Fic: 'I love you' is a thing you say to people who are dying (8/16); hard R
[start of fic and notes]
'I love you' is a thing you say to people who are dying
by Quinara
Season 7. Buffy/Spike. Some Watchers survived, because sometimes people do.
[breakfasts II]
breakfasts III
When they’d gone out for their recon trip, Spike had only brought a stake, so the first port of call for his dragon hunt was back at 1630. Specifically, it was the back porch of 1630, because he rather desperately needed a fag and it took longer than the short walk home.
His body didn’t crave nicotine. As far as he had it figured out, the demon had given him a general health boost when he’d been turned and then all his functions had been in stasis ever since. He could put on weight, he could grow his hair however slowly, but what these days they’d call the chemical balances in his brain were all pretty much the same. As a result, every cigarette gave him the same hit it had back in life, when he’d been a social smoker at best - when and if he was ever invited anywhere.
They’d never been on the temperance kick, though, no matter how many non-conformist friends his mother had managed to make, so he’d always had a decent tolerance to alcohol.
Really, it was enough to make anyone worry about the vampire population of the future, how physically unhealthy everyone was these days. People today, they were going into unlife with all sorts of physical cravings, full of fat and distorted brain chemistry, like they said on the TV was causing all sorts of problems.
As Spike finished his smoke, the need for which was entirely psychological, he remembered that, of course, his job these days was to stop people getting dragged into the world of vampirism anyway. Moreover, cravings for caffeine and sugar and whatever else weren’t probably any match for the one getting sired gave you for blood.
The kitchen had been full earlier and he’d been planning to eat when he got back, but now Spike realised he had the perfect opportunity to get himself settled for the night. He went inside, wove his way between various uninterested parties to find a knife and then got himself back into the kitchen. There were a load of groceries sat on the countertop, yet to have been put away, but he ignored them. Rooting through the fridge (which at least had been restocked), he dug out a bag of butcher’s best pig.
Of course, he couldn’t be left in peace to have his meal. For the first twenty seconds or so in the microwave, the kitchen was blessedly empty. Before the rest of it could count down, however, there was Ms. Watcher herself, bustling in with some empty mugs - just like she owned the place.
Spike had his arms crossed. He didn’t uncross them.
“Oh!” Chalmers said when she saw him, then blushing for no reason. “I thought you were out.”
“Change of plan,” Spike replied shortly, looking back to the microwave. Only ten seconds left now. “Slayer’s on patrol; I’ve got something else to look into. I’ll be out of your hair in a minute.”
The microwave dinged. Spike pulled the bag out, squeezing to get the temperature even throughout all the pig.
It really had made unlife easier after Andrew had brought this machine home. No more fucking around with a bain-marie. Maybe there was hope for ill-gotten gains across the world.
With a glance at all the mugs hooked on Lydia’s fingers, which she was now bringing to the sink, Spike figured there wasn’t going to be any clean in the cupboard, as usual. He bit straight through the plastic bag and sucked.
“Is it much different?” Lydia asked curiously, turning on the tap. She was going to run a whole basin of water, it looked like, which would be a relief for his ears, at least, from the way everyone else washed up in this house. “Pig’s blood, I mean. From human.”
Spike raised an eyebrow. She wasn’t serious, was she?
The Watcher looked flustered, shaking the washing up liquid bottle to get the last few drops out. “On a molecular level,” she defended herself, “there’s not very much difference.”
Swallowing, Spike detached himself from the bag. “And on a molecular level there’s not that much nutrition. It’s black magic, yeah?” he reminded her, bitterly. “You take a human life; you take a pig’s life. It’s not really the same.”
Silence returned as Spike went back to his drinking. The sink filled with water and of course they were joined in the kitchen by someone else, this time Dawn. She had more washing up with her, plates and cutlery.
“Hey,” she greeted as she came in. Lydia got the most of it, along with the plates. “Oh, hey Spike,” Dawn added when she saw him, a little more subdued. “I thought you were on patrol.”
Then, before Spike had the chance to explain himself (again), Dawn did a double take.
It was downhill from there. “Why is there lip gloss on your face?” she asked.
Spike stared at her, taking a moment to figure out what she’d said. Then he looked at Lydia, who glanced away as if she’d seen it too.
Lowering the hand that now held a fairly empty bag of blood, Spike swiped his other around his mouth. Sure enough, his fingers came away with a shummering sheen that was faintly golden pink. How the hell had Buffy not noticed it? It must have been too dark…
“Oh my god!” Dawn exclaimed, putting two and two together and coming up with a nice, round four. “That’s Buffy’s Maybelline Sugared Honey! Why is it on your face? What have you…?”
“Now, Dawn,” Spike began, cursing the fact he’d come back here. Let’s not overreact.
“This is…” she cut into anything he would have had a chance to say. Fear, shock and worry were written all over her face. “This is disgusting,” she said, finally. “How can the two of you do this?”
All right, so that hurt. Spike turned away so the girl wouldn’t see it, tipping the last bit of blood out of his bag and into his mouth before he binned it.
That was disgusting as well, he knew, but finances were so tight in this place it didn’t feel right to waste good food.
“I don’t understand,” Dawn continued, sounding like she was seconds away from tearful. “After everything you guys… Is it all even true, what Buffy…?”
“Dawn.” It was Chalmers who said it. Spike glanced at her, up from the bin. There was a serious look on her face and Spike was grateful. This seemed almost like payback from the night before, like she was doing him a favour. “When we spoke earlier, you said you didn’t always listen to yourself.”
“I’m not apologising,” Dawn immediately replied. Spike snuck a glance at her profile, the fury contained within it. “Not to him.”
“I’m not asking you to,” Spike intervened, drawing her anger back because he wasn’t a coward. He refused to be. “You’re not wrong,” he allowed her, because, hell, she wasn’t. “Not for all of it. Just...” He dared to ask her - he dared because he had to, “You won’t talk like this to Buffy, will you? She doesn’t deserve it.”
Dawn’s eyes flashed. Like the scary, scary adult she was practically doomed to become, she laughed. “Oh,” she said, “where do you get off telling me to do anything?”
Staring into the face of her, Spike was lost for words. This bridge, it felt like, was entirely burned, all the ashes long washed downstream. In some ways it didn’t seem like a catastrophe of the year before, but a catastrophe of this one. It ached inside of him.
“Spike,” Lydia called his name again. She was looking at him sympathetically, weirdly as though she wanted to be his friend, not just understand him for her books. “Maybe you should go.”
He nodded, once, because it seemed like a good idea. With a final glance at Dawn, who still had a thousand emotions on her face, Spike turned and left the way he’d come.
