove you through, lead you back. But I can’t. Need a mage, and I’m not that. Need a warrior, a Champion of the Powers, and I’m not that either. Besides, you already got one of those. Doesn’t love you like I do, but likely you’d get used to each other again over time.”
“No! I didn’t go through all this to be handed off to Mister bloody pigs’ blood like a door prize. Don’t you dare even think it!”
“Knew you wouldn’t like it. But you’ll come to see it’s for the best.”
“No! If you pull out, I’m not going either!”
“If you say so,” Spike rejoined, much too mildly. “You’ll let down your Watcher, who’s desperate to rescue his mage, and Angel, just as desperate to pull out this Destroyer, or whatever it is. ‘Course you will. If you say so.”
“You watch me! I won’t, and nobody can make me! Besides, when we really get down to it, you’ll come. You always come!”
“In one way of speaking, I surely do,” Spike said, trying to do his sexy eyebrow thing without any eyebrows, which didn’t work very well. Then the eyes in that alien face turned somber, resigned…knowing. “For the rest, the Slayer will decide.”
**********
(more to come)
by Nan Dibble
Chapter 9: Cold (in progress: 9 a)
As Buffy descended the stairs the next morning, toweling her hair after a long, luxurious shower and thinking about all the things she had to get done for the party on Friday, she halted, hearing Dawn and Spike talking in the front room.
He hadn’t come back at all last night. He’d turned his phone off. Still sulking, she’d concluded.
She hadn’t decided how she should feel about that, which meant she felt annoyed and off-balance.
Dawn was explaining, “--a bargain we made. He doesn’t come here when, well, he’s eaten somebody.”
“That what it was, then.” Buffy could hear the shrug in Spike’s voice. “Just as well, then, I suppose. Ow! Leave off, Bit--”
“Sorry, but it’s your own fault. Hold still.”
“Not like it won’t mend on its own, day or so, doesn’t need tending--”
Having adjusted the belt of her robe to a dependable tightness, Buffy sauntered the rest of the way down, flying casual.
From the conversation, she’d expected to see Dawn tending the usual aftermath of a fight: skinned knuckles and the like. Instead, Dawn was kneeling on the couch next to Spike, intently slathering white cream on his very, very sunburned face that he turned in one direction, then another, irritably trying to avoid her attentions without actually stopping her, or leaving.
He has no defenses, Buffy found herself thinking. From Dawn, anyway, he’d put up with just about anything…which was more than he’d do for Buffy, she thought rancorously.
First, she laughed: he was red as a beet. Then that was overwhelmed by a rush of concern because the conspicuous damage could have been so much worse. Stupid vampire!
Leaning against the door arch, Buffy commented, “Overdid a little, did we?”
Spike’s head whipped around, streaked with cream and bright as a tomato: belatedly noticing her. His eyebrows were singed off, and the front of his hair had burned away, too. As his face began to change, he retorted, “Think this is funny, do you?”
“Quit that,” Dawn directed, laying two stiff, greasy fingers on the bridge of his nose, where the flesh was sliding into the corrugations of the vampire mask. “You’re only making it worse.”
“It itches,” Spike grumbled, turning away from them both, now in full sullen game-face.
Persisting, Dawn fingered up more cream from an indigo jar. “Spike, you got to quit doing this. First, explosions and smoke, and now this--”
As Dawn’s hand reached toward his throat, his patience broke and he bolted--into the hall and then up the stairs, three at a bound.
The sisters traded a look of accord that commented on stupid, stubborn vampires that forgot they were flammable. On the floor above, a door slammed. As Buffy swung around to the stairs in slower but relentless pursuit, Dawn called, “Don’t let Angel see.”
Or Spike would never hear the end of it: Buffy nodded understanding, still trying to decide what to feel toward her wayward vampire.
The shower was running. Buffy eased through the bathroom door. Although she shut it quietly behind her, he heard, smelled, knew, the way he nearly always did, and snarled from behind the undulant shower curtain, “Let me be. Took me by surprise, didn’t it? But not the first time I got singed and likely not the last neither. Nothing to get your knickers in a bunch about. Expect it looks worse than it is, Bit just goes all bossy--”
“You get hurt,” Buffy interrupted calmly, unbelting the robe and letting it fall, stepping over the mound of his discarded clothes, “and I inspect the damage. It’s how we do, remember?”
She pushed aside the curtain, got into the shower, and immediately regretted it: the water was frigid.
“Somebody used up all the hot,” Spike commented pointedly, his back to her, hands braced against the wall and his head bent against the tiles under the full of the spray.
His clothes had provided an instant’s protection: long enough for him to dive away from the full sunlight. But his back was mottled with burns, too--from shoulders to shins. It had, Buffy realized, been a near thing.
She touched the back of his neck and felt him flinch. “You know what will help that.” Actually, she was surprised he hadn’t gone for her the second she came into the bathroom.
“No. No need. I’m fed up well enough, don’t need that.”