It was a cigarette he’d needed earlier, but now Spike needed a drink. Again, no physical craving, just a psychological need to cleanse his every sinew of the feeling he could feel.
In the past, of course, such exercises had not gone well, which had resulted in many things the not so very least of which was the return of his soul. Tonight, Spike had no such interest in finding out what consequences would beset his drinking, but he did at least have a good excuse to swing by the one demon bar that would still have him, on the other side of town.
It was a long walk - about an hour - so the swinging was more figurative than anything. Last year Spike would have taken the bike to anywhere this far away, but that had got lost somewhere between leaving town and finding his way back. He was good. He didn’t drop in at any of the liquor stores en route and waited until drinking would only be a necessary part of blending in.
Of course, that gave him a lot of time to think. It wasn’t something he was good at, so he didn’t get very far, mostly just replayed Dawn’s words round and round as he tried to make sense of whether and how much she meant them.
Disgusting. That was the kicker. Yet it was true, wasn’t it? It was an epithet he’d once longed for, but it cut him to the bone this time around.
This whole business with Buffy was a dream come true, for the most part. The problem was that it also, in a very real way, wasn’t. In his dream scenario, he did not get together with the woman of his dreams after once attacking her for sex in her own family bathroom. Nor did he live in her basement like a parasite, unable to leave in case the source of all evil in the world got its mitts on him again. He didn’t have a terrible relationship with her only remaining close family - and he wasn’t so pathetic that a few cross words could send him scuttling for liquid reassurance.
By the time he reached the bar, Spike didn’t even want a drink. He wanted to prove he could do this without one.
Of course, when the barman asked, “Hey. What you having?”
It seemed churlish to refuse. With a sigh, Spike gave in. “Jack,” he said. “And a bottle of Sam.”
It was crowded in here tonight, but the bloke nodded anyway. He looked human, but he was a mixed breed of some such - had demonic hearing along with whatever else no one could see. “You want the regular lager or one of these seasonals we got in? You might like this one for summer - it’s kind of like a Cologne beer.”
Ja, zwei Weizenbier und noch ein Kölsch. When the hell Spike had said that, he didn’t know, but he remembered it. “Bloody craft beers,” was what he said now - and the bartender smirked in agreement. That bit of banter out of the way, he conceded to the fact he’d always liked a German brew. “Yeah, I’ll give it a go,” he said. “By the way,” he added casually, as the keep turned to get his shot, “is Maldred in tonight?”
“Sure,” the bloke replied, hearing nothing amiss. He wasn’t the snitch that Willy was, this guy - Spike didn’t even know his name - but he didn’t like trouble. Cole’s was an altogether classier establishment than The Alibi Room, underneath the necessary grime. “He’s out back.”
“Cheers,” Spike replied as he took his shot - necked it. With that back on the bar he reached for the wallet inside his coat, ready to pay.
The barman, however, didn’t release his hold on Spike’s beer. “You know I can’t let you go back there,” he said seriously.
That was the thing, of course. Like everywhere else, this place was head over heels in hock to Teeth and his cronies. It made the poker a hell of a lot better than at Willy's, but it also meant that Spike had been persona non grata for at least a year now. Even after he’d paid back the Siamese, the fact that the Slayer had killed off the shark's entire posse of henchmen had apparently left Teeth with no choice but to bar Spike from all lines of credit and all means of play.
It was bad enough that the Hellmouth picked up Los Angeles’ filth, but Teeth really proved that the stuff from Vegas was worse.
“Fine,” Spike replied, pulling the bills from his wallet without a fuss. It would be on him to find a chair now. “I’ll wait.”
Again the barman nodded. Really, Spike thought, with the speed the world tended to shift around his feet, it was always a surprise when none of the people moved with it.
A while later, Spike had had several more beers and two conversations. The first was with a young Brachen couple from down south, who were nice enough if square as a set of houses - they’d left early. The second was a sweet vampire bird named Consuelo, who was on the game but whose trade had dried up down at the new bitehouse. She zeroed in on Spike as ‘that vamp who’s with the Slayer’, telling him he could distract attention without needing to do anything special; he said fine, because he’d been getting bored again. They made small talk, and he told her about the First Evil - how it was making people leave town. She said she might try and look up a distant cousin of hers in LA.
It was all very congenial, but as the clock moved forward Spike found himself getting very impatient indeed. Buffy’s patrol with the girls would have been long finished by now, and he still had an hour’s walk back home. Maldred, the slimy git, was nowhere to be seen.
Around the time that Spike was seriously thinking of packing things in for the night, after a couple of earlier false starts, the daft, shrivelled wizard appeared from around the end of the bar. “Spike!” he exclaimed, like the imp no one was ever certain he was. “Tobias said you were looking for me.”
“Yeah,” Spike replied, clonking his latest beer down on the table in front of him. “And you’ve taken your sweet time about it.”
Consuelo, the dear girl, recognised her cue to leave and left. Spike waved her off.
The old imp Maldred tutted, straightening his grime-green velvet hat around his ears. It had a point to it, just about. “Don’t be like that,” he said as he sat down opposite. “Now, have you brought me good news? Is Anyanka’s shop opening doors again?”
“I ain’t brought you any news,” Spike replied, remembering how frustrating it was to deal with this berk. He hadn’t had much to do with him since the summer Buffy was dead, and there’d been an incident with sporing death-pansies. “I’ve come to ask you about dragons.”
“Oh, really?” Maldred asked, waving his hand by his shoulder. Behind him, two beermats did a tap dance on the bar. “Dragons, you say?”
The barman was muttering, “Yeah, yeah.” Seconds later, a sherry glass of what smelled to Spike like mead was served to the beermats and spirited through the air to their table.
“And what is it you want Maldred to tell you about dragons?” the wizard continued as it arrived.
Spike paused for a moment, nursing his irritation. Maldred used the time to take a sip of his drink, smacking his lips together and sighing with relish.
“Holy dragon,” Spike eventually stated, deciding it was best to make his request as direct as possible. “In the Bronze.” Maldred raised his eyebrows, as though he had never heard this story before. Yeah right. “I’ve never seen her,” Spike persisted, “but she has a valet somewhere round town, don’t she?”
With an exaggerated frown, Maldred shook his head. “No one calls their humans valets anymore, Spike,” he said with what had to be mock-exasperation. “They’re called guardians now. We live in a post-Lord of the Rings era.”
“What, and that makes you Gollum?” Spike couldn’t resist. He’d read the books, obviously. Needed a strong edit, as far as he was concerned, and more Éowyn. Less of bloody boring Frodo.
In any case, Maldred didn’t seem particularly keen on this gag. “Well,” he scoffed, putting his drink down as if he was about to stand up, “if you came here to be juvenile…”
“Oh, shut up, you old coot,” Spike shot back at him, before taking a slug of his beer. He did like beer. The right amount of it, not too much - it made things easier. “D’you know the dragon or don’t you?”
For a moment, it looked like the imp was going to be difficult. He narrowed his wrinkled, beady eyes and stared down deep into Spike’s soul. It was a little unnerving, but then seconds later Maldred was sitting back, his drink in his hand again. “Ah, Beatrice,” he said, like he’d only just remembered. “What good times we had, back in Constantinople… Yes, she’s around,” he conceded. “I can’t imagine she’ll grant an audience to any vampire, though. Even of your persuasion.”
“Well, I’m not asking for me, am I?” Spike immediately replied, ignoring the dig about his soul. “As you well know,” he reminded Maldred, because he clearly did.
The wizard raised his eyebrows innocently.
Spike rolled his eyes. “I’m asking for the Slayer,” he said. “Think even the most holy sanctissima might give her the time of day.”
“Hmm,” Maldred replied, looking around. “You may well be right…” he continued, non-committal as he reached over to a neighbouring table and the napkin which lay by an abandoned glass. “I’ll write you an introduction to her squire,” he finally said, pulling a pen out of mid-air and clicking the end of it.
Spike ignored the fact that his language had slipped to be even more old-fashioned than his. Squire. It was pathetic. “Cheers,” he said anyway, meeting Maldred’s eyes again before the wizard began to write, then knocking back the rest of his drink. This wasn’t necessarily going to be fun.
“Here,” the old imp finally said, passing the napkin over. Spike took it, folded it up and put it in his coat. “Go to the Bronze. Ask for Dante.”
Dante and Beatrice? You couldn’t make this up.
“Oh - and Tobias has my tab.”
Feeling significantly lighter in pocket, Spike made the long walk back to the Bronze. It was pushing 3am now, from what the clock on Main Street reckoned, and if he wasn’t lucky he thought he was going to find the club already shut.
By the time he got there, things were definitely winding down. There was no one waiting in the queue outside and the usual bouncer was nowhere in sight.
Still, the lights were on and the music was pumping, so Spike made his way over to the entrance. Before he’d reached the threshold, however, the missing bouncer came into view, all arm muscles and an annoying number of inches above Spike’s head. “Hey,” he said, crossing the arms over his grey t-shirt. “We got no new entries now. Place is closing for the night.”
Around the corner then, behind Spike, two women came giggling up to the entrance. They were pretty much falling over each other, shrieking as they did so, and they had more hair than clothes. The bouncer didn’t even blink as he unclicked the guide rope beside him and let them through.
Spike cocked an eyebrow.
“They were here already,” the bouncer replied, like it didn’t even matter if it was true. “Must’ve gone lost themselves from out the fire escape.”
“Look,” Spike said, trying to be reasonable. He knew bouncers and he knew the last thing he needed was to wind this bloke up. “I’m not here for a drink.”
“You know,” the bouncer said, ignoring him. “I saw your honey around here earlier.”
His honey? Spike was taken aback.
“Small thing,” the man continued, “Blonde hair; green eyes. She’s been by here before.”
“What are you on about?” Spike asked, wondering what the hell he’d done to deserve this particular evening, the moon long gone behind clouds and this tosser stuck in front of him. Because, Christ; did everyone know about them now? “Are you talking about Buffy?”
Of course, in his time Spike had done many things to deserve this.
“I didn’t see either of you for a while,” the bouncer cut over him, proving it. “Figured maybe you two had patched things up.” He had a superior look in his eyes, this bouncer, like he had a claim on morals that Spike could never come by. It seemed rude. “But then she’s coming here again and I’m thinking you must have gone missing. And now I see you…”
“Mate, you’ve got the wrong end of the stick,” Spike tried to interrupt. This was a serious problem, after all. If there was one truth in life, it was that you were going to get nowhere while the bouncer thought you were scum. All right, there was nothing to stop Spike from forcing his way in, arm muscles or no arm muscles, not now the chip was out, but he’d get nowhere with finding his contact without this bloke onside. “I’m not cheating on Buffy,” he promised, because it was ridiculous, the whole idea of it. “I don’t know why she was here but she wasn’t looking for me.”
Actually, why had she been here? Spike was willing to give this guy the benefit of the doubt and say that he had seen her, but it seemed a bit off the beaten track for a patrol recon mission. Presumably she’d been tracking a lead or something. At least Spike hoped so. Buffy wasn’t the sort of girl to go clubbing on her own.
God only knew when she’d come by here before, looking for him. She could have made less of an impression, as far as Spike was concerned.
Of course, out here in the nighttime, with himself a half-sheet to the wind, Spike wasn’t surprised that Buffy had drawn another champion to her cause. It was what she did. It was what she’d done. The facing of the Bronze looking grimy now they were coming close to dawn, and he could only imagine her coming by and brightening the whole place up.
For the most part, Spike reckoned he’d convinced her he was worthy. Presumably he must have done, for her to let herself be close to him, again if not at all. The problem was convincing everybody else, who either saw him with more clouded eyes or else brighter and clearer than Buffy was able to do.
The problem for Spike was that he just didn’t know. He didn’t know if Buffy was the one to see the way of things in him or if it was everyone else, if it was himself. Every part of him yearned to be the way she saw when she looked at him, but it was difficult not to feel like he wasn’t using her - like he wasn’t wasting her.
That particular image, after all, was vivid and clear in this bouncer’s eyes. “You can talk whatever game you want,” he said. “But if you think I’m letting you in to use my club as your pick-up house, you got a lot of other things coming.”
Growling in his frustration, Spike pushed as much of his self-doubt aside as he could. “I’m being honest with you,” he said, knowing he didn’t sound it one jot. “I’m not here for any of your punters; I’m looking for some bloke called Dante.”
The guy pulled back, his hands falling to his hips as surprise crossed his face. “Yeah?” he replied, completely giving away that there was at least someone called Dante who was known there. “And what do you want with him?”
“I’ve got a message for him, innit,” Spike replied, feeling like he was having his teeth pulled. When this particular line got no response, he even pulled the napkin out from inside his coat and held it in front of his face. “It might not look like much, but it’s important.”
Really, Spike wondered how many conversations this bouncer had were with drunk people. He seemed a little slow to pick up on a straightforward point of fact, looking between Spike’s face and the napkin as though he didn’t believe there was any connection.