“Maybe I do,” she countered, tugging carefully at his shoulder, trying to make him turn. “The bite’s gone numb, Spike. I can’t feel it. I think…I think it’s even healing.” Although she knew Spike loved warmth, he was indifferent to cold. Probably the icy water felt good on the burns. She endured it, shivering. “This is partly my fault. Willow told me, and I didn’t pass the warning along, not that you made it easy to tell you anything. And I got distracted, and forgot. Didn’t think it through, didn’t take it seriously enough. Willow knew you couldn’t channel. Something to do with your aura, I don’t know.” Buffy laid her cheek against his shoulder blade.
“Always knew it,” Spike muttered. “Always knew I’d get accustomed to the light, get careless, get burned. Just in a flash, it was, wasn’t looking for it….”
“It was something. Yesterday, when I wouldn’t…. Willow said you just shut down.”
“Oh,” he said in a tone of puzzled discovery. “Something like, I suppose…. Not your fault, pet. You weren’t to know, and I didn’t know how else to ask, everybody there and watching, not be crying wolf, like you told me once, never to do that again--”
It sank in, like the cold water Buffy didn’t really feel anymore, wasn’t even shivering, too distracted by the realization: yesterday in the kitchen, he’d really, truly needed her, a need as urgent as a mortal wound but too easily taken for an unimportant, untimely whim…and she hadn’t known it. Had flung away the nuisance without a moment’s consideration. Intent on her own concerns, she hadn’t heard him at all, hadn’t listened. Hadn’t cared.
“I need diagrams,” she blurted, shaking against his chest. So he’d turned, was holding her, carefully petting her back, smoothing her soaked hair away from her face. He’d turned the water off, too, she noticed dimly. It didn’t help: the cold had settled inward, turned to ice. “With arrows and large print. I need somebody to whack me and make me pay attention. I should know when things are important, and I don’t. And I do the same dumb things over and over again--!”
“Hush, now. Don’t fret yourself. Things are how they are. Don’t…don’t need you to be hovering, worrying about me--that’s what I have Bit for, innit? Just made me know…some things, is all. Made me stop and consider. An’ that’s good, yeah? Know what I’m doing, like. Know what’s needed and what’s not, the best way I can help now.” Guiding her out of the shower enclosure, enfolding her in a huge dry towel, Spike went on, “Here, you’re chilled to the bone, hothouse flower, you are, need the warm….”
Abruptly she lifted her head, looked him straight in the eyes. It was his human face…yet not. With the cream washed away, his sunburned features seemed one great radiant bruise, the browless, lashless blue eyes wide and surprised-seeming. “I need you to bite me. Right now. For--”
“No, pet. Not a good thing now.”
“For both of us. Do it!”
“You can’t afford--”
“Bite me!” Her fist was pounding against his chest. “What am I, that I can’t get a vampire to bite me?”
“What use,” Spike countered quietly, “is a vampire who won’t bite you?”
He stopped after that, as though it were a real question.
If it was, she couldn’t take it in or make sense of it. Vampires bit people. It’s what they did. What they were. Otherwise, there’d be no need of a Slayer.
She leaned into his embrace, let herself be held. Suddenly, she was exhausted and shuddering, feeling the only thing keeping her from shattering into a million pieces was Spike holding her together. “You’re what: a hundred and twenty-seven years old?”
“Something like that.”
“And I’m not. And right now, I feel that. I don’t understand, Spike. Tell me in simple words what you tried to tell me yesterday. I’ll try really, really hard to listen now.”
“Most of it…doesn’t need saying anymore,” Spike said after a few moment’s silence. They were rocking, just a little, back and forth. “Just how things are. When you go to Quor’toth, love, I’m not coming with you, is all.” As she gazed at him wildly, he went on, “Best if I take care of what I can, here, so you’ll have someplace to come back to.”
“But…but maybe we can never get back!”
“Know that.”
“But you can’t…can’t just abandon me!”
“No. Know you got issues about that, makes you think that way. But no. If I could, I’d stop Fudo, open you a fucking portal to Quor’toth, shove you through, lead you back. But I can’t. Need a mage, and I’m not that. Need a warrior, a Champion of the Powers, and I’m not that either. Besides, you already got one of those. Doesn’t love you like I do, but likely you’d get used to each other again over time.”
“No! I didn’t go through all this to be handed off to Mister bloody pigs’ blood like a door prize. Don’t you dare even think it!”
“Knew you wouldn’t like it. But you’ll come to see it’s for the best.”
“No! If you pull out, I’m not going either!”
“If you say so,” Spike rejoined, much too mildly. “You’ll let down your Watcher, who’s desperate to rescue his mage, and Angel, just as desperate to pull out this Destroyer, or whatever it is. ‘Course you will. If you say so.”
“You watch me! I won’t, and nobody can make me! Besides, when we really get down to it, you’ll come. You always come!”
“In one way of speaking, I surely do,” Spike said, trying to do his sexy eyebrow thing without any eyebrows, which didn’t work very well. Then the eyes in that alien face turned somber, resigned…knowing. “For the rest, the Slayer will decide.”
**********
(more to come)