“O-K,” he allowed eventually, his words stilted. His expression remained suspicious, but Spike could hardly blame him for that. “How about you give it to me and I’ll pass it along?”
He made to take the note, but Spike pulled it back into the safe-keeping of his pocket. “You’ve got to be joking,” he replied, staring the man down. “I wouldn’t trust you with one of those messages you get army jets to write in the sky. I mean,” he pointed out, “would you if you were me?”
The man smiled, just a little, hopefully because he saw Spike’s point. However, what he said was, “Well, you’re gonna be waiting a long time.”
Something in the way he said it clued Spike in to a rather unfortunate possibility. He looked the man in the eye, took stock of the humour in his expression and the part of the way he stood that looked an awful lot like victory. “Oh,” he complained, “you’ve got to be bloody kidding me.” As usual in the world of Spike, anything that could go tits up made sure to shove its feet over its head and have a day at the sodding races. “You’re Dante?” he challenged.
“What?” the guy replied, like this was turning out to be one of the better outcomes for this particular encounter. “You were expecting a white man with that name?”
The bouncer snickered. Spike rolled his eyes and pulled the napkin out again. “Here,” he said, not touching that line with a barge pole, though it was fair to say he’d initially gone down an Alighieri route. “It’s from Maldred, out in the ‘burbs.”
Dante, as it seemed Spike would have to call him, turned out to be a careful reader. He took the napkin and unfolded it, holding it up to the dim light of the foyer behind him. His eyes narrowed as he traced over the small, careful lines of script, glancing to Spike and then back to the paper.
As he reached the end, or at least as he seemed to, he lowered the napkin back down and looked at Spike with shrewd eyes. “So what you’re telling me is that you’re a vampire - with a soul.”
Spike shrugged, wishing that didn’t actually vouch for him, because it didn’t when it came down to the facts.
“And that cutie pie’s the Vampire Slayer?” This part seemed to surprise the man more.
Thankfully, Spike found it easier to get his back up on this point. After all, he’d never underestimated the girl. “What?” he challenged the man who was apparently a defender of light, or at least the errand boy for one of the greater forces of good on this earth. He mocked the bloke’s tone from a second ago, “You thought you fancied the girl for that weird nose she’s got?”
The man took the point, nodding his head as he seemed to assess himself the way Spike had done a thousand times before. “And she’s - making time with you. No matter how many chicks you score.”
Any moment now, Spike reckoned, he was going to get really pissed off. He put his hands on his own hips and talked the accusation down. “It wasn’t like that, all right? It was a whole business. The First Evil…”
“Oh yeah, I heard about that,” Dante interrupted, like they were having a chat in the employee’s lounge - like he didn’t get enough opportunities to have chats like this. “It sounded like something, but B’s not so worried. She says keep the club open, so we’re all gonna keep the club open.”
Again, Spike rolled his eyes. “Sounds great.” It was a funny point, actually, about how the Bronze never shut during any apocalypse. He’d never connected it to the rumours about the dragon living there, but maybe it all added up. “Look,” he tried to get the conversation back on track, not entirely surprised that Maldred’s introduction hadn’t perfectly helped matters. “The Slayer’s got it in her head that Beatrice,” he tried out, still not certain of the name - he’d never been one for saying it the Italian way - “she can help with this particular apocalypse. I’m trying to get an audience, right?” he added. “For her, not for me.”
“I got it,” Dante replied, shoving the napkin into his pocket. He looked at Spike with new eyes. They were still mistrustful, of course, but they were new. Oddly, they seemed to look at Spike more like this guy knew him: there was respect there, grudging though it was. The disappointment, though - the irritation - that seemed to run deeper, enough that it rankled. “She’ll say yes,” he added assuredly, surprising Spike. “She’s been wanting to meet the Slayer for years.”
“Good,” Spike replied. It was strange, almost, that things could be this easy, but he was happy to run with it for the moment. Buffy would be pleased. “We’ll be back tomorrow night.”
“I’m tell you for free, though,” Dante added, before Spike could turn to leave. There was a warning now, on his face. A friendly one, which was a little bizarre, but a warning all the same. “She ain’t gonna like you.”
“Yeah, well,” Spike replied, feeling the end of this very long night. “Sing me a sodding new one.”
By the time Spike made it back to 1630, it wasn’t all that far from dawn. He let himself in through the back, feeling odd that he could let himself in so silently the way that any predator could - into the henhouse and set to do mischief without anyone the wiser before he wanted them to be.
For a few minutes, he stood in the kitchen, trying to feel like he belonged there - as though he wasn’t some strange appendage to this household. The sort of thing that let itself in right before the red morning to bury itself away in the dark. It was difficult, if he was completely honest. It was very difficult indeed.
The groceries from earlier, they’d been put away now. Spike couldn’t imagine that Buffy had done it, but if there was one benefit to bearing so many bodies in the house, it was that the shared labour was light when and if people chose to pitch in. What he hoped was that she’d come home from patrol and seen the place like this - in the light if not in the dark gloom that Spike was stood in now - and what he hoped was that she’d taken it to mean that people cared.
It wasn’t always in her nature, Spike knew, to recognise how special people thought she was. This kitchen, from how Spike could see it, it was spotless, and that didn’t mean nothing. He traced a finger along the sink, which had been horrific a few days ago. It was looking all right now.
There was one lonely glass in the basin of it, because of course there always would be. It wasn’t always easy to sleep in a house like this and someone had clearly wanted a glass of water.
What was odd, of course, when Spike looked closer, was that the glass was still wet. Beads of liquid rested halfway up its insides, as though it had only just been drunk and abandoned, washed out if it wasn’t water before.
That didn’t happen quite so much in this house. It was gone four AM, so whoever’d woken up had woken up pretty late.
Unless… There was another possibility of course. Buffy’s patrol should have finished hours ago, the reconnaissance and the part where the girls had a stab at it. If she’d actually waited up for him then Spike was going to shoot himself in his own face, because the thought of it hurt too badly. She wasn’t supposed to waste her sleeping time on him. Not Buffy.
The worrying thing was, of course, that it was possible. She was getting withdrawn again, his girl, and Spike was worried what it would look like this time around. What exactly the Slayer could do with an apocalypse this big, Spike didn’t know if he wanted to see, especially not if there was a dragon involved.
Yet he didn’t know and he couldn’t be certain that it would not turn out all right in the end. Maybe she could - if anyone could…
In the end, really, there was nothing Spike could do but wash out the glass again and set it on the draining board. It had been a long night. He went to bed.
.
[breakfasts IV]
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'I love you' is a thing you say to people who are dying
by Quinara
Season 7. Buffy/Spike. Some Watchers survived, because sometimes people do.
[breakfasts II]
breakfasts III
When they’d gone out for their recon trip, Spike had only brought a stake, so the first port of call for his dragon hunt was back at 1630. Specifically, it was the back porch of 1630, because he rather desperately needed a fag and it took longer than the short walk home.
His body didn’t crave nicotine. As far as he had it figured out, the demon had given him a general health boost when he’d been turned and then all his functions had been in stasis ever since. He could put on weight, he could grow his hair however slowly, but what these days they’d call the chemical balances in his brain were all pretty much the same. As a result, every cigarette gave him the same hit it had back in life, when he’d been a social smoker at best - when and if he was ever invited anywhere.
They’d never been on the temperance kick, though, no matter how many non-conformist friends his mother had managed to make, so he’d always had a decent tolerance to alcohol.
Really, it was enough to make anyone worry about the vampire population of the future, how physically unhealthy everyone was these days. People today, they were going into unlife with all sorts of physical cravings, full of fat and distorted brain chemistry, like they said on the TV was causing all sorts of problems.
As Spike finished his smoke, the need for which was entirely psychological, he remembered that, of course, his job these days was to stop people getting dragged into the world of vampirism anyway. Moreover, cravings for caffeine and sugar and whatever else weren’t probably any match for the one getting sired gave you for blood.
The kitchen had been full earlier and he’d been planning to eat when he got back, but now Spike realised he had the perfect opportunity to get himself settled for the night. He went inside, wove his way between various uninterested parties to find a knife and then got himself back into the kitchen. There were a load of groceries sat on the countertop, yet to have been put away, but he ignored them. Rooting through the fridge (which at least had been restocked), he dug out a bag of butcher’s best pig.
Of course, he couldn’t be left in peace to have his meal. For the first twenty seconds or so in the microwave, the kitchen was blessedly empty. Before the rest of it could count down, however, there was Ms. Watcher herself, bustling in with some empty mugs - just like she owned the place.
Spike had his arms crossed. He didn’t uncross them.
“Oh!” Chalmers said when she saw him, then blushing for no reason. “I thought you were out.”
“Change of plan,” Spike replied shortly, looking back to the microwave. Only ten seconds left now. “Slayer’s on patrol; I’ve got something else to look into. I’ll be out of your hair in a minute.”
The microwave dinged. Spike pulled the bag out, squeezing to get the temperature even throughout all the pig.
It really had made unlife easier after Andrew had brought this machine home. No more fucking around with a bain-marie. Maybe there was hope for ill-gotten gains across the world.
With a glance at all the mugs hooked on Lydia’s fingers, which she was now bringing to the sink, Spike figured there wasn’t going to be any clean in the cupboard, as usual. He bit straight through the plastic bag and sucked.
“Is it much different?” Lydia asked curiously, turning on the tap. She was going to run a whole basin of water, it looked like, which would be a relief for his ears, at least, from the way everyone else washed up in this house. “Pig’s blood, I mean. From human.”
Spike raised an eyebrow. She wasn’t serious, was she?
The Watcher looked flustered, shaking the washing up liquid bottle to get the last few drops out. “On a molecular level,” she defended herself, “there’s not very much difference.”
Swallowing, Spike detached himself from the bag. “And on a molecular level there’s not that much nutrition. It’s black magic, yeah?” he reminded her, bitterly. “You take a human life; you take a pig’s life. It’s not really the same.”
Silence returned as Spike went back to his drinking. The sink filled with water and of course they were joined in the kitchen by someone else, this time Dawn. She had more washing up with her, plates and cutlery.
“Hey,” she greeted as she came in. Lydia got the most of it, along with the plates. “Oh, hey Spike,” Dawn added when she saw him, a little more subdued. “I thought you were on patrol.”
Then, before Spike had the chance to explain himself (again), Dawn did a double take.
It was downhill from there. “Why is there lip gloss on your face?” she asked.
Spike stared at her, taking a moment to figure out what she’d said. Then he looked at Lydia, who glanced away as if she’d seen it too.
Lowering the hand that now held a fairly empty bag of blood, Spike swiped his other around his mouth. Sure enough, his fingers came away with a shummering sheen that was faintly golden pink. How the hell had Buffy not noticed it? It must have been too dark…
“Oh my god!” Dawn exclaimed, putting two and two together and coming up with a nice, round four. “That’s Buffy’s Maybelline Sugared Honey! Why is it on your face? What have you…?”
“Now, Dawn,” Spike began, cursing the fact he’d come back here. Let’s not overreact.
“This is…” she cut into anything he would have had a chance to say. Fear, shock and worry were written all over her face. “This is disgusting,” she said, finally. “How can the two of you do this?”
All right, so that hurt. Spike turned away so the girl wouldn’t see it, tipping the last bit of blood out of his bag and into his mouth before he binned it.
That was disgusting as well, he knew, but finances were so tight in this place it didn’t feel right to waste good food.
“I don’t understand,” Dawn continued, sounding like she was seconds away from tearful. “After everything you guys… Is it all even true, what Buffy…?”
“Dawn.” It was Chalmers who said it. Spike glanced at her, up from the bin. There was a serious look on her face and Spike was grateful. This seemed almost like payback from the night before, like she was doing him a favour. “When we spoke earlier, you said you didn’t always listen to yourself.”
“I’m not apologising,” Dawn immediately replied. Spike snuck a glance at her profile, the fury contained within it. “Not to him.”
“I’m not asking you to,” Spike intervened, drawing her anger back because he wasn’t a coward. He refused to be. “You’re not wrong,” he allowed her, because, hell, she wasn’t. “Not for all of it. Just...” He dared to ask her - he dared because he had to, “You won’t talk like this to Buffy, will you? She doesn’t deserve it.”
Dawn’s eyes flashed. Like the scary, scary adult she was practically doomed to become, she laughed. “Oh,” she said, “where do you get off telling me to do anything?”
Staring into the face of her, Spike was lost for words. This bridge, it felt like, was entirely burned, all the ashes long washed downstream. In some ways it didn’t seem like a catastrophe of the year before, but a catastrophe of this one. It ached inside of him.
“Spike,” Lydia called his name again. She was looking at him sympathetically, weirdly as though she wanted to be his friend, not just understand him for her books. “Maybe you should go.”
He nodded, once, because it seemed like a good idea. With a final glance at Dawn, who still had a thousand emotions on her face, Spike turned and left the way he’d come.
It was a cigarette he’d needed earlier, but now Spike needed a drink. Again, no physical craving, just a psychological need to cleanse his every sinew of the feeling he could feel.
In the past, of course, such exercises had not gone well, which had resulted in many things the not so very least of which was the return of his soul. Tonight, Spike had no such interest in finding out what consequences would beset his drinking, but he did at least have a good excuse to swing by the one demon bar that would still have him, on the other side of town.
It was a long walk - about an hour - so the swinging was more figurative than anything. Last year Spike would have taken the bike to anywhere this far away, but that had got lost somewhere between leaving town and finding his way back. He was good. He didn’t drop in at any of the liquor stores en route and waited until drinking would only be a necessary part of blending in.
Of course, that gave him a lot of time to think. It wasn’t something he was good at, so he didn’t get very far, mostly just replayed Dawn’s words round and round as he tried to make sense of whether and how much she meant them.
Disgusting. That was the kicker. Yet it was true, wasn’t it? It was an epithet he’d once longed for, but it cut him to the bone this time around.
This whole business with Buffy was a dream come true, for the most part. The problem was that it also, in a very real way, wasn’t. In his dream scenario, he did not get together with the woman of his dreams after once attacking her for sex in her own family bathroom. Nor did he live in her basement like a parasite, unable to leave in case the source of all evil in the world got its mitts on him again. He didn’t have a terrible relationship with her only remaining close family - and he wasn’t so pathetic that a few cross words could send him scuttling for liquid reassurance.
By the time he reached the bar, Spike didn’t even want a drink. He wanted to prove he could do this without one.
Of course, when the barman asked, “Hey. What you having?”
It seemed churlish to refuse. With a sigh, Spike gave in. “Jack,” he said. “And a bottle of Sam.”
It was crowded in here tonight, but the bloke nodded anyway. He looked human, but he was a mixed breed of some such - had demonic hearing along with whatever else no one could see. “You want the regular lager or one of these seasonals we got in? You might like this one for summer - it’s kind of like a Cologne beer.”
Ja, zwei Weizenbier und noch ein Kölsch. When the hell Spike had said that, he didn’t know, but he remembered it. “Bloody craft beers,” was what he said now - and the bartender smirked in agreement. That bit of banter out of the way, he conceded to the fact he’d always liked a German brew. “Yeah, I’ll give it a go,” he said. “By the way,” he added casually, as the keep turned to get his shot, “is Maldred in tonight?”
“Sure,” the bloke replied, hearing nothing amiss. He wasn’t the snitch that Willy was, this guy - Spike didn’t even know his name - but he didn’t like trouble. Cole’s was an altogether classier establishment than The Alibi Room, underneath the necessary grime. “He’s out back.”
“Cheers,” Spike replied as he took his shot - necked it. With that back on the bar he reached for the wallet inside his coat, ready to pay.
The barman, however, didn’t release his hold on Spike’s beer. “You know I can’t let you go back there,” he said seriously.
That was the thing, of course. Like everywhere else, this place was head over heels in hock to Teeth and his cronies. It made the poker a hell of a lot better than at Willy's, but it also meant that Spike had been persona non grata for at least a year now. Even after he’d paid back the Siamese, the fact that the Slayer had killed off the shark's entire posse of henchmen had apparently left Teeth with no choice but to bar Spike from all lines of credit and all means of play.
It was bad enough that the Hellmouth picked up Los Angeles’ filth, but Teeth really proved that the stuff from Vegas was worse.
“Fine,” Spike replied, pulling the bills from his wallet without a fuss. It would be on him to find a chair now. “I’ll wait.”
Again the barman nodded. Really, Spike thought, with the speed the world tended to shift around his feet, it was always a surprise when none of the people moved with it.
A while later, Spike had had several more beers and two conversations. The first was with a young Brachen couple from down south, who were nice enough if square as a set of houses - they’d left early. The second was a sweet vampire bird named Consuelo, who was on the game but whose trade had dried up down at the new bitehouse. She zeroed in on Spike as ‘that vamp who’s with the Slayer’, telling him he could distract attention without needing to do anything special; he said fine, because he’d been getting bored again. They made small talk, and he told her about the First Evil - how it was making people leave town. She said she might try and look up a distant cousin of hers in LA.
It was all very congenial, but as the clock moved forward Spike found himself getting very impatient indeed. Buffy’s patrol with the girls would have been long finished by now, and he still had an hour’s walk back home. Maldred, the slimy git, was nowhere to be seen.
Around the time that Spike was seriously thinking of packing things in for the night, after a couple of earlier false starts, the daft, shrivelled wizard appeared from around the end of the bar. “Spike!” he exclaimed, like the imp no one was ever certain he was. “Tobias said you were looking for me.”
“Yeah,” Spike replied, clonking his latest beer down on the table in front of him. “And you’ve taken your sweet time about it.”
Consuelo, the dear girl, recognised her cue to leave and left. Spike waved her off.
The old imp Maldred tutted, straightening his grime-green velvet hat around his ears. It had a point to it, just about. “Don’t be like that,” he said as he sat down opposite. “Now, have you brought me good news? Is Anyanka’s shop opening doors again?”
“I ain’t brought you any news,” Spike replied, remembering how frustrating it was to deal with this berk. He hadn’t had much to do with him since the summer Buffy was dead, and there’d been an incident with sporing death-pansies. “I’ve come to ask you about dragons.”
“Oh, really?” Maldred asked, waving his hand by his shoulder. Behind him, two beermats did a tap dance on the bar. “Dragons, you say?”
The barman was muttering, “Yeah, yeah.” Seconds later, a sherry glass of what smelled to Spike like mead was served to the beermats and spirited through the air to their table.
“And what is it you want Maldred to tell you about dragons?” the wizard continued as it arrived.
Spike paused for a moment, nursing his irritation. Maldred used the time to take a sip of his drink, smacking his lips together and sighing with relish.
“Holy dragon,” Spike eventually stated, deciding it was best to make his request as direct as possible. “In the Bronze.” Maldred raised his eyebrows, as though he had never heard this story before. Yeah right. “I’ve never seen her,” Spike persisted, “but she has a valet somewhere round town, don’t she?”
With an exaggerated frown, Maldred shook his head. “No one calls their humans valets anymore, Spike,” he said with what had to be mock-exasperation. “They’re called guardians now. We live in a post-Lord of the Rings era.”
“What, and that makes you Gollum?” Spike couldn’t resist. He’d read the books, obviously. Needed a strong edit, as far as he was concerned, and more Éowyn. Less of bloody boring Frodo.
In any case, Maldred didn’t seem particularly keen on this gag. “Well,” he scoffed, putting his drink down as if he was about to stand up, “if you came here to be juvenile…”
“Oh, shut up, you old coot,” Spike shot back at him, before taking a slug of his beer. He did like beer. The right amount of it, not too much - it made things easier. “D’you know the dragon or don’t you?”
For a moment, it looked like the imp was going to be difficult. He narrowed his wrinkled, beady eyes and stared down deep into Spike’s soul. It was a little unnerving, but then seconds later Maldred was sitting back, his drink in his hand again. “Ah, Beatrice,” he said, like he’d only just remembered. “What good times we had, back in Constantinople… Yes, she’s around,” he conceded. “I can’t imagine she’ll grant an audience to any vampire, though. Even of your persuasion.”
“Well, I’m not asking for me, am I?” Spike immediately replied, ignoring the dig about his soul. “As you well know,” he reminded Maldred, because he clearly did.
The wizard raised his eyebrows innocently.
Spike rolled his eyes. “I’m asking for the Slayer,” he said. “Think even the most holy sanctissima might give her the time of day.”
“Hmm,” Maldred replied, looking around. “You may well be right…” he continued, non-committal as he reached over to a neighbouring table and the napkin which lay by an abandoned glass. “I’ll write you an introduction to her squire,” he finally said, pulling a pen out of mid-air and clicking the end of it.
Spike ignored the fact that his language had slipped to be even more old-fashioned than his. Squire. It was pathetic. “Cheers,” he said anyway, meeting Maldred’s eyes again before the wizard began to write, then knocking back the rest of his drink. This wasn’t necessarily going to be fun.
“Here,” the old imp finally said, passing the napkin over. Spike took it, folded it up and put it in his coat. “Go to the Bronze. Ask for Dante.”
Dante and Beatrice? You couldn’t make this up.
“Oh - and Tobias has my tab.”
Feeling significantly lighter in pocket, Spike made the long walk back to the Bronze. It was pushing 3am now, from what the clock on Main Street reckoned, and if he wasn’t lucky he thought he was going to find the club already shut.
By the time he got there, things were definitely winding down. There was no one waiting in the queue outside and the usual bouncer was nowhere in sight.
Still, the lights were on and the music was pumping, so Spike made his way over to the entrance. Before he’d reached the threshold, however, the missing bouncer came into view, all arm muscles and an annoying number of inches above Spike’s head. “Hey,” he said, crossing the arms over his grey t-shirt. “We got no new entries now. Place is closing for the night.”
Around the corner then, behind Spike, two women came giggling up to the entrance. They were pretty much falling over each other, shrieking as they did so, and they had more hair than clothes. The bouncer didn’t even blink as he unclicked the guide rope beside him and let them through.
Spike cocked an eyebrow.
“They were here already,” the bouncer replied, like it didn’t even matter if it was true. “Must’ve gone lost themselves from out the fire escape.”
“Look,” Spike said, trying to be reasonable. He knew bouncers and he knew the last thing he needed was to wind this bloke up. “I’m not here for a drink.”
“You know,” the bouncer said, ignoring him. “I saw your honey around here earlier.”
His honey? Spike was taken aback.
“Small thing,” the man continued, “Blonde hair; green eyes. She’s been by here before.”
“What are you on about?” Spike asked, wondering what the hell he’d done to deserve this particular evening, the moon long gone behind clouds and this tosser stuck in front of him. Because, Christ; did everyone know about them now? “Are you talking about Buffy?”
Of course, in his time Spike had done many things to deserve this.
“I didn’t see either of you for a while,” the bouncer cut over him, proving it. “Figured maybe you two had patched things up.” He had a superior look in his eyes, this bouncer, like he had a claim on morals that Spike could never come by. It seemed rude. “But then she’s coming here again and I’m thinking you must have gone missing. And now I see you…”
“Mate, you’ve got the wrong end of the stick,” Spike tried to interrupt. This was a serious problem, after all. If there was one truth in life, it was that you were going to get nowhere while the bouncer thought you were scum. All right, there was nothing to stop Spike from forcing his way in, arm muscles or no arm muscles, not now the chip was out, but he’d get nowhere with finding his contact without this bloke onside. “I’m not cheating on Buffy,” he promised, because it was ridiculous, the whole idea of it. “I don’t know why she was here but she wasn’t looking for me.”
Actually, why had she been here? Spike was willing to give this guy the benefit of the doubt and say that he had seen her, but it seemed a bit off the beaten track for a patrol recon mission. Presumably she’d been tracking a lead or something. At least Spike hoped so. Buffy wasn’t the sort of girl to go clubbing on her own.
God only knew when she’d come by here before, looking for him. She could have made less of an impression, as far as Spike was concerned.
Of course, out here in the nighttime, with himself a half-sheet to the wind, Spike wasn’t surprised that Buffy had drawn another champion to her cause. It was what she did. It was what she’d done. The facing of the Bronze looking grimy now they were coming close to dawn, and he could only imagine her coming by and brightening the whole place up.
For the most part, Spike reckoned he’d convinced her he was worthy. Presumably he must have done, for her to let herself be close to him, again if not at all. The problem was convincing everybody else, who either saw him with more clouded eyes or else brighter and clearer than Buffy was able to do.
The problem for Spike was that he just didn’t know. He didn’t know if Buffy was the one to see the way of things in him or if it was everyone else, if it was himself. Every part of him yearned to be the way she saw when she looked at him, but it was difficult not to feel like he wasn’t using her - like he wasn’t wasting her.
That particular image, after all, was vivid and clear in this bouncer’s eyes. “You can talk whatever game you want,” he said. “But if you think I’m letting you in to use my club as your pick-up house, you got a lot of other things coming.”
Growling in his frustration, Spike pushed as much of his self-doubt aside as he could. “I’m being honest with you,” he said, knowing he didn’t sound it one jot. “I’m not here for any of your punters; I’m looking for some bloke called Dante.”
The guy pulled back, his hands falling to his hips as surprise crossed his face. “Yeah?” he replied, completely giving away that there was at least someone called Dante who was known there. “And what do you want with him?”
“I’ve got a message for him, innit,” Spike replied, feeling like he was having his teeth pulled. When this particular line got no response, he even pulled the napkin out from inside his coat and held it in front of his face. “It might not look like much, but it’s important.”
Really, Spike wondered how many conversations this bouncer had were with drunk people. He seemed a little slow to pick up on a straightforward point of fact, looking between Spike’s face and the napkin as though he didn’t believe there was any connection.
“O-K,” he allowed eventually, his words stilted. His expression remained suspicious, but Spike could hardly blame him for that. “How about you give it to me and I’ll pass it along?”
He made to take the note, but Spike pulled it back into the safe-keeping of his pocket. “You’ve got to be joking,” he replied, staring the man down. “I wouldn’t trust you with one of those messages you get army jets to write in the sky. I mean,” he pointed out, “would you if you were me?”
The man smiled, just a little, hopefully because he saw Spike’s point. However, what he said was, “Well, you’re gonna be waiting a long time.”
Something in the way he said it clued Spike in to a rather unfortunate possibility. He looked the man in the eye, took stock of the humour in his expression and the part of the way he stood that looked an awful lot like victory. “Oh,” he complained, “you’ve got to be bloody kidding me.” As usual in the world of Spike, anything that could go tits up made sure to shove its feet over its head and have a day at the sodding races. “You’re Dante?” he challenged.
“What?” the guy replied, like this was turning out to be one of the better outcomes for this particular encounter. “You were expecting a white man with that name?”
The bouncer snickered. Spike rolled his eyes and pulled the napkin out again. “Here,” he said, not touching that line with a barge pole, though it was fair to say he’d initially gone down an Alighieri route. “It’s from Maldred, out in the ‘burbs.”
Dante, as it seemed Spike would have to call him, turned out to be a careful reader. He took the napkin and unfolded it, holding it up to the dim light of the foyer behind him. His eyes narrowed as he traced over the small, careful lines of script, glancing to Spike and then back to the paper.
As he reached the end, or at least as he seemed to, he lowered the napkin back down and looked at Spike with shrewd eyes. “So what you’re telling me is that you’re a vampire - with a soul.”
Spike shrugged, wishing that didn’t actually vouch for him, because it didn’t when it came down to the facts.
“And that cutie pie’s the Vampire Slayer?” This part seemed to surprise the man more.
Thankfully, Spike found it easier to get his back up on this point. After all, he’d never underestimated the girl. “What?” he challenged the man who was apparently a defender of light, or at least the errand boy for one of the greater forces of good on this earth. He mocked the bloke’s tone from a second ago, “You thought you fancied the girl for that weird nose she’s got?”
The man took the point, nodding his head as he seemed to assess himself the way Spike had done a thousand times before. “And she’s - making time with you. No matter how many chicks you score.”
Any moment now, Spike reckoned, he was going to get really pissed off. He put his hands on his own hips and talked the accusation down. “It wasn’t like that, all right? It was a whole business. The First Evil…”
“Oh yeah, I heard about that,” Dante interrupted, like they were having a chat in the employee’s lounge - like he didn’t get enough opportunities to have chats like this. “It sounded like something, but B’s not so worried. She says keep the club open, so we’re all gonna keep the club open.”
Again, Spike rolled his eyes. “Sounds great.” It was a funny point, actually, about how the Bronze never shut during any apocalypse. He’d never connected it to the rumours about the dragon living there, but maybe it all added up. “Look,” he tried to get the conversation back on track, not entirely surprised that Maldred’s introduction hadn’t perfectly helped matters. “The Slayer’s got it in her head that Beatrice,” he tried out, still not certain of the name - he’d never been one for saying it the Italian way - “she can help with this particular apocalypse. I’m trying to get an audience, right?” he added. “For her, not for me.”
“I got it,” Dante replied, shoving the napkin into his pocket. He looked at Spike with new eyes. They were still mistrustful, of course, but they were new. Oddly, they seemed to look at Spike more like this guy knew him: there was respect there, grudging though it was. The disappointment, though - the irritation - that seemed to run deeper, enough that it rankled. “She’ll say yes,” he added assuredly, surprising Spike. “She’s been wanting to meet the Slayer for years.”
“Good,” Spike replied. It was strange, almost, that things could be this easy, but he was happy to run with it for the moment. Buffy would be pleased. “We’ll be back tomorrow night.”
“I’m tell you for free, though,” Dante added, before Spike could turn to leave. There was a warning now, on his face. A friendly one, which was a little bizarre, but a warning all the same. “She ain’t gonna like you.”
“Yeah, well,” Spike replied, feeling the end of this very long night. “Sing me a sodding new one.”
By the time Spike made it back to 1630, it wasn’t all that far from dawn. He let himself in through the back, feeling odd that he could let himself in so silently the way that any predator could - into the henhouse and set to do mischief without anyone the wiser before he wanted them to be.
For a few minutes, he stood in the kitchen, trying to feel like he belonged there - as though he wasn’t some strange appendage to this household. The sort of thing that let itself in right before the red morning to bury itself away in the dark. It was difficult, if he was completely honest. It was very difficult indeed.
The groceries from earlier, they’d been put away now. Spike couldn’t imagine that Buffy had done it, but if there was one benefit to bearing so many bodies in the house, it was that the shared labour was light when and if people chose to pitch in. What he hoped was that she’d come home from patrol and seen the place like this - in the light if not in the dark gloom that Spike was stood in now - and what he hoped was that she’d taken it to mean that people cared.
It wasn’t always in her nature, Spike knew, to recognise how special people thought she was. This kitchen, from how Spike could see it, it was spotless, and that didn’t mean nothing. He traced a finger along the sink, which had been horrific a few days ago. It was looking all right now.
There was one lonely glass in the basin of it, because of course there always would be. It wasn’t always easy to sleep in a house like this and someone had clearly wanted a glass of water.
What was odd, of course, when Spike looked closer, was that the glass was still wet. Beads of liquid rested halfway up its insides, as though it had only just been drunk and abandoned, washed out if it wasn’t water before.
That didn’t happen quite so much in this house. It was gone four AM, so whoever’d woken up had woken up pretty late.
Unless… There was another possibility of course. Buffy’s patrol should have finished hours ago, the reconnaissance and the part where the girls had a stab at it. If she’d actually waited up for him then Spike was going to shoot himself in his own face, because the thought of it hurt too badly. She wasn’t supposed to waste her sleeping time on him. Not Buffy.
The worrying thing was, of course, that it was possible. She was getting withdrawn again, his girl, and Spike was worried what it would look like this time around. What exactly the Slayer could do with an apocalypse this big, Spike didn’t know if he wanted to see, especially not if there was a dragon involved.
Yet he didn’t know and he couldn’t be certain that it would not turn out all right in the end. Maybe she could - if anyone could…
In the end, really, there was nothing Spike could do but wash out the glass again and set it on the draining board. It had been a long night. He went to bed.
.
[breakfasts IV]
